When Taylor Swift was doing her tour this year, I saw lots of news articles about the “Taylor Swift” effect on public transit, and how people were taking the metro and buses to her concerts, and it was invigorating essential city infrastructure!
So, given that Loserville (aka Los Angeles) is one of the biggest cities in the world, you would only expect that a lot of excited people would be taking the metro to her concerts there, too.
Wrong. In Loserville, they’re too good for that sort of thing. I felt bad, because normally the Loserville metro stops running around 11 pm, but they extended the hours to 2 am for the course of the Taylor Swift concerts, all 6 nights. That way, “everyone can make it home!”
And, they had massive amounts of of their green-vested “Metro Ambassadors” standing sentinel, telling everyone where to go. Supposedly they were there to help point out the direction, but I know they also must have been posted in an attempt to drown out, by sheer numbers, the great quantity of trashy barbarians that the Los Angeles metro is most frequently serving — the ones who threaten to beat you up, the ones who spit in the chairs, the ones who smoke onboard, etc.
And they decided to be really cutesy about things and rename the metro stop as the “Speak Now/Taylor’s Station” stop.
Alas, with all that effort — I mean, someone had to go and hammer up the sign — there was pretty much NO “Taylor Swift” public transit invigoration, that I could tell. The sums of people riding the metro were absolutely paltry.
Oh, LOL, not to mention, just when it was most needed, the A-line metro started running like every 40 minutes or something due to some sort of “emergency” situation, like the power got knocked out or something. Or maybe it was that two trains had collided at the 7th Street Metro, I don’t even remember any more. They need to stop calling them “emergencies”, since it’s actually just the regular day-to-day malfunction. An emergency is something that happens rarely and you don’t see it coming. You can’t claim it was an emergency when it happens everyday, and therefore, you most definitely see it coming.
But, I did feel bad for the Metro people. They extended the hours; and they had all the Metro Ambassadors out in force; and they tried to be cutesy; and it didn’t work, there were no giddy hordes of Swifties lining the metros end-to-end.
People decided to go in their cars and sit in traffic instead, LOL.
But you really can’t expect much else from the Losers in Loserville.
Los Angeles has 3 shiny new metro stations in its downtown region. They are so new, in fact, as of yet, no deathly stench pervades them. They are beautifully designed with lots of glass, and they are next to things like the Walt Disney Concert Hall. They are just a walk away from the Central Library. One has a ramp right onto a nice art museum that is free to browse. These shiny new stations have made it so much easier to get from the east side of Loserville to the west side of Loserville, and back via public transit (unless the trains break down, which …)
And yet sometimes I pass through them, in broad daylight, on a weekend, and I’m the only one there. It’s just me, and 2 green-vested Metro Ambassadors who are always posted to help guide people, plus one or two cops! So they’ve put all this in place to try to make it as comfortable for people as possible, and help people feel safe, and the day is sunny and warm, and still, there’s not much interest.
I know exactly how it feels to pour time and effort into something, and just for no one at all to notice what you did. I can’t help but feel bad for them.
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