Morning Commute

Daily Transit Links Roundup

Contributed by Fred Camino on May 21st, 2008 at 9:53 am

Transit TV on Orange Line

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There are 2 Responses to “Daily Transit Links Roundup”:

  1. I love that Krugman editorial.

    I really wish had politicians honest enough to tell Los Angelenos that in the future while millions of people may still have and drive cars, the car culture itself as it has been known for the last six decades is no longer environmentally or economically sustainable by either the government or the beloved “free market”. Los Angeles’ so-called “DNA” will change, period. The only question is HOW it will change, towards sustainability or chaos.

    Many people intuitively know this, but what local politician is courageous enough to say, “We can no longer guarantee in Los Angeles that you will be able to drive and park your car anytime, anyplace, anywhere, cheaply and conveniently on demand, in the next 60 years as you have known in the past 60 years. In the decades ahead, the atypical suburban lifestyle within an urban environment you have known is diminishing and we will all need to rethink what it means to be a Los Angeleno. Furthermore, millions more people are expect to relocate to Los Angeles County over the next few decades and that means greater density and less automobile-centered mobility.”

    Of course, none will. It would certainly be refreshing to hear it instead of the endless grandstanding for countless NIMBYs wanting to return to Sam Yorty’s Los Angeles.

    Increased density brings the option of improved mass transit and recentralization along mass transit corridors or continued attempts to futily subsidize and preserve a decaying car culture with ever-worsening congestion, ever-lesser environmental quality and ever-lower economic productivity.

    Krugman is right about Berlin. It’s amazing how that city has been put together since 1990. Berlin, like London, is a sprawling city that proves that transit can still work. Every time some automobile-entitled NIMBY or bus-only transit extremists shouts “This isn’t New York” in an attempt to shut down the debate, there are real life examples of sprawling cities with lots of cars and world class transit systems.

    Comment by Dan Wentzel on May 21st, 2008 at 11:22 am »Reply« resta suma

  2. Here’s an interesting commentary in the May 18th edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer sent to me by my friend Jim.

    http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/19049604.html
    “The American car culture is running out of gas” by John Timpane

    From the article:

    Car culture got us where we wanted when we wanted - for five generations. Much has been spectacular, beyond what could have been dreamed 100 years ago.

    How, then, can I say that car culture doesn’t work? Because the cost to individual and communal life, and to the environment, has been too high. And the bill is just now coming due.

    It’s not evil, just heedless. People take the opportunities they’re given. They have the right. The car symbolizes freedom, rights of passage, career, sexuality. We’ve created the national road system, bought hundreds of millions of cars, based hundreds of millions of lives on the assumption that Hey, we can just drive. But all that time, we’ve been burning resources, replacing none. (How much steel have we put back in the ground? How much oil?)

    We’ve basically laid the environment to waste, millions of acres never to return, all because there was no plan B. Roads are good things - but where you build a road, you outrage an environment, and no one ever rectifies it. The sad sprawl of the 1980s and 1990s, when people let towns metastasize into hastily planned and built exurban strips - that worked well, didn’t it?

    And does anyone think the morning and evening rush is good for us? Individually and as a society? Single drivers (70 percent and more in many metro area traffic jams) in single cars, edging ahead, until sometimes it seems as if the ambient blood pressure is about to blow? (Studies show traffic jams do contribute to stress and high blood pressure. But you knew that.)

    And wasteful: The car commute amounts to a willing sacrifice of billions of hours of precious, productive time. U.S. Census figures suggest the average U.S. driver spends 100 hours commuting a year (the standard vacation, 10 work days of eight hours apiece, is only 80 hours). Philadelphia ranks fifth among cities with a long one-way commute (29.4 minutes); New Jersey ranks third among states (28.5 minutes). Traffic jams waste time, and therefore bucks: A 2007 Texas Traffic Institute study said that in 2005, folks wasted an average of 38 hours a year stalled, for grand totals of 4.2 billion hours, 2.9 billion gallons of fuel, and a loss to the economy of $78.2 billion. That’s what I call not working. (At least you can work on a train or bus.)

    This has wrecked family life for many who live farther and farther from work - and so work farther and farther from home. It has created the commuter suburb, whose residents have little to do with their towns except, just about, the bed where they happen to sleep between commutes. How great is that?

    Comment by Dan Wentzel on May 22nd, 2008 at 7:16 am »Reply« resta suma

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Blog > Morning Commute > Blog article: Daily Transit Links Roundup | MetroRiderLA