Why isn't it easier to travel between neighboring rich-hipster (ripster?) enclaves Silver Lake and Los Feliz? Both have local DASH bus routes circling the 'hoods, but they're not very popular. They could be, though, if they'd join together into one powerful route that would connect Vermont and Hyperion via Fountain Avenue. At least, that's what two members of the respective neighborhood councils think, says the Los Feliz Ledger. They're saying that a new route could attract more riders and eliminate some traffic by offering alternative ways to get to John Marshall High School and the Silver Lake Gelson's and Trader Joe's.
The current Los Feliz route, says Los Feliz's Neighborhood Council Transportation Chairman, is a "loop-de-loop. It wastes time." Plus, the DASH only has a couple stops in Los Feliz Village and only travels the area on weekdays. The DASH bus to Griffith Obervatory comes once every half hour on the weekends—not exactly convenient. The Silver Lake Transportation Chairman says that Silver Lake has been trying to get changes made to the DASH route for 10 years.
But changes to the DASH are not a high priority for city officials, because ridership is down. (Would it be higher with different routes? We may never know.) Another obstacle to extending the line, maybe the biggest one, is money, says a rep for the LA Department of Transportation, which oversees the DASH; there's not a ton to go around, so why spend it on a system that not a lot of people seem to use? LADOT is expecting to get a report on bus ridership from an outside consultant by the end of the year, but there's no guarantee that those findings will help the two neighborhood councils make their point any more persuasively.
· Los Feliz Wants to DASH to Silver Lake [LFL]
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