Contributed by
Wad on January 1st, 2009 at 12:01 am
The Year in Transit commences its second decade into guessing what the future holds for the analysis and advocacy of getting-aroundery. For this edition, The Year in Transit is modifying the protocol slightly by cutting right to the chase and writing the looking back/looking forward after the predictions.
Stand clear, the doors are closing.
Continue Reading…
Contributed by
Fred Camino on December 26th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Los Angeles Streetblogger Damien Newton was extra busy the weeks before Christmas interviewing members of the Los Angeles transiteratti including none other than yours truly (I consider myself the Lindsay Lohan of the L.A. transit scene). Other interviews of note include the always entertaining and militant Brown Molyneaux, bicycle activist David Pulsipher, and The Times own transit reporter Steve Hymon. These and more are availabe for your Holiday reading pleasure over at Streetsblog LA.
Contributed by
Fred Camino on December 18th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
UPDATE: We have a winner, by random choice, congratulations BZCAT! The Metro 2009 Calendar is yours, and good luck on taking those baby steps…
Hey folks and Happy Holidays! I’ve got an extra Metro 2009 “Opposites” Calendar and I want to give it to one of the faithful who still check out this dead zone of a blog. This calendar is actually incredibly cool, Metro commissioned a bunch of Los Angeles illustrators to take their “opposites” campaign (you know, car bad metro good) to the next level. The art is absolutely beautiful and witty to boot.
Here’s what you gotta do to win it. Leave a comment telling me what your Transit Oriented New Years Resolution is. Are you getting rid of your car at last? Are you starting a transit riders club? Are you moving to some snazzy new T.O.D.? Are you going to give a transit-blogger-on-hiatus a bunch of money so he can blog again?
A winner will be chosen randomly from the comments. Make sure to include your email address so I can contact you if you win.
Oh yah, and comments have to be posted by noon tomorrow, because I’m leaving town for the Holidays, so get to it!
Contributed by
calwatch on November 5th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
With the County Registrar of Voters posting its statement of votes cast by community, I’ll channel my inner Chuck Todd and go through how Measure R did, by the numbers.
- Out of the larger cities, West Hollywood had a superlative turnout for Measure R, with 84% of the vote. But Lynwood, South Gate, Bell, Santa Monica, Maywood, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, and Cudahy all scored more than 75% for Measure R.
- Out of the Los Angeles council districts, District 1 (Reyes), 4 (La Bonge), and 13 (Garcetti) did the best, with the Hollywood/Echo Park district of Eric Garcetti pulling in 81% of the vote. Together, these Central Los Angeles districts voted four-to-one for the measure.
- The two Los Angeles City Council districts where Measure R failed were 12 (Greig Smith’s northwest San Fernando Valley) and 3 (Dennis Zine’s southwest San Fernando Valley).
- The only city where Measure R failed to get a majority? La Habra Heights, which has more in common with Orange County than LA County.
- Even the gated cities turned in good results: Rolling Hills pulled in 51%, Bradbury pulled in 55%, and Hidden Hills with 61% of the vote. This is significant since the gated cities have little or no public roads to use their Local Return share on. Avalon had 63% say yes, while the unincorporated community of Topanga, whose only public transit operates literally two months out of the year, gave 74% of their votes to the yes column.
- The Antelope Valley didn’t all vote no. Palmdale had 61% and Lancaster 56% voting yes, while Quartz Hill voted 46% in favor for the measure. Santa Clarita pulled in 53% for the measure, and Castaic turned in 54%
- Cities served by the Gold Line turned in about 60% for the measure, while cities served by the Wilshire subway pulled in 76% (Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and LA Council Districts 4, 5, 10, and 11).
- Out of the cities of the opponents, Bill Bogaard’s Pasadena turned in 69% for the measure. Gary Delong’s district in Long Beach turned in 57% for Measure R, seven points less than Long Beach as a whole, while George Hunter’s Pomona council district turned in 71% for the measure, higher than the 68% yes vote for the city as a whole. Ara Najarian’s Glendale pulled in 64% of the vote for the measure, the same as John Fasana’s Duarte. For the entire City of Los Angeles, 72% voted for the tax increase.
You can play with the numbers here.
Contributed by
calwatch on October 8th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
A report on the Metro web site quietly confirms what many of us have known for some time… the structural deficit keeps ballooning. From a projected structural deficit of $1.8 billion between 2008 and 2018, the projected operating deficit now stands at nearly $2 billion over the next ten years, and over $2.1 billion when capital expenses are included. The deficit alone is projected to be $134.1 million.
Measure R, if it passed, would provide $2.1 billion to backfill this deficit, although a good percentage of this money will be siphoned off to other transit operators through the complicated Formula Allocation Procedure. Still, Metro would receive the lions’ share of the funding, and combined with reallocation of capital funds (now funded by Measure R) to operating expenses, and some small fare increases every few years, the amount of revenue is likely adequate to cover the current system and some additional service.
But should it fail, you would be looking at 1.06 million hours of cuts on the bus side…. the equivalent of lopping off all Sunday service, or shutting down the Orange, Green, and Gold lines. Come July 2010, assuming this scenario holds and only service cuts are made, you would see an additional 800,000 service hours cut back, or the equivalent of shutting down all service after 6 pm. The other option would be to jack up fares across the board by about 50% next year (in addition to the already approved fare increase) and another 40% in 2010, more than doubling fares from today.
