Western Avenue is also busy with ridership of about 38,000 boardings.

Crenshaw Boulevard has about 22,000 boardings.

All figures are local and Rapid boardings combined.

The heavy boardings are primarily conduit, rather than destination trips. The presence of Rapids indicates heavy transfer activity.

Vermont and Western have slightly busier traffic north of the 10 freeway; Crenshaw’s heaviest activity is south of the 10 freeway. Ridership falls off south of Manchester Boulevard on Vermont and Western; as half the trips are short lines ending there.

Vermont has a few major attractions along the line: Exposition Park and USC, the Red/Purple Line junction, Los Angeles City College and the hospitals at Sunset Boulevard. Vermont also has several K-12 schools along the line.

Western Avenue generally has strip malls and gas stations at major intersections, and it’s generally a street with heavy transfer activity.

Crenshaw, with the lowest ridership of the three streets, has a thriving commercial district between the Exposition right-of-way and Leimert Park. A major bus transfer center is at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. This commercial strip is richer in destination traffic than Vermont or Western.

As a highway median, it seems like a very unpleasant place to have stations, but it’s a nice direct route for an express train…

…that would bypass a poor, dark-skinned and transit-dependent neighborhood?

We in L.A. just shook ourselves loose from a consent decree a few years ago. We don’t want to do anything that would make another one warranted.

If there is a suitable place for a rail line, it would be anything parallel to the 110 freeway, not on it. Vermont Avenue has 57,000 daily bus boardings. A train, such as a subway extension south of Wilshire Boulevard, would serve the corridor most in need of a high-capacity transit service.

If it doesn’t, perhaps the correct thing to do will be to rip out the Harbor Busway and replace it with something else. As a highway median, it seems like a very unpleasant place to have stations, but it’s a nice direct route for an express train…

The stations on Manchester and Slauson are not in “some of the highest-crime neighborhoods in the U.S.” The crime rates for those residential neighborhoods are actually quite low compared to some other regions.

And your camera is not as good a lens as a human eyeball. There are very-bright lights shining in those long underpasses 24/7.

What is the crime rate there? Why don’t you call 77th Street Division, or the LACo Sheriff transit bureau and ask. They will tell you the truth: very low.

Those stations are, indeed, full of people with dark skin. Scary indeed for out of towners who are going to tell us what that their fears are the reality.

ITA with Wad above, re: unattractiveness of the stations along the Harbor Freeway. I got off at Slauson Station a few years ago, and I felt like I had to double check the elevator before I got in there. It just didn’t feel safe.

That said, the improvements of legibility and use offered by the implementation of the Silver Line should make improved ridership possible over time, and may provoke Metro to ultimately increase service there.

I don’t think that dog will hunt.

Legibility is the least of the Harbor Transitway’s problems.

The Harbor Transitway was a born loser.

The Harbor Transitway opened in 1996 as a double-decker HOV and Transitway from the USC area to Artesia Boulevard. Buses have always been using the freeway, though, and there were shoulder stops before the Transitway opened.

Despite the major operational improvements with the Transitway — and as you said, the buses are f-a-a-a-s-t — demand has always been stagnant along the Harbor Transitway. It never attracted much new ridership on top of who had been using the buses before 1996.

Worse, the Harbor Freeway is flanked by high-frequency service along Broadway (which also has a Rapid service) and Figueroa Street. So it’s not running through a transit wasteland.

In fact, it runs through the heart of poor, predominantly African American South Los Angeles. There should be high ridership, just as there is on Broadway, Figueroa, Vermont Avenue and Avalon Boulevard (two other nearby streets).

One thing that has always depressed ridership is the charging of the express step-up fare. When L.A. had a broad freeway express bus network, the policy had been to charge zone fares for every four miles of non-stop travel.

Metro carried the express policy over, ostensibly because the buses ran on a freeway. However, with station stops, the buses now make stops every 1.5 to 2 miles. They should have been treated as locals. Metro even tried for a year a fare amnesty in which the expresses were treated as locals. Even that failed to attract riders.

The Blue Line was almost always treated as a local fare, despite a very fast speed and a 23-mile journey between L.A. and Long Beach. The Blue Line runs 3 miles east of the Harbor Transitway and serves the same communities. It is the busiest single light rail line in the U.S.

So you have a couple of factors working against the Harbor Transitway, despite offering a faster service.

You still have the high fares. You have a competing Rapid bus that, while running on surface streets, improves upon the design flaws of the Transitway by serving busy intersections like Vernon and Florence avenues that the freeway buses skip.

Perhaps the flaw that cannot ever be corrected is how the design of the station breeds a dangerous atmosphere. You have stations whose entrances are in dark freeway underpasses.

This is a view of the Manchester Transitway entrance, taken from Google Maps Street View:
http://tinyurl.com/yc62wef

This is Slauson Avenue:
http://tinyurl.com/y9cp4o7

Do these look enticing? Well, from here its a winding walk up the stairs or a long elevator ride to await a bus on an isolated platform. There is no view from the street, and cars are moving far too fast to pay attention to the waiting bus passengers.

Freeways are headache-inducingly noisy, so there’s a perfunctory effort to mitigate sound through glass bricks. This further blocks out the view from the surrounding traffic.

The Harbor Transitway replicates the dangerous-by-design elements of housing projects that made the areas breeding grounds for crime.

This is the last thing that’s needed for some of the highest-crime neighborhoods in the U.S.

In Miami, Miami-Dade Transit does the same thing, and they label the South Miami-Dade BRT line as part of the Metro system here as well. Same goes for the Miami Metromover.