SILVERLAKE
June 7th, 2005, 08:40 PM
TRAIN IN VAIN
Riders are suddenly flocking to the MTA’s buses and trains · only to find their dreams of quality mass transit crushed
~ By DONNELL ALEXANDER ~
Photo by Ted Soqui
~ Life’s a blur: Transit can be a moment of treasured calm – or not ~
ne squadron of rain droplets has splashed around your shoes. It’s wet your sock as you move toward the Metro Transit Authority subway station’s escalators at Santa Monica Boulevard at Vermont.
The bearded man in a plastic vest has what you’re looking for: a Day Pass Special. His paper looks good, appropriately slick and better overall than the product of that one Blue Line entrepreneur whose MTA logos appeared faded. So you reach under his umbrella and score that ticket for a couple dollars and just a few reasons. No rationale is more prominent than fair trade. At the day’s end, when you’re done riding, you’ll sell your pass to another passenger for two dollars. You’re mad at MTA these days, and one of the three dollars charged seems what the service is worth.
It’s arguable that nothing so marvelous has ever sucked as bad as Los Angeles public transit in the first part of 2005. At the exact same moment that millions of dollars of construction is underway to connect the Valley and East Los Angeles into the main of MTA, this cavernous Santa Monica Red Line Station has a ticket machine that won’t take bills other than ones. And when the air’s humid like this, the machines down below refuse to ingest even singles that aren’t crispy. On more than one occasion, you waded over to this same spot, opened your wallet to realize your money would be no good here, and, no hustler present, backtracked to a gas station for change.
Or you went home, to bed. Or you hopped the train illegally, risking another confrontation with the sheriff’s department refs who patrol the trains, wielding the threat of a $250 fine. You feel, on days like this one, that MTA is not keeping up its part of the deal.
Thing is, you hadn’t much previously felt that way. You had a crush on MTA from the time two years ago it touched you down on all four train lines (plus a shuttle) and got you from Mt. Washington to LAX in under an hour. For a means of transportation that always sucks at least a little bit, commuting by train or even bus in Los Angeles can be awesome. Light-rail or subway or Rapid bus, the vehicles are among the newest and cleanest in the nation. (Regular buses? Not so much.) Then, unexpectedly, a year’s perfect storm of inclement weather and high gas prices poured riders onto MTA and stressed its infrastructure. Summer will only offer more pressure. The gods of public transportation, such as they are, appear ready to give L.A. its close-up. As you move toward the escalator, your route down to the ticket machine you just won’t use, you cannot help but wonder if the train will be on time.
This is not my beautiful car
The term “quality mass transit” always seems to indicate New York or Chicago, but L.A.’s system is one of the nation’s biggest, and growing. And a decade or two from now, when it’s fully developed, MTA’s system of buses and trains might just be the planet’s envy.
This is not to say the mode will replace the automobile in the 21st century or ever; that faux freedom symbol is the eternal jones of the city’s inner-child actor. Angelenos crave car travel, even though they know the car is not good for them. Rather, the point is MTA was on its way to being dope, until a winter’s success revealed its flaws.
If it’s hard for folks anywhere to give themselves over to public transit, in Los Angeles it’s that much harder. People here get all self-critical for having to walk to the street for parking. Some beat themselves up for not yet having that semi-circular driveway. So it’s a leap to be leaving the Honda at home and commuting to a distant locale alongside a bunch of strangers.
A ridership must trust the train. But trust won’t come easy. And might not come at all, given this performance.
You’re thinking nothing has rooted your MTA experience in the realm of experimental technology – think mid-’90s Internet culture: fun, useful, but certainly not anything a serious person would bank on – more than the on-again, off-again status of train platform escalators. Cuz, while Rapid buses annoy the shit out of you by being too few and profoundly overcrowded, the innovative Rapids are what they are – awkward yet incredibly speedy. A lifeless escalator, meanwhile, is a minefield in your workday.
You’re like, how many evenings did you watch hobbling seniors encounter one of those vertiginous metal lifts, stilled? (For some reason, this city’s ridership features people permanently injured, not quite to the point of disability, but worthy of walking-wounded status.) Making her way from the platform at the dark end of evening rush hour, that old lady had declined to compete for a spot on the overstuffed elevator. She’d chanced it on the escalator and lost like she’d played Lotto. She sighed, bags in hand, then limped up toward the streetlit night.
