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Chinese“…but then I’d be all dirty”
Among the people involved with MetroRider.elhay I probably ride the least as I have not yet switched my daily communte over to the hands of a semi-capable MTA driver. I’m still a weekend warrior with the public trans, but I’m waiting for a new rapid out of hollywood/western which is supposed to start in July before I fully hand over the keys in the morning.
I’ll be the first to admit I have a problem with busses.A few bad experiences as a child and certain issues regarding the immediate need for a bathroom have made me severly prejudice to the lorrey, like the very smell used to fill me with hate. I’ve since grown up, had some overall health improvements and supplanted my rage onto more appropriate beacons, but I still don’t really like them. For instance, a friend recently told me he sometimes takes the bus home instead of the train. They both take about the same time and cost the same for him and he chose the bus over the underground metro. I was completely taken aback, why would anyone want to take the bus instead of the train? To me the reasons are so obvious it’s not even worth going into, but then I realized it was just me, not the transit. It was just my malaligned sense of cleaniness and comfort that skewed the train in favor so dramatically. Simple PR, something that can be overcome.
This new outlook colored an exchange at the workplace the other day. A co-worker was having car problems and I suggested she take the MTA. She made some generic hems and haws about the lack of public transit in elhay but I kept on her to get to the root of her reasoning for not wanting to use the MTA. After a minute or so she said with a straight face “…I could ride the bus but then I’d be all dirty, I’d have to take another shower when I got to work”. As absurd as that reasoning is I’m pretty sure ideas like that are commonplace among many elhay commuters. More and more it seems the root of MTA problems lie in public perception, which brings me to my longwinded point:
Do away with the word bus as it concerns MTA.
Bus is a negative word laden with some sordid and dirty history, why taint an already encumbered public trans system with such a bad word. I think to start all metro rapid b-words should be referred to only as rapids, never use the b-word. After all, they really aren’t like other b-words. As far as non-rapid b-words, we’ll have to decide upon a suitable term and use it like so much hairspray until it catches on or burns a hole in the ozone brain of the MTA and latches onto the PR core. Submissions welcome.
“language is the only collectively owned human commodity”
Discussion
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i’m in complete agreement. when some co-workers found out that i rode the b-word and didn’t drive, there was a simmultaneous sigh of disgust. an outrage as to “why?” and “how gross”. i tried to hide my annoyance with them but i could’nt and i blew up on them for being so absurdly full of themselves. but you’re right, it boils down to image and from what i’ve read on other boards it’s a far reaching scar on MTA’s face. how about, “glide rides”.
i agree that a change in language would help, but even better would be for MTA to greatly improve its b-word service making it easier to use, more attractive, and faster.
Let me be blunt here.
The bus (I won’t patronize anyone by saying b-word — damn, I just did!) is not the problem in the minds of the non-riders. It’s only a vehicle.
The problem is that most non-riders view the bus the way a Jew views Israel: “It would be a nice place to be if it weren’t for all the Palestinians.”
It’s not marketing; it’s sociology. People avoid public transportation to avoid the poor blacks and Latinos who ride the system every day.
Is it time? Well, most people who drive take the same roads and freeways every day, even when the traffic is no faster than a rolling idle. Even lab rats know to avoid the little pellet after they’ve been shocked a few times.
Is it convenience? Unless you are in a line of work where you are on call 24/7 or your car is required for you to perform your job, most of your life revolves around you conforming to someone else’s schedule. One more won’t hurt.
Is it that it’s too hard to use? Hmm. Just the fact that you’ve had at least a public school education and can navigate the internet makes you one of the smartest 20 percent of people in the world. There are people riding transit who came from parts of the world where they were given nothing but basic survival instincts at a very young age who can get around the system with little trouble. It worries me that there are people with college degrees who cannot comprehend timetables or maps.
I worry that what’s really on most riders’ minds is not for a better marketing campaign (monopolies don’t need marketing) but a demographic displacement. It’s just most people won’t say so.
I know that’s the BRUs angle, and I’m sure there’s some truth to it, but I really don’t buy it 100%. Now perhaps this is how the bus originally got the negative conotation that Johnny is talking about, but I don’t know how much this racism applies today (at least out right). As far as I know this is one of the most socially liberal cities around (granted it’s also one of the most hyopcritical), and I’m sure many rich white Angelenos would ride the bus just to prove that they WEREN’T racist if you accused them of it (ha, maybe MTA should consider that as a new marketing angle). Furthermore, I find the buses that I ride to be quite diverse. I live in East Hollywood (certainly not the richest and whitest part of the city)and am often suprised by the diversity on the bus. There’s certainly more Latinos, but there’s more Latinos in this city so what do you expect. I still contend that the problems with bus ridership have less to do with current racism than with historical perception (which is probably racist) and inconvenience.
No, most people who have a choice in the matter avoid the bus because it is dirty, AND slow, AND filled with the great unwashed masses. That’s just the camel-breaker.
People who have a choice DO take the train. Not all of them, but a lot more than those take the bus. Why? It’s FASTER. It’s the SPEED, stupid. People will put up with a lot if they can save time. People gladly tolerate crowds in the subway and people playing guitars at them because the subway is faster, as long as it goes where they need to go.
And why is the subway faster? Three reasons: grade separation, grade separation and grade separation. Why is the Gold Line so slow? Same three reasons.
I agree Scott. Which I think is the point Johnny was trying to make… rail is almost always preferable… even for those working poor who the rich white liberals abhor. And I think the reason it’s hard to convert the car drivers to BUS rather than RAIL is that a car driver says, “what’s the point, the bus is still in traffic, I might as well be in traffic in my nice clean car without these abhorid poors around me”. The train makes more sense to them (and to me, or am I one of them?)because it is seperate from the traffic so it makes the “dirt” and “scum” more tolerable because at least you aren’t stuck in traffic.
Scott Mercer wrote:
Yeah, but the trains have lots of cops, too. MTA allocates the highest percentage of rail operating costs to security out of all rail systems in the U.S.
It’s funny though, those cops really seem to do very little. They rarely ask me, or anyone else on the train or in the station for my ticket. I’ve seen people blatantly violationg the “Metro rail rules” in front of them without any action. In fact, most of the time I see them in a large group socializing. Maybe they don’t bother me because I don’t look poor or black, but I do sorta look like a terrorist (especially with a full beard)!
what’s stupid about the cop issue is that they should be there just as a presence, monitoring and doing whatever cops do to keep the likes of fredcamino from bombing shit rather than checking tickets. what other city (perhaps there is one, i don’t know) would pay such exorbitant amounts for ticket checkers. if metro just installed better systems in the beginning rather than terrible-always-breaking ticket machines the amount spent on security could be halved if not more. there are a lot of cities to reference that have gate systems (chi/nyc to name only two) and i’m sure there are a great many other systems to prevent such a ridiculous waste of money. a friend of mine was in japan for some time and they had another way of doing it… unfortunately i can’t remember exactly what.