L.A.'s Measure M Voters Fund Transit, but Don't Use It
citylab.com
citylab.com
Unfortunately it seems some people actually believe this.
Actually, you'd be surprised. I've met tons of Americans who actually like long commutes, and refuse to live too close to work. They seem to live having some kind of separation, and having to spend a lot of time in the car driving there every day. It boggles my mind.
And why can't these idiots get their families to leave them alone for a while in their bedroom or whatever?
But one thing about Munich: it's just not that large a city, either geographically or population-wise, compared to LA. The LA metro area has 13 million people, and LA proper about 4, according to a quick google search. Munich has 1.5M, though the metro area has 6M. But the city itself is really not very large geographically; unfortunately Americans have really screwed themselves by making their cities too sprawling, and it's pretty hard to fix that once it's done.
One thing I noticed about Munich and other German cities: there's a lot of mixed-use development, where shops and businesses are on the ground floors of buildings, but there's residential space on top. This makes cities extremely livable and walkable: you can walk down some stairs and over a street and go to the local grocery store, for instance. This is mostly impossible in America because we hate this kind of development with a passion. You don't even see it much in Manhattan, NYC.
Specific to LA, here are a couple of projects where moths -> flame -> incentivized developers:
https://urbanize.la/post/renderings-revealed-1200-unit-cumul...
http://labusinessjournal.com/news/2019/jan/22/1b-crossroads-...
I'm a "sometimes" user of transport. I own a car and it's probably my most frequent form of transport outside my legs. I'm lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where I can walk to a grocery store, two restaurant/retail dense streets, a mall, and even a university, so that's fun. If I'm meeting/visiting friends across the city, though, there's rarely public transport options that aren't going to triple or quadruple travel time. So, I often drive.
But not always. Some routes have convenient travel times -- for example, I can get from LAX to my house for $1 on a bus. Metro to downtown LA or Santa Monica is pretty convenient and lets me skip parking hassles/fees. Throw a rideshare into the mix and you can get pretty great coverage.
And as a sometimes transit user, I can tell you that buses and trains are definitely not empty -- sometimes they're uncomfortably crowded. People are absolutely using them, even if not everybody uses them all the time.
So I was happy to support Measure M, be a sometimes transit user, and hope that I can become a more frequent one as options expand.
About the only real complaint I have isn't really a transit network one per se -- the modern society-wide issues of homelessness, mental health, and drugs spill over into every public space. Cars and curated neighborhoods can give you a bubble of comfort, but don't solve the problem. So I voted for Measure H (among others) in hopes of seeing solutions there, too.
A coworker of mine was out in South Pasadena and tried taking the train one day. His normally 45 minute commute turned into an hour and 50 minutes one way. There's no way that makes sense.
I've since moved, as has our office. I still live about 3 miles from work, so overall very low mileage each year. I looked up bus schedules as both my house and work are near bus stops. My one-way commute time would go from about 15-20 minutes to 50-60 minutes. That's just stupid. I have a family I'd like to see and making my commute 3-4 times as long just isn't worth it.
I'm all for public transportation, but if it doesn't go where I need to in a timely manner, it's useless.
Considering your karma I am more inclined to believe you than the article.
But even if the article were correct: it suggests that people in the cars don't mind if money is spent to persuade people to use public transport, perhaps a system can be set up such that gas taxes are levied and used to sponsor people to use public transit? Without the price of the ticket going negative of course, but arbitrarily low until congestion is tolerable?
Of course if both the roads and public transit vehicles are congested, then Measure M was simply not successfully executed or planned, as it promised to ease congestion...
>Instead, the top predictors of whether a voter supported Measure M were their political party and their frustration with congestion.
You can believe the transit will be good for congestion even if you don't expect to personally use it. Are you confused if you're an East Bay-SF commuter who drives and also supports BART capacity expansion?
Edit: Furthermore, transit is hard to quickly scale up or down. It can be reasonable to support expansions now, even not realizing you might find it useful later as traffic gets more choked.