Give Rick Jager some slack when he explains that MTA is working on the problem. He’s just a flack for the transit authority and actually doesn’t deserve to function as de facto villain in a newspaper parable.
“In a perfect world, they would all be functioning. And that’s what we strive to [have],” Jager said, at another time on another day.
“Hopefully the downtime on those types of incidents can be reduced by simply stopping and restarting the escalators.”
You sort of buy his explanation that youths who stomp on the escalators’ foot-panels are at the problem’s root; these machines must be re-started by key, manually, every time an escalator shuts itself down. But when Jager says the transit authority is working on the problem and that its solution is to give escalator keys to security for assistance and that they’ve been on this plan for a year, you’re beyond skeptical. You had to climb from the bottom platform at Wilshire and Vermont yesterday. And that shit was not cute.
This morning the serrated metal at your feet rolls down, the first of two escalators above the trains. No drama so far, today. ´´
The betrayal
You began seeing new people on the train – but not so much on the buses – at the year’s start, Rose Bowl Week. They were tourists, twangy relatives clad in Michigan and Texas gear and when these innocents left amused and giddy, their accompanying family remained. These unfamiliar riders had briefcases or bicycles in hand. They were so on board. And the rains came and gas costs got high and next thing you knew Red Line ridership was up by 12 percent, the Green Line eight percent, and the Blue three. Even the bus was up nine percent, and rain usually brings that ridership down.
The growth almost seems to be in spite of MTA. Now that you’ve rolled down the stairs, you’re looking at the machines that are of no use to you. You’re thinking you’d like to ask MTA why these machines are such an impediment.
“The ticket machines, particularly for the Red Line, are fairly old,” MTA’s Jager will admit. The machines, instituted in 1999, never did take five dollar bills or provide change, unlike the new Gold Line, which connects Pasadena to downtown. And Jager will have no explanation for why the ticket dispensers won’t take dollars when the weather is damp.
But he will have a bulletin about new technology. By the end of 2006, the MTA spokesman will insist, a Universal Fare System will be in place. It will have “smart card technology” and be on buses as well as these stations.
“Every time you boarded a bus or a train, you would tap this card on a device and it would subtract the fare from that card,” he notes.
But that’s not gonna keep you from wasting time at an antiquated machine. Nor will the promise of smart technology keep you from looking for the bootleg pass man whenever you arrive at a station. You wonder if the tourists paid.
Now that you actually possess a ticket and have made your way down to the bowels of the city, you are on the platform and finally get to wait for the train. You are excited because it’s actually the time of day when you’re certain one is coming. Today is not the time you left that party ’round midnight and hopped aboard easily at Hollywood and Vine, but spaced on your stop at Santa Monica Boulevard, missing the night’s last train and found yourself walking up from Beverly.
In short, you can’t just stumble to the train or the bus and assume one will come along eventually, like, say, in Washington, D.C.. Here, not knowing the schedule can be the difference between being home in a half-hour or never getting home at all. This doesn’t do much to establish that aforementioned trust.
And it’s getting worse. Beginning June 26, MTA will shave an hour off service from Lines Red, Gold, and Green. The final train from Redondo Beach will leave at 11:55 p.m., not 12:50 a.m. Koreatown’s Wilshire-Western train and the last one bound for Pasadena out of Union Station also lost an hour. So long, last call! (Good thing you don’t live in the ’hood; Rapid bus service – every rider’s back-up plan – stops working on Crenshaw at 7 p.m.!)
In all, it’s a 6.1 percent service reduction, designed to save $9.4 million. Trains will contain four cars, instead of six during off-peak ours. Which means more standing than sitting and the opportunity to find out exactly what that old crazy guy you’ve been avoiding smells like. These cuts come as the Gold Line remains so slow it can literally be driven as fast in a car. In the sort of inclement weather that might down a power line or erode a hill, the Pasadena route might suffer delays of up to an hour.
