R We There Yet? Re-evaluating Los Angeles's Transit Future

Some new rail lines funded before Measure R are on tap much sooner. An extension of the Gold Line light rail line to the diverse working-class communities of East Los Angeles opened in November. Another light rail, known as the Expo Line and traveling about nine miles from Downtown to Culver City, could open by late next year, though it’s more likely to open in 2011.

Even as that line nears completion, an extension of it to Santa Monica paid for with Measure R money is in the midst of environmental reviews. Depending on how the extension’s permitting process and planning proceed, it could be finished around 2015. Other Measure R-funded projects, particularly the long-anticipated Subway to the Sea from Western Avenue to Santa Monica, might take longer, but Metro board members have chastised the agency’s staff to work harder to speed up those projects’ timelines.

Assemblyman Mike Feuer, one of transit’s biggest allies in the state legislature, rejects the idea Measure R will hurt Los Angeles bus riders and argues that its passage infuses much-needed funding for both the region’s rail network and its bus routes.

“Measure R contributes 8 billion new dollars to the bus system than would ever have been available before Measure R,” he says.

Feuer doesn’t regularly ride buses when in Los Angeles, which is usually one day a week. Normally he spends his day driving quickly from meeting to meeting in a Toyota Prius. His children do ride the bus regularly and he says he has ridden L.A.’s buses “extensively” over the years.

“I know the advantages and the pitfalls of the system. It is very possible to traverse Los Angeles by bus, but it is too slow,” he says, explaining that a portion of Measure R money targeting potholes and other street improvements would increase the efficiency and comfort of the area’s buses. “We have an integrated transportation system that requires improvement at every access of it.”

Feuer also dismisses the claim nothing can be done to find the solutions and money to fix Los Angeles’ transportation network.

“It relegates us to live in a polluted, congested city forever,” he says.

The BRU doesn’t necessarily oppose rail travel, but doesn’t believe it should be Metro’s central focus. Criollo urges observers to look more closely at the statistics Metro provides to justify its focus on rail travel.

Instead of building new infrastructure, the BRU believes transit planners should work to inhibit auto usage. The organization supports the creation of more bus-only lanes on roads and highways, and increased parking fees. All of these measures might make car travel less appealing. More bus riders may be retained if the system seems convenient and intuitive.

Where the BRU lobbies transit agencies to refocus their attention on buses, other critics of Metro’s policies say the agency is too focused on expensive projects within the city limits of Los Angeles. Most vocal with this critique is Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who, as a county supervisor, also serves on Metro’s board. His district includes some of the county’s most conservative areas, including many suburban communities outside of the city of L.A.’s boundaries. All five county supervisors, including Antonovich, sit on the 13-member board, which also includes Glendale mayor and current board chair Ara Najarian, Villaraigosa, Katz and another Villaraigosa appointee, and city council members from Santa Monica, Duarte, and Lakewood, as well as a now-vacant seat for a non-voting representative appointed by California’s governor. Antonovich opposes the Subway to the Sea, because, says his spokesman Tony Bell, it represents “Years and years of diesel belching drilling machines and trucks, earth-moving equipment and special interests.”

“A much more eco-friendly system would be light rail,” Bell says. “But of course that doesn’t line the pockets of big construction companies on cement and years and years of work.”

Antonovich is adamantly opposed to heavy rail, but it’s unlikely the Metro board will change its priorities until the governing body is reformed, Bell says. Supervisor Antonovich has made a career claiming entrenched interests from the city of L.A. hold the board hostage and ignore the interests of the 7 million county residents outside of the city. He says measure R wouldn’t have passed otherwise.

“A lot of it is the media’s failure to properly address the issue and to communicate it to the voters who were duped into Measure R,” Bell says.

Still others think deeper concerns are lost in debates about transit’s environmental impact. People like Browne Molyneux — the author of The Bus Bench — say race and class should be more prominent discussion topics

A woman of color born in Canada, Molyneux moved to Los Feliz as a child with her white step-mother and Honduran father. Always around a diverse crowd, as a teenager she loved British sports cars and lived what she described as a “sheltered life.” She hadn’t ever thought about gender. She never thought about her race. That changed when she started riding the bus and the train.

“I saw this world that was so different,” she said. “I was actually really pissed. I was really pissed that this city was so segregated, not just by race but by class. There’s such a different world that certain people are in.”

As she rode the bus and the Blue Line, a light rail which runs between Downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach through places like South Los Angeles, Watts and Compton, she got angry and depressed. Angry because such stark divides were still prevalent. Depressed because so many people in South Los Angeles and the East Side took it in stride. It was as if they felt like they deserved their treatment, Molyneux said.

Despite Molyneux’s pessimism, I wondered if in the midst of this economic crisis, there might be an opportunity for the transportation system to change. I wanted to know how easily she thought change could come to the city with so many layers of power, so many sources of authority, so many people from so many different areas with so many different priorities.

“I think the thing that’s so great about the economy going into Hell, it’s going to force people to be creative,” she says. “You’re going to either have to be creative, or you’re going to be on the streets. I don’t necessarily think that’s bad. I think it’s bad that people are going to be on the streets. But I feel like right now is the time to be creative.”

With Measure R now passed, the question for Metro has become when it should start trying to figure out how to get Los Angeles back on the right track.

The return

In late January I return to Vermont and Santa Monica. There’s also a Red Line subway stop here, and this time it’s early enough for me to catch a train. I descend the stairs to the station and find a seat in the center of the train platform. Unchanging, unwavering fluorescent light illuminates the speckled floor and the escalators running constantly in my peripheral vision.

Here and there exhausted bodies crouch into their own worlds. A man wearing a backpack and ski jacket fiddles with his cell phone, a pretty girl in sweats intently studies a new-age looking book called The Law of Attraction. Next to me, an older African American woman with short hair and a thin white plastic jacket decorated with a grid pattern, worn over a blue hoodie, highwaters and tennis shoes thumbs through a design magazine, staring at its pages. Soon a man with a bald head, save a sculpted triangular black mohawk just above his brow, props himself against the metallic side of an escalator. He grasps a music player strapped around his hand and taps his fingers against his leg to its beat.

They all wait silently. Time doesn’t seem to pass, doesn’t seem like it ever will. Maybe someone else appears, but nothing else changes. The train is more than a quarter hour away, if the handful of TV monitors above the platform are to be believed.

The man with the cell phone starts pacing. The woman with the design magazine turns the page to a story about “Hawaii’s Big Island,” which she devours as intently as the previous pages she’s turned through.

Time begins to move, slowly and instantly, first with a soft breeze, then a blast of air, then a rumble combined with a torrent of squeaking and scraping metallic sounds.

Almost unconsciously, I’m aboard a train car. Half the people in the car watch intently as I find a place to ride. Half are indifferent to their surroundings, like the man with the dark brown slick of hair and gray eyebrows staring forward or the old man perched by the door wearing an old L.A. Dodgers hat.

I find a spot by a door and grab a handrail along a nearby seat. My body rocks as the train continues on its journey. As it moves, my feet stiffen beneath me and I find my balance. Time slows down. I relax. Just a few more stops and I will be home.