Go Metro

Yes, LA does have a subway -- my hotel is located right across the street from a Metro Rail Red Line stop. Now that I'm living in Orange County, I know that I'm supposed to be afraid of mass transit (and doubly afraid of mixing with the common people in big, bad LA), but compared to other systems I've ridden around the world, I'm mostly-impressed so far.

Pros:

• Metro Rail stations are clean, architecturally interesting (each station seems to host its own mega-scale art project), and climate-controlled. No sweltering underground while trying not to step in mysterious puddles leaking from the ceiling!
• A Metro day pass (rail + buses) costs $3.00. Talk about your super transit deal -- that's the least I've ever paid for a day pass anywhere. Between their three-dollar day passes and the fact that Metro Rail seems to be advertising-free (except for 'house' advertising inside the trains), you know that this system has to be receiving massive subsidies.

Cons:

• Metro Rail service is a little ... lacksadaisical, to say the least. Trains seem to come at random intervals.


• I miss the electronic display signs in Hamburg's U- and S-Bahn stations telling me when the next train is coming, and where it's going. If an old and creaky subway system like the London Underground can tell passengers the number of minutes until the next train, why didn't Metro Rail, a system built from scratch in the 90s, start providing this info from day one?
• In the same vein, there are charts displaying service frequency posted in every Metro station -- rush hour trains come every six minutes, evening trains come every twenty minutes, etc. -- but no charts displaying the time that it takes for trains to travel between stations. If the last train in my direction leaves Union Station at 11:17 PM, when do I have to be at my station to be sure that I don't miss the train?

Why can't Metro Rail do this?

. . . unsurprisingly, most of my fellow subway-riding PDCgoers happen to be European. Yesterday morning I took Shelby's admonition that I should be networking at this conference to heart and tried to chat up a guy waiting on the platform next to me about his impressions of PDC so far, and he turned out to be a programmer for the German Federal Office of Somethingorother. We shared a brief moment of Deutschsprachigkeit.