Florin Light Rail Station

I’ve been taking the Blue Line into downtown for work recently. This place is definitely a work in progress…
Station: Well, here’s the station (
). Looks nice, right? Wrong. Ugh. Seriously, do they ever clean this place? It’s covered with spit, discarded cigarettes, and random fast food wrappers. With the exception of the spit, I can’t really blame any of the patrons for the mess because the trash cans here have these weird lids that prevent you from depositing anything without snaking your entire hand deep into the can like you’re playing some sick real life game of Operation. it’s so hard to throw stuff away without touching the grimy trash can! You can tell that they tried to make this place look decent. The pillars feature acorn decorations (
), but even these are marred by graffiti and grime. They have a couple of benches where you can sit and wait, but they’re also far from pristine. Perhaps the most annoying thing about this station (and the RT light rail in general) is the fact that you cannot use a twenty to buy a ticket. Yes, that’s right. None of the machines accept a bill larger than a ten and there ARE NO CHANGE MACHINES. If you are lucky enough to have a five or ten on hand, you’ll get your change in the form of dollar coins, which is actually kinda neat, but super annoying if you don’t like carrying around coins. Also, to add fuel to the fire, they alway seem to run out of change at the ticket machine closest to the parking lot. Good thing there is another one in the island between the two tracks. Unless you are a student in high school or at Sac State, you cannot get the student pass. Your best bet is to get the $ 100 monthly pass through the mail and avoid all of this.
Parking: Despite the fact that hardly anyone uses the parking lot, it still costs a dollar a day to park here. How does that make any sense?! It’s almost like they don’t want people to use this station. Anyway, you have to get the number of your parking space and then pay at using the machines at the platform. You can avoid this by buying a $ 15 monthly parking pass from the RT website. They don’t have any guards here, especially at night. I never really feel safe leaving my car here, because even on a busy day, there are usually only ten or so cars parked here. If I return later than 5 PM, I’m usually the only one still parked. Even sadder is the fact that only the Meadowview and Florin stations have a park and ride. If you need this service anywhere else on the blue line, you are SOL.
Synopsis: Sacramento has, by far, THE WORST public transit system I have ever used. I would give it one star, but I need to get to work without paying $ 18 a day for parking. I would take the bus instead of doing the park and ride, but the bus only comes by at ridiculous times.