A Perch High Above Cars, but Not Noise

My plan was to tap out this column while sitting on the platform of the Gold Line’s Sierra Madre station. But I couldn’t write because of the noise from the 210 Speedway, which is close enough that you can spit on passing cars.

So I decided to just consider how I would write the column when I got to the office. But I couldn’t think because of the noise.

Maybe I should give it up and just go talk to other passengers, I figured. But I couldn’t hear anyone because of the noise.

The same is true at the Lake and Allen stations. As cars roar by, you feel like you’re in a pit crew at the Daytona 500, waiting to change someone’s tires. The exhaust rises up around you, rifling through to your sinuses. And when a big rig rumbles past, you have to bite down hard so a molar doesn’t rattle loose.

Was this any way to build a railroad?

No region in the entire republic needs more desperately to tease people out of their cars. And yet had the designers of MTA’s Gold Line tried their darndest, they could not have created a more unpleasant experience.

You try to do the right thing and leave the car behind, and now you’re up on the median strip like a trapped rat with nothing to do but count cars.

I set my watch and started counting.

One minute, 217 cars. And that was just in the eastbound direction.

Del Waterbury, 28, has a noise-abatement system that seems to be a popular choice among the intrepid souls who keep coming back. He wears a stereo headset and cranks up the volume.

I asked what music is capable of beating the racket.

“Metallica,” he said with a smile.

Hiding out in the stairwell until the train arrives is another way to go.

“Is that to block the noise?” I asked a man in a cowboy hat.

“That’s right,” said Tex.

Brian Hoffstadt, a federal prosecutor, said he’s gotten pretty used to the noise, but not to the wicked wind that sometimes whips through, making you wish there were a way to tether yourself to the platform. The whole experience is a little unsettling, he admitted.

“The first time I took my parents up here they said, ‘Wow, you have to stand in the middle of the freeway.’ ”

Yes, and if you use the Allen station here in the city of the car, please be advised that there is no parking. That’s right. None. No one has spotted a pedestrian in that part of town since about 1948, but the MTA apparently thought they’d suddenly fall from trees and catch the train.

Mary Metz and I tried to have a conversation at the Allen station by shouting into each other’s ear canals. If I’m not mistaken, she warned me to stay away from the Lake station. It’s recessed below the highway, she said, and you have the sensation that a car could flip out and land on your head.

Please do not get the wrong idea. The experience is much nicer once you get onto the train, and I’m not telling you to give up on the Gold Line, which opened last July. I’m trying to get this problem fixed so people aren’t driven away after their first try.

The authority that built the 13.7-mile railway predicted 38,000 daily boardings. Last month, the Gold Line averaged a measly 14,258, which computes to roughly 7,000 round-trippers each day.

That means that on any given day in L.A., you can find more people on inline skates than on a train line that cost $859 million.

The strike didn’t help, said MTA spokesman Marc Littman. And don’t forget, he added, that Blue Line ridership began at 19,000 daily boardings and now has nearly four times that number, so there’s hope for similar growth on the Gold.

Not if they don’t fix the noise problem.

Another hang-up is that the train slows to a crawl through South Pasadena and Highland Park neighborhoods, where it would have been tunneled underground if they had done it right.

But the noise on the 210 platforms is the more annoying problem, admits MTA official Rick Thorpe, who headed up the authority that built the Gold Line.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it out of the freeway,” he said. Pasadena city officials negotiated with Caltrans to move the railroad right of way off city streets and onto the 210 median.

But couldn’t the stations have been designed to block some of the racket?

The canopies help, Thorpe said. And some sound-absorption material is stuffed up under there.

Look, I’m no engineer. But if someone had asked me, I could have told them a tin roof and a couple bags of cotton balls wasn’t going to cut it.

Thorpe said the MTA will look into solutions sometime soon, and it can throw as much as $20 million at the problem. Maybe there’s a new kind of sound-absorption material they can buy, he said.

Can we please think bigger than sound-absorption material?

My suggestions include building a sound wall between platform and highway (this is under consideration), and digging up the fast lane in each direction of the 210 and planting 40-foot trees (this is not under consideration).

I saved the best for last, though, because it’s an idea that will beat back the noise, transform the experience, and put people to work day and night.

Mariachi bands on every platform.

Do you have any idea how many horns $20 million can buy?

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Reach Steve Lopez at steve.lopez@latimes.com.