An Open Letter to Gardena Officials

For those who don’t follow me on twitter (or know me IRL), last year I left Washington, DC for the Los Angeles area. My new job is in Redondo Beach, not too far south of LAX, but this left an interesting dilemma as to where to live, given the paltry transit options in LA and the way the housing stock is dispersed throughout the county.

Long story short, we ended up in Gardena – a fairly suburban city but one where we managed to find a rental townhouse in walking distance of no less than three grocery stores (all closer than our closest one had been in DC – and that was living downtown!). But while the immediate environs are nice enough – and home to excellent Japanese food – the transit leaves much to be desired. The closest LA Metro line is the Silver Line – BRT – and it’s more than a mile away, requiring a roundabout route if I were to take it to work. But just a half-mile north is a stop for the 1X line of “Gardena Municipal Bus Lines” (or “GTrans”), the transit agency that rather bizarrely operates independently from LACMTA. The line terminates practically across the street from my office, so that’s great. What’s not great? Yes, of course – it’s the headways.

The 1X only runs half-hourly at peak hours, and, for some reason, duplicates Silver Line service and runs all the way downtown then, too, leading to terrible traffic-driven delays when trying to head in the opposite direction. Offpeak frequencies are hourly at best. Needless to say, this is not optimal for me, “Low Headways.”

But today hit a new low. The last time I tried taking the bus, I arrived on time only to watch it depart about a minute early. Fine, that’s on me. Today I arrived five minutes early and waited for another 25 minutes for it to arrive 20 minutes late. Unacceptable by any standards, but especially for such an infrequent bus. So, long story short, I wrote an email to our elected officials in Gardena asking them to, you know, make it suck less. Here it is.

Mayor Tasha Cerda

Mayor Pro Tem Art Kaskanian

Councilmember Mark Henderson

Councilmember Dan Medina

Councilmember Rodney Tanaka

Your honors;

I moved to Gardena last year from Washington, DC, where I was a transit advocate (having founded MetroTAG and the WMATA Riders’ Union) and rider, and never owned a car for the near-decade I lived there. As a Gardena constituent, I have to express my utter disappointment with the Municipal Bus Lines, and particularly the 1X. I can count on one hand the number of times that the bus has been within 3 minutes of its scheduled departure times, and more often than not, I have to wait for delays upwards of 15 or even 20 minutes. For any bus, but especially one scheduled only every half-hour, this is unacceptable. There are so many inadequacies with this service it is hard to know where to begin, but first and foremost, this level of frequency is an insult to ridership. “Frequency is freedom,” as transit planner Jarrett Walker has written, and the only way to provide the same mobility option as a car is to allow one to catch a bus without having to first consult a timetable or schedule. The 1X (and all other Gardena lines) should be boosted to 15 minute or better frequency, including on weekends and off-peak hours, to better serve potential riders along, for instance, the Western Avenue corridor.

As a matter of both principal and practicality, it would be my strongest desire to see GTrans absorbed into LACMTA. This would eliminate redundant dispatching, garaging, and other duplicated physical plant (and/or allow for better distribution with the wider LA system), and most importantly, allow for much better coordination and integration with exist Los Angeles bus lines. The South Bay is isolated from most of the rest of of the city, leaving a car as the primary means of getting around the area, but the choice to drive or ride should be a much more meaningful one. Shorter trips, nonwork trips, and non-peak hour rides need to be encouraged, and the best way to achieve that is through the greater frequency that LACMTA has promised.

However, if GTrans is to persist independently, I would strongly urge the adoption of similar service levels as Metro’s new NextGen bus plan, which seeks to provide buses on 5 or 10 minute headways for the most part (with some 15 minute exceptions). Some of the shifts that would result from consolidation could be implemented regardless: for instance, truncating the existing 1X to no longer run all the way to downtown Los Angeles, but instead drop riders at the Harbor Gateway Silver Line station, would allow for a significant increase in frequency at no additional cost, and would still provide riders with easy(-ish) access to downtown.

Given the urgency of climate change and the tremendous need to provide non-auto mobility options to the city and country, improvements to bus service should be made swiftly and dramatically: we no longer have the luxury of incrementalism. Providing a frequent, comprehensive bus network – ideally as a part of LACMTA, but even without – is a critical step towards serving the residents of LA and the South Bay, and I look forward to helping bring about change. I am at your service and would be happy to discuss this further.

