Streetsblog Los Angeles

Local transit advocates are reacting with fury to the Governor’s rumored plan to skirt a court ruling requiring that the state stop robbing transit funds dedicated in the gas tax by completely revoking the tax and reinstating it as an excise tax.

As reported recently in the LA Times, and briefly discussed here on Monday, to close a looming $20.7 billion budget deficit,
Schwarzenegger is expected to release a plan this Friday to eliminate
the state’s gas tax, which has specific mandates to provide funding for
transit, and replace it with an excise tax that would not have transit
funding requirements. The net effect would be 5 cents less per gallon
at the pump and continued decimation of state funding for transit
operators.

Erin Steva, the transportation advocate for CALPIRG, makes the case that the Governor’s end run on state law is not just bad policy, but politically tone deaf, "  Raiding public transportation funding is the wrong move. We need more
transit, not less to keep our cities moving and our economy strong.
Cutting public transit funding goes against California’s commitment to
fight global warming pollution and clearly violates the voter’s will to
expand, not contract, transit."

"It’s what we feared," said California Transit Association (CTA)
spokesperson Jeff Wagner told SF Streetsblog earlier this week. "This proposal circumvents both the law and
the will of the voters. The court ruled they had to stop doing it, so
what do they do? They change the laws that were in place. Time and
again, transit has been the piggy bank they’ve gone to to fill
in the gaps in the other stuff. It’s shortsighted and it’s in blatant
contravention of the voters’ will."

Wagner said the CTA was tempered in its reaction to its victory in
court last year, saying they assumed the governor could come up with a
scheme to continue taking money from transit to plug the general fund
hole. "We knew that our lawsuit victory would provide us with some
reprieve, but we were cautious. We knew that it wasn’t beneath this
administration."

Locally, transit advocates were just as outraged.

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Two weeks ago, I celebrated that the Metrolink Board agreed to "look into other options" rather than raise fares by 6%.

Maybe I was premature.

Earlier this week, Metrolink announced a series of proposed service cuts that would eliminate service on some weekend lines and curtail service on lines across the board.  The cuts would replace the fare hike, but for many activists the cuts go way too far.  You can read Metrolink's official announcement of the proposed cuts here.  The Metrolink Board will vote on their budget, including either fare hikes, or service cuts, or both, on December 11.  If you're interested in this story, be sure to read on until the end as some of the information provided by Transit Coalition volunteers is must-read material.

Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, complains that while the lines that are on the chopping block may be some of the least used lines, they provide start or end of trip connections.  In other words, eliminating or reducing these services will reduce ridership across the service.

If you drill down into the numbers, you will find that the weak trips that are on the chopping block still carry between 80 to 125 riders. Many of those riders are completing a final leg of their trips. While at Union Station today, I actually saw a number of riders get off the Orange County and San Bernardino trains and transfer to the Moorpark bound Metrolink. Many got off in either Burbank or Glendale. If the trip segments are cut, Metrolink becomes worthless for many more riders, as their trip corridor can only be completed by auto.

Ryan Stern, a volunteer board member for the National Association of Rail Passengers, notes that many of the large trip generators served by Metrolink would see a sharp decline in service, to the point of neutering the service at certain times:

If all the cuts go through as proposed, Northridge Station (which services Cal-State University Northridge as well as the large Northridge Medical Center) would see a total of TWO morning trains from Los Angeles (one of which would be the dual-personality Amtrak #799) and only ONE inbound afternoon/evening train.

Burbank Airport would see its service cut almost in HALF.  Downtown Burbank (which is utilized by employees at Disney, Warner Brothers, and NBC Studios, among others) would see a reduction of 10 trains-- mostly morning trains originating in Los Angeles and afternoon/evening trains heading "inbound" toward Union Station.

It has been my observation that many passengers who ride "outbound" in the morning actually begin their trips heading "inbound" from points on other lines.  I often wonder if Metrolink fully comprehends how Union Station has become a way-point for a substantial number of their passengers.  Even though it may be preferable to dismiss the morning outbound frequencies as "re-positioning" moves, these short "reverse trips" are vital to those who connect at Union, enabling these passengers connect to "long" trips elsewhere in the system.

