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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup
Contributed by Fred Camino on April 4th, 2008 at 10:29 am
- Public transportation takes 800,000 cars off California roads.
- Long Beach Press Telegram fails to see the connection between these three things: global climate, local traffic, and air pollution. Laughable article, a must read.
- The little bus line that could. Bus 108,serving Marina del Rey, has been saved!
- California Progress Report tries to teach Dan Walters a lesson about High Speed Rail.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
That’s great news about the 108. There is an argument that Culver City Bus could provide better and more reliable bus service for the Del Reys, but a direct transfer to another service sector wasn’t on offer.
Perhaps Marina Del Rey and Play Del Rey could be served by Dash buses between Fox Hills Mall and the beach, but that wasn’t on offer either. Only eliminating service.
This is good news. Glad to see the MTA listened. The MTA was providing rare, undependable service, then complaining there was no demand for it. Glad to see the change.
Note, the people who advocating saving the 108 also wrote their elected officials. We cannot just talk to each other and even just send comments to transit agencies. We also need to communicate to our elected officials who are often personally far removed from the needs of the transit riders in their communities.
My god that Long Beach Press Telegram article was so hideous:
“There is a case to be made for public transit, but it mostly has to do with providing bus or rail transportation for low-income workers. In L.A. County, public transit has almost nothing to do with easing traffic congestion, and absolutely nothing to do with global warming.”
Jesus H Pete! You god damned maroon! When Charlton Heston was slumped over on the beach on the burnt out remnants of the earth shouting “You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!” this is the guy he was yelling at.
What sick mind actually can’t fathom a connection between public transit and getting cars off the road? What sick mind thinks the bus and the train are welfare boxes we force the poor into and that no one else can use them? Has this guy even been to New York, just once in his life? Hell, any city with a subway!
This is the sort of default idiocy public transit in LA is going to have to fight against. Imagine being some random guy who doesn’t take the bus and you read this. You’d get the impression that Feuer’s bills are just obviously stupid and then you’d vote against it. I really hope someone with money comes out to help Feuer on this stuff, or else we’re gonna be dreaming about these new subways and light rail for another forty years.
Keep in mind, that the anti-rail, automobile-entitlement folks will be telling many people what they want to hear. Many conservatives don’t want to believe in global warming because they inherently have disdain for all the possible solutions on offer. It’s better to ignore or deny the problem.
Stating that public transit has “absolutely nothing to do with easing global warming” discredits the whole article. However, we shouldn’t be surprised if the automobile-entitled fight for continued government preservation of the “car culture” at all costs.
This is the comment I left on the Press Telegram site about the article:
As opposed to the pro-rail, transit subsidy folks who don’t?
LOL.
Well, I want to hear the truth, and so far I’m getting it from the pro-transit folks.
The Press-Telegram discredited his own article by stating that public transit has ‘absolutely’ nothing to do with reducing global warming.
I’m not a big global warming guy. And obviously the interest in Global Warming in the last few years is purely a political tactic. But, the Long Beach Telegram wasn’t disputing Global Warming, that would have been on thing. If Global Warming is a reality, then indeed a local tax on autos and increased investment in alternative transportation would be a damn fine way of combating the problem. But even if we take Global Warming out the equation, and just look at traffic congestion and air quality, it still makes sense as far as taxes go.
more cars=traffic=poor air quality.
less cars=less traffic=improved air quality.
Yeah, I don’t think you have to buy into global warming to accept any of these concepts.
We already know Los Angeles has horrible, awful air quality and we know our obsession with cars is largely to blame, so you don’t need to be arguing whether we’ll all be underwater in 50 years because we already know we have increased risks of cancer RIGHT NOW.
Global warming? I don’t know really. There’s at least some science, but there’s a large dose of politics, especially of the bash-USA-while-China and-India-skate variety. So take our cars away, we may *still* end up under water.
Having said that, we still need an expanded subway system in Los Angeles, and other large US cities.
Any time the apocalypse is invoked in politics from either end of the political spectrum I tend to tune out.
Oh definitely. I generally believe that global warming is a problem, but the whole apocalypse angle seems to be a combination of crazy people and well-meaning people trying too hard to get people to listen.
Afterall, in the 60s and 70s academics were saying we’d all be fighting over water and rationing meat right now. Hell, it’s in the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Singapore average temp 82 degrees F
Boston average temp 52 degrees F
IPCC max 2100 rise 4 degrees F
Where’s the problem? Still I fail to see how coal powered plants in Utah replacing replacing gas powered autos in Los Angeles addresses AGW.
Presumably, the per-person-trip GHG output of a light rail vehicle powered by coal burned in Utah is just a smidgen less than that of a car powered by gas burned in Los Angeles. Of course, if we’re talking about a system with Santa Clara Valley Transit levels of productivity, maybe not.
That said, if we really gave a damn about cutting GHG emissions we’d be building nuclear power plants left and right and massively beefing up the interregional power grid. We’d also work on fixing jobs-housing imbalances. The NIMBY crowd wouldn’t be too happy about any of those measures, though.
That’s what should have been done in the first place. When a transfer is involved, though, it takes over a year for the other agency to pull its share. Culver City is a much more suitable operator, but even when Metro bisected Line 220 and transferred the Culver Boulevard segment, that took over 2 years to complete.
Also, Culver CityBus is a very small operator (about 70 buses). Adding a new bus run is a huge problem for Culver City. With the 220/7 proposal, what happened was the muni was able to add the service through a zero-growth plan. Line 5 on Braddock Drive, a block or two from Culver, was reduced from hourly weekdays to a single school tripper and the rest of the runs reallocated to Line 7.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of the details of the CCB and the MTA and the direct transfer of the MTA220 and the CCB7.
The other possibility could have been a contract with LADOT for a DASH bus. In any event.
In any event, kudos to the people who spoke out and saved the Marina Del Rey leg of the 108.
Dan, you may think that it’s as easy as calling up a muni and organizing them to operate a low-performing Metro route.
The sad truth is that it’s a headache, of the bureaucracies’ own making.
For one, Metro has to go by the letter of the collective bargaining agreement with the UTU. Metro can no longer contract out high-cost/low-performance lines, but can contract out brand new services that did not have services before (like Line 577). Metro also eliminated the BDOF designation. This was an option that allowed Metro to contract out lines to itself; this sounds baffling, but BDOF allowed Metro to use rookie drivers on high-cost lines. Otherwise, these high-cost lines tend to attract the most expensive high-seniority drivers since operators bid on work based on experience.
Another option to salvage service rather than to cancel it is to turn the service over to municipal operation. Metro has tended to do this with the old-line munis (Culver City, Santa Monica, Montebello, etc.). Problem is, this requires the cooperation of the munis, who are not obligated to work with Metro. They must also be willing and able to take over the service. Willing meaning desiring to take over a line with lousy performance, and able meaning having the buses, drivers and money to operate the service. Then, it’s a matter of setting service policies, such as accepting transfers or Metro passes on the routes.