D.C. Declares Laughable 'Transit Revolution' in Los Angeles While Metro Hacks Bus System
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/09/las_transit_revolution.php
Posted by Gabriel Strachota on No on Measure J Facebook page.
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| Slate |
| L.A. buses: a dying breed. |
'Tis
the season for local and national politicians to co-opt the media into
singing their praises. November 6 is right around the corner -- making
one positive article by a respected journalist the (free!) equivalent of
100,000 campaign mailers.
But because L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the president's longtime
Latino pet, has burned through all his shills here at home, he now
relies on D.C. journalists to spot his political ambitions. And boy, are
they delivering:
The
New York Times has been his No. 1 fan these last few months, trailed closely by
Yahoo News.
Then, earlier this week, Slate's Democratic political reporter
Matthew Yglesias gave the Los Angeles mayor and
his proposed Measure J transportation tax the slobberiest cross-country blow job to date.
The piece has since blown up on Reddit, and has been shared on Facebook over 3,500 times. Read it here: "
L.A.'s
Transit Revolution: How a ballot initiative, a visionary mayor, and a
quest for growth are turning Los Angeles into America's next great
mass-transit city."
Villaraigosa is nothing if not "visionary." But as has been concluded many times before by papers like the
Los Angeles Times,
L.A. Weekly and
The New Yorker
(after sticking around long enough to follow up on his ambitions), the
man has a hell of a time turning his visions into functional reality.
Upon taking a day trip to Los Angeles and apparently committing
the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's self-promotional blog to
memory, Slate reporter Yglesias felt he had seen/heard enough to
declare an unlikely "transit revolution" in a land infamous for its
sprawl.
On a recent visit to Southern California, I began my day in
Claremont, where I'd spoken the previous evening at a Pomona College
event. I walked from a hotel near campus to the Claremont Metrolink
station, where I grabbed a commuter rail train to Union Station in
downtown Los Angeles. From there I transferred to the L.A. Metro's Red
Line and rode up to the Vermont/Santa Monica station and checked into a
new hotel. I had lunch in that neighborhood, and later walked east to
meet a friend for dinner and drinks in Silver Lake.
My father, a lifelong New Yorker and confirmed L.A. hater whose
screenwriting work has frequently taken him to the City of Angels, found
the idea of a carless California day pretty amusing. But the city
that's defined in the public imagination as the great auto-centric
counterpoint to the traditional cities of the Northeast has quietly
emerged as a serious mass transit contender. It's no New York and never
will be--Los Angeles was constructed in the era of mass automobile
ownership, and its landscape will always reflect that--but it's turning
into something more interesting, a 21st-century city that moves the idea
of alternative transportation beyond nostalgia or Europhilia.
This news blogger can relate. Sometime last winter, I got my Corolla
impounded (don't ask), and had no choice but to explore the city's bus
and rail systems. I, too, found myself pleasantly convenienced: There
were plenty of bars and city services within busing distance, and the
hands-free commute allowed for reading and ear-budding and window-gazing
like I was in high school again. I'd study the Metro map every day,
looking for new destinations. It was like a game.
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| Bus Riders Union via Facebook |
| Bus
riders protest the "racist" Measure J, which they see as an attempt at
glamorizing L.A. transit while gutting its most critical aspects. |
But
for daily commuters traversing the county's 4,000 square miles --
mostly low-income, mostly minority workers who rely on a complex web of
bus routes to get from, say, their homes in South L.A. to the wealthy
Westside -- Metro's public transportation system is a rapidly darkening
nightmare.
That's because
Metro has cut 16 percent of the county's bus lines, or close to 1 million hours in transport time, over the last four years.
Metro spokesman Rick Jager
has bragged
that this will save the county about $50 million per year. But that's a
sad little pouch of pennies compared to the cost of Metro and the
mayor's gold-plated subway dreams:
According to
Reason Magazine managing editor Tim Cavanaugh,
a raging critic of L.A.'s discriminatory and ineffective transit
priorities, Metro has spent $2 billion on eight new miles train track
since 2009. And according to
our calculations,
at least $11 billion worth of rail construction is still in the works.