So the reductions feel like a betrayal, in light of your escalator ordeals and those ticket machines. You want to trust MTA, but you cannot reconcile the awkwardness and inconvenience you experience daily with the groundbreaking going on with the new Orange Line bus route in the Valley. You don’t so much mind the waiting. Public art at Los Angeles MTA stations is singular, enough to make you want to pay full fare, every time. Your favorite is the film reel wall at Hollywood and Vine, but you also love the giant, walking metal man outside the Gold Line’s Mission Street stop. The Blue Line’s full of lovely structures that raise and lower people from South L.A. streets to light rail then back again and you could just linger at the stations all day. Check in too late, though, and you’ll be waiting there all night, and that’s not what this project is about. You are trying to get somewhere.
Bus vs. train smackdown
Anyone who thinks the stilted development of mass transit culture in Los Angeles hurts no one but the poor souls – bus riders on average make less than $12,000 a year – who are MTA-dependent hasn’t driven by the Universal City station. Making their way to a trolley bound for CityWalk, the amusement park, and the Gibson joint, your sprawling troops spill into the intersection while stop signals flash, stalling drivers and impacting traffic. Angelenos are the shittiest pedestrians on the face of the Earth. And the entire city is poorer for this.
In antithesis of that Universal City experience is 7th and Metro Station. Pulsing beneath downtown’s midsection, the Blue Line connects with the Red over two well-designed levels of train track and platform, and the essence of the ridership flows up from Long Beach to the easternmost edge of Pasadena, to Koreatown and to the Valley. The mix is effortless, the mood confident, not timid. Your relationship feels sturdy. There’s even a change machine here. Aw, heck. You cannot stay mad at MTA. Cuz at 7th and Metro, Los Angeles comes together. Everyone seems to disembark from their smooth, safe rides in a state of uplift – the MacArthur Park shop owner on a quick errand same as the student from Compton. You become ecstatic enough to feel you’ve made all these stops in just one day, forget that you’re working for a living and take it in mind to head down the line on which Jamie Foxx shot Tom Cruise in Collateral, just to shoot the shit and grab some lunch down in Long Beach.
But you need to catch the bus.
Manuel Criollo, lead organizer for the Bus Riders Union, is embarrassed. At Wilshire and Western, the two of you wrangled a bus and a seat easily enough – it’s off-peak hours. Now, minutes after boarding, a gay-baiter in his 50s is haranguing a queer 20 years his junior, just short of drawing public tears. And Criollo cringes because he cares madly about buses, old locals and sleek new Rapids alike. He wants the bus to make a nice impression on you.
If only he knew: The episode is nothing compared to the previous week, when a coffee-and-cream-colored, middle-aged woman, sane-looking at quick first glance, yelled at you – in front of a vehicle full of passengers:
“I do not stand next to black men on the bus!”
An audible gasp traveled through the bus. Your face felt flush, then you were oddly redeemed when, seconds later, the woman added, “You’re not gonna stick your black dick in my white mouth.”
It does something to a person, this traveling so close to the shared dysfunction. Illusions are demolished. Distances are bridged. Citizens got shit to work out. You need to ride the bus, if only because sprinting for something once, twice, three times in a week is good for the constitution. (You theorize that if Angelenos had the kind of meaningful relationship with public transit that’s possessed by riders in NYC or the Bay Area, there’d at least be a single pro football team in this soul-deprived and rambling burg by now.)
Buses both Rapid and regular, as they currently work, exacerbate underlying tensions. At least that’s the opinion of the guy from the Bus Riders Union. On Wednesday the union, with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, rallied against bus overcrowding and MTA’s means of addressing it. In essence, the fight right now is over what its critics consider addition by subtraction.
But also Criollo thinks the battle is as much about tensions derived from crowded buses and the prospect of missed connections. Over the din of the still-babbling homophobe he wonders, passionately, “Why does it take three and a half hours to commute from South-Central to the Valley?
“The bus is not in any way sexy,” adds Criollo. That’s why, when billions in federal transportation awards are divvied up across MTA, the bus cannot compete with train lines “and the contracts that accompany them” in suburban districts. The feds’ Special Master decreed that 134 buses be added to city routes, to lessen crowding, but the city is fighting it. According to Jager, MTA has through the end of July to negotiate the number of vehicles down.
Buses might be the veins that make transit arteries local, but in terms of political advocacy, the big talk is never about them or the people who ride them. Transit politics, in Criollo’s view, “is how much can I bring to my district and appease certain voters who don’t even ride the train.”
