Streetsblog Los Angeles

Next Tuesday, Metro CEO Art Leahy will be the featured speaker of the Transit Coalition at their monthly meeting for the second time in as many months.  The reason for Leahy’s return?   There were so many questions at the last meeting, he didn’t have a chance to answer them all.

If you’re like me, and can’t make next Tuesday’s meeting, and have a question for the CEO, feel free to leave it in the comments section.  Transit Coalition Executive Director Bart Reed does read Streetsblog and will take your questions to Leahy.  However, if you want to be 100% sure that your question is asked, there’s nothing like attending the meeting yourself.

If I had a question…While we’ve heard plenty from Metro’s public relations team on the B.R.U. civil rights complaint to the Federal Transit Administration, it might be interesting to hear an opinion from the top man at the agency.

The Coalition meets from 6:46 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. at Philippe The Original, 1001 N. Alameda St. Los Angeles CA. 90012.

Earlier this week, Metro announced another set of proposed cuts to its bus system.  Following so soon on the cuts from just last month, Metro CEO Art Leahy took to The Source to defend the changes.  Oddly, rather than defend the good work being done by the bus division at Metro and push for the state to finally restore funds pledged to transit operations but spent on closing a gap in the general fund.  Instead, he tries to sell the cancellation of nine bus routes and reductions on dozens more.

A full list of the cuts can be found here.  Streetsblog will be covering cuts in each of the service areas in the days leading up to the local hearing in that area.  A list of the hearing schedule can be found here.

I reached out to transit advocates to get their take on the cuts.  The Bus Riders Union sent a quick reply that they’re still working on analyzing the cuts, but that they found the proposal shocking.  The Southern California Transit Advocates, Transit Coalition and San Fernando Valley Service Council Member Kymberleigh Richards all sent in detailed responses both on specific proposed changes and on Leahy’s statements in The Source.

Richards’ statement is particular to changes happening in the San Fernando Valley area, and will be discussed in a later post.  In the meantime, you can read her statement here.

Writing for the Transit Coalition, Faramarz Nabavi takes issue with how the proposed cuts were planned.  Nabavi notes both that several parts of the Blue Ribbon Commission Report that Leahy references to justify the cuts are not taken into account and that such deep cuts may not be needed as sales tax revenue, which provides Metro with its operations subsidy, is rising.  Nabavi’s full statement can be found here. Read more…

Tomorrow night at 7:00 P.M. Metro CEO Art Leahy will speak and take questions at The Transit Coalition's monthly meeting at Philippe the Original in downtown L.A.  Love him or hate him, the affable Leahy has been more open about his plans and vision for Metro with the press and advocates than either his contemporaries at other agencies or predecessors.  He even sat down for a Streetsblog interview last summer.

The Transit Coalition meetings are open to the public, so just show up and be prepared to ask him some questions.  When I spoke with Leahy last summer, he had a lot of information and stories at his fingertips and loved to hit you with facts illustrated by a part of his or the agency's history.

You can read the Coalition's meeting announcement after the jump.

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(Author's note: this write-up was delayed when I was hit with a particular vicious bout of flu that made me bed ridden for 9 days. But since no one in the media (including Metro's own bloggers!) attended it is still timely and informative as the sole coverage of this event. - DG)

I previously noted regarding the Feb. 16th quarterly Metro Sector Governance Council Meet and Confer meeting that in attending my hope was it would be somewhat educational. And was it ever!

The main reason I attended was to present to the assembled Council members and Metro management a nine point list of items of concern derived from input by several Transit Advocate members. My intent was to use this opportunity to raise key issues of regional concern. The list has now been posted on the SO.CA.TA website.

By far the most interesting agenda item was #2, Metro CEO Art Leahy's remarks which it was promised would include clarification on the "Continuing Role of Sector Governance Councils."

As my previous commentary "Metro in Transition" noted, Leahy is disbanding the sectors in favor of having bus operations managed by function and overseen by Executive Officers who report to the Chief Operations Officer.

Yet Leahy simultaneously has committed to keeping the Sector Governance Councils in place, continuing their role as geographical based oversight of bus service. How this will all work out has been more than a little vague, and many attendees were keenly interested in hearing Leahy provide more details.

In his remarks Leahy noted statistics that bus ridership compared to 20 years ago is down about 35%. And that lines which serve the L.A. central business district carry only 50% of seated capacity for riders with a destination in downtown. Leahy decried these numbers as proof Metro is running excess service and is in need of restructuring how it operates.

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News website The Daily Beast crunches the numbers from the most congested areas in America and finds, to nobody's surprise, that the worst driving commute in America is right here in Los Angeles.    The Hollywood Freeway ranks as the worst place to commute in the entire country based on rush hour congestion, the worst bottleneck, and the average amount of congestion per week at the worst bottleneck.