My offer stands, GTrans! I’m happy to be your Jarrett Walker (if you don’t want to hire him yourself, that is).

Tech Bros Will Not Save Us

I know, I know, someone was rude on the internet. But that someone was tech titan Elon Musk calling transit expert (and headways-importance-understander) Jarrett Walker “an idiot” for daring to suggest that enshrining elite preferences as transit policy was perhaps not an optimal solution.

You’re an idiot

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 15, 2017

This comes on the heels of Musk’s depiction – perhaps echoing Donald Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural – of public transit as a dystopian hellscape of demonspawn, and worst of all, the other hoi polloi right there with you:

I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.

It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.

Musk may be 46, but he sounds like a bog-standard baby boomer in this; the sort who might have lived in a city in the 1980s and ridden its crumbling, graffiti-ridden subway for a time before fleeing for the suburbs and vowing “never again” (and yes, I’m aware Musk fled apartheid South Africa in 1989 as a 17 year-old; it’s his tone, not his biography, that’s so troubling).

The most maddening thing, though, isn’t so much that Musk has been given blank authority to do as he pleases, or that institutions are increasingly unwilling to make necessary improvements in the face of reactionary local governments and the specter of autonomous vehicles. It’s that he, like so many others, condemns the easy and obvious solutions that we all already know.

It’s not going to be AVs, or “pod” transit (see: any PRT truthers); it won’t be Lyft’s gradual reinvention of the bus or some sort of underground traffic tunnel; the geometry and spatial capacity of cities will ensure that.

Look at the soaring cost of real estate in proximity to transit:

In Boston, home prices near train stations were about 129% higher than in the rest of the region during the height and trough of the housing market, according to the report. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the figure was 48%, followed by San Francisco and Phoenix at 37% and Chicago at 30%.

This is because in the United States, we have so little of it. The solution: build more transit.

Fixing what we’ve got shouldn’t be so hard either; we know what has to be done and all we lack are leaders with the spine to do so. Adopt Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton as a mantra, implement organizational and managerial best practices from Japan and Europe, adequately fund transit systems, modernize as possible (ATO in DC, CBTC in New York, etc.). Funding mechanisms might include such obscure vehicles as a congestion charge (London, Singapore, Milan), higher payroll taxes, a miniscule but uniform regional tax, general fund monies…this really isn’t hard. Considering the tremendous imbalance in transit funding versus that for roads, the money is there; as with all other obstacles, it’s a question of political will.

Run trains frequently. Pay to keep systems clean and functional. Build extensions. Expand core capacity. Run frequent last-mile transportation. Give buses and light rail dedicated lanes. Widen sidewalks. Deprioritize the private car. In short: devote space to public goods and not private vehicle movement and storage.

We have the tools, but if our policymakers continue refusing to use them, people like Musk are going dictate the terms of the next wave of urban disintegration. He isn’t right about the utility of transit or about who rides it. But given current levels of disinvestment and neglect (both financially and organizationally), we’re trending towards a world in which he is. In which the automobile and an environment built for it and it alone reign supreme. In which fantastical tech solutions ensure mobility only for the well-off and not the rest of the masses (indeed, this absolute gutting of anything resembling a public service represents the ideological struggle of our time).

Letting the lords of tech and their impractical, borderline-offensive solutions determine our collective urban future? That’s the only thing worse than the status quo.

We Are All Made of Wood

Todd St. John, better known as HunterGatherer, has begun a series called Subway Syntax exploring the everyday vagaries of underground rapid transit. While the New York influence is clear (e.g. the subway stop design), these animations reflect a universal experience. For example, “Screecher”:

“Screecher” — Individual who screeches to a halt without warning. They are unpredictable and oblivious, often staring down at their phone.

Come on, we’ve all known that guy (and/or walked into him). Other daily experiences include “Free Radical,” when there’s nothing left to hold on to; and “Subway Salmon,” a remarkably lifelike portrayal of navigating what appears to be the Red Line platform at Gallery Place.

Anyways, they’re cute and accurate, and if you’re not a dinosaur like me still into RSS feeds, you can also follow the Instagram here.

(Via The Fox is Black)