In other words, train dollars are better than bus dollars. Even though both are in short supply. “It’s a very cannibalistic way in which it works,” observes Criollo.
The light at the end of the tunnel
In July, just before MTA’s deadline to decide how many more buses it has to add to the city streets, Los Angeles will swear in its new mayor. Antonio Villaraigosa has been seen as a staunch advocate for public transit, having worked out the 2003 MTA strike settlement, among other negotiations. He’s certain to be a strong lobbyist for the state and federal funds that will be necessary for the visions of systemic integration that dance in his head.
But as much as it’s important to secure the outside funds that will keep, for example, East L.A.’s Gold Line construction from bogging down, Villaraigosa will have to be the local presence who keeps the MTA board from shortchanging existing bus service – serving poorer, cloutless passengers – in order to move forward such attractive, porky rail projects as the Exposition Light Rail extension through Culver City, which is apparently working its way onto the schedule after the Gold Line extension.
The Gold Line, which seems to have been funded and constructed in an order opposite of its residents’ needs, has to get faster in order to be useful. So the express service being talked about in experimental terms ought to move to the front of the line. The currently temporary Wilshire bus-only lane, a mile stretch in Westwood, should not only be inked in as permanent. It should be extended. And greenlight the plan to integrate all of L.A. County’s disparate municipal operators from Santa Monica to Montebello.
These are the things a mayor who truly cares about public transportation would deal with.
Rising out of the ground and into the evening, you think about the 60-foot buses, new “articulated” vehicles that will join the fleet this month, and you’re doing so as much because it helps complete the narrative of your “day” as because there might be one of the older Rapids plugging across Santa Monica and down Vermont, the most heavily used bus route in America. And maybe back here at your local MTA stop you think about the Express Service that may well shave 10 minutes off stem-to-stern Gold Line journeys. And maybe you start to feel tolerant of MTA. This summer is, after all, going to be a demanding journey. A man sings low and spins casually, “Day Pass – two dollars. Day Pass – two dollars!”
And he’s totally doing it all wrong; (The idea is not to look like someone’s doing you a favor.) But a part of you is thinking, “Aw shit, competition.” So you put your pass away and let the man do his thing.
After all, the trip’s not been so bad. Easily worth two-thirds the price of admission.
Riders are suddenly flocking to the MTA’s buses and trains · only to find their dreams of quality mass transit crushed
~ By DONNELL ALEXANDER ~
Photo by Ted Soqui
~ Life’s a blur: Transit can be a moment of treasured calm – or not ~
ne squadron of rain droplets has splashed around your shoes. It’s wet your sock as you move toward the Metro Transit Authority subway station’s escalators at Santa Monica Boulevard at Vermont.
The bearded man in a plastic vest has what you’re looking for: a Day Pass Special. His paper looks good, appropriately slick and better overall than the product of that one Blue Line entrepreneur whose MTA logos appeared faded. So you reach under his umbrella and score that ticket for a couple dollars and just a few reasons. No rationale is more prominent than fair trade. At the day’s end, when you’re done riding, you’ll sell your pass to another passenger for two dollars. You’re mad at MTA these days, and one of the three dollars charged seems what the service is worth.
It’s arguable that nothing so marvelous has ever sucked as bad as Los Angeles public transit in the first part of 2005. At the exact same moment that millions of dollars of construction is underway to connect the Valley and East Los Angeles into the main of MTA, this cavernous Santa Monica Red Line Station has a ticket machine that won’t take bills other than ones. And when the air’s humid like this, the machines down below refuse to ingest even singles that aren’t crispy. On more than one occasion, you waded over to this same spot, opened your wallet to realize your money would be no good here, and, no hustler present, backtracked to a gas station for change.
Or you went home, to bed. Or you hopped the train illegally, risking another confrontation with the sheriff’s department refs who patrol the trains, wielding the threat of a $250 fine. You feel, on days like this one, that MTA is not keeping up its part of the deal.
Thing is, you hadn’t much previously felt that way. You had a crush on MTA from the time two years ago it touched you down on all four train lines (plus a shuttle) and got you from Mt. Washington to LAX in under an hour. For a means of transportation that always sucks at least a little bit, commuting by train or even bus in Los Angeles can be awesome. Light-rail or subway or Rapid bus, the vehicles are among the newest and cleanest in the nation. (Regular buses? Not so much.) Then, unexpectedly, a year’s perfect storm of inclement weather and high gas prices poured riders onto MTA and stressed its infrastructure. Summer will only offer more pressure. The gods of public transportation, such as they are, appear ready to give L.A. its close-up. As you move toward the escalator, your route down to the ticket machine you just won’t use, you cannot help but wonder if the train will be on time.
