MetroRiderLA

Attention all working class heroes: Metro wants your business.  The latest installment of the billboard ad campaign running in Hollywood features a world-weary cubicle slave proclaiming to the masses that he “M’s to the daily grind.”  The one before that was of a young woman letting us know about the joys of not having to shell out money at the pump.  The theme of these ads focuses on the low cost of Metro and how it will let you keep more of your paycheck than a car.

This is a bit of an odd commercial campaign, because the tone of it really does not pitch the product in glowing terms to the consumer.  It goes more in the direction of the reassuringly cheap option instead of presenting itself as ride that is just as comfortable, if not more so, than taking a car.  Young professionals can be attracted to Metro for more than just saving a buck.  The morning commute offers a good opportunity to get work done and organize for the day plus desk jockeys can get a fleeting amount of exercise when walking from to/from the bus stop.

Let’s further examine who Metro is  trying to attract with these advertisements.  The series is aimed at people in the same age group as the disgruntled employee in the empty office and the sweater lady.  Young working people who have never taken public transport before the economy tanked.  Now there is a big influx of people who are now using metro for economic reasons and a concerted effort should be made to attract and hold onto as many of them as possible.  The message conveyed to potential riders in these ads seems to be that Metro is all right, but more importantly,  much cheaper than owning some wheels.  Money issues may keep people on Metro now when times are bad, but what will happen if/when the economy improves?  Long-term passenger retention of these 20-30 somethings will not just rely on low costs, but a comfortable traveling experience as well.  If services are set at a high standard, these people could become regular passengers for the rest of their lives.

A perfect example of this new breed of metro rider is a young lady who is writing in a blog I recently came across call Snob on a Bus, which details the life of a girl in here in LA who takes Metro because she could not afford to keep her car.  Taking into account that economics dictate nearly all of our actions, will people like this blogger abandon Metro in a year if they suddenly can afford to make that car payment every month?  This will depend on a few factors.  Will attitudes towards taking the bus change to the point where people than can afford a car decide to refrain from having one and opt for mass transit instead?  Also, will the expansion of service offer a comparable amount of convenience as taking a car for these newbies?  The price is right for new Metro riders, now the big factor is the customer experience.

A while back, I asked Fred Camino if I could make a post about Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence by Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy. So I decided that now I could make a few posts about the recommendations that they made in their book.

On reducing automobile dependence, they came up with 5 solutions: traffic calming, introducing options (bike/bus lanes for example), polycentrism, planning for open space, and different tax methods. However, I thought that they missed what what would be better than all of these options: tolling freeways (and roads where applicable).

Why is tolling roads such a good idea? Well first off, it would decrease the traffic on roads almost instantaneously. Instead of a 2 hour drive from Westwood to Pasadena, it would only take a little more than half an hour (like it does weekend mornings). Secondly, the price would act as an incentive to use other modes of transportation because they are inherently cheaper. So we would give an incentive towards rail that most in the political spectrum would have to agree on. Liberals (for the most part) would like the lower pollution from alternate modes of transportation and conservatives (for the most part) wouldn’t be able to argue against it because this is what we would arrive at in a free market. Thirdly, it would help us see where we need to divert the most resources for transportation because we can directly see where people are paying the most to use roads. Lastly, and what I think is most important, is that we would finally have a way to separate traffic based on the importance of the drive. Right now, a mother sending her kids to daycare gets just as much priority as a son driving to see his dying father. With toll roads, the son would be able to pay the toll while the mother would look for another, cheaper option.

What about the gas tax system that we have now? We should abolish it. It prices all roads the same so it is in some ways hard to tell which roads should get the most maintenance. As for pollution, it would go way down. So why not toll roads? Traffic decreases, alternative uses will become more popular, and pollution will decrease. Of course, this begs the question: why not price for pollution? Well, I think we should. And weight? Of course. It is easy to see why the latter should be taxed, by conservatives would cry fowl about the former. I say, so what? In their ideal system, the road builder would have to make a deal before building the road in order to compensate local landowners for the pollution that the road creates. How would this be any different?

So this sounds like a good idea in itself,  but it is not the only transformation that would be necessary. But more on that later.

These aren't racing flags

Yet another good idea we can steal from the Old Continent: the income based speeding ticket.  Already the law of the land in Finland, where a 2002 fine to a director of the Nokia Corporation cost him €116,000 ($103,600 at the time) for doing 75 km/h (47 mph) in a 50 km/h (31 mph) zone.  The man charged, Mr. Anssi Vanjoki, was charged a fine equivalent to 14 days of his €12.5 Million annual income.

What prompted this post was the news on Yahoo! on January 7^th that the record for a traffic ticket has been broken by a Swiss speeder to the tune of $290,000.  This may seem harsh to the offender until you realize that he is worth over $20 million and will definitely not be rolling pennies for gas.

Now for those Angelenos living paycheck to paycheck, a speeding ticket really hurts.  They have the feel of a harsh penalty and getting a speeding ticket definitely affects their driving for months after a citation.  Say an individual makes the minimum wage and works 40 hours a week.  The net pay on the check is about $300.  After a fine and other ancillary costs (e.g. traffic school), that person has lost at least a full week’s wages.  For a person worth $20 million in LA, a $300 fine is laughable and no deterrent to speeding at all.  With a toothless monetary deterrent to hundreds, if not thousands of drivers, what is to stop them from speeding?  There is a point system in place to punish repeated offenders, but this means someone has to get caught time after time to have their driving privileges curtained.  Not the best system that requires the multiple offenses before behavior is punished for a particular segment of the population.

A copy-paste of the income-based traffic fines used in Finland and Switzerland would bring many positive benefits:

1. Rich people would drive better.  It levels the rules of the road for all drivers by implementing a fairer system of deterrence that would make even the wealthiest of people think twice before speeding.
2. Since some people will speed anyway, the city would raise a lot more cash.  The money raised by the city should entirely be used to fund public transportation.  After a few years of this, the city might have enough money to fund European-quality mass transit.
3. Not to bang the egalitarian drum too loudly, but implementing such a system would be a fine example of ending the cultural phenomenon of being able to buy your way out of things in this country.  Think of the children.

If you are driving multiple $500,000 cars and are worth millions, there is not much of a defense in arguing against such a proposition on monetary grounds.  Those people have the money to pay two weeks of their annual income should they be found exceeding the speed limit.  If there are any millionaires that read the metroriderla blog and would like to mount a defense of the current system and how it keeps them in check, contrarian views are most welcome.

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.

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The route names, rationales for the changes and service frequencies are on the Google Map for this series. Click on a line and look.

This map covers route suggestions for services between the Santa Monica Mountains and the 10 Freeway. There are DASH proposals for East and Northeast Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley as well.

The route names, rationales for the changes and service frequencies are on the Google Map for this series. Click on a line and look.