While the Southern California Transit Advocates are still working on a formal position, it's a bit of a tight deadline to have cuts announced one week and a vote occurring the next,  but they seem to be leaning towards a position supporting a mix of the cuts and hikes to balance the budget.  They note that a 6% across the board increase would effect all riders, while targeted cuts would effect a much smaller minority.  While there are some cuts that are more troubling than others, the SoCATA Board Members I spoke with are concerned on the impact that a second fare hike in the last year would have on riders while noting that ridership has dropped by nearly 20% on some of the routes expecting cuts.  Dana Gabbard writes:

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It is important from time to time as an advocate to expose yourself to the broader universe of perceptions and experience beyond the universe of fellow advocates, agency staff, officials, etc. populating the policy sphere. We all have a stake in transportation issues and it is educational to meet the public and engage with it in an exchange of knowledge, hear their thoughts and concerns plus answer questions.

In my experience the most productive events to do outreach about transit are transportation related ones versus community street fairs, environmental expos, etc. Openings of new Metrolink stations and Metro fixed guideway projects, such as the Green Line, Red Line, and Orange Line, have always been excellent in that regard, along with the occasional transit fairs held at community centers and the like. The annual Alternative Energy and Transportation Expo in Santa Monica and Fullerton Railroad Days, which is currently in limbo due to local politics, have been very well attended events that I very much enjoy participating in.

As the Eastside Gold Line extension opening approaches, quite likely on Nov. 14th per a Metro staff report first noticed and posted by commentor LAofAnaheim on the Streetsblog Eastside opening thread, I have been looking back at what I have learned and experienced during my years staffing a booth on behalf of the Southern California Transit Advocates.

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(editor's note:  A couple of weeks ago Joe Linton wrote an update on Los Angeles' support for the Wilshire Bus-Only Lane.  A City Watch Columnist, Harold Katz, responded with an article attacking the project.)

I'd like to begin by stating I have nothing but admiration for activist Harold Katz's nearly 40 years of involvement with traffic and transportation issues in Los Angeles. But respectfully I think he is wrong headed in his recent commentary for CityWatch titled "Bus-Only Lane will Turn Wilshire into Traffic Mess."

I am not going to engage in a battle of statistics--my focus is on the larger picture.  I would have to believe to some extent the concerns raised about auto accidents being caused by the bus lane can be addressed by their design and associated mitigation measures. I don't see a fatal flaw in the basic concept of the lanes. And I don't know why there is a concern the project will result in a unending stream of LAPD motorcycle traffic officers giving out traffic tickets to poor innocent auto drivers victimized by the big bad bus lanes.  

The unstated premise is that facilitating automobiles is the ultimate goal of improving mobility. When Harold decries that in his view a "bus rider will save 5 minutes and the thousands of auto drivers will lose 26 minutes" he avoids the question how many bus riders will benefit and whether the improvement for bus users exceeds the cost to auto drivers.

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Dana Gabbard has written several stories for Streetsblog over theyears helping to advance issues such as the passage of Measure R and the advancement of many of the transit expansion projects being proposed.  Gabbard has been a member of the Southern California Transit Advocates for fifteen years, and has helpfully written a piece about his roots in advocacy.

Here’s a quick personal anecdote about Dana.  When I first started writing Street Heat almost two years ago I ran into Dana two times in the first week: first at the 2007 Alt Car Expo and later that week at a So.CA.TA.  meeting on the Subway to the Sea.  Since then?  Our paths haven’t crossed once.

The featured speaker before this month's Southern California Transit Advocates meeting will be Denny Zane, the former Santa Monica Councilman and Mayor and Metro insider who is as responsible as anyone for the passage of Measure R.  Zane and the It's Time to Move L.A. Coalition organized the January 2008 that was the beginning of the movement that led to the sales tax increase that will fund transit projects for the next thirty years.

So.CA.TA. is billing Zane's appearance as a chance to talk with a transit insider about the future of Metro and the growth of transit in Los Angeles.  In addition to his work on Measure R, Zane is also the former executive director for the Coalition for Clean Air and led the campaign that led to the purchase of the Right of Way for the Expo Line.

Zane's presentation will begin at 1:00pm this Saturday, with the So.CA.TA business meeting to follow at 2:15pm. The event is free and open to the public and will be held on the 4th floor of Angelus Plaza, 255 S. Hill St in downtown Los Angeles.

