In fact, Los Angeles’s suburbs are actually the country’s most densely populated. While more people might be packed into the urban cores of Manhattan and Chicago than Downtown Los Angeles, more people per square mile live in Los Angeles’ surrounding suburbs than anywhere in the country. Normally, density helps shorten the lengths of drivers’ commutes, but that’s not true in L.A., where more drivers compete for the same road space. There is still congestion in other dense cities, but they also have direct transit alternatives. In Los Angeles, that’s not always the case, because the area doesn’t just have one central urban core or Downtown. It is “polycentric.”
Los Angeles isn’t a sprawl of low density suburban communities. Instead, the city and its surrounding metropolitan area have multiple “Downtowns,” including Century City, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena and Glendale, to name just a few. This polycentricity makes public transit more logistically difficult. Commuters don’t just move between a suburban periphery and a dense core – they move in multiple directions at all times of the day. So many trips in so many directions across a polycentric city require a more complex transit network.
Thus, a metropolis like Los Angeles, with a complex mesh of roadways already in place between its urban centers, can’t just build its way out of congestion with new rail lines. RAND’s study recommends 13 traffic-management solutions policymakers could adopt in the short-term. The ideas include capitalizing on the robust bus network that already exists in the Los Angeles area, as well as other ideas, such as parking meters that charge different rates depending on the time of day and location, incentives for ride sharing, and special toll lanes for high-occupancy vehicles.
All these goals, the report says, would serve to help manage demand for Los Angeles’ limited road space during peak hours. Such demand management is criticized because its impacts tend to wear off over time, but, say the RAND report’s authors, it might work if regional planners simultaneously develop strategies to put a price on the amount of use drivers get from the region’s roadways. Meanwhile, the report suggests, the pain lower-income commuters might feel from higher driving costs would be alleviated if convenient and reliable public transit were protected and improved.
New rail lines and realignment of zoning and planning rules to improve land use may be long-term solutions, but the team studied only projects that were likely to measurably decrease the number of cars on the road. ”The region could implement such projects quickly and they could be addressed without needing to engage numerous stakeholders simultaneously. Problems like diesel truck traffic carrying cargo from L.A. and Long Beach’s busy ports — a major contributor to both the region’s traffic congestion and air pollution — weren’t within the scope of the study. Instead, RAND looked at solutions that could be implemented quickly, while policymakers debate extensive, long-term changes, such as those Measure R might allow or the complexities of cargo truck traffic. But some of these policymakers say change is overdue.
“L.A. is way behind,” Katz says.
I meet Katz on a rainy January morning before a Metro board meeting. When I first arrive at Metro’s Downtown headquarters I can’t find him. He calls as I pay for a cup of coffee and a muffin. Caught behind an accident at Stadium Way, Katz is stuck in traffic on Interstate 5.
I settle down at the corner of the cafeteria to wait for him. Steam from a nearby metal forge billows behind Gold Line tracks as they curve into Union Station. A few trains pass. Mist obscures most of the faint outline of the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance.
When Katz arrives I tease him about not riding transit to the meeting. He normally works from home and only comes to Union Station for Metro board meetings, he says. He often takes the Red Line from North Hollywood but will drive when he expects meetings to go late, as he did today. Just the day before he had been in Washington, D.C. for Obama’s inauguration. There, he and Mayor Villaraigosa urged the incoming administration to change federal permitting rules to allow the state’s environmental review documents in place of federal ones, thus cutting down on redundant reviews that might slow new projects down.
“We are looking to move the agency so that now we not only turn around projects faster and get them on the street faster and start building them faster, but we do it in green ways as well,” Katz says.
Lifestyle overhaul
Greening a community takes more than quickly building new projects, though. Tim Papandreou, Metro’s former transportation planning manager, says any community that wants to be green has to completely overhaul its lifestyle.
“There is no city right now that is sustainable,” Papandreou said at a February conference hosted by the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “Right now, we need to change the transportation gears, and we need to do it fast.”
Papandreou now works for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority. Despite the broad overtones of the event he addressed, the third annual Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility Summit, most of the event’s discussion in fact centered upon new battery technologies and other ways to improve individual automobiles.
“Sometimes designing our way out of things is not the solution,” Papandreou told the audience.
Most people don’t drive just because they think it’s fun, Papandreou said. Instead, they are “literally forced to drive” because of current land use and transportation policies.
“Automobiles in current planning have more rights than we have,” Papandreou told the summit. “Cars have a right to housing, but humans don’t.”
Papandreou, who hasn’t owned a car this century, urged the audience to consider more systematic lifestyle changes in how we move through our lives, changes he says are already underway in the Los Angeles area.
“Los Angeles is going through a massive transformation.” Papandreou tells me in an interview a week after the conference. “A lot of the stereotypes that people placed on L.A. in the 80s and 90s don’t apply any more.”
The city’s changing attitudes toward transportation could have an environmental payoff. Papandreou stresses the fundamental lifestyle changes that must happen; others, like Denny Zane, say policymakers must invest in lower emissions transportation systems, like light rail and subways. Zane, a former Santa Monica mayor and the political consultant credited with getting the ball rolling on Measure R, says that’s why 35 percent of the $40 billion the new tax will provide will go towards rail.
“The real holy grail for transportation besides walking and bicycles is zero-emission, electric public transit,” Zane says. “We’ve been doing that for decades. We just haven’t done enough of it.”
After convening an unlikely coalition of labor unions, environmentalists and businesses, Zane worked with state and local officials to craft Measure R into a palatable initiative. The campaign was tough, but Zane says the coalition was able to make its case fairly easily.
“I don’t think it’s rocket science,” Zane says. “Congestion really sucks and gas prices were really high.”
