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ChineseThe transportation issue
[tags]los angeles, mta, la city beat, public transit, transportation[/tags]
L.A. City Beat put together a series on what was once a dead-end beat in the media but now the lowest hanging fruit on the story tree: transportation.
On the menu:
- “Dozing in the Slow Lane”: The article looks for leadership to get things done. And it’s written by L.A. Sniper Alan Mittelstaedt, mentioned before here recently.
Mittelstaedt’s writing in the City Beat regarding public transit seems like he’s been hanging around Dana Gabbard and/or Bart Reed a little too much. And that’s a good thing. He recognizes there are more players in the transportation scene besides the shrillest left- and right-wing extremes of the Bus Riders Union and the Reasoners. And he can be quite militant about transit — he’d better be with the nickname L.A. Sniper — but maybe not as militant as this guy.
- “Back to 1984″: This is a piece that infuriates righties at every possible level. It’s pro social-engineering!!!1!!11! It was about the greatness of the L.A. Olympics … in 1984!!!1!!11! The Orwellian symbology is so flagrant!!!1!!11! It forces people out of their cars!!!1!!11! THEY want to take away OUR CARS!!!1!!11!
Larry Zarian, a former Metro board member during the Dark Ages — last decade — makes a great Monday-mornin-quarterback point: politicians are the problem. They don’t know squat about planning or operations, and should stop acting like they do and leave that up to the professionals.
- “Road Rage”: One of two companion lists. Here are the seven people most responsible for screwing up transit in Los Angeles. Right on the mark and unimpeachable.
The link is provided, but the names and the reasons shock no one who reads MRLA. And for the record, I or anyone else on this blog did not write this list.
- “All Aboard, City Council”: The other of the companion lists. It fits in with the City Beat’s righteous and justified indignation angle about public transit. It asked why the 15 members of the Los Angeles City Council do not ride public transit, and how the situation can be remedied.
Eh. It’s serviceable for stoking cynicism, but the basic flaw is … well, it’ll come in a separate analysis. The A material can’t just be given away now.
Discussion
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Ahhhh, the “Miracle of ‘84″ again. All you need do is plan for years, spend hundreds of millions, get people to take coordinated vacatiobs, reschedule and cancel some truck traffic and put the entire region on alert and you can have another 16 days of congestion relief.
The Southern California Association of Governments did a “post mortem” of the 1984 Olympics impacts on traffic published in 1985. The short answer - 25% of L.A.’s population when on vacation during the games. The long answer is that lots of strategies were employed, and new technology demonstrated. The technology aspects have been adopted and greatly expanded with little notice or credit from the public. While the Olympic traffic mitigation has made its way into urban mythology, the main strategy that really worked was getting a quarter of the population to stay home or go away. Since L.A.’s population has grown by more than that since then…obviously the old strategies won’t work the next time L.A. hosts the whole world, oh, wait, we do host the whole world even without any Olympic games.
Good for L.A. City Beat for at least taking on the transportation issues. Now if the rest of the press would wake up, study up, and be a force for good instead of running back and forth between Robert Poole and Eric Mann, we might get somewhere.
aside from public transit PR and funding, LA should really try and press companies to get their employees to work from home. granted i want this for personal reasons, but for society it would do a huge part as well. i work in a big ol’ office thats overcrowded with a parking garage thats 3 levels of triple parked cars and i know for a fact that at least half of these people dont NEED to be here. we live in the future, huge offices are so damn antiquated and should be out of practice except for the absolutely necessary. i really think that if it was preached by the city and the state and the public spoke up it would do great deal to calm the burden of our traffic filled streets. “presentee-ism” has alot to do with the nightmare of la traffic.
Ah yes, the great bug-a-boo of “social-engineering”.
I laugh in the faces of conservatives who accuse transit advocates of “social-engineering”.
We’ve had social-engineering for single-occupancy vehicles for several decades. Lack of investment in transit forces people to buy cars because they don’t have alternatives. Reckless sprawl encourages people to travel long distances from place to place, encouraging car use.
Over-investment in freeways and not rail or bus encouraged and in some cases required more car use than otherwise would be required. Dismantling of the red-car system forced people onto road-only means of travel. Cheap gasoline with lower gasoline taxes than other nations pay enabled more and more car users.
In other words, there has been plenty of social-engineering already — 99% in favor of single-occupancy motoring. I can see why conservatives and libertarians by nature would prefer automobile-based social-engineering as mode of transport based on the individual driving where they want without having to mingle with the masses.
Mass transit implies there is a common good in transportation, but conservatives tend to disbelieve there are any common or public goods.
Just know that when someone shouts “social-engineering” at you, it isn’t actually “social-egineering” they dislike. It is social-engineering that isn’t 100% supportive of their preferred lifestyle. They’ve been the benefits of 99% of the social-engineering of the last several decades in Los Angeles and want to preserve that 99% ratio, even at the expense of the common good.
There ARE common goods and public goods and infrastructure that they SHOULD pay for as a member of society, whether they like it or not. But it’s not social-engineering to provide for Los Angeles’ economic and environmental future by a more balanced approach to public transportation policy.