One afternoon I observe how it works at a coffee shop near the intersection of Vermont and Franklin Avenues in Los Feliz
Outside, steam and exhaust gather behind the tailpipe of a maroon Pontiac. The traffic shifts and the window of the coffee shop fills with a sheet of orange broken up by white letters reading “Metro Local.” The classical soundtrack dissipates momentarily beneath the whining brakes and chugging engines of the passing #180 to Pasadena. Vacant faces gaze through rain splattered windows, then turn forward as the light changes at the nearby signal.
The bus passes. More cars go by, their exhaust mirrored by gray wisps of vapor above a coffee cup. Moments later the windows fill with color again. This time the deep rumble carries with it a flash of fire-engine red. It’s the #780. A Rapid.
It will eventually pass Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, where Pat Brown works. Brown doesn’t ride the bus, but he does commute from here in Los Feliz via Metro Rail four to five times a week. Each day, he boards a Red Line train at Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue and rides to Union Station. There he transfers to a Gold Line, which he rides to the Memorial Park stop. The trip can take between half an hour and an hour on the train. Were Brown to ride the #780, #180 or #181 bus, it would take about the same amount of time, assuming there are no significant traffic delays, according to Metro’s Trip Planner Web site.
Brown hasn’t always relied on rail travel. He and his wife used to share a beat-up car. Then they traded it in for a new vehicle. As gas prices skyrocketed last year they decided to make a point of not driving the new car too often.
Brown started riding the train regularly to work. The commute was easy.
“I get so much reading done,” says Brown, who, for some time ran Vroman’s blog. “In general, I like the way the system moves. In general, I’m not on a train that breaks down, and when one does, they handle it well. It feels safe to me. That’s not the case in every city. In general, I think they do a good job and for the things that they don’t I think they have a good reason.”
Brown says as long as he takes the train during peak hours the experience is smooth, but he’d like it if trains ran later and more frequently at night and to more destinations. Still, in the meantime, Brown doesn’t consider taking the bus as an option.
“I think I’ve taken public buses twice in L.A.,” he says.
While he thinks he could make sense of L.A.’s bus network if he focused on it, he says it’s a confusing system. He’d ride it more often if it were obvious where buses were headed, and if there were more express buses available.
“The train in LA makes sense to me because you’re bypassing the worst of L.A. The train doesn’t have to go through traffic,” Brown said. He acknowledged critiques of rail which argue it doesn’t serve low income riders, but he doesn’t think buses are adequate transit solutions for Los Angeles. “Rail makes so much more sense in L.A. than buses do. The traffic doesn’t seem to be going away, so buses add to that.”
Muddled Messages
Many who might take transit seem daunted by the idea of L.A.’s bus network, perhaps even scared by it. They don’t know how to ride the bus, they don’t know where it goes, when it goes or how often. To attract and retain these riders, Metro and other transit operators struggle to show how to conveniently take advantage of transportation alternatives.
“I can’t tell you how many people say to me ‘You know, I don’t know how to catch anything on the system’,” Katz says. He says Metro’s Web-based Trip Planner is an easy way for would-be riders to figure out what routes they need to take, how much the trip will cost, and even how far a walk they’ll have to take from their destination to a bus stop or train station.
Right now, though, Trip Planner is only accessible to those with Internet access. Even then, it doesn’t provide real-time information about buses or trains, and its information can be inaccurate. One option to make things easier might be software for phones and other electronic devices that can tell people where the nearest bus or train stops are, what the right route is to their destination, and when the next ride can be expected.
“The key is that the people who want to take transit are taking it, and the people who have to take transit are taking it,” Papandreou says “The people who are not sure know they should be taking it more, but they don’t know how.”
If banks across the world can provide understandable automatic teller machines and make them available everywhere, why shouldn’t there be technology throughout the transit system anyone can use to learn how to get where they need to go in Los Angeles and when they can get there?
Papandreou says part of the problem is the fact there are multiple agencies offering multiple transportation alternatives. Sometimes transit isn’t even the right option. For certain trips, rental bikes, car sharing, or just better telecommuting or delivery services to keep people from leaving their homes in the first place might make more sense.
“We have all these different little pieces, but they’re not coordinated under one umbrella and the one program or widget you can install on your phone,” he says.
“We need to have a meta information database that basically links all this information together and tells you what you need to do when you need to know it.”
Some officials and transit activists alike say mobile solutions shouldn’t be a priority because it wouldn’t help the masses of low-income riders who rely on public transportation. But Papandreou thinks more transit-dependent riders have cell phones than some might think. Regardless, no riders will realize what options they have without better marketing and outreach. Transit planners, therefore, might be wise to go into specific communities and speak to specific people about what alternatives they have. Businesses, meanwhile, should be directly engaged and shown how to implement ridesharing programs for employees and other practices that will promote transportation alternatives, Papandreou says. Metro has a working product, it just needs to market it better and show residents and businesses how alternative transportation modes can work for them.
“When I was working at the agency we were trying a lot of strategies, but we didn’t have anything to sell,” he says. Now Metro has a product. “In the areas where there is good marketing, the ridership is very high.”
In fact, Metro’s current product is at risk. Much of Metro’s funding for operations — paying bus drivers’ salaries and maintaining rail and bus fleets, for example — comes from hundreds of millions of dollars in state transportation assistance. After more than three months of acrimonious stalemate over how to eliminate a $42 billion budget deficit in the state, California lawmakers cut a deal slashing numerous state programs while implementing new fees. Transportation funding from the state was one of the Feb. 19 budget deal’s victims. Another was a proposal to tax drivers an additional 19 cents per gallon of gasoline they purchase — a tax hike that would have raised general revenue and was not directed specifically to transit, but might have discouraged driving.