This week's Metro Board Meeting, the meeting where much of the transportation related news for the entire month comes to a conclusion, has a lot of interesting items.  Highlighted by the potential passage of the "2009" Long Range Transportation Plan and the potential extension of the AnsaldoBreda light rail car contract.  However, some smaller items, such as a discussion of Asm. Lieu's proposal to extend HOV access to cars with the magic "fuel efficient" sticker, a setting of the fares for the Silver Line and setting the prices for Metro's Express Lanes will also be discussed.

Highlighting the agenda is an expected vote on the 2009 Long Range Transportation Plan.  Technically, the LRTP is a document required by the federal government before agencies can request federal funds, but traditionally it is also a visionary document where an agency spells out its priorities and its vision for the growth or transit and transportation in its area.

You may remember that Metro delayed a vote on the 2008 LRTP until this year so that it could take into account whether or not Measure R had passed when creating its project timeline.  Over eight months after the transit tax's passage, the Board is finally ready to vote on the LRTP.

Or are they?  At a "workshop" on the LRTP last month, then Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa moved to hold off passing the 2009 LRTP until July so that Metro could do more outreach.  Tt had been eighteen months since Imagine campaign had kicked off and the Mayor claimed he wanted to make Metro's vision clear to county residents before its passage.  If there's been any new outreach in the last six weeks, I'm not aware of it. Based on email conversations; neither is the Bus Rider's Union or the Southern California Transit Advocates.  So.CA.TA's  Dana Gabbard took a humorous look at the lack of any new outreach efforts on behalf of the LRTP.

...previous Plan preparation included convening stakeholder groups to provide input while the draft plan was being formulated and a round of public meetings in the region (held in the evenings) on the draft plan were conducted seeking input.

This current plan has had minimal to no substantive means by which to comment. A poorly publicized hearing held during a weekday in downtown L.A. falls far short of what used to be common practice.

That said, I should note the old way of doing things still mostly resulted in what you would expect they planned to do anyway, so I am not claiming it was paradise or some such. But at least the niceties were observed.

As best I can tell, with the exception of the addition of some clarifying language on bicycle and pedestrian funding; the current draft plan is no different than what was presented at last month's workshop.  So if they weren't going to change anything, or do more outreach, than what was the point of the delay?  I'm pretty sure they didn't just hold-up the process so that they could release the new bicycle and pedestrian funding numbers.

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(Editor's Note: This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of residents defending their community as the best for car-free living in Los Angeles.  Make your submissions to damien@streetsblog.org.  For more information on the series, visit yesterday's story.)

I am a resident of the Wilshire corridor (especially the stretch from Alvarado to Fairfax). I live, work and do most of my living along that famous boulevard. And do so easily sans car. Wilshire is lined with places to eat, nightspots, markets, medical offices, famous museums, etc. Apartment complexes cluster in the Miracle Mile, Wilshire Center, Westlake, etc.

Daytime you have frequent local public transit service from Metro (Line 20--downtown L.A. to Westwood Bl.) and Big Blue Bus (Line 2--Westwood Blvd. to downtown Santa Monica). Overnight line 20 serves the entire street (16 miles!) with owl service that operates on a 30 minute headway! Plus you have the Rapid 720 and during weekday peak the Super Express 920 for key linkages and long-distance travel. Western Ave. to downtown L.A. is also served by the Metro subway. Several neighborhoods (Koreatown, Miracle Mile, Pico/Union) have DASH community circulators. And via various connections you have access to the web of Rapid, busway and Metro Rail services that criss-cross the County plus Metrolink and Amtrak for regional access and beyond. It can be mindboggling when you understand how transit access along Wilshire works and how to make use of it.

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Last Friday I received a forwarded email from Dana Gabbard of So.CA.TA. fame from someone looking to move to Los Angeles.  This future resident wanted to know what the best neighborhood for transit riders was in L.A.  While Gabbard can certainly offer a take on pretty much any community in Los Angeles, we thought it would be better to let residents speak on behalf of their own communities.

So how do you feel about your community?  Do you think it's the best one in Los Angeles for living a car-free lifestyle?  If so, feel free to submit a short essay to me, via email with your thoughts and we'll publish it here on Streetsblog.  As essays come in we'll send them to our future resident and in the end we'll find out who wins when we find out where he moved to.

Tomorrow we'll feature Gabbard's post on his community and later in the week I'll write a post on Fairfax.  We look forward to hearing from everyone else out there...