Los Angeles' ranking in this survey is hardly a surprise.  A couple of times a year surveys are released that show Los Angeles' car gridlock to create the most pollution, waste the most drivers hours, etc.  No matter the methodology, our highway system isn't working.  What makes this survey interesting, is that they tracked down Metro CEO Art Leahy to explain why the congestion is so thick on the 101.

"I recall they would say things like it's a 20-minute trip downtown on the Hollywood Freeway,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief executive Art Leahy says on traffic when he was growing up in Los Angeles. “No one anticipated the congestion that would emerge."

It always amazes me that transportation professionals can look at the disaster that is our local highway system and comment that the traffic growth is a lot heavier than they ever thought; yet expect people to believe estimates on future traffic growth to justify expensive highway projects that won't do anything to solve the long-term problem that there's just too many cars on the road.

Denny Zane is calling on the Measure R Champions and challenging them to engage in a second round of battle, this time mobilizing to embrace the 30/10 campaign which will leverage the anticipated $40 Billion in funding and then expedite the process so that 30 years of transit construction can be completed in the next 10 years.

This "all or nothing" campaign has several anticipated benefits, including significant discounts on American product, significant environmental impact, significant employment opportunities, and, most of all, the completion of the 12 mega-transit projects that are currently in line, all within 10 years.

The MoveLA Camp Meeting was held Monday evening at LACMA’s Brown Auditorium and the invitation came complete with Metro instructions, a touch I appreciate. Of course, the sign-in table offered parking validation, an amenity I will continue to consider as a sign of disconnect until the day it is complemented with free air for my bicycle and Metro tokens for those prefer mass transit.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Metro Boardmember Richard Katz and Deputy Mayor Jaime de la Vega all addressed the eager audience which included officials and staff from Beverly Hills to San Gabriel alongside consultants and reps from transit non-profits and advocacy groups. The audience nodded eagerly as the "pie-in-the-sky" Long Range Transportation Plan was brought to the "now" and a timeline for the upcoming decade was laid out. Katz and de la Vega both moved quickly over the details of the 30/10 plan, dropping enough data and showing enough graphs to elicit a few "ooh’s" without having to slow down the momentum of the pep rally.

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Monday Dec. 14 at 6:30 p.m. Move LA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are co-sponsoring a public meeting on Strategies to Accelerate the Development of the Wilshire Subway and Other Measure R Projects in Los Angeles County--What You Can Do to Help Implement the Measure R 30-Year Plan in 10 Years!  The meeting will be held at the Museum's Brown Auditorium, in the Art of the Americas building off the Central Court. The Museum is at 5905 Wilshire Bl. just east of Fairfax.

So far we have only been getting the soundbite that Mayor Villaraigosa has a 30 in 10 strategy. I'm curious to finally hear some more details about just what is being proposed and what role interested citizens can have in making this happen. It is an intriguing concept but as always the devil is in the details. So far the only details are a laundry list of strategies to be studied per the Metro Board motion Villaraigosa co-sponsored with Metro Board Chair Ara Najarian at the Dec. Board meeting. Hopefully the presenters at the event will flesh out the skimpy details that the two page document for tomorrow's Metro Board Meeting offers.

Speakers include:

• Art Leahy, Metro CEO
• Richard Katz, Metro Board member
• Jaime de la Vega, Deputy Mayor for Transportation--city of Los Angeles
• Denny Zane, Executive Director of Move LA
• Metro staff with responsibility for planning and government relations of the projects
  

The event is free and open to the public .  For more information, call (310) 310-2390.

Transit service to the location include Metros Rapids on Fairfax and Wilshire (the 780 and 720), a Wilshire Rapid Express during rush hour (the 920), local services (20 on Wilshire, 217 on Fairfax) plus the Fairfax DASH will be ending service just prior to the start of the meeting.

When entering Metro CEO Art Leahy's office, you can't help but notice that he's a sports fan and a native Angeleno. His wall is decorated with USC football paraphernalia and his bookshelf has a couple of Los Angeles Dodgers bobbleheads and other memorabilia from Dodgertown. When staff that happened to graduate from UCLA are in the room, they get ribbed. I also took some flack that my choice in favored baseball teams was also lightly mocked.

And Leahy appreciates what it means to be an Angeleno. "In Los Angeles people have vision and a belief in exceptionalism. When I say that Los Angeles is the best city in the world and I want it to have the best transit agency people don't bat an eye."

And what does the best transit system in America look like? Leahy professed no favorite project when I asked him if he had a favorite Measure R project, but did get excited and animated when we talked about bus routing. In Leahy's view, Metro's biggest challenge include making the buses run on time, and that buses that arrive and leave early are a bigger problem than those that run late.