Many transportation experts agree it is a myth that roads are free and highways pay for themselves. Roads have long been subsidized by taxpayers, because gas taxes don’t always pay for all the wear and tear drivers put them through. Federal gas taxes haven’t risen with inflation, and, despite increased use of the highways they’re meant to pay for, they haven’t been raised along with demand. More fuel efficient cars also mean drivers aren’t buying as much gasoline, or paying as much tax, at once. Thus, transportation infrastructure actually gets less money each year. Many scholars now agree charging drivers for the amount of demand they put on the network, perhaps by taxing the number of miles drivers travel, makes much more sense. Even that would only provide more money if people drove more overall. A different, perhaps more consistently lucrative option might be taxing a percentage of fuel sales. Nevertheless, the difference may be moot. In February, Obama’s administration was forced under political pressure to backtrack from hints it might consider a tax increase.
While not a perfect solution, the proposed gas tax hike in California might have helped the state’s budget woes. Now, transit agencies are preparing for a blow to their operational funding. While other agencies are arguably worse off, Metro officials must resist dipping into money from Measure R’s passage to cover the shortfall. That would be a murky option legally, as Measure R was specifically designed to pay for system improvements and expansion, not everyday transit operations in the county. Metro board members have stated explicitly they won’t deny the will of voters and raid those funds to backfill its funding.
“Measure R is the beginning, it’s not the answer,” Papandreou said. “It helps as a huge down payment. It’s not going to build everything. It’s like a bonus. You’ve got to figure out how to pay the rest of the mortgage.”
The problem: Metro isn’t likely to increase the amount people pay to cover its “mortgage.” That means it’s more likely it will decide to cut back on the services it offers, eliminating some bus routes and changing the times on others. While it would be political suicide to raise fares, cutting back on service could have a tremendous negative impact on congestion, Papandreou predicts.
“You don’t want to raise fares because people are relying on the system, and you also want to reward people for using the system,” he says.
Simply put, cutting service will leave fewer transportation options for riders who depend on buses.
Even before California’s budget passed, transit advocates warned cuts to transportation assistance funding might be illegal. Now some are preparing new efforts to lobby lawmakers to protect transit from future state cutbacks.
Erin Steva, a spokesperson for the California Public Interest Research Group an organization heavily involved in transit policy, says the public adopted new transportation behaviors when fuel prices soared in the summer of 2008. She either bikes to work in the Mid-Wilshire area or takes a combination of the #201 and #603 buses and the Purple Line rail. She says she’s been able to figure out the city’s transit system.
“The city does not have a reputation for really having any public transportation,” she says. “Clearly it does and it does work for many different people, but it does need to improve.”
The public did its part by passing Measure R, Steva says. Now it’s up to Metro to keep up its end of the bargain and pursue the projects it said it would if the measure passed. Meanwhile, the state, she says, has a responsibility to protect transportation funds instead of backfilling it with money from the federal stimulus plan. In Cal-PIRG’s view, funding public transportation isn’t just a transit policy issue. It means jobs. Maintaining and expanding current operations mean bus drivers and maintenance workers get paid.
“I think of all of those benefits, the angle not covered enough is job creation,” Steva says.
“Transportation is a right. Everyone should be able to get to and from work, be able to travel throughout the community, and they shouldn’t need a car for that.”
Not long after my conversation with Steva, I find myself on the #204 as it slithers up Vermont, clinging to the edges of the avenue. Ahead at Pico another #204 is stopped. My driver weaves her charge around her colleague’s. Both buses continue North, writhing around one another along the bumpy asphalt.
I sit and stare ahead, noticing an empty Cheetos bag behind the wheel wells on the gray floor. A mish-mashed slough of blue and orange blanket the vacant seats in front of me. The upholstery features a mess of random typographic symbols and icons vaguely suggesting travel. Above, city lights fight their way through the etched graffiti and water-drop stains on the plexiglass windows.
This scene may be familiar to thousands of bus riders every day, riders the Bus Riders Union advocates on behalf of. The grass roots organization advocates for increased transit access, often through the ballot box, participation in civic meetings, and court challenges to transit policy it believes is unfair or harmful to low-income and minority communities.
“We see the intersection of climate change, transit, civil rights and equitable rights and together their ability to transform LA transportation by forming the concept of a bus-centered, pedestrian-centered, auto-free city,” says Miguel Criollo, the BRU’s lead organizer.
Wander through Los Angeles County’s transportation networks long enough and you won’t miss the BRU. Their bright yellow shirts are easy to spot anywhere, particularly when BRU members pack the Metro board room to lobby transit planners to focus more attention on maintaining and improving the city’s network of buses. Best known for winning a consent decree in the mid-90s forcing Metro to protect the low fares and purchase the low-emissions buses the agency now touts, the BRU, which attempted to organize voters to reject Measure R, believes spending billions on rail infrastructure that may not be built for years diverts funding desperately needed to move riders around the city today.
“A lot of people have written about how public transportation was destroyed in Los Angeles,” Criollo says. “All of that is true, yet we believe we don’t have that long time period to dabble with a new infrastructure that would take 20 or 30 years. In reality [Metro] already has been promising a whole set of models. Ridership hasn’t dramatically changed since then.”
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.