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ChineseExcuses, excuses
[tags]los angeles, los angeles city council, la city beat, public transit[/tags]
A house only is as good as its foundation. Garbage in, garbage out.
Any other axiom to illustrate how starting off the wrong way leads to poor outcomes.
L.A. City Beat, in a package on Los Angeles’s transportation malaise, asked the 15 members of the Los Angeles City Council what are their transit-taking habits. The answers shock and surprise no one. And their remedies are nothing that should be raised on a flagpole and saluted.
This is not about scolding the city council for setting a bad example. This is not about our elected officials doing enough. The bigger problem was the City Beat writing and including this information alongside three far better news items.
Asking bad questions leads to poor answers. Poor answers lead to poor perceptions. Poor perceptions lead to poor policy. And if things get screwed up even more, City Beat is number eight.
City Beat wanted a good scoop: catching elected officials in duplicity. It did. Sorta. Most of the answers came from the council members’ staff members.
The problem is not the snicker-inducing answers, or that most council members would not go on the record themselves to say them.
Why did City Beat ask the city council in the first place?
The alt-weekly raised important issues of political and bureacratic bungling. But it was caused by, or thrust upon, Metro and its predecessor agencies. Metro is a special county agency with its responsibilities outlined by the state. The council did not and does not have influence over Metro. Nor should it.
Metro provides bus and train service for most Angelenos, but the official transit agency for the city is the Department of Transportation. So the council does have influence over transportation matters and even an agency it must oversee.
The Los Angeles mayor, along with three appointees, represent the city on the 13-seat Metro board. Only one of those appointees may be a city council member. The state legislature stipulates the number and eligible representation of the Metro board.
The L.A. council is largely powerless over Metro’s affairs, yet it does have a city-level agency and resources to provide transportation solutions if the Taj Mahal is dropping the ball.
Los Angeles has several tools available for its transportation problems. L.A. does not lack solutions. L.A. does not know how to get things done right.
Getting things right means: identifying the problems correctly, applying the right solutions in the right places, getting the right people to carry out the task, and recognizing that good politics and good policy are completely different things.
It’s that last item that’s the peril of most politicians. The City Beat comes along and catches the council in the bathroom with its pants down and in a wide stance. The council, caught in an awkward position, then makes some rear-guard moves to improve their standing.
Riding a bus or train? That’s good politics. Core competency? That’s good policy.
Council members not using transit is not as troubling as the answers they gave on what it would take them to use buses. The excuse of not being able to conduct city business via transit alone is valid and legitimate. Council members and their office workers, at both City Hall and district field offices, must appear at several places throughout the day as well as carry brochures, display materials and refreshments. These are part of the duties of the offices, and autos help accomplish their tasks best. Plumbers and couriers aren’t expected to provide their services using public transit; neither should council members. The council gets the benefit of the doubt.
What is worrisome, though, is what the council members say it would take for them to use the system. Nearly every response relied on vague adjectives: “comprehensive,” “extensive,” “fast,” “reliable,” etc. This is evidence that most council members have only the weakest, most abstract concepts of transportation policy. They make decisions based on the thinnest information that can permeate their minds.
Put them into a panic situation, such as bad press, and they are more prone to make bad decisions. Some councilmembers did not submit a response. Most served up a tapestry of banalities. The most glaringly bad responses came from District 7 councilman Richard Alarcon and District 15 councilwoman Janice Hahn.
Alarcon avoids taking transit because it would take him 2 1/2 hours to get from his Panorama City home to downtown L.A. (!) Umm, Panorama City is close to two Metrolink stations: Van Nuys and Sun Valley. He’d be in downtown in less than an hour. And if he wouldn’t have a Metrolink on the way back, there’s always Amtrak or Metro as a fallback. Hahn said that she can’t take transit because there’s no train to the Harbor area. The ego of her!
There’s no train, but the Harbor got nearly a billion dollar gift in the form of the Harbor Transitway. The buses are as fast as they are empty.
These two council members have fast connections to downtown, and through ignorance or equivocation, thumbed their noses at the option.
Please, Mr. Alarcon and Ms. Hahn, recuse yourselves from voting on transportation matters for the rest of your terms and use the time to figure out how to become better policy makers.
This is not bad advice for the other 13, either.
But wait … this turned out to dump on the city council after all. Wasn’t the point of “Excuses, excuses” to shoot the messenger?
The point really is not an indictment of the city council or L.A. City Beat. It’s a cautionary fable. People in both public office and the press have done their jobs, but spend the hardest time looking for the easiest answers. Maybe there is no easy answer. Maybe not compounding mistakes is just as good as getting things right. Maybe the best questions are the ones not asked. Maybe this stream-of-consciousness babble should end here with the point that what you put in directly influences what you get out.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
So why is the Harbor Transitway so underutilized, anyway?
I pulled this from my archives.
