Everyone loves a three-day weekend, and here are some ideas for you to get started on yours.

Downtown Independent, a small theatre located near downtown’s Old Bank District, is hosting LAconic Fest on Friday. This short film festival will be premiering three independent local films – Altair, Gabriel’s Kiss and Time Becomes You – and will screen various other acclaimed indie shorts. The event is free and doors open at 7 p.m. for drinks and snacks; the show begins at 8 p.m. Once the movies are over, the venue for the after party will be announced, and it will be within walking distance of the theatre. Classy attire is required, so break out the suits and cocktail dresses for a fun night out.  (Metro Bus Line 92 to Main/3rd.)

Harry Potter fans can celebrate J.K. Rowling and the wizarding world this Friday at Wizard Rock Fest. Los Angeles is said to be the home of wizard rock, a musical genre that is indie inspired with a whimsical spin. Head to the El Rey with your robes and wands and rock out in honor of the boy who lived. Doors open at 7 p.m. and tickets are $15, special offers may be available online. (Metro Bus Line 20 to Wilshire/Dunsmuir.)

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Here’s the update from Metro’s government relations staff: 

Moments ago, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by a margin of 237 to 187 to adopt H.R. 3408, the Protecting Investment in Oil Shale the Next Generation of Environmental, Energy, and Resource Security Act or PIONEERS Act. 

House GOP leaders will reportedly take this legislation and consolidate it into the broader surface transportation bill they hope to adopt when Congress reconvenes after the President’s Day Recess. The PIONEERS Act would direct the Obama Administration to issue more research, development and demonstration (RD&D) and commercial oil shale leases. The legislation would also open up portions of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy production and would require the Obama Administration to move ahead with new offshore production in the Atlantic, Pacific and Eastern Gulf of Mexico. 

As outlined by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) earlier this week, the PIONEERS Act is meant to help pay for a portion of the House GOP’s surface transportation bill. Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has sharply criticized the PIONEERS Act and recently offered the following comment on the House GOP surface transportation bill, “It eliminates all of the dedicated funding for public transportation, leaving millions of riders, already faced with service cuts and fare increases, out in the cold.”

Two key updates from today’s Metro Board of Director committee meetings:

•Board Member Zev Yaroslavsky directed Metro staff to come up with a plan and timeline for locking the turnstiles at Metro Rail stations. Here’s a staff report about the testing of the locked gates that has taken place over the past several months.

•Metro CEO Art Leahy told Board members that he will have meetings in the next 10 days or so to try to determine an opening date for the Expo Line, which could be as soon as early spring. The opening will depend on several factors, most notably the state Public Utilities Commission approval of the line and local fire and safety officials signing off on the line.

Transit agencies across the U.S. have been waiting with baited breath to find out if their projects would qualify for New Starts funding from the Federal Transit Administration. If New Starts sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same program through which the Regional Connector and Westside subway are slated to receive a combined $81 million in 2013 — with much more hopefully to come in the following years.

Well the New Starts news is out for the rest of the country too in the form of the FTA’s Annual Report on Funding Recommendations [PDF]. Even though some projects are funded without the Fed’s help — take the Expo Line for example — the list of projects funded through New Starts gives you a pretty good sense of what Washington views as critical transit projects for the country.

As the FTA’s report details, 20-plus projects are currently receiving New Starts funding or are recommended to receive it in the coming year. We’re going to focus here on the major new additions to the federal funding rolls, each of which are in the home stretch of the design and environmental review phase.

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6818056617_03131c6e30_z photo by shaggy359, via Flickr creative commons

Nicely composed photo of a pedestrian and bike bridge over railroad tracks — known as the Carter Bridge — in Cambridge, England.

To submit a photo for the Art of Transit, post it to Metro’s Flickr group, email it to sourcemetro@gmail.com or Tweet it to @metrolosangeles with an #artoftransit hashtag. Many of the photos we’ve featured can be seen in these galleries on Flickr.

Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’s Headlines blog, which you can also access via email subscription or RSS feed.

Boxer says no path forward for Senate transportation bill (The Hill)

Sen. Barbara Boxer says her bill is getting weighed down with unrelated amendments from the GOP. Meanwhile, the very unpopular House Republican bill was split in three in a last-ditch effort to save it. Stay tuned.

How green was my bike lane (KCET)

That green-painted bike lane on Spring Street in downtown L.A. has caught the attention of Hollywood and not in a good way. Spring Street is a popular film location because it can be made to look like old cities — but it’s not possible to erase a bright green lane digitally in post-production. So a new bike lane on Main Street will be toned down in color.

Leak offers glimpse of campaign against climate science (New York Times)

Documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based group which promotes “free market solutions,” lay out some details of an upcoming campaign to discredit climate science in public schools. Excerpt:

Heartland’s latest idea, the documents say, is a plan to create a curriculum for public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and budgeted at $200,000 this year. The curriculum would claim, for instance, that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”

It is in fact not a scientific controversy. The vast majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk. Whether and how to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases has become a major political controversy in the United States, however.

No major problems from the President’s visit Wednesday night (L.A. Times)

As has become his custom, the President took a helicopter from LAX to a Westside park and transferred to a SUV for the trip to his hotel and campaign events. Traffic was stinky as usual on the Westside but motorists were mixed on whether it was any more heartbreaking than usual. Of course, the President can follow my rules for visiting the Westside and only travel there between 11 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. on weekdays.

