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LA METRO MUSINGS - Los Angeles Metro carries more than one million passenger trips every day. It oversees a budget measured in the billions, manages one of the nation's largest transit systems, and repeatedly asks Angelenos to leave their cars behind. Yet here's the uncomfortable question Metro's leadership has avoided for decades: How can you fix a system you don't regularly use?
This week, the Metro Board will decide whether an everyday transit rider deserves a permanent seat on the agency's governing board. The debate has focused on board size, political appointments, and legal technicalities. That's the wrong conversation. The real issue is accountability.
For decades, Metro has been governed almost exclusively by politicians and political appointees. They approve billion-dollar projects, determine service levels, set safety priorities, and make decisions affecting more than a million daily riders. Yet there is no requirement that any of them regularly ride a Metro bus or train. Imagine a hospital run by executives who never enter a patient room. Imagine an airline whose executives never board an airplane. Imagine a restaurant chain whose owners never eat the food. No successful organization would tolerate that disconnect. Why should Metro?
Every delayed train tells a story. Every broken elevator tells another. Every overcrowded platform, missed connection, canceled bus, malfunctioning fare machine, dirty station, and rider who no longer feels safe using public transportation reflects decisions made inside a boardroom often by people who never experience those problems themselves. Metro doesn't suffer from a lack of reports, consultants, strategic plans, or PowerPoint presentations. It suffers from a lack of lived experience.
That is why the proposal to guarantee a seat for a regular transit rider deserves overwhelming support. This isn't about political symbolism. It's about bringing reality into the room. An everyday rider notices what statistics cannot measure. They know where stations feel unsafe after dark. They know which elevators stay broken for weeks. They understand how unreliable service can mean arriving late to work, missing a doctor's appointment, or losing wages because a transfer never showed up. That perspective cannot be manufactured through staff briefings. It must be lived.
Metro staff has proposed allowing elected officials to appoint transit riders or transportation experts. Mayor Karen Bass has proposed reserving seats for riders, while Supervisor Janice Hahn has gone one step further by calling for a permanently dedicated rider seat. Among the competing proposals, Hahn's deserves the strongest support. An independent rider representative would answer to the riding public not to the politician who selected them. That distinction matters. Public trust is built when people know someone at the table is speaking for passengers rather than political interests.
But adding one rider is only the beginning. Every Metro Board member should be required to use Metro on a regular basis not for carefully staged photo opportunities, not during election season, and not when television cameras are rolling, but as part of the job. Every month. If Metro expects Angelenos to depend on public transportation, its governing board should experience the same crowded trains, delayed buses, broken escalators, parking shortages, and safety concerns that riders encounter every day. Leadership begins with understanding, and understanding begins with experience.
Some opponents argue that adding another board member creates unnecessary administrative costs. That argument is almost impossible to take seriously. Metro manages billions of taxpayer dollars every year. The cost of one additional board member is insignificant compared with the billions lost through delayed projects, declining public confidence, and policies disconnected from the rider experience.
The larger issue extends far beyond a single board seat. Metro has become an agency where political influence too often outweighs operational performance. Press conferences receive more attention than on-time performance. Ribbon cuttings generate more excitement than clean stations. Grand visions frequently overshadow the daily experience of the people who actually keep the system alive by using it. That culture must change.
Public transportation succeeds only when the public trusts it. Trust isn't restored through advertising campaigns or polished presentations. It is restored when riders see their concerns reflected in policy, when safety improves, when trains arrive on time, when stations are clean, when elevators work, and when accountability replaces excuses.
Metro has spent years asking Angelenos to believe in the future of public transportation. Now Metro must prove it believes in the people who already depend on it. The question before the Board isn't whether riders deserve a seat they earned that seat decades ago. The real question is whether Metro's leadership is finally willing to listen.
Because Metro's greatest challenge isn't its rail lines, buses, or infrastructure. It's a governing culture that has spent too long making decisions about riders instead of with them.
If Metro truly wants to rebuild public confidence, improve service, and justify every taxpayer dollar it spends, the solution is remarkably simple: Put a rider on the Board. Make every board member ride the system. Replace politics with accountability. Only then will Metro begin earning the trust of the people it was created to serve.
(Yonthan Mendal is an accomplished writer, researcher and leading expert on Jewish-Arab relations and Middle East affairs. He serves as Director of the Center for Jewish-Arab Relations at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and as a Research Fellow at the Forum for Regional Thought. His work focuses on politics, identity, media and regional dynamics in Israel and the broader Middle East. Widely respected for his scholarly analysis and public commentary, Mendel is a prominent voice on democracy, coexistence, public policy and cross-cultural dialogue.)