This is not my beautiful car
The term “quality mass transit” always seems to indicate New York or Chicago, but L.A.’s system is one of the nation’s biggest, and growing. And a decade or two from now, when it’s fully developed, MTA’s system of buses and trains might just be the planet’s envy.
This is not to say the mode will replace the automobile in the 21st century or ever; that faux freedom symbol is the eternal jones of the city’s inner-child actor. Angelenos crave car travel, even though they know the car is not good for them. Rather, the point is MTA was on its way to being dope, until a winter’s success revealed its flaws.
If it’s hard for folks anywhere to give themselves over to public transit, in Los Angeles it’s that much harder. People here get all self-critical for having to walk to the street for parking. Some beat themselves up for not yet having that semi-circular driveway. So it’s a leap to be leaving the Honda at home and commuting to a distant locale alongside a bunch of strangers.
A ridership must trust the train. But trust won’t come easy. And might not come at all, given this performance.
You’re thinking nothing has rooted your MTA experience in the realm of experimental technology – think mid-’90s Internet culture: fun, useful, but certainly not anything a serious person would bank on – more than the on-again, off-again status of train platform escalators. Cuz, while Rapid buses annoy the shit out of you by being too few and profoundly overcrowded, the innovative Rapids are what they are – awkward yet incredibly speedy. A lifeless escalator, meanwhile, is a minefield in your workday.
You’re like, how many evenings did you watch hobbling seniors encounter one of those vertiginous metal lifts, stilled? (For some reason, this city’s ridership features people permanently injured, not quite to the point of disability, but worthy of walking-wounded status.) Making her way from the platform at the dark end of evening rush hour, that old lady had declined to compete for a spot on the overstuffed elevator. She’d chanced it on the escalator and lost like she’d played Lotto. She sighed, bags in hand, then limped up toward the streetlit night.
Give Rick Jager some slack when he explains that MTA is working on the problem. He’s just a flack for the transit authority and actually doesn’t deserve to function as de facto villain in a newspaper parable.
“In a perfect world, they would all be functioning. And that’s what we strive to [have],” Jager said, at another time on another day.
“Hopefully the downtime on those types of incidents can be reduced by simply stopping and restarting the escalators.”
You sort of buy his explanation that youths who stomp on the escalators’ foot-panels are at the problem’s root; these machines must be re-started by key, manually, every time an escalator shuts itself down. But when Jager says the transit authority is working on the problem and that its solution is to give escalator keys to security for assistance and that they’ve been on this plan for a year, you’re beyond skeptical. You had to climb from the bottom platform at Wilshire and Vermont yesterday. And that shit was not cute.
This morning the serrated metal at your feet rolls down, the first of two escalators above the trains. No drama so far, today. ´´
The betrayal
You began seeing new people on the train – but not so much on the buses – at the year’s start, Rose Bowl Week. They were tourists, twangy relatives clad in Michigan and Texas gear and when these innocents left amused and giddy, their accompanying family remained. These unfamiliar riders had briefcases or bicycles in hand. They were so on board. And the rains came and gas costs got high and next thing you knew Red Line ridership was up by 12 percent, the Green Line eight percent, and the Blue three. Even the bus was up nine percent, and rain usually brings that ridership down.
The growth almost seems to be in spite of MTA. Now that you’ve rolled down the stairs, you’re looking at the machines that are of no use to you. You’re thinking you’d like to ask MTA why these machines are such an impediment.
“The ticket machines, particularly for the Red Line, are fairly old,” MTA’s Jager will admit. The machines, instituted in 1999, never did take five dollar bills or provide change, unlike the new Gold Line, which connects Pasadena to downtown. And Jager will have no explanation for why the ticket dispensers won’t take dollars when the weather is damp.
But he will have a bulletin about new technology. By the end of 2006, the MTA spokesman will insist, a Universal Fare System will be in place. It will have “smart card technology” and be on buses as well as these stations.