10 coolest subway systems (Coolist)

Most lists are yawn-worthy but Coolist tosses a couple of surprises on its list, including subways in Pyongyang (yes, they have a subway, albeit a short one) and in the country of Kazakhstan. The only American entrants are the Washington D.C. Metro and the abandoned New York City Hall station. Nice pics.

Despite the cold and wet weather this morning, spirits were high among the 20 Eagle Rock Elementary School second-graders as their teacher led them onto the Chinatown Station platform. The kids had been studying Chinatown in the classroom and thanks to Metro’s Student Field Trip Program they now had the chance to explore the real thing instead of settling for books and photos.

The students were met by Los Angeles Mayor and Metro Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilman and Metro Board Member Jose Huizar, Metro CEO Art Leahy and Principal Jose Posada from Eagle Rock Elementary School, who had come out to celebrate the official start of the program. Mayor Villaraigosa had first proposed the program in 2010 and pushed for its realization.

“It’s a win-win situation,” says Mayor Villaraigosa. “We are going to partner with the schools and the students, with the Metro School Field Trip Program that will enable students in the Los Angeles County region to see historica sites and learn from different cultures that these sites offer, and do it for free while traveling on the Metro bus and rail system during off-peak hours.”

Councilman Huizar also showed his appreciation for the program, saying, “I want to thank Mayor Villaraigosa and Metro for their leadership in helping students from all over the Los Angeles region have the opportunity to explore the world outside their own worlds. Through field trips on Metro’s public transportation lines, these young people will discover the beauty of the Los Angeles region and all it has to offer in culture, science and the arts.”

The Student Field Trip Program allows students grade 1-12 from all public, private and parochial schools in Los Angeles County to travel free on Metro bus and rail during off-peak hours to 19 approved destinations, including the California Science Center, Campo de Cahuenga and LACMA. With the LA Unified School District facing increasingly severe budget cuts, funding for school field trips is all but gone as money for school buses has become extremely limited. Metro’s new program ensures students will still be able to visit a variety of cultural and learning centers to enhance their classroom curriculum.

An additional bonus: kids will be learning how to ride Metro buses and trains safely, increasing their chances of enjoying public transportation in the future.

The Metro Board of Directors’ planning committee on Wednesday moved the Regional Connector’s final environmental study to the full Board for their consideration. The Committee, as it often does, did not make a recommendation on the item. 

Several property owners along Flower Street testified that the cut-and-cover construction planned to dig the Connector’s tunnel under Flower would carry too many impacts on the Financial District. They asked that Metro instead use the tunnel boring machine that will be used to dig the Connector’s tunnel under 2nd Street. 

81 MILLION REASONS TO BE HAPPY: All things considered, I thought it was pretty amazing that President Obama’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year included $31 million in federal funds for the Regional Connector and $50 million for the Westside Subway Extension.

Both, of course, are excellent and needed projects that will give hundreds of thousands of people a good alternative to sitting in traffic in the years after they open. I’m not the biggest fan of ridership projections — predicting the future is generally hard — but this federal document shows that both the Connector and the Subway Extension are expected to have some of the heaviest ridership of any transit projects getting federal funds in the nation.

On the federal funding front, the challenge for both projects has been the long and drawn-out environmental review process. Generally, transit projects don’t get federal money until the environmental studies have been approved by local agencies and then certified by the feds in a “record of decision.”

There’s a good reason why: the studies, after all, spell out in excruciating detail what exactly is going to be built. The feds, naturally, want to know what they’re spending their dollars on.

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Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’s Headlines blog, which you can also access via email subscription or RSS feed.

DOT head Ray LaHood takes another whack at the House transportation bill and it isn’t pretty (Transportation Nation)

U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has called the House transportation bill “the most partisan ever” and the “worst bill in decades,” continued to pile it on this week. He called the bill “lousy” and said “it takes us back to the dark ages.” Further, “The House bill takes us back to the horse and buggy era. That’s why over 300 amendments have been offered — many of them by Republicans, to a Republican bill.”

House transportation bill stumbles so Republicans split it in three (Reuters)

Sectretary LaHood isn’t the only one critical of the transpo bill. Even Republicans don’t much like it. With that in mind Republican leaders approved procedural steps on Tuesday to prevent the $260-billion bill from disintegrating. House Speaker John Boehner and his lieutenants, concluding they did not have enough support to ram the bill through the chamber, decided to break the proposal into three pieces and vote on each separately. Roughly, one part would deal with transportation reauthorization, one with energy production and one with federal pension reform. (Yes, all of that was included in what’s called a transportation bill.)

House transportation bill also promotes a new roadside attraction. Bet you can’t guess what it is (Huffington Post)

And furthermore … the Huffington Post reports that a little-noticed provision in the transportation bill would allow states to privatize interstate rest areas, open them up to advertisers and let them sell a variety of goods “serving the traveling public,” which under the bill’s definition could include lottery machines.

Blue Line opens to downtown L.A. (Metro Transportation Library Primary Resources Blog)

A short post on the Metro Library blog reminds us of an anniversary today: The Blue Line opened to the public from Long Beach to downtown L.A. and what is now 7th St/Metro Center in 1991. The Blue Line was the first 22 miles in what has grown to be 79 miles of rail service … with a few more Expo miles coming up soon.