But just because Measure R passed, most people in transit circles don’t believe the money will accomplish much if Metro pours it all into subways and light rail lines. Rail can be so energy intensive and expensive to build that it doesn’t recover its costs.
Metro’s bus fleet also cuts down on emissions. It has been called the nation’s “largest clean-fuel bus fleet” because its vehicles run on compressed natural gas, a fuel touted for lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, some transportation experts say CNG vehicles spew more toxins than diesel engines equipped with emissions reduction technologies, claims environmental scientists and engineers continue to study. The debate has yet to be settled.
Some measurements of transit’s environmental contributions can be deceptive as well. It’s not enough to look at large ridership numbers and declare a rail line a success. Deeper analysis has to take place to determine whether the people riding those lines would otherwise have driven or if they would have taken a bus, biked or walked to their destinations.
What’s certain is people are beginning to drive less, at least nationwide. The United States Department of Transportation released data Feb. 19 showing travel on all America’s roadways dropped by 3.8 billion vehicle miles between December 2007 and December 2008. The drop partially coincides with a huge fuel price spike in the summer of 2008, but it continued even after oil prices plummeted in the fall (although it also coincided with a worsening economy in which more people are unemployed and not driving to and from work). In Los Angeles County, Papandreou attributes the changes to cities retooling their downtowns and neighborhoods and people deciding to live in transit-oriented communities where they can walk, ride bikes, or take buses and trains where they need and want to go.
“People are not purposefully not driving because they want to be green,” he says. “It just works for them.”
What an impressive piece of work, Bill. Thanks for painting such a thorough and compelling picture of LA transit for an outsider who’s finally starting to pick up on the fact that LA is not the town it used to be.
I’m not sure how I feel about the BRU, as you portray them. They’re almost certainly the most effective such organization in the country, it seems, and god bless them for that. Do they have a BRT vs. LRT position?
Also, the PIRG guy actually argued that the most underrated reason to build transit is so we can hire more public-sector mechanics? Christ. That’s depressing.
BTW, I especially appreciated your lucid explanation of the multicentric city. Maybe that’s old hat in LA transit circles, but it has interesting implications for those of us who live in aspiring LA Counties.
Michael,
Thank you for your comments. L.A. is definitely not the town it used to be. Then again, it’s never the town it used to be.
As far as the BRU, I wasn’t attempting to portray them in one light or another, but I do agree they have been effective. Exploring their history in L.A. and on the L.A. transit scene, though, is another story.
When I first conceptualized this piece it was Fall, 2008. My initial goal was to explore — at a time when the scope of the recession and remained unclear — whether the response to the economic crisis would offer an opportunity for a real Green New Deal. Obama hadn’t yet been inaugurated, and it was still unclear what the stimulus would entail. At first I wanted to discover whether the moment would be an opportunity for actual structural change in how we manage both economy and society.
Of course, I had to narrow my scope and look at specific examples, so I wanted to see how or whether Measure R — and LA transit priorities in general — offered an opportunity for a green revolution (at the outset of my reporting gas prices were still high, too, and I wanted to know whether record ridership levels would maintain once they dropped, and whether leaders would take steps to maintain the public focus on transit even after fuel costs dropped). Just as the resultant story didn’t have as much as one might want about the BRU, I don’t feel it had quite enough about the environmental nature of this discussion, and I’d still like to write more about how society could actually make the shift away from the individual passenger automobile and what public leaders could do to encourage such a shift, if indeed it is seen as a priority.
I think I can say something about the BRU’s position on BRT vs. LRT, with the caveat that I don’t speak for them and didn’t speak with them too deeply about this. What I’d imagine they’d argue is that LRT, or any transit modality, shouldn’t take resources away from functional, existing transit systems relied upon by tens of thousands of Angelinos. With limited transit funds, resources should go toward those systems already depended upon for commutes to work, school, health care and other necessities.
As to Erin Steva of PIRG, well, she did make that argument, but it’s clearly not her, or PIRG’s only reason for promoting transit. As she notes in the story, she experiences its functionality every day (still, you rightly noted the point about it being an “under-rated reason” for building transit). It’s worth noting that our interview took place in February, when the economic picture was quite unsettled (not that it’s particularly settled now) and my guess — and this didn’t come up in our conversation — is that the job creation element of her position might have had something to do with making transit expansion politically palatable.
As I noted in the “A story still in transit” sidebar, this story has evolved very much since I reported it. Unfortunately, the realities of establishing my freelance career since May, applying for jobs, etc., kept me from keeping the concerted focus on transit I was able to have during my graduate studies, and that others like Damien Newton of Streetsblog or Steve Hymon (first of the times, now of Metro’s The Source) continue to keep. I’m not trying to make excuses, but to note that it’s certainly an evolving subject. What I can say confidently is that it remains an underreported subject, even though transportation is so crucial to modern life.
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful response, Bill. (And sorry about the mix-up on Erin’s gender. I was reading and commenting on my phone last night and couldn’t easily refer to the text.)
On the BRU, I didn’t mean to dispute your characterization, only to say that I came away with a vaguely negative impression of them after reading this, the most detailed description I’ve yet read. That’s more because of my pro-train bias than your actual writing.
Good point about the ever-changing LA. As somebody who’s planning to start a transportation-only publication up here in PDX, I think and hope you’re right that this is an underreported subject. We definitely need to talk more about this when you’re up here.
Bill, excellent piece. i learned a lot; too bad i don’t live in LA! the most useful idea in the piece for Portland is that of “multicentric” cities. we’re like that here, obviously not to the extent of LA, but still most of our transit goes thru downtown. those that run outside use transit centers that may or may not serve local communities. i’m not sure we’ve addressed transit in terms of multicentricity (or as Michael said, maybe it’s just us non-transit planning types what don’t know this term), but it has given me a lot to think about.
see you soon! good luck with the move.