"Our schedules are a contract with our customers. And if a bus leaves at 8:41 when it's supposed to leave at 8:42 that's breaking that contract. A bus that leaves a minute early is worse than one that leaves a minute late because someone is going to be waiting much longer than a minute for the next one and it can throw off the entire system. "

Leahy went on to explain that early leaving buses are going to be getting less and less people every time it stops while the other buses trailing are going to get more and more people. The increased boardings and alightings will leave the second bus running farther and farther behind schedule. All because one bus was early, the entire line can be thrown off for hours.

"Think about it this way. If a bus is one minute early on a five minute headway, and the bus behind is late for some reason, that second bus could have 40% more passengers than the one before it. Those passengers are going to think we need more buses, more service; but better service that runs on time would accomplish the same thing."

As a driver, Leahy himself wasn't immune to running ahead of schedule, but he tried not to. He even has a copy of a citation he received for running early framed behind his desk. According to Leahy, 15% of Metro buses actually run ahead of schedule, a number he and his staff are working on lowering. While the passage of Measure R brings new opportunities to Metro, it also requires that staff work harder to, in Leahy's words, "to be worthy of the public trust."

"We need to constantly be working. Constantly be thinking. The public trusted us, and we have to be constantly doing everything we can to be worthy of that."

The other major obstacle facing Metro, and every other transit agency, is funding.

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The big news from today's Metro Board meeting was that after our leaders subjected themselves to the pain of listening to the public, they were able to sorta-kinda pass the FY 2010 budget and put off a decision on whether to abandon their contract with Ansaldo Breda for another two months.

If this article seems at all sarcastic, angry or mean-spirited it's because the level of governmental dysfunction shown by the Metro Board earlier today was out-of-control.  Apparently the Board had a lot of really important things to do today besides their jobs so they punted on major decisions and tried to rush the public so they could still be there to show support to their favorite projects or special interests.  Picture a science fair where none of the students bothered to research or prepare for the fair.  Then picture all of the participants showing up a half hour late.  That was the feel of today's Metro Board Meeting.

Hint to the Metro Board: You're more likely to be on time to the meeting if you actually take transit instead of driving there yourself.

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There were a lot of highlights from last Friday's "21st Century Transportation for Los Angeles" conference sponsored by CalPIRG, but many of them will require more research before I can write a full story on them.  From Asm. Mike Eng's channeling of Gavin Newsom when he declared that the 710 Tunneling Project is going to happen "whether we like it or not" to a discussion of pedi-cabs downtown, there was a lot of interesting discussion.

But when new Metro CEO Art Leahy stepped to the microphone, it provided the first chance for me to get a measure of Leahy and his vision for Metro.

If Leahy is as progressive as his speech, the news is good.  Leahy, who if you missed the press release or haven't spoken to anyone working at Metro recently, is the son of  Los Angeles Transit Lines Yellow Car drivers and began his career as a bus driver himself.  He's been around long enough to have taken transit to a Dodger game, and not on the city's free shuttle last year.

While he wasn't able to give details on a lot of specifics, after all he's been on the job for less than a month, he pledged that public outreach was the most important part of a project design.  In response to a question about Metro crossings, he replied, "We want to know potential issues...we'd rather work with you for solutions you believe in rather than muscle you over."

Leahy also argued forcefully that the state and federal governments need to be more forthcoming to help the agency push back against fare hikes and service cuts.  When asked to outline his top priorities they were to pass and implement the Long Range Plan, operate an efficient and on-time transit service in order to not lose the trust of the public that entrusted them with Measure R and other taxes and to "get to" Pelosi and Boxer the message that we need support for operations, not just building new rail lines.

Now, pretty much every transportation advocate I know has had their heart broken by a politician or bureaucrat who hasn't matched their rhetoric; but Leahy's most promising answer was about his personal habits rather than policy.

When questioned by the Bike Coalition's Dorothy Le about his vision for cyclists and pedestrians, Leahy demanded a transportation system which makes it easier to move about Downtown and in their communities.  Then he added a personal anecdote about his first days at Metro.

Leahy had a meeting with L.A. Mayor and Metro Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa at City Hall.  When Leahy was informed that his car was waiting downstairs he responded that "No, I can walk to Downtown.  I'm not taking a car a couple of blocks."  Whether Leahy was aware of it or not, former Metro boss Roger Snoble took a beating on some blogs for his willingness to take a car to destinations that were transit accesible or within easy walking distance.

So, let's say I'm cautiously optimistic about Leahy.  Combining his speech with a later statement by the Bus Rider's Union's Francisca Porchas that we need to increase operating funds for "bus and rail" and the future for Metro is looking bright.