a transporatation dispatch from sara harris... "I’m glad the Gold Line rolls past my house, under the bridge and over the concrete river right along the concrete corridor of the 110 Freeway. I can walk to the train stop. I rode MTA’s Gold Line the very first day it opened nine months ago. 30,000 of my closest friends rode it that sweaty L.A. Sunday, too. But now it’s spring. Gasoline costs upwards of $2.20 a gallon here. The smog is as bad as it’s been in seven years, and they have trouble filling the seats on the Gold Line. They can’t sell tickets. Only 8000 of the 10 million-some Southern California dwellers want to ride it. No golden tickets for the gold line. We have governor that drives a Hummer. Heck, he drives seven of them! But that’s Los Angeles. That’s part of the reason the folks in San Francisco turn their noses up at us. Governor Arnold lives in L.A., not by the Bay Area. We have a subway system that cost billions of dollars, adorned with neon art and sound installations. Sleek and sparsely populated tile tunnels, over the river and under Hollywood Blvd. Now Mexico City’s subway, ‘el metro’… that is another world. It is as crowded as Tokyo’s underground at times. It is life. It moves. It teems with humanity. It is an every-man’s subway. Senators and celebrities ride it. It’s bright orange and the stations have icons as well as names for those who have trouble reading. Chapultepec, the tree-lined lung of the hulking metropolis, is represented by a perky little grasshopper sign. La linea café, Line Number Nine, has regal lion that represents the station stop “Etiopia”. The streets are as busy and smoggy and nasty as the worst L.A. has to offer, but oh, the D.F. (distrito federal) subway is a subterranean work of art, a world onto it’s own. If the Paris Metro is the Eiffel Tower of undergrounds, L.A.’s metro is a gilded park bench, and Mexico City’s is befitting of the ancient pyramids that surround it. It is an underground sac bé, a trade route full of sound and fury, signifying democracy in transportation. You can ride as far as you like, for twenty cents on-the-dollar, and emerge from the slick slate steps with chocolates, notebooks, scissors, compasses, you name it. The entertainment is candy for the eyes and the ears. It is home to a musical underground economy, and this is what it sounds like…"