By Steve Hymon, January 12, 2015
In partnership with Metro, Zocalo Public Square today
is beginning a year-long series of short profiles of Metro riders. The
profiles can be found here everyday: http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/mylacommute/
I think the first seven profiles posted this morning
provide a nice glimpse into the many different people and the wide
variety of places they go on the Metro system. Look at this first batch —
of the seven, only two are commuting to downtown L.A.
It’s one thing to see a bunch of people on a bus or train,
it’s another to know a little about them. It really humanizes the
transit experience.
We’ll be sharing many of the photos on The Source each week and pointing readers to the Zocalo site.
Here’s the news release about the series from Metro and Zocalo:
Metro and Zócalo Public Square Join Forces to Create Innovative Program to Examine Our Commutes and Our Lives
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority (Metro) and Zócalo Public Square have joined
forces to launch an innovative program to examine our commutes, our
lives and our region today.
It’s a multi-faceted project that will
include interviews and profiles of Metro riders (#myLA commute); bus
tours into the history of Los Angeles; live, open-to-the-public events
on issues connected with regional mobility and development and a series
of syndicated stories about topics of national interest, including how
mass transit connects communities.
Metro and Zócalo will seek to humanize an
experience shared by millions of Angelenos every day: our commutes. We
sit next to one another on mass transit; we pass by thousands of people
each morning as we walk, drive or ride to work. Yet beyond complaining
about traffic, we seldom talk with one another or think broadly about
how our commutes affect our lives, change the way we see L.A. and
provoke our curiosity and frustration, our sense of humor and of wonder.
The Metro/Zócalo partnership includes a
pioneering fellowship program that directs college students and recent
graduates to explore Southern California and seek out stories of how
people live in and move around the region today.
Metro/Zócalo fellows will ride Metro bus
and rail lines—and car and vanpools—collecting written, spoken and
visual stories from fellow passengers to be published by Zócalo at http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/mylacommute/, on The Source on Metro’s website metro.net and on KCRW.com. Zócalo, Metro and KCRW will be sharing stories and photographs widely on social media with #myLAcommute.
The Metro/Zócalo project is part of
Zócalo’s broader mission to help Angelenos tell their stories, and to
create a deeper sense of place and attachment for all Southern
Californians. It also represents Metro efforts to put a human face on
the transit experience in hopes of fostering greater public awareness of
the expanding transit system as well as vanpool, carpool and other
alternatives to driving solo in the congested Los Angeles metropolitan
area.
The project headquarters will be in a new
Zócalo satellite office on Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, across from
the Metro Gold Line Station.
About Zócalo Public Square
Zócalo Public Square, a proud affiliate
of Arizona State University, is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that
blends live events and humanities journalism. Zócalo partners with
educational, cultural, and philanthropic institutions, as well as public
agencies, to present free public events and conferences in cities
across the U.S. and beyond, and to publish original daily journalism
that is syndicated to more than 160 media outlets. Visit Zócalo at www.zocalopublicsquare.org and twitter.com/ThePublicSquare.
About Metro
Metro is a multimodal transportation
agency that is really three companies in one: a major operator that
transports about 1.5 million boarding passengers on an average weekday
on a fleet of 2,000 clean air buses and six rail lines, a major
construction agency that oversees many bus, rail, highway and other
mobility related building projects, and it is the lead transportation
planning and programming agency for Los Angeles County. Overseeing one
of the largest public works programs in America, Metro is, literally,
changing the urban landscape of the Los Angeles region. Dozens of
transit, highway and other mobility projects largely funded by Measure R
are under construction or in the planning stages. These include five
new rail lines, the I-5 widening and other major projects.
Stay informed by following Metro on The Source and El Pasajero at metro.net, facebook.com/losangelesmetro, twitter.com/metrolosangeles and twitter.com/metroLAalerts and instagram.com/metrolosangeles.