2010: The Year in Transit

We’ve made it through 2009, and before 2010 is bound to give us another round of motion sickness, let the Year in Transit be your Dramamine. The Year in Transit gets you to the destination directly, and unlike Metro Rapid, the Year in Transit catches green lights all the way.

The Transit Coalition, a rider advocacy group pleasantly short of kooks and cranks, has graciously volunteered to maintain the Year in Transit archives. Look back at the years past and see how frighteningly true these predictions have come.

With the pre-trip inspection complete, let’s roll this bus out of the division.

Metro once again shows it can make quick decisions, and once again, it shows the quick decisions only leave riders confused and angry. A week before the June shake-up, Metro decides to transpose the colors on the two busways. Riders and bus drivers are baffled, but Metro says the confusion is worth it because it was stupider to have silver buses on the Orange Line and orange buses on the Silver Line.

Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach wins the hearts and minds of locals with his new solution for the OCTA funding crisis: Cancel all bus service, then round up Orange County’s transit-dependent population to be ground up and fed to the hungry.

Los Angeles’ bicyclists evolve from a community to a fierce, hardy tribe when they acknowledge Ubrayj as their leader. The announcement catches Brayj by surprise and he decides to learn leadership methods from a weekend of watching “Braveheart”. He is then inspired to lead bicyclists on a siege of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation headquarters in downtown L.A.

Californians are getting so sick of the state’s raids on transit to balance its own budget that a group is now circulating an initiative petition to stop it once and for all. The wording of the measure says that if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or any state official attempts another raid on funds, their punishment shall be to strap all their campaign contributions to them and then have a transit agency representative be able to keep all the money they can obtain from turning the politicians upside down and shaking them.

The Metrolink board is unable to decide on either raising fares or cutting service to meet budget shortfalls, so it instead decides to allow passengers to get free passes if they mail in a manila envelope filled with gold coins or jewelry they no longer use.

The Expo Line is so desperate to get any part of the problem-plagued light rail line in service by the end of 2010, the best it could do is scale back Phase I to operate peak hours only between 7th Street Metro Center and Pico stations in time for the service shake-up in December.

Metro decides fare gates are a failure — we can only hope — after an experiment to try actual fare collection ends miserably when riders stare glazedly at the turnstiles because they aren’t sure how they work.

California’s high-speed rail plan wins federal funding, but the state doesn’t even get beyond the $1 billion mark. The federal money we get is just enough to buy higher-speed service powered by adding sails to existing Amtrak trains and locomotives.

Long Beach pours water on a councilwoman’s ambitious plans to introduce modern streetcars in the city. The City Council instead votes to spend the equivalent amount of money that would have gone into a steel-wheel system and spend it on buying battery-powered faux trolleys and use the money left over to “paint” tracks into the street.

One of the last acts of retired USC president Steven Sample is to announce that the University of Southern California will be vacating the campus and leaving Los Angeles the Friday before the weekend the Expo Line will open. He put a few professors in the School of Policy, Planning and Development in charge of the transition team, and they settled on an ideologically correct campus near the junction of the 133 and 241 toll roads in Orange County.

An investigation reveals Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s vow to have a subway extension completed within 10 years relies heavily on a speculative extension beyond Santa Monica to the Moon. Villaraigosa figured an extraplanetary extension would make the Purple Line extension eligible for NASA funding.

Southern California transit systems become the test markets for a new federal initiative to get on-the-ropes carmakers General Motors and Chrysler back into health by building transit equipment. The yet-to-be-named end product has the looks of a Pontiac Aztek combined with the reliablity of a Chrysler.

While we’re on car companies, the latest conspiracy theory to raise teabaggers’ hackles the way chum does in shark-infested waters is a Drudge Report post claiming the Obama administration deliberately bankrupted GM and Chrysler in order to weaken the auto industry and force everyone onto transit. Teabaggers claim they are victims of the “Reverse Roger Rabbit Conspiracy.”

RobDawg, who has been noticeably quiet for much of the last year, will resurface in a big way after he completes his move to the Inland Empire. He says his heart will always be in Ventura County, but the houses he scored for cents on the dollar at an auction was a deal too good to pass up. He will relaunch his blog as Methburban Nation.

And speaking of relaunches, Fred Camino will be coming back to MetroRiderLA full-time, only this time, he knows the haters are the only ones that get readership. So starting April 1, MetroRiderLA will keep the same name, except content from then on will be a daily candid photograph of a transit user that Web users can laugh at without the fear of putting themselves in danger — transit’s answer to PeopleOfWalMart.com.

There you have it, the Year in Transit.

This is the point where the entree is finished with a lemon wedge and a warm cup of vinegar. It’s that bitter. Readers, this is the optional point where you can take the road Lisa Simpson wish she could have and get off at Crackton. A Metro or Santa Monica bus will be by shortly to complete your trip on Pico Boulevard.