To be fair, a lot of the ten-year planning process is hocus-pocus that would make the Soviet Union proud. It does not include a proposed 20% fare increase in 2012 (even though the Metro Board authorized a fare increase then), and assumes that state revenue will be slashed by a third next fiscal year and another third in July 2010. The allocation of state funds between capital and operating expenses seems arbitrary, since most of that money can be used for both capital or operating expenses. Government budgeting is notoriously complicated, and numbers can be massaged to give the appropriate message to opinion leaders. Past memos on the subject have been less than illuminating for the real number crunchers out there. Still, the deficit is real and, perhaps not as apocalyptic as presented in this report, the problem is big.
Part of this has been the Board of Directors’ undoing. Rather than working with Metro CEO Snoble to craft a reasonable fare increase proposal, Snoble chose to scare the public with the absurd specter of $140 EZ passes and $8 day passes. Instead of making the hard decisions to cut service, the Board blinked - possibly to avoid cutting service right before Measure R went on the ballot - and avoided cutting 256,000 hours from the budget using one time revenue. When Pam O’Connor was asked earlier this year about the growing deficit, she replied she was focused on Measure R and not on the deficit that would happen if it didn’t pass.
On the same Board agenda where the structural deficit is being discussed, Gloria Molina has decided to rant again about Measure R, this time with a measure to have Metro shut down the Measure R web site and brochure program, and ask the nonexistent pro-Measure R campaign to reimburse them for their expenses. Almost an hour was wasted at yesterday’s County Board of Supervisors meeting with an intellectual exercise designed solely to shaming County Counsel for giving the go ahead for the informational campaign for Measure R. Ironically, she was one of the leaders to stop Snoble’s Draconian fare increase, and crafted a compromise fare increase… which while helpful doesn’t even meet the problem halfway. Will she have blood on her hands for slashing needed bus service, much of which goes through her district, because Measure R fails? Or will somehow another tax increase be sold to the public just to fund the operations of the existing bus and rail system, without the “carrots” of more rail, repaved streets, and better freeway interchanges?
If Measure R fails, as many folks think it will, be prepared to see planning for service cuts start the next day, and an accelerated public hearing process. Depending on the timing of the process, the normal February public hearings could be moved up a month, with the June “shakeup” moving up a couple of months to buy some time and save some money. Expect labor negotiations, currently set for 2009, to deteriorate completely as Metro staff realizes that the only way to maintain some level of service is to cut salaries and contract out service… which will not be popular in a post-Metrolink crash world, where an employee one of Metro’s three contractors, Veolia, was the at the throttle when the collision happened. A 1974-like strike of two months or more could result as both sides butt heads over how much money there really is. (Incidentally, the strikes of the 70’s probably doomed LA’s best chances for rapid transit to be built, with enough funding to build it. Instead, the 1980 Proposition A, which promised everything for everybody, but couldn’t deliver, passed. And remember, for every day employees go on strike, Metro saves money by not operating service.)
These are the choices we face, and they aren’t pretty. Essentially, vote for Measure R, or watch the dismantling of the MTA as we know it.
Contributed by
calwatch on September 15th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell being consoled by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky Friday after the Chatsworth train collision. Photo Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times.
Aside from the focus on the victims of this horrible tragedy, attention has been turned to the travails of Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell. After breaking down during a press conference Friday night, she stated the results of the preliminary investigation: that Metrolink was responsible for the incident due to the engineer failing to stop at a red signal. That triggered a firestorm of coverage, from angry denounciations by the union, to a backdoor backstabbing from the chair of the Metrolink board: - all while the CEO remained curiously silent, until Monday morning when he belatedly defended Tyrrell, but only after she resigned in disgust. Others have called the announcement ill-timed, while others have claimed a power struggle between the NTSB and Metrolink staff. Lots of comments on the matter, too, including the most comments I’ve ever seen to the Bottleneck Blog.
But I think she did the right thing here. As she stated in the statement (which for whatever reason I can’t find online), Metrolink is a family. I’ve talked to Board members, staff, and passengers, and there is a unique bond between the passengers and the staff, which has survived previous incidents, annual fare increases, and other issues. And sometimes, you have to face up to the reality of what happened, and try to start the healing process. The odds of the story changing are very slim, probably slimmer than the chance of the collision happening in the first place.
After an incident, there is a lot of speculation. Could it be the Union Pacific’s fault? A case of terrorism? (After all, almost simultaneously to when she made the statement, a special Board meeting was held regarding a potential threat to public safety.) Tyrrell needed to reassure commuters by telling all of the facts she knew. NTSB investigations usually take over a year and at the end they tell everyone what they already know. Meanwhile, a lot of goodwill is lost. Should she have kept her mouth shut because of the liability? I mentioned that in my original comment, but some experts state that, buy quickly admitting responsiblity, they can insulate themselves from additional punitive damages.
Local transit activist Dana Gabbard notes the insularity of the Metrolink Board, which you can take a glimpse at by reading the minutes. Metrolink management made the right call to go with what they knew at the time.
And Tyrrell made the right call to resign. In an interview with CBS, she chose to resign rather than backtrack over something that she knew - and was told by Metrolink CEO Solow - was not true. The Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Ethics stresses the need to advocate informed debate, to be honest with the public, and to be loyal to the CEO, David Solow, to whom she works for. Unfortunately, many public relations professionals don’t care about “free flow of information”, “disclosure of information”, or “enhancing the profession”. But Ms. Tyrrell did, and for that, I, and many other Southern Californians who ride the rails, are grateful for it. Let’s hope the other public relations professionals at Metrolink can keep the dialogue open with the public about the changes that need to be made after the incident.
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