Happy Labor Day!

First, today is either a Sunday schedule for some transit systems, while others may not be operating at all. Be sure to check before traveling.

With public service announcements out of the way, this brings us to another Metro Library entry from its Flickr e-treasure chest. (Just as transit systems operate on weekend schedules for major holidays, MetroRiderLA will pull an extra image from Metro and continue weekend presentations.)

This is a photo of one of the predecessor agencies of today’s Long Beach Transit. General Motors Old Look No. 7554 operates for the Long Beach Motor Bus Co. in the East Long Beach neighborhood of Los Altos, which is just north of California State University, Long Beach. Despite the old bus and cars, Los Altos looks very much the same then as now, with wide boulevards and shopping centers set far back from the street.

A Flickr commenter says the exact location is at Abbeyfield Street, near today’s Los Altos Market Center.

Long Beach Motor Bus Co. in 1963 would become what is today’s Long Beach Transit.

Here’s a long-gone system that falls somewhere within this month’s theme (other L.A. transit agencies) and predecessor systems of Metro.

The Asbury Rapid Transit System, as shown by this Mack bus from the Metro Library collection, was a bus company that ran in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Its territory of operation was Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank and neighboring communities in L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. This photo gives us a look of downtown Glendale, on Brand Boulevard, in 1950.

The Electric Railway Historical Association and the San Fernando Valley Transit Insider, Kymberleigh Richards’ website, both have information on the routes this company had operated. With some modifications, the Asbury routes can still be seen today in some Metro routes.

Asbury would be first absorbed by Metropolitan Coach Lines, and then that company would turn public and form the first LAMTA.

The Metro Library‘s collection doesn’t just include historic and beautiful images from its legacy agencies. There are also a few from its other surrounding agencies.

This bus might be long gone, but the agency that runs them is arguably the most beloved in Southern California. This is a vintage black-and-white of what is today’s Big Blue Bus.

Otherwise known as Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines, the agency has been continuously operated by the city since well before the Great Depression. Municipal operation at the time was seen as a progressive alternative to the privately operated bus companies, and particularly the Pacific Electric and Los Angeles railways.

Santa Monica even had to compete with a private operation known as Bay Cities Transit in its own area. The competition would last a little more than two decades, until Bay Cities was folded into the city’s operations. The process would repeat itself through the next couple of decades until all transit became a government enterprise.

This bus, in particular, dates from about 1954, according to Metro’s info on Flickr. It’s a bus built by the White Co. of Ohio. Yet there is something that’s still very familiar to riders today. Almost 60 years later, many Big Blue Bus riders still have to catch a bus here at Pico and Rimpau boulevards. Originally, it was because the streetcar didn’t go farther west than this point. Today, we transfer here because of … well, it’s one of the remnants of our streetcar heritage we chose to preserve.

Come for the food, but stay away from the pizza. That’s just hard to do when pizza is a bulk of the enterprise’s name.

It’s not the toppings. Those are flavorful, with a wide selection and many menu-listed or custom-built creations.

It’s not the price. If you’re a fan of the California Pizza Kitchen chain, Pitfire has a lower to the same prices for a slightly larger individual pie.

It’s not even the caliber of the kitchen or the wait staff.

It’s the crust.

The crust is meant to emulate the texture of dense, flour-crusted artisan-style breads. Pitfire has even added the word “artisan” its new branding.

“Artisan” is a euphemism for cardboard that overwhelms each of the senses. It tastes, looks, feels and smells like cardboard. At least it doesn’t sound like cardboard tearing when slices are pulled apart.

The fibrous dough sucks away flavor like a black hole. Pity, because Pitfire has a great niche for itself with its toppings snagged from farmers’ markets and thrown in a fire. There are 9 signature pies (burrata, margherita, Pitfire sausage, field mushrooms, greens egg and ham, pepperoni, white pie, Big Sur and folded-style garlic chicken). Check the site (linked below) for their ingredients, but they are particularly inventive.

Pity, too, because Pitfire understands there’s more to pizza than unbreakable mozzarella cheese. Pitfire has a cheesemaker’s delight available: fontina, gorgonzola, feta, burrata, Parmesan, and yes, mozzarella.