That’s it?

Last call.

Alright.

If there is anything that can be proved from living through the last year, it’s that The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” had been proven true, lyric line for lyric line, in 2009.

Barack Obama may be the United States’ first American president, yet at the same time Americans elected a conservative despite that ideology leading us into the abyss. Obama is the definition of a classic conservative. The root of “conservative” is “conserve,” going all the way back to the Enlightenment.

Obama chose to conserve the very agents that have pushed the United States on that split second of hang time Wile E. Coyote has after he overshot the cliff ledge but before he falls hard into the chasm.

He chose to conserve the war effort that’s yielding no benefits but a sizable portion of the costs of our trillions in debt. He chose to conserve the cracked and termite-infested pillars of our financial community who caused a global economic collapse through reckless business practices by committing another trillion to ensure “stability.” What did we stabilize? The finance sector’s license to recklessly squander wealth on whatever the prerogatives taste makers of the markets have and set us up on the rhythm method of bubble-collapse-bubble that has become our economic system. Only each subsequent bubble will grow bigger and the aftermath more catastrophic.

The self-identified liberals and progressives are shocked, shocked! that they thought by voting for a Democrat and getting him elected, that the election represented a chit they could call in. Call in for things that we actually need: infrastructure repairs, energy efficiency and of course, a health care deserving of even Third World standards. Yes, America, we need to aspire to Third World status because genuinely poor countries have been able to invest in First World medical standards and technology and build nascent economies around medical tourism.

The last year was marked — besides our moribund economy — by what has been misnamed as the “debate” on health care. Supposedly, after spending the better part of the year fashioning compromise and consensus, the Senate and House present thousands of pages of laws that amounts to the health care industry getting a government license to play with our health the way the finance sector played with our money.

The health care may be labeled Healthcaregate once the bloom comes off the rose, but the “-gate” suffix should be banished forever. This is not a scandal, it’s the internal mechanics of the American way. Just standard operating procedure.

I propose a new suffix, one more apt to Americans’ capabilities: -Trina. It of course originated in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. We of course now know that the city, state and the federal government had ample warning that a sizable hurricane would wipe out the city and kill thousands unless everyone got on the same page and invested money and energy to solve the problem. We dithered, then the worst came true. Now, more than four years after the disaster, we are no better off than the years before the hurricane and won’t be for years to come.

It repeated itself in the Twin Cities with the bridge collapse. It manifested itself as the first horseman of the economic collapse in 2008 when the trauma of $4.69/gallon gas made all of America into transit advocates. This year, regardless of the health care bill’s outcome, we’re witnessing Healthcaretrina as we speak.

A bipartisan consensus has determined that the avarice of the healthcare industry is Not Up For Negotiation. The healthcare industry will come out a winner either way, right up until a few years down the line it collapses under its own weight and everyone’s nightmare comes true: We get socialized medicine, only it will be the medical equivalent of Amtrak.

The one curiosity to emerge from the healthcare fiasco is the rise of a subculture that is bound to infest the body politic like crab lice. America, meet Citizen Teabagger.

If Obama is conservative by virtue of the institutions he wants to, you know, conserve, what becomes of the opposition that can’t stand the true conservative? Well, the discombobulated multitudes that emerged from the Tea Party movement cannot be linked by an ideology, since it is a movement free of ideas. Teabaggery isn’t an ideology for the same reason that arson isn’t a political movement.

If there is a tie that binds them, their common sentiment would be: “I’m against people who don’t think like me giving my money to people who don’t look like me.”

That doesn’t take much thought, and the movement — remember the rallying cry “Get the government’s hands off my Medicare!” — sees ideas as an undesirable personality trait to be corrected.

Disaffection? Yes. Untenable expectations? Why not. Deep-seated resentment against a world full of The Other? You betcha.

America, these are the choices left to you. In one corner, you are supporting the forces of a financial and a government overclass that will tug the leash around your neck ever tighter, and expect larger and larger pulls in the future.

In the other corner, you can cast your lot with the arsonists. Their only redeeming quality is hostility to the order of things, but the more you hang around them you realize that to the arsonists, fire is both the means and the end.

There is yet another way to a better life — in theory. Yet most Americans will take their side among these two factions, and those that remain don’t have the numbers, the intellect, the self-discipline and the resources to offer something compelling.

Listen to The Who very carefully. The message is about futility. Acknowledge it. Resign to it. Embrace it.

The year 2009 shall also be known for a collection of famous and historic figures that have left us. Michael Jackson. Walter Cronkite. Robert McNamara. Heck, even Billy Mays and Ed McMahon are people of accomplishment in their own ways. There are so many to acknowledge, so it is tough to single out a dedication to a single deserving person.

This Year in Transit is dedicated to the memory of Hope and Change. It left us too soon.

Sardonically yours, the Year in Transit wishes you peace and a Happy New Year.

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