MetroRiderLA

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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Here you have it. MetroRiderLA has plumbed the depths of Census Bureau data to get a profile of stations for the proposed subway to the sea extensions of the Purple Line, and threw in the Pink Line as a bonus.

This effort all got started as a case to keep the Wilshire/Crenshaw station included, and then expanded to get a better outlook for all stations on the proposed subway extension. If this is your first opportunity reading this, look at the profiles for MOS-1 (to Fairfax Avenue), MOS-2 (to Century City), MOS-3 (to Westwood and Barrington Avenue) and MOS-4 (West Hollywood).

Each station has population density maps from census tracts to blocks, centered on the potential station site. Below that are tables showing indicators revealing factors closely tied to transit usage: transit share of commute trips, walking share of commute trips, renter-occupied dwellings, individuals below the poverty level and households with no or 1 vehicle.

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That is an actual map of a real transit corridor under consideration by Metro. It would be a subway line running from Hollywood to Beverly Hills primarily under Santa Monica Boulevard and San Vicente Boulevard. What makes this interesting is that in just a span of about two years, this service went from an internet meme to what may be the fourth leg of the Los Angeles subway system, ahead of actually getting it to the sea.

MetroRiderLA traced the evolution of the meme for what is colloquially referred to as the Pink Line. The downside: A subway is already an expensive proposition under Wilshire –  at $6 billion, or at least 10 percent of Measure R. The Pink Line would add $3 billion, and there’s no money committed to getting it built. The upside: This uncommitted line has fierce community support going for it, and West Hollywood residents are determined to see this project become a reality. It’s very interesting to see how this plays out, especially since Metro said it will be necessary to extend its MOS-3 beyond the 405 because of the expected crush load of passengers anticipated at Westwood.

What is the ridership climate like for West Hollywood? Very favorable to transit. There are frequent services available, and the line would serve high-ridership destinations. As for the other profiles in this series, 2000 Census Bureau data were used to pull data maps of population density as well as characteristics favorable to producing transit ridership (transit mode share, walking mode share, renter-occupied units, poverty rate and households with no or 1 car). Also, existing bus services are provided as a gauge of existing transit demand.

The profiles follow the jump after this refresher for new readers coming aboard:

• The Case for a Wilshire/Crenshaw station
• Census profiles for Purple Line MOS-1 stations
• Census profiles for Purple Line MOS-2 stations
• Census profiles for Purple Line MOS-3 stations

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Photo by via tombothetominator via Flickr; used with a Creative Commons license

The Urbanophile, part of the On the i10erary collection of must-read sites, posted terrific reasons why it’s difficult to reform transportation in Chicago. I post it here because Southern California is a treasure trove of this behavior — it might have a little to do with our Midwestern colonization during most of the 20th century.

It’s a behavior we see all the time in politics from the neighborhood to the nation. Now it has a name: “the racquet.” It was presented to Aaron Renn in an anonymous e-mail. I post it here for your edification:

Your discussion … reminds me of a concept I learned in the early ’90s.

The concept is “Racquet”. … A racquet is when folks have something they complain about and commiserate about but don’t fix it. Upon delving into the roots of racquets one finds that the folks don’t really want it fixed — the subject of the racquet is a unifying force that if corrected will remove the common complaint and thus the unifying force. The cultural changes that would ensue from the change in practices that “no one wants” are not acceptable to the people (the complainers).

I worked for a rapidly growing company in the early 90′s. … The CEO hired two consultants to help “transform” the company into a modern, international company with cohesive leadership. They introduced us to the “racquet” theory. In corporate organizational behavior, it is important to break the racquets. It is also difficult. But, I imagine far easier in a company with some semblance of common objectives that it would be in a each-man-for-himself city.

There are so many examples of this everywhere we look that it’s enough to fill a book. The concept of the racquet now also gives a focus on the foundations of a reorganization and the counter-force needed to overcome this deeper resistance (the dissolution of a unifying force).