The benefits of increased transit is significant and worth supporting, but reduced congestion is not one of those benefits.
but if you look at it economically, adding transit (or road) capacity is a net positive since part of what drives economic activity is the ease with which you can execute transactions in person. so the main benefit of transit is more economic activity, not less congestion.
so transit funding was never really about materially impacting transit/commute times. but now that we have transit funding, LA and the state are both working on upzoning around transit corridors. for example, sb-50 (fka sb-827): https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-housing-bill-tr...
upzoning can actually reduce some congestion but it's not enough by itself. we also need to properly price in good/timely maintenance and the externalities of pollution. we need to greatly speed up the government agencies/bureaucracies that slow down construcion (permitting, inspection, planning review, etc.). we need to reduce dishonest roadblocks meant to stop development by making it prohibitively expensive (e.g., many ceqa challenges). we need to better control rent-seeking behaviors around real estate.
more housing, and a more responsive housing market, means people can move more easily, reduce commute times, and thereby reduce congestion.
The problem with the graph is that it doesn't factor in population growth, which seems to have grown from 3.2 million to 6.9 million from 1970 to 10 million 2013. If you calculated the miles travelled in transit per year, you'll interpret many folks in LA benefit from the Measures.
As a result, I believe the article is disingenuous by attacking a successful measures by relying on poorly interpreted data.
After it's built it'll take a couple decades for housing developers and businesses to properly exploit the ease of transportation to them.
IMHO, the congestion that we see now in LA freeways - much worse than in, say, the 1990s - will provide a slow incentive toward re-orientation of business and homes along transit lines.
Not every place needs to try and be like all the others. Los Angeles is not like London and should not want to be. Give me something different. How about a LA basin wide measure that supports the building of a huge network of tunnels that can carry electric trains, buses and small vehicles a la "The Boring Company". I bet people would get behind that if the city leaders could, for just a moment, get past the idea that evil "cars" (ie. their constituents) would use those tunnels along with "public" transport.
+1
don't forget very loud music playing out of someone's boombox (no doubt for the benefit of all other riders)
another joyful aspect of some of LA's public transport lines is you never know what you're sitting on: some guy who's just pissed himself may have been the previous occupant of your seat, or someone was walking on it or propping their feet on it. OTOH, I've been quite impressed with the cleanliness and comfort of one of the Commuter Express bus lines.
That said, I currently reside abouts Downtown Los Angeles and have no car. I find I'm in walking distance to most places I'd like to go, though I realize I have a much higher tolerance for walking than most people. I've found it usually takes no more than one bus/train route to get to places outside of my walking range, say an hours ride or so (which I don't mind as I usually read during this time). Public transportation has been serving me well. Granted, I'm in the densest part of Los Angeles. I'd like to see the survey results overlaid on a map of the county. Those in the more sprawled out portions of Los Angeles County probably don't feel any benefit to increased public transportation spending.
An aside: I find the typeface this website uses for its headings to be terrible.
I know mods move comments, but I've never seen them reset the timestamps.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SilasX&next=18968338
IOW, the flow of benefits from hiring more police officers goes in directions that make it politically difficult or impossible to get the additional money. And you need a lot of it.
Though adding officers would benefit rider safety and increase the quality and pleasantness of the rider's experience, the increased taxes would fall mostly on people who do not use the system much or at all. (To raise fares would discourage ridership.)
And police officers aren't cheap - each one costs about $150,000 per year (according to a 2011 article which estimates that adding 725 officers to the LAPD added 110 million dollars a year in costs. [0])
[0] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/22/opinion/la-oe-ridgew...