“Every time you boarded a bus or a train, you would tap this card on a device and it would subtract the fare from that card,” he notes.
But that’s not gonna keep you from wasting time at an antiquated machine. Nor will the promise of smart technology keep you from looking for the bootleg pass man whenever you arrive at a station. You wonder if the tourists paid.
Now that you actually possess a ticket and have made your way down to the bowels of the city, you are on the platform and finally get to wait for the train. You are excited because it’s actually the time of day when you’re certain one is coming. Today is not the time you left that party ’round midnight and hopped aboard easily at Hollywood and Vine, but spaced on your stop at Santa Monica Boulevard, missing the night’s last train and found yourself walking up from Beverly.
In short, you can’t just stumble to the train or the bus and assume one will come along eventually, like, say, in Washington, D.C.. Here, not knowing the schedule can be the difference between being home in a half-hour or never getting home at all. This doesn’t do much to establish that aforementioned trust.
And it’s getting worse. Beginning June 26, MTA will shave an hour off service from Lines Red, Gold, and Green. The final train from Redondo Beach will leave at 11:55 p.m., not 12:50 a.m. Koreatown’s Wilshire-Western train and the last one bound for Pasadena out of Union Station also lost an hour. So long, last call! (Good thing you don’t live in the ’hood; Rapid bus service – every rider’s back-up plan – stops working on Crenshaw at 7 p.m.!)
In all, it’s a 6.1 percent service reduction, designed to save $9.4 million. Trains will contain four cars, instead of six during off-peak ours. Which means more standing than sitting and the opportunity to find out exactly what that old crazy guy you’ve been avoiding smells like. These cuts come as the Gold Line remains so slow it can literally be driven as fast in a car. In the sort of inclement weather that might down a power line or erode a hill, the Pasadena route might suffer delays of up to an hour.
So the reductions feel like a betrayal, in light of your escalator ordeals and those ticket machines. You want to trust MTA, but you cannot reconcile the awkwardness and inconvenience you experience daily with the groundbreaking going on with the new Orange Line bus route in the Valley. You don’t so much mind the waiting. Public art at Los Angeles MTA stations is singular, enough to make you want to pay full fare, every time. Your favorite is the film reel wall at Hollywood and Vine, but you also love the giant, walking metal man outside the Gold Line’s Mission Street stop. The Blue Line’s full of lovely structures that raise and lower people from South L.A. streets to light rail then back again and you could just linger at the stations all day. Check in too late, though, and you’ll be waiting there all night, and that’s not what this project is about. You are trying to get somewhere.
Bus vs. train smackdown
Anyone who thinks the stilted development of mass transit culture in Los Angeles hurts no one but the poor souls – bus riders on average make less than $12,000 a year – who are MTA-dependent hasn’t driven by the Universal City station. Making their way to a trolley bound for CityWalk, the amusement park, and the Gibson joint, your sprawling troops spill into the intersection while stop signals flash, stalling drivers and impacting traffic. Angelenos are the shittiest pedestrians on the face of the Earth. And the entire city is poorer for this.
In antithesis of that Universal City experience is 7th and Metro Station. Pulsing beneath downtown’s midsection, the Blue Line connects with the Red over two well-designed levels of train track and platform, and the essence of the ridership flows up from Long Beach to the easternmost edge of Pasadena, to Koreatown and to the Valley. The mix is effortless, the mood confident, not timid. Your relationship feels sturdy. There’s even a change machine here. Aw, heck. You cannot stay mad at MTA. Cuz at 7th and Metro, Los Angeles comes together. Everyone seems to disembark from their smooth, safe rides in a state of uplift – the MacArthur Park shop owner on a quick errand same as the student from Compton. You become ecstatic enough to feel you’ve made all these stops in just one day, forget that you’re working for a living and take it in mind to head down the line on which Jamie Foxx shot Tom Cruise in Collateral, just to shoot the shit and grab some lunch down in Long Beach.
But you need to catch the bus.
Manuel Criollo, lead organizer for the Bus Riders Union, is embarrassed. At Wilshire and Western, the two of you wrangled a bus and a seat easily enough – it’s off-peak hours. Now, minutes after boarding, a gay-baiter in his 50s is haranguing a queer 20 years his junior, just short of drawing public tears. And Criollo cringes because he cares madly about buses, old locals and sleek new Rapids alike. He wants the bus to make a nice impression on you.