Speaking as someone [Tom Rubin] who was there at the time, trust me, this was a Caltrans
project with virtually no involvement what-so-ever of either the Southern
California Rapid Transit District (my agency, which ran the buses and
trains) nor the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, the planning
and funding agency.
If anyone had asked — which they didn’t — it would not have been difficult
to show that there was no money in SCRTD’s budget to improve service in this
corridor, nor was LACTC likely to give us any. It was pushing the Long
Beach Blue Line, which was only a few miles over, and wasn’t about to fund
SCRTD to operate bus service to compete with its creation.
If I’m going to complain a bit about the story, there is a bit too emphasis
on the stations on the freeway — which is understandable, because they cost
a lot of money and are a total flop, for reasons that are explained very
well. However, what you also have to understand is that it is very
difficult to even get to the stations. Since they are in the middle of a
very wide freeway, some superelevated, you often have to go way up, then
walk over the freeway on a long access path. This takes a long time, and
the stations are not really close to anything major.
The big problem with the stations is that they really never should have been
built. Unless you spend a lot of money AND do busways right, there really
isn’t much purpose in having stations on the busways proper, especially in
the middle of freeways. Some of the best freeway/busway bus routes don’t
have ANY, or very few, such stops — the buses collect and discharge their
passengers before they get on the freeway/busways or after they leave.
The El Monte Busway/HOV lane is like that. There is really only one station
in the middle (it wasn’t really planned that way on purpose; the locals
didn’t want bus stops — gee, you’ll never guess why), at Cal State U. This
one is NOT in the middle of a freeway and there is fairly good access,
although no one would describe it as short or simple. The station at the
far end of the Busway, at El Monte, does a huge business. It is in the
middle of a major park-and-ride lot and all kinds of buses come into it to
swap passengers. A small number of major stations is generally superior to
a large number of minor stations, because you can afford to put more money
into the major stations and make the design work better — and
people-friendly design, not just quick in-and-out for buses, should be what
drives design.
One thing that was NOT mentioned at all is that this is fantastic for LAX
access. In the days before the Century/Anderson Freeway and this HOV/Busway
were built, there was no direct freeway access. Taxi drivers would take the
tourists on very long freeway trips (I-405 San Diego Freeway North to I-10
Santa Monica Freeway East) to get to downtown, a wonderful taxi trip in the
non-peak hours — for the drivers, or would take one of two surface street
routes that were far shorter and, especially during rush hour, usually quite
a bit faster. Now, you can get on the Century Freeway, get in the HOV lane,
take it to the Harbor, use one of the very few dedicated HOV lane to HOV
lane ramps in the nation to get to the Harbor Freeway HOV lane, and this
will take you most of the way to downtown. Then, it craps out just South of
the Santa Monica freeway, which is, of course, the slowest portion of the
entire trip, but you’re only about two miles, max, from your final downtown
destination.
This way of getting from LAX to/from downtown is so much faster than trying
it by train that there is no comparison. Not only do the taxi’s and
Airporter buses not make any stops along the way (as trains do) and the top
speed is faster, but the route is a couple of miles shorter, as well. Of
course, if you want to take the train, it is first a shuttle bus to Aviation
Station (named after the STREET, which is not all that far from the airport,
but not that close, either), then the Green Line to Imperial Station,
downstairs to catch the Blue Line, and take it to Seventh/Flower. Now,
there are some major hotels within a block of so of Seventh/Flower, but
there are a whole lot more that aren’t, and you’d need to take the Red Line
(for those REAL public transit enthusiasts), a taxi, or shuttle bus, to get
to your final destination. For anyone on an expense account, the operative
statement is, “get real.”
By the way, the El Monte busway, which is a pretty complex piece of highway
design, had a total cost way under $100 million back in the early 1970’s
when it was built.
Another part of the problem with the Harbor Transitway is that you have a bus route on the freeway with stops on the freeway, but charged as an Express Route, when just a bit further over you can take the Blue Line for the base fare (and is therefore fully included in all Metro Passes).
Agreed, I am sure more people would use the Harbor Transitway if Metro charged only base fare. I have found that the Harbor Transitway is faster (by about 10 minutes) than the Blue Line when I commute from the Norwalk Green Line. The 450X especially (makes no stops between Harbor/105 and Downtown) is even faster. There are too many stops on the Blue Line for commuters as far as Norwalk or Long Beach. The only thing that makes up for this are the Blue Line’s 3 minute headways during rush hour. It would be nice though if they could have timed transfers for the different lines (Green to Blue, Red to Blue, Red to Purple). It’s not entirely impossible to do, BART does it with 95% on time performance (though they run their trains by computer, which is what I think Metro should do as well).
As for the best way to travel between LAX and Downtown using transit, the FlyAway is probably the best bet (supposedly under 30 minutes) and $4 one way.
I think the problem isn’t whether the Harbor Transitway is fast enough. Rather, it’s that Hahn didn’t even seem to be aware of its existence.