(That number will likely skyrocket, thanks to unforeseen construction
costs and
lawsuits
from angry homeowners and businesses. Not to mention the cost of
keeping the tracks nice and safe enough for its new white-collar
constituents;
the L.A. Times believes Metro is nowhere near prepared.)
These funds are flowing directly from
the mayor's Measure R tax,
passed by voters in 2008 -- basically a fat $40 billion loan that Metro
will slowly pay off until the year 2039. And some of our money is also
going to new transit-oriented development (TOD) alongside the rail
lines, all of course
filled with parking spaces. You know, just in case!
So is our subway investment paying off? Not so much, writes Cavanaugh in
Reason:
Buses move more than four times as many Angelenos as trains
do. In 2009 MTA buses carried about 1.2 million riders a day.
Multiplying that by 16 percent, we can estimate more than 180,000 people
had their service canceled while fewer than 40,000 had service
introduced.
Not surprisingly, the result is that fewer people are using mass
transit overall in Los Angeles than in 2009 (about 5 percent fewer,
according to MTA statistics). This is a continuation of a long-term
trend. Since the MTA began rail construction in 1985, more than 80 miles
of railroads have been built, but mass transit ridership as a
percentage of county population is lower than it was in 1985.
Will Dominie, an urban-studies graduate student at UCLA, believes
this trend will only worsen under the forced Metro gentrification of the
future. He concludes in a June 2012 report that...
... Although not all Los Angeles transit stations have
gentrified over the last two decades, many did. Those that did lost
transit riders and gained drivers much faster than the rest of the
county. These effects are quite robust -- gentrification is the most
powerful predictor of neighborhood transit use. Since transit riders in
Los Angeles are overwhelmingly low-income people, immigrants, and people
of color, it is perhaps not surprising that where these groups are
displaced, transit use has declined.
These findings yield compelling implications for policymakers
concerned with our environmental future. Specifically, they suggest that
current TOD practice, with its emphasis on attracting wealthier
residents to new, mixed-income development, is entirely
counterproductive.
The Bus Riders Union -- not so much a union as a coalition of bus
riders -- held a massive protest last week over Measure J, a countywide
transportation tax
that would tack another 30 years onto Measure R. In other words, we'd be funding Metro's skewed priorities until the year 2069.
Slate's sole evidence that more Angelenos might be riding rail is a
survey showing "a 10.7 percent increase in the share of the metro area's
population that relies on mass transit to get to work, matched with a
3.6 percent increase in driving" from 2000 to 2009.
But Sunyoung Yang of the Bus Riders Union says that the 10.7 increase
could be an effect of the recession, and that it definitely includes
low-income bus riders -- who, since that survey was conducted, have seen
their services hacked to pieces. In some cases, bus lines have been
stunted so severely that they're as obscure and un-useable as the rail
lines replacing them.
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| Metro via Flickr |
| Expo Line Phase I ribbon-cutting. |
"People hate change," Metro spokesman Jager
once told L.A. Weekly,
referencing another brutal round of bus cuts. "Anytime there's talk
about modifying services, people are concerned about that -- because it
changes their routine."
For the larger labor force living on the cheap outskirts of Los Angeles, that routine is a livelihood.
Yet every few months, Mayor Villaraigosa and his supporters stage
another splashy ribbon-cutting
for a new subway station. The shiny, bullet-shaped new Metro trains are
almost phallic in nature, and local politicians can't help but puff up
with macho glee at the sight of their extended metallic manhoods.
(Even when
the train breaks down on its highly publicized trial run.
Oops. Not that Metro or L.A. City Hall officials ever have to worry
about their dysfunctional new system again, considering they all happily
drive taxpayer-funded gas guzzlers.)
All this is to say: The wealthy liberal fantasy of awkwardly jamming a
Manhattan-style subway system onto L.A.'s established urban sprawl is
stupid growth at its most ambitious.
As ace L.A. reporter David Zahniser predicted
for the Weekly in 2007:
So here's an unpleasant thought: Unless enough people can be
persuaded to change their behavior, the L.A. traffic nightmare will be
much, much worse under smart growth -- miles and miles of high-density
neighborhoods, with public transportation no one but the poorest
residents will use, or tolerate.
[
@simone_electra /
swilson@laweekly.com /
@LAWeeklyNews]