If only he knew: The episode is nothing compared to the previous week, when a coffee-and-cream-colored, middle-aged woman, sane-looking at quick first glance, yelled at you – in front of a vehicle full of passengers:
“I do not stand next to black men on the bus!”
An audible gasp traveled through the bus. Your face felt flush, then you were oddly redeemed when, seconds later, the woman added, “You’re not gonna stick your black dick in my white mouth.”
It does something to a person, this traveling so close to the shared dysfunction. Illusions are demolished. Distances are bridged. Citizens got shit to work out. You need to ride the bus, if only because sprinting for something once, twice, three times in a week is good for the constitution. (You theorize that if Angelenos had the kind of meaningful relationship with public transit that’s possessed by riders in NYC or the Bay Area, there’d at least be a single pro football team in this soul-deprived and rambling burg by now.)
Buses both Rapid and regular, as they currently work, exacerbate underlying tensions. At least that’s the opinion of the guy from the Bus Riders Union. On Wednesday the union, with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, rallied against bus overcrowding and MTA’s means of addressing it. In essence, the fight right now is over what its critics consider addition by subtraction.
But also Criollo thinks the battle is as much about tensions derived from crowded buses and the prospect of missed connections. Over the din of the still-babbling homophobe he wonders, passionately, “Why does it take three and a half hours to commute from South-Central to the Valley?
“The bus is not in any way sexy,” adds Criollo. That’s why, when billions in federal transportation awards are divvied up across MTA, the bus cannot compete with train lines “and the contracts that accompany them” in suburban districts. The feds’ Special Master decreed that 134 buses be added to city routes, to lessen crowding, but the city is fighting it. According to Jager, MTA has through the end of July to negotiate the number of vehicles down.
Buses might be the veins that make transit arteries local, but in terms of political advocacy, the big talk is never about them or the people who ride them. Transit politics, in Criollo’s view, “is how much can I bring to my district and appease certain voters who don’t even ride the train.”
In other words, train dollars are better than bus dollars. Even though both are in short supply. “It’s a very cannibalistic way in which it works,” observes Criollo.
The light at the end of the tunnel
In July, just before MTA’s deadline to decide how many more buses it has to add to the city streets, Los Angeles will swear in its new mayor. Antonio Villaraigosa has been seen as a staunch advocate for public transit, having worked out the 2003 MTA strike settlement, among other negotiations. He’s certain to be a strong lobbyist for the state and federal funds that will be necessary for the visions of systemic integration that dance in his head.
But as much as it’s important to secure the outside funds that will keep, for example, East L.A.’s Gold Line construction from bogging down, Villaraigosa will have to be the local presence who keeps the MTA board from shortchanging existing bus service – serving poorer, cloutless passengers – in order to move forward such attractive, porky rail projects as the Exposition Light Rail extension through Culver City, which is apparently working its way onto the schedule after the Gold Line extension.
The Gold Line, which seems to have been funded and constructed in an order opposite of its residents’ needs, has to get faster in order to be useful. So the express service being talked about in experimental terms ought to move to the front of the line. The currently temporary Wilshire bus-only lane, a mile stretch in Westwood, should not only be inked in as permanent. It should be extended. And greenlight the plan to integrate all of L.A. County’s disparate municipal operators from Santa Monica to Montebello.
These are the things a mayor who truly cares about public transportation would deal with.
Rising out of the ground and into the evening, you think about the 60-foot buses, new “articulated” vehicles that will join the fleet this month, and you’re doing so as much because it helps complete the narrative of your “day” as because there might be one of the older Rapids plugging across Santa Monica and down Vermont, the most heavily used bus route in America. And maybe back here at your local MTA stop you think about the Express Service that may well shave 10 minutes off stem-to-stern Gold Line journeys. And maybe you start to feel tolerant of MTA. This summer is, after all, going to be a demanding journey. A man sings low and spins casually, “Day Pass – two dollars. Day Pass – two dollars!”
And he’s totally doing it all wrong; (The idea is not to look like someone’s doing you a favor.) But a part of you is thinking, “Aw shit, competition.” So you put your pass away and let the man do his thing.
After all, the trip’s not been so bad. Easily worth two-thirds the price of admission.