Public transit will never be a profitable enterprise. It must be subsidized. But we already subsidize roads for cars, but somehow the car-lovers just ignore that.
that's probably true overall, but it matters where the benefits flow to and where the taxes flow from.
in LA, how are we going to increase taxes on car travel enough to reduce car trips to the point where deaths and pollution are noticeably reduced and then redirect those new tax revenues to improving public transport? what politician or government leader can deliver that message and actually succeed?
one of the first political realities that leader will discover is that the increased taxes must not be levied on working poor drivers. (most of them still need to drive their cars because public transport is not everywhere yet.) there will be a lot of complaints. and such taxes could actually increase levels of poverty because some poor workers won't be able to get to their jobs in their cars anymore. such a leader would be demonized for hurting low income people.
that means the leader will have to propose an even greater tax hike on the middle and upper classes. well that's a hard fight too. those people vote. they fund campaigns. they also do not use the public transport systems as much as other income groups.
So basically, there's no realistic solution at all, and that society is headed for an inevitable collapse because of its own shortsightedness.
Every nation gets the government it deserves, and this case is no different.
the existing local political processes seem insufficient. i've seen it play out this way for a long time.
but i believe an externally imposed shock (e.g. oil rising to $5000/barrel or a deep local economic depression) might accomplish what local politics cannot
Urban traffic congestion is a difficult, complex problem. So, instead of the nontrivial question posed by the proposition on the ballot of "Would this measure succeed in its stated goal, in the face of evidence that prior attempts have failed, and have the factor(s) which caused the prior failures been mitigated?" the simpler question that the mind solves is (and, given the results, answered in the positive) "I hate traffic. This measure claims it will help. Should I support it?"
Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a damned good read on these sorts of things.
Consjestion isn't just about cars. You can generalize it to all forms of transit (MTA anyone?).
You can't "solve" congestion. At best you can add additional capacity (of the same type or a different type) in order to reduce the amount of time when congestion is at its worst. Instead of "rush hour" being from 3-7 increased capacity (of any type, people will naturally load balance by choosing the least worst option for their situation) could potentially make it only from 4-6 by allowing the same number of trips to happen in less time.
If you add capacity (of any type) and congestion is unchanged that is still a win because it means more trips are being taken which is an indication of more stuff getting done, more commerce, higher quality of life).
It’s true that transit doesn’t solve congestion; however, it provides an extremely high capacity alternative. Speed and reliability of a highway lane is approx 2k people per hour, but try nudging past that and you start getting phantom traffic jams. The New York City subway has a theoretical peak capacity of 60k people per hour.
> Demographically, the average Measure M supporter resembled someone with a very high likelihood of driving: They owned cars, enjoyed free parking at home and work, and had higher incomes.
Most people in LA drive. They own at least one car, and parking is not scarce. Are we supposed to be shocked and dismayed that people who want to fund competent mass transit don't use a system that fails to meet their needs?
> So party identity strongly swayed voters.
It might be fun to call transit supporters a bunch of party-first limousine liberals, but the dull conclusion is that Republicans reflexively vote against taxation measures.
The article does get at that, but the headline is clickbait and consideration of "likelihood to use transit" in a place with mass transit as messed up as LA is a red herring.
If I'm reading the chart correctly, rail trips have steadily increased since the city started building it. And that's with only 110 miles of track, which seems absurd for a city the size of LA.
For comparison, Denver's RTD has 90 miles of track, and I know from living there that it's not nearly enough. People would love to take it, but it's such a limited deployment most of the time they can't. We've even voted for tax increases to build track between Denver and Boulder, but RTD and the other government agencies are dragging their feet.
So the voter behavior seems completely logical to me. People want to use transit, but they can't until it's built up.
This seems like an article trying to hold off an increasing support for transit rail, perhaps worried by the fact that urban support for it (in L.A. at least) seems to be increasing.
Show advertisements demonstrating how long it takes to get from A to B and when the service is available to accomplish that.
Once someone starts tasting driving, they're hooked on it. The best bet for transit would be to market to the next generation.
Say two conflicting groups (perhaps one electrified light rail plan and one DMU plan that basically follow the same path) get their questions on the same ballot, and both pass. What happens?