Fortunately, Pitfire doesn’t tie its fortunes to its pizzas alone. Its diversified menu has soups, salads, pastas and panini. Some of the salads contain the same or better toppings than the pizzas, taking us back to those golden days of the near past when America was too terrified to eat carbohydrates.

The pasta menu is more basic, with four standard dishes (chicken meatballs, Bolognese, sausage and greens, and house mac & cheese) along with whatever else may be on the seasonal blackboard.

Pitfire expands upon its offerings with a regularly rotating menu of roasted vegetable plates, pastas, salads and pizzas with in-season and/or locally grown produce and meats. Prices are about $1-$3 more than a regular item, but some can be winners.

Pitfire had a summer dish of roasted corn, a sweet-spicy eggplant caponata, summer squashes and small tomatoes that went from farm to palate with flavor included. The fire-kissed vegetables, lightly oiled, retained a pleasant earthiness.

The dishes Pitfire offers zigzag across a line between Left Coast “zeitgeist” cuisine and a traditional pizza place, with Pitfire’s comfort zone being in the former.

Pitfire wasn’t always how it is now. This was one of the anchors of the NoHo Arts District that predated the subway. It had been there since at least 2000.

The weekend of the subway extension coincided with the NoHo Arts Festival, and that brought out hundreds of thousands of people to that warm corner of the San Fernando Valley to rediscover a neighborhood ready to bounce back from years of community-scarring construction.

Pitfire had been an early success. It was also one of the most full restaurants that weekend, with lines to get a pizza almost as long as the free Red Line rides.

Then, though, it was a more conventional pizza shop. It hadn’t yet tried to out-CPK the Pizza Kitchen. It was an indie eatery that knew its varieties had to be a little bit better than the competition, and that was good enough.

But good enough never is. Lankershim and Magnolia boulevards is the NoHo Arts District’s pizza district. There are about a half-dozen pizza shops on that corner or within a block, and they’re all up in Pitfire’s grill. Domino’s is across the street, Big Mama’s and Papa’s with its obscene pies the size of a manhole cover up the block, and several restaurants have pizzas on the menu. The other chains (Little Caesars, Papa John’s) are within a mile of the North Hollywood station, so it’s chef-eat-chef out there.

Pitfire needed an angle, and it found the right one by differentiating itself by grasping randomly at the various foodie subcultures (organicphiles, locavores, vegans, hipsters who think anything goes great with Pabst, garden variety epicures, and a whole legion of others too small and/or off-putting to list here).

The formula worked. Pitfire may not be the same, but it remains a bedrock of the NoHo scene, and its success has spawned locations in Downtown L.A. and the Westside.

Now Pitfire has to figure out how to return to a crust that tastes like something other than a suitable alternative to roofing shingles. Or, it doesn’t have to taste like anything. Just make it thin and unobtrusive enough to make the toppings the life of the party and the dough the wallflower who skulks behind the coat rack.

While I’m making requests, the NoHo location absolutely, positively must bring back a soda fountain. It’s cruel not to have unlimited refills, especially for what is Italian food with a California tan. Pitfire has homemade lemonade, beer, wine and soft drinks … but Galco’ed. In other words, you’ve got a good variety of indie sodas, but you’ll pay through the nose before slurping through the mouth.

That, or just get everything to go and decamp across the street at Quizno’s, with its unlimited beverage bar (including the awesome passionfruit-flavored iced tea).

And, oh yeah, one more reminder: find a different crust recipe.

Report card

Food: C. Pitfire’s seasonal blackboard specials and local ingredients add to a competent offering of salads and sandwiches. The pizzas, though, suffer from the crust.

Service: B+. No complaints. Staff are prompt and attentive.

Atmosphere: B+. On a summer day, both indoor and outdoor seating can be hot. Indoors because of the kitchen at the center of the enterprise, especially for the fire oven, and outdoors because of the Valley heat. The decor just fades to the background.

Price: C+. It’s a good $10-$20 for entrees and drinks, but Pitfire gets you on the non-refillable drinks. And the pizza can’t be made right at any price with that crust.

Transit access: C+. Yes, it’s near the North Hollywood station orbit, but it’s a bit of a walk and the nearby bus services are less frequent south of the station.