She probably represents her constituency well in that regard!
I don’t take away from that statement that she isn’t aware of it. She’s not aware of any passenger rail from San Pedro to DTLA, and that’s pretty accurate. In fact, her or her spokesperson’s use of passenger rail was so precise in that regard that I presume that not only does she know about the transitway, she doesn’t much care to use it ;p.
I’d like to point out that the Blue Line serves downtown Long Beach and downtown LA. It’s not very hard or time consuming to get from San Pedro, or the rest of the Harbor, to the Blue Line. Try the LADOT Commuter Express 142.
And hell, if she MUST board a train in San Pedro, they do have that nifty little red-car:
That’ll take you a bit closer, where you can pick up the 142 near Terminal Island.
The Harbor itself is very well served by trains. Of course, these are for cargo, not passengers!
not really dealing with this post, but just wanted to let you know stephen that it truly is a great service. i’ve made it there in less than 30 anytime its not “rush hour” and between 35 and 45 during peak times. so worth the 4 bones.
You all missed the sidebar to the City Beat article in which they said, among other things, that Zev’s Measure A in 1998 “screwed up transit for at least a decade” and offers Eric Mann a “one-way ticket out of town”.
Here’s the link:
Okay, the link didn’t make it to the comment. (Fred?)
Cut and paste it for yourselves:
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6247&IssueNum=225
And I hope you all laugh as much as I did about how right on the money City Beat was.
agreed, the eric mann bit was great but i’d prefer it was a one way ticket out of the country. i’d hate to accidentally move to another city where his racist claws are scratching.
The trouble with the Harbor Transitway is that not only is ridership abysmal, there is little to nothing that can be done to get people to use it.
When Metro started Line 745, that was pretty much the nail in the coffin.
For one year, Metro did a fare amnesty for the Transitway lines. All routes could be ridden for the then-$1.35 base fare. The $1 step-up was waived. Even that didn’t bump up ridership any.
I still think, though, the Harbor Transitway needs to be given one more go. This time, it should be similar to Orange Line service.
Run a single artic route between Union Station and San Pedro, and install TVMs with the Sheriff’s Department doing fare checks. Peak hour service is every 10 minutes, off-peak every 15, and night/owl every 20-30 minutes.
This might require forcing riders on the busway by canceling 745 and Line 381 on Figueroa Street.
Charing base fair and some advertising on the green line would probably help boost ridership. Whenever I do the Green Line to the Blue Line there are always a lot of people transferring with me, and especially if heading into Union Station the Harbor Transitway would have the advantage of cutting out a transfer.
One of the more damning issues with the Harbor busway that I found while living in an area of South L.A. is the perception of safety and convenience by the rider, particularly on the stops between downtown and the Green Line station. Using the Slauson stop as an example, the station exit/entrance is situated on a freeway underpass on a single side of the street, with a block of walking required to get to the nearest transfer point. A block of walking doesn’t sound tedious by any means, but it makes a hell of a difference if you’re in South L.A., and you have to cross at least one near-empty parking lot (the underutilized P+R’s) where any suspicious individuals could be engaging in equally suspicious activity.
Then there’s the task of entering the station: either use an elevator or walk up a tediously long flight of stairs. No escalators. The busway station is set up as a side platform with the tracks… er, pavement in the middle(as opposed to an island platform like every Metro rail station) so only one elevator is allocated per side.
(Whoops, overshot there, sorry. Continuing…)
The problems are immediately apparent by just looking at the stations. Whereas a lot of TLC is undertaken with the rail stations, the elevators and stairways on the busway are littered with all kinds of stains and garbage and strange people and the smells they leave behind when they’re not there. But good luck if you ever manage to get a glimpse of the elevator’s interior — if an elevator breaks down for whatever reason (in some cases because a homeless man wanted to get some uninterrupted shuteye) the best you can hope for is to have your call to Metro’s maintenance people be heard and addressed within the next seven days or so, and to try to avert an asthma attack trying to walk the stairs.
Waiting for the bus on the platform/stop/sidewalk thing is probably the easiest portion of the experience, though being in a freeway median in an area where your feet are on the same level as the cars going 60 (possibly more!) in the background doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Especially when you’re alone or beside a single stranger most of the time.
So, really, they could charge two cents as the base fare for Transitway rides — it doesn’t change that the stations themselves are so rider-unfriendly and so neglected. And it’s because of that that the 745 just a few blocks down or the Blue Line just a couple more minutes on the bus will be the more viable choice.
Now, to clarify, I’m basing my opinion on experiences that last happened in 2004, since I no longer live in California, so I might be ignoring great strides made by Metro to heighten security and awareness of the busway that I don’t know about. In such a case, pretend I didn’t say anything.
Freeway stops are not pleasant places to be, buses or rail. This teaches us that they should be used sparingly, if not at all.
The Green Line, though, is not hurting for ridership even though it commits so many design atrocities. And I’m not even talking about LAX.