Tag: public transportation

  • Los Angeles 2026 wrap-up and stray observations

    I never planned to become a regular in Los Angeles, but here we are. This visit started out as a work trip to Long Beach, followed by a few carefully planned days off. My goal with this vacation was to have new experiences, and I think that worked out: if you told me six months…

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  • MuniMet.ro

    Over the holidays I took my first real crack at “vibe coding” a project I’d wanted to build for a while: a webapp that lets you know if San Francisco’s Muni Metro subway is working or not. Using Claude Code, I had it build an image classifier and a script that scrapes the live snapshot…

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  • Los Angeles 2025 wrap-up and stray observations

    After flying into Los Angeles via the Burbank airport, my first two stops didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. First up was the Old Zoo in Griffith Park. It’s kind of depressing to imagine any animal larger than a mouse feeling at home here. The park itself was also partly roped off for construction,…

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  • Why I have reservations about the Measure RR Caltrain tax (but I’m voting for it anyway)

    Recently the three main counties that serve CalTrain were asked to add an additional sales tax to fund CalTrain service. This was initially rejected by San Francisco leading to some finger wagging, before ultimately landing on the ballot. Many transit advocates decried San Francisco’s decision, but let me point something out: of all the counties…

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  • Thoughts on extending the T line

    With all the recent news of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, even avid readers of local news might have missed that two new BART stations opened over the weekend in the South Bay. Here in San Francisco, Muni Metro’s T line extension is still under construction with the Central Subway from SOMA…

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  • Angels Flight

    For my last day in Los Angeles I was determined to cross a few items off my bucket list, and in order to get there I thought I’d cross off another: riding Angels Flight, the “world’s shortest railway.” It’s really a diagonal elevator with two cars that act as counterbalances. On my previous visit to…

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  • Every single BART plaque I could find in San Francisco

    “Always read the plaque” is the unofficial motto of one of my favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible. Following that advice, over the past months I’ve been tracking down every BART station plaque located within San Francisco as a scavenger hunt of sorts. Conventional wisdom tells us there are eight BART stations in San Francisco, so there…

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  • Gondola ride to Salesforce Park

    The term “gondola” can mean many different things. The first that comes to my mind are the boats in Venice, but here I’m talking about a different form of transportation: a gondola lift. This gondola in particular takes visitors up from ground level to Salesforce Park on the top of the freshly re-opened Salesforce Transit…

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  • Getting around Denver via RTD public transit

    Denver’s public transit system is called RTD (or “Regional Transportation District”… how creative) and it makes getting around the city a snap. It integrates seamlessly into Google Maps, so much so that I found Google’s arrival estimates more accurate than RTD’s own displays. RTD has three types of vehicles: buses, light rail, and commuter rail.…

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  • Riding the “L” in Chicago

    The easiest and most cost effective way of traveling in Chicago when walking isn’t practical is taking the “L” trains. They’re called the “L” because they’re elevated… except a few of the stops are actually underground. (Adding to the confusion, the regional Metra rail network also runs on elevated tracks in certain places.) Each “L”…

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