CommentsGAMING GRIDLOCK-Usually they work individually, but in the August 27, 2017 edition of The Daily Breeze, Joel Koktin and Wendell Cox formed a tag-team for their latest article, “The Great Transit Rip-Off.”
The lead-in to their premise -- that building subways and light rail lines in Los Angeles is a rip-off -- begins with an obvious statement: “a remarkable 40 percent of all transit commuting in the United States takes place in the New York metropolitan area.” New York City alone, with 8.53 million people, is more than double the population of Los Angeles, with 3.97 million people. Add the population of the outlaying regions from New York City, such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and it is not surprising the region would have over 40 percent of all transit commuting.
But this does not mean the Los Angeles Region should not have its own rail transit network.
Of course, within the City of New York, transit ridership is high. It is an old city, limited in space for roads; it was already crowded with people when the first subway was built in 1904. Los Angeles, a city that came into its own in the beginning and middle of the 20th Century, was founded on the concept of driving, always and everywhere, but is now foundering because of it.
The article states “an overlooked fact: Transit now serves about the same number of riders as it did in 1907, when the population was barely 15 percent of what it is today.” Typical for the article, Kotkin and Cox do not state where that fact came from, or state the population of who or what, or differentiate what constituted transit in 1907 -- such as horse drawn carriages, wagon trains and passenger railroads which have by-and-large disappeared -- compared to modes of transit of today.
According to U.S. Census data, the nation’s population in 1910 was 91,972,000. On their website is a ticker with an increasing number for today’s population: 325,762,805 and counting. The differences are greater than 15%.
Kotkin and Cox reiterate their obvious comparison between the concentration of employment centers between New York City and Los Angeles as their reason why “our (Los Angeles’) urban form does not work well for conventional mass transit.” I contend that it does work well for our urban form. Downtown Los Angeles, while not an employment hub as dense as New York, is still an employment hub and a connection hub for the growing network of buses, light rail, subway lines, and heavy rail trains moving people across the region. Legions of people travel through or transfer between transit rides or go to downtown Los Angeles as their destination.
I have ridden every mile of light rail and subway in the LA region, with trips to and through downtown Los Angeles during morning and evening commuter hours. The 7th Street Metro station, which links the Blue and Expo Lines (light rail) with the Red and Purple Lines (subway-down a level), is bursting at the seams with riders, and may now be too small. Union Station is a mass of people during commuter hours. This makes one wonder, do Kotkin and Cox observe real-time, real-life transit…or just write about it from their offices?
They return to their current fail-safe, reporting on the decline of ridership without attributing their source of information. In my research, without a think-tank support group, I found that, according to the August 17, 2017 publication of National Transit Database at transit.dot.gov, “In the United States, transit ridership has grown by more than 20 percent in the last decade, reaching its highest levels since 1957.”
Surely Kotkin and Cox, as transit experts in their respective think-tanks, must be aware that there was a 2014 Federally mandated change for counting transit ridership, so the current counting method cannot be compared to the past.
In the past, transit ridership was based on estimates of crowd counting. Today, buses use an Automated Passenger Counter (APC) on top each bus door, probably a more efficient method. In crowd counting estimates, the accepted norm of deviance between the actual and estimated crowd is 10%, with some saying it can be, and usually is, higher -- some say as high as 30%. The higher figure is the “cheerleading effect” in which those who want a positive estimate for a positive outcome naturally overestimate crowd size. (See Donald Trump and his inauguration.)
If a transit agency is dependent on sources for funding (usually governmental) to make up the always existing negative spread between operating costs and fare box collection, it would be natural to overestimate crowd size, or transit ridership size, to get increased funding.
So when Kotkin and Cox’s recent articles continue to state comparisons of transit ridership counts before 2014, there needs to be an automatic handicap of a 10% overstatement. If its stated ridership is 5% less today, taking into account the 10% overestimate handicap of the pre-2014 counting method, ridership today could be the same, or could be 5% higher. If the old counting method of crowd size estimates were 30% higher, then transit ridership today would be increasing, as the National Transit Database states, not decreasing.
The article continues with its unreferenced, unverified statement, “In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, for a commute of 30 minutes or less, the average employee is within 60 times as many jobs by car as by transit.” This is a strange statement to me with the implication that transit cannot efficiently serve employment centers.
Who has a thirty-minute commute in today’s gridlocked Los Angeles region? I’ve been a regular transit rider since 1992, so I know how buses and trains and subways operate. I use them to my advantage: I own a car and drive and I also know gridlock much too well.
I have many different commutes and places where I go to do business. Most I reach through transit. My shortest commute is under one-and-one-half-miles, which, if I drive, can take over twenty to thirty minutes in gridlock plus five to ten minutes for parking. (Kotkin and Cox fail to mention the hundred-plus hours lost each year by drivers in Los Angeles just looking for parking.) If I take one bus and walk about one-quarter of a mile for the same commute (not spending time looking for parking) my bus/walk times are always faster than driving…and much less polluting. Kotkin and Cox’s uncredited 30-minute commute would probably take place in the start of a work-shift late at night or early in the morning when traffic is lighter.
Transit routes, and particularly bus routes, follow the main roadways of the city and reach major employment, school/academic, shopping, entertainment and sports events centers. I can take one bus to Westwood, a major employment center. I am then in the center of the high-rises and UCLA and employers without fighting gridlock nor needing to worry about parking.
If I go to the employment center of Century City, I take two buses. If I go to downtown Los Angeles, I go by bus, or light rail to one employment area of DTLA, or if I need to go further in DTLA, I take the subway. If I go to employment areas in Santa Monica, it takes me one bus and one light rail. When I go to the Hollywood Bowl I drive and park at a Metro lot because at night buses do not run often or late enough. I take the Expo Line to the Red Line to the Hollywood and Highland Station and walk to the Bowl. It is a delightful way to travel and I am not alone. I emerge from the station with a knot of people and walk with them up Highland Avenue to the Bowl. After the concert at around 10:00 p.m., the station is crowded. The current bus and rail transit network serves me as well as others for LA’s urban form.
In their articles, Kotkin and Cox always seem to look to the past for reference (which may not accurate), look at the present with great negativism, and seem distrustful of a future with transit. They state that more densification around transit centers will create more traffic. But if the Los Angeles’ urban form continues with the sprawl of suburbs, people will still need to commute to their far-flung work centers, creating more traffic. Since the tag-team is anti-rail, maybe they’d prefer to see these people stuck in their vehicles in gridlock, throwing tons of pollution into the air. The next rung for air pollution on the environmental harm ladder is the carbon gases from vehicle exhaust, creating global warming and climate change and leading to catastrophe.
In addition to the environmental damages, gridlock that chokes our streets is often cited as a reason that businesses consider moving from the area. Gridlock and long driving commutes cause health issues for drivers such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and negative mental and emotional problems. Transit, and particularly forms of rail transit, is needed more than ever. More buses, light rail, subway and heavy rail cannot be added or built fast enough.
(Matthew Hetz is a Los Angeles native. He is a transit rider and advocate, a composer, music instructor, and member and president and executive director of the Culver City Symphony Orchestra.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
