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This Map Shows How Long It Takes To Walk Between Each Metro Station
North Hollywood Metro Station (Photo by Chris Yarzab via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
Ever wondered how long it takes to walk from one Metro station to the next? A trio of architects and urban planners have answered that very question, “hacking” Metro L.A.’s rail map to add walking times between each station.
(Courtesy of Martin Leitner. For higher resolution, see PDF)
The team calculated walk times using Google Maps, and took their cues from Transit for London’s new Tube map, which also shows walk times between stations. LAist spoke with Torti Gallas and Partners architect and urban designer Martin Leitner, who created the map alongside Alison Collins and Rogelio Huerta, also of Torti Gallas.
Walking distances between the different stations varied greatly, with some stations in Koreatown and East L.A. located only seven to 12 minutes from each other, and others, like the 79-minute Red Line slog from Hollywood/Highland to Studio City, located more than an hour's walk apart.
We asked Leitner what he thought was the ideal walking distance between stops:
From having visited places, Boston always seems like the best place. You walk around Boston and whenever you’re thinking ‘I need to get on the train now,’ there always seems to be a stop right in perfect walking distance. Whereas, say San Francisco, where they always seem to be an extra three to five minutes further than you’d want it to be. But I think it depends, if you’re far away from a center and there’s not much to see, they can probably be further apart, but in somewhere like Koreatown, they should probably be a lot closer together, which they are.
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Dave Sotero, a Metro spokesperson, told LAist that the agency doesn’t measure in walk times, but that the typical distance between stations on Metro rail service is about a mile. Sotero said the mile average is by no means “a hard and fast rule,” but that it does roughly reflect most of the rail lines (the 22-mile Blue Line, for instance, has 22 stations; whereas the 31-mile Gold Line has 27 stations).
It takes about 19 and a half minutes for the average person to walk a mile, for the record.
[h/t: StreetsblogLA]
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