How Mass Transit Can be Financially Viable in Los Angeles
Another article came out this week, essentially another opinion piece trashing public transportation and the approaches taken by the various public agencies responsible for building, operating, and maintaining mass transit systems in the greater Los Angeles area. It seems like a continuous topic here in Los Angeles, with these articles popping up at regular intervals. These articles have spurred some posts by me in the past, so when reading this recent article, I tried to look for some other points. In one part of the article, the author talks about the harmful byproducts of mass transit, and opens with three points. Below I’ve presented the three points, with my commentary following each point, and closes with some recommendations.
Point #1:
Mass Transit takes a lot longer than owning a car.
How “long” does it take to own a car? Seems like two different points. I didn’t “own” a car outright until I was 28 years old. Before then, after the age of 16, my parents were kind enough to buy used cars for my use. And they were pretty sweet — first a 1984 Volvo 240 DL wagon, next a 1985 Buick Skylark, and then a 1995 Jeep Cherokee. But I digress, and believe the author was trying to make a different point.
It appears that the author is suggesting travelling by mass transit takes longer than travelling by car. I wonder how often the author drives in the Los Angeles area, in a car, during virtually any point of any day. Turns out, there’s a lot of traffic and it generally takes a while to go anywhere by car.
If’ you’ve ever tried to drive a car through downtown Los Angeles during the evening rush hour, I’m sure you can agree that it takes much longer than one would expect to get from, say, 7th/Figueroa over to the City Hall/Union Station area. Probably takes 20 to 30 minutes, based on my experience. You know what is faster, taking maybe 15 to 20 minutes? The answer is the Metro rail line that runs from 7th/Metro to Union Station.
The point being is that mass transit doesn’t have to take longer than driving in a car, and in order to make mass transit more effective, we need to focus our priorities a bit differently. More on that below.
Point #2:
Commuting to work is not the only use for cars.
Sure, and no one is saying that is all people use mass transit for. See for yourself — go get on a bus or train in the middle of the day, and there’s lots of people riding, for many reasons. On the flip side, cars are not the only way to commute for work, and there are a vast number of people in the greater Los Angeles area who do not have access to a car and yet want and need to commute to work.
In any case, once a person uses a car to commute to work, or for whatever other reason they use a car for, the car is then parked for an amount of time. The fact is, cars sit idle for about 95% of the time. Mass transit, on the other hand, runs throughout the day, constantly providing transportation options for people who need it. In my opinion, that is a much more efficient use of a transportation mode, and a better option when weighing the costs and benefits of vehicle emissions and traffic congestion.
Point #3:
People who work at home also needs cars.
Honestly, this seems like a rehash of point #2; of course people need cars for a variety of reasons. Of course it can also be said that people who work at home need transportation. In fact, it might be a universal need among all humans — the need for motion and travel.
In describing this last point, the article drops a bombshell of a statement:
“When traffic is congested, it is worse for the bus, making a car the fastest mode of transportation. A single mother who misses the bus home after the Parent Teacher Conference may have an extra hour wait at that time of night. Then, she has to get up early to catch the bus or subway to get to work, if she has a job. All that wasted time could have been spent with her children or taking a correspondence course. A poor person with a car has that extra time.”
This is a pretty major pet peeve for me, for two reasons. Reason one is that of course buses have to slog through the same traffic congestion as all the cars on the road. There is a pretty simple solution to this problem, as I will describe at the end of this. The second reason is that the concept of “extra time” saved by driving a car is debatable. That is because when you are driving a car, all you can do is drive a car. Of course lots of people try to do other things, and from my personal experience the safest things I can do while driving a car are listen to music and make phone calls. I’ve seen people put on makeup, eat salads (seriously?!), hand toys and tablets to children in back seats, and more; but for me, I’ll stick to the low impact activities and focus the majority of my attention on driving. For me, driving a car means not being very productive for the time while I’m driving. That is why I prefer to take public transportation, when I want to be more efficient in how I use my time.
Here’s an alternate narrative:
A single mother works at a business who provides her with a discounted monthly Metro TAP card each month. This discounted card allows her to take all Metro bus and rail systems, and integrates with 24 other carriers in the greater LA region. She uses the Transit app to get real-time arrival updates for public transportation, so she knows exactly when to walk out of work to catch the bus home. After catching the bus home — a shorter commute than driving too, since her bus uses an exclusive bus lane to bypass congested streets — she attends the Parent Teacher Conference and heads home. The next morning she does it all over again, using the transit app to monitor the real-time arrival of her bus. While riding the bus to work, she has time to work on the paper due for her online certification course, which will help her when she asks for a promotion next month. A person taking the bus has extra time.
Recommendations
The title of the article that raised the three points above is “Why Mass Transit Will Financially Destroy Los Angeles.” After discussing the three points raised in the article, I can now present a few recommendations that would prevent mass transit from financially destroying Los Angeles. Hopefully a reader will find these recommendations fairly straight-forward:
- Provide more dedicated, exclusive facilities for mass transit. There are peak period bus only lanes on Figueroa in Downtown LA, as well as on Wilshire Blvd. That’s a good start. A better example is the Orange Line through the San Fernando Valley, which runs on a road all to itself. We could make the bus lanes on streets like Figueroa and WIlshire by making them 24-hour facilities, and providing additional features to better separate the lanes from general auto traffic.
- Enforce the dedicated, exclusive facilities for mass transit. Use automated technologies, like cameras and license plate readers. People who break the law and use these dedicated facilities — from driving in them to parking a car “just for a second” — need consistent reinforcement to change bad behaviors. Without consistent and constant enforcement, human behavior shows us that the rules will continue to be broken, and the prevalence of this rule breaking will expand, further degrading the quality of service for public transportation.
- Allow our high-tech traffic signal systems to operate better by increasing automated enforcement. In Southern California, we have spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars — taxpayer dollars — on building some of the most technologically advanced and interconnected traffic signal systems in the world. Some of these systems adapt the signal operations to ensure consistent and steady traffic flows depending on the volume of traffic, as it changes over the course of a day. But you know what? These investments are totally worthless if people don’t obey red lights, create gridlock by getting trapped in an intersection after a light changes red, and simply run red lights. It doesn’t matter how many millions or billions of dollars we spend to improve and synchronize traffic signal operations, if the cars can’t move through intersections on green lights. And we can’t spend infinite amounts of money putting traffic cops on every corner. Instead, we can support and deploy more automated red light photo enforcement throughout the region. As people get used to the ubiquitous deployment of this technology, behaviors will change and the benefits of our investments in advanced traffic signal technologies can be realized.
- Fund the construction, operation, maintenance, and enforcement of dedicated facilities for mass transit using the revenue generated by those investments. A complete system would generate revenue through congestion pricing, ticket revenue from automated enforcement, smart parking rates, and permit programs to facilitate things like filming, commercial deliveries, tour buses. The objective of enforcement is to reduce infractions by drivers, so as a revenue stream it should be considered a sinking fund. Overall, don’t divert the funds into general revenue pools, to be distributed to the variety of other services and programs provided by public agencies. If people see the money going right back into transportation, and understand that the role of the public sector is to help make transportation and mobility safe, efficient, and accessible for all people, then the public sentiment should change in regards to mass transit.
In the end, I believe that the greater threat to the financial health of our region is the ability for people to move around for things that they need every day — homes, work, groceries, school, etc. — and the ever growing disparity in terms of where people can afford to live versus work. Rather than sit here and complain about how mass transit isn’t helping to fight these threats, why not consider some of the recommendations above?