Final grade: C.

Pitfire Pizza
	Pitfire Pizza also has locations in Downtown L.A., West L.A. and Culver City. Pitfire Pizza is also on Facebook and Twitter. Beer and wine are served.	Transit access (Commuter lines omitted) Bus Metro lines 152, 156/656, 183, 224, and Orange Line; Santa Clarita Transit Line 757 Rail Metro Red Line

Copyrighted image by Rudebigdog; used with permission from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. All rights reserved.

Surf culture goes hand-in-glove with car culture, so why would surfboards adorn the car culture’s antithesis, the bus? Because the front half of this vehicle is from the South Bay’s own Beach Cities Transit.

Its officially overseen by the city of Redondo Beach, which takes great pains into giving the system little recognition on a hard-to-navigate website. Not that anyone is accusing Redondo Beach of anything, nosireebob. All riders ask is for a website that’s easier to remember than http://www.redondo.org/depts/hbt/transit/beach_cities_transit/default.asp.

Redondo Beach heads this service, which operates in the South Bay’s coastal cities between Los Angeles International Airport and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The service is contracted out and uses midibuses like this El Dorado National.

Beach Cities Transit is a relatively young transit agency. It was turned into fixed route service when the general public Wave Dial-a-Ride was becoming too popular to continue to run affordably. Two fixed routes were in place, running along former Metro and Torrance Transit routes.

Beach Cities Transit also picked up the southern leg of what was Metro’s Line 439, itself facing extinction this December. Line 109 serves the most scenic route along the coast between LAX and southern Redondo Beach.

Copyrighted image by rjmcconnell; used with permission from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. All rights reserved.

Even bees need their rest. In this case, it’s not the honey- and wax-making creatures, but the official system of the city of Glendale, the Beeline.

It complements busier Metro lines throughout the city. Its busiest line is 1/2, both of which loop on Central Avenue and Brand Boulevard. The Glendale Galleria, in the middle of the route, is generally where most other routes meet. Glendale Beeline also posts its schedules on NextBus.

The Glendale Beeline was one of the few successful “new” city-based systems created after the passage of the Proposition A sales tax in 1980. It was a modest system, operating cutaway buses and complementing RTD and Metro service within the city. Glendale is a classic streetcar suburb, and over the years, maintained the ridership to have excellent service for a suburb. Being close to Los Angeles helps, certainly.

In the 1990s, Glendale Beeline grew sufficiently enough that it could graduate to midibuses, like the ones seen above. In this sandwich of four buses, Blue Birds are the bread while El Dorado Nationals are the filling. Glendale even has smaller versions of full-sized New Flyers, as well as retired Foothill Transit Gillig Phantoms.

MetroReaders, you were told that there would be a quiz coming up. It’s ready for the first of the month.

Sporcle is a text-based trivia site with a wide variety of puzzles, from the serious (geography, history, etc.) to the silly (Rick Astley guarantees, Big Mac ingredients, etc.).

The Metro Rail quiz lies somewhere in between, though around here, we’d like to think its serious. You have 12 minutes to guess all 73 Metro Rail stations. After the time period, it will show what stations, if any, you may miss, and it’ll track what percentile you rank.

Good luck!

MetroRiderLA founder Fred Camino will open the September 2010 edition of MetroFlickrLA with this shot of a Foothill Transit Silver Streak bus in Downtown L.A. The framing and proportions are very nice with the skyscrapers in downtown.

The Silver Streak, started in 2007, is Foothill Transit’s showcase bus rapid transit route. It is a route that spends most of its time along the 10 Freeway between Union Station and Montclair. It makes the El Monte Busway and Bus Station stops, major transit centers such as West Covina Plaza, Pomona, Montclair, as well as some bus pads between these stops. It replaced the full Line 480, which ran more local service through the San Gabriel Valley and took more than 2 hours end-to-end.

On weekdays, during the day, Silver Streak runs NABI 60-BRT articulated buses, like the one seen above. These 30 buses also are named after a San Gabriel Valley community, beginning with “Spirit of …”. Silver Streak‘s Wikipedia page has the list of the names and the history of the line.

