Bottom Five List

Okay, now we get to do the five worst public transit systems. This should be fun. As you can probably tell by now, I enjoy riding around on subways.

1. Los Angeles
To get from the LAX airport to Pasadena, here is what you must do: Hop a shuttle bus to the Green Line station. Buy a ticket from the unmanned ticket machines (good luck if you don't have singles or quarters). Take the Green Line to its connection with the Blue Line. Take the Blue Line (through Compton) to its terminus at the Red Line. Take the Red Line to its terminus at the Yellow Line. Take the Yellow Line to its terminus at Pasadena. And they wonder why nobody ever bothers with this system. Sure, blame it on Angelenos' love of their cars. But with no reasonable alternative, what else are you going to do?

2. Philadelphia
It's an intermodal system with light rail, heavy rail, and streetcars. But the fare structure is perplexing. To go from Norristown to downtown Philly, you must pay the fare for a two-zone trip on the light rail and also buy a transfer which will get you onto the subway. Forget to ask for your transfer in advance, and it will cost you more. Buy single rides instead of buying tokens in bulk, and it will cost you more. On the light rail outbound, you must pay while departing the train, so make sure you have money on you. Additionally, streetcar routes aren't even marked on the map outside the immediate downtown area. I guess that they assume that since the streetcars go to West Philly, if you don't see it on the map, you don't want to go there.

3. Seattle
The Seattle monorail takes you from the downtown area to the Space Needle at Seattle Center. The intent was that it would be the foundation of a city-wide monorail system. But they ran out money. Recent bond measures to extend the monorail have failed. Therefore, what's left is a system that isn't convenient for anybody except for tourists, and even then, if you want to go see anything else in the city besides the Space Needle, it won't do you a lick of good.

4. Las Vegas
There are all of seven stations on the Las Vegas monorail, which can only be accessed by hiking through the bowels of Strip casinos. When they initially opened the monorail, they charged $2.60 per person. Nobody was riding the monorail and the project was shaping up to be a money-bleeding white elephant. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Strip, there is free transportation between the Mandalay Bay and Excalibur as well as between the Monte Carlo and Bellagio, as well as Mirage and Treasure Island. So, what did the brain trust decide to do? Raise prices to five bucks a head. Then again, logic gets turned on its head in Vegas, and the system has reported record revenues.

(Any significance to the fact that items one through four are all in the United States? I would say so.)

5. Venice
So this a major cheap shot. Because of the nature of the city public transit is impossible beyond the ferries that ply the Grand Canal. I love Venice. I really do. The only point I'm trying to make is that it's a city where you must walk everywhere, and there isn't really a darned thing they can do to fix it.