Foothill’s own history emerged from a cloud of controversy. The San Gabriel Valley long had sparse service under the Southern California Rapid Transit District. Most of the service was tilted toward downtown L.A. commuter express service, with infrequent daytime service and often no weekend service. A round of fare increases and service cuts threatened to take away even more. Former L.A. County Supervisor Pete Schabarum wanted to do something about it.

Schabarum, who represented much of the San Gabriel Valley, figured the San Gabriel Valley was getting screwed on bus service because of the RTD’s unions. So he set out the work to carve the San Gabriel Valley apart from L.A. County with a joint-powers board represented by the region’s cities.

Organizationally, not only would this new transit zone have no unions, it would have no employees. All functions needing a human would be contracted out to private firms. Also, each unit (two bus yards plus administrative functions) would be contracted out to a different firm.

The plan worked in theory, but the execution has been buggy for many years.

On the one hand, the San Gabriel Valley’s bus riders were able to get the bus service that would have never been possible under RTD and Metro’s cost structures. Foothill Transit was able to expand to 7-day service on most routes, and through service changes over time, went from 14 lines to about three dozen now.

Administratively, Foothill Transit proved to be great at cost controls. Without union workers, and with employees being the responsibility of the contractors and not Foothill Transit (no civil service scales, pensions, etc.), Foothill was able to put most of its money in places where riders could see it: in more buses and more services. Also, with a private firm managing the performance of a different private operator, this created an internal rivalry that pressed all sides to meet standards.

It didn’t always work, though. Lost in this equation was the human element. Private contracting and non-union shops mean lower pay. If RTD represented an overpaid and underperforming workforce, Foothill Transit depended on an underpaid and overworked labor pool.

Foothill Transit was notorious for its very high turnover, particularly for its bus drivers. A labor market does exist for bus drivers in a mostly governmental environment. And the market tilts in favor of Metro — which isn’t even the highest-paying agency — and especially the municipal operators.

Short-staffing was chronic on Foothill Transit. Missed runs were not uncommon, especially on busier lines such as 480 and 187.

Best laid plans and all …

Foothill is nearing its quarter century of service, but realities have altered Schabarum’s vision. The emphasis on cost control has been weakened, as Foothill has been pinched by high turnover costs and has to pay higher labor costs. Also, Foothill Transit is now a union operation, just like most other carriers. The Pomona yard’s drivers, now working for First Transit, are represented by the Teamsters. The Arcadia drivers, who work for MV Transportation, elected Amalgamated Transit Union representation a few years ago.

Copyrighted image by So Cal Metro; used with permission from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. All rights reserved.

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Answer: Because it was stuck to the roof of a Metro bus.

What a great photograph taken by So Cal Metro in San Pedro. Not only do the colors really leap out, but the angle of the shot makes it look like the chicken statue adorns the gas tanks on the roof of the NABI 40-LFW, which has been explained here before.

According to So Cal Metro, the chicken is actually adorning Slavko’s Harbor Poultry, not the bus. Coulda fooled me. A chicken does make much more sense on a polutry restaurant — a “before” picture, if you will — but a chicken on top of a bus would grow ridership.

Copyrighted image by So Cal Metro; used with permission from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. All rights reserved.

Here’s a little love for the little guy. The runt of the litter. The cutaway bus.

Metro’s fleet is primarily known for its lumbering, pavement-eating 40-, 45- and 60-foot buses. Yet there are routes where the buses are just too big or impractical to run. That’s where cutaways fill the void.

Cutaways are the bus world’s equivalent of brunch: They’re not quite buses, they’re not quite vans, but they come with a slice of cantaloupe at the end. (Actually, you don’t. I just think a lot of people may get this particular “Simpsons” reference).

A cutaway is a truck or van chassis, in this model a Ford E-450, with a small shell attached to form a bus. They are used when service demand is light, or buses need maneuverability (such as for dial-a-ride service). This is one of the more prolific cutaway models, the ElDorado National Aerotech.

Metro doesn’t directly operate cutaways, since the buses have low capacity, they don’t last very long (7-10 years) and the drivers are paid too much. Metro’s contractors use these buses on low-patronage lines such as lines 214, 607 or 625/626. They are also on the famous Line 218, which runs on Laurel Canyon through the canyon.