The last time I was in Southern California I swore I would never come back until gas was $10 a gallon, SUVs were impractical relics, and there were only half as many cars on the road. Well strangely enough, I find myself back in LA this month with gas pushing $5/gallon and SUVs suddenly less desirable than tract homes in Las Vegas. Even more surprisingly, LA has a real Metro system! OH MY GOD!!! Who would have imagined that!!!
When I was last in LA about 10 years ago, they had just finished building the Purple line, that quaint, but rather useless line that only went about 8 stops from Union Station to Vermont and Western. Now LA has FIVE different metro lines, and though they still only serve mostly immigrant areas, one can actually get around pretty well, especially in and around the downtown area. In the few weeks I've been here, I've managed to travel all over LA without having to use a car (and this my friends, is a REVOLUTIONARY concept). I've been from Hollywood to Pasadena, Redondo Beach, North Hollywood and all over downtown. It may not be a very complete, or even efficient system, but it's here! You can even go all the way to Long Beach or LAX. You can buy a 1 week pass for only $17 that allows you unlimited usage and is also valid on buses. Well done!
OK, now the bad news - often times you wait FOREVER for a train to reach the platform and the clocks that are supposed to tell you how far away the trains are almost never work. Trains also stop running around midnight, escalators rarely work, the seating both on the trains and the platforms is terrible, connecting buses take obscenely long to arrive, and 85% of the ridership is Mexican or Central American, with another 10% consisting of homeless and mentally disturbed people who don't bathe and wreak of BO. That's not a racist statement, just a lamentation that so many "affluent" and non-immigrants still prefer to drive rather than take public transportation. In fact, one of the biggest stigmas about riding public transportation in LA is that it puts you face to face with LA's "underclass", the poor, dark-skinned (and sometimes homeless) throbbing masses that look better from behind the closed windows of your air-conditioned Lexus SUV than from the seat next to you. If you didn't think LA was a third-world city, a few days of riding public transportation will change your mind...
That's right, riding the subway (or buses) in LA, it's not hard to imagine yourself in Mexico City rather than Los Angeles. Mexican Spanish is the predominant language and you'll probably even hear some indigenous Mexican languages here and there. It's always fun to see the occasional European riding the LA transportation system, they always have this perplexed look, kind of like - hmm, I guess public transportation in America is only for poor people! I didn't know there were so many poor people in LA!
I suspect this situation will start to change though as gas keeps climbing in price and cars become less and less viable for working class people. Maybe the folks on the Westside will finally decide that having alternatives to driving are worth the trade off of having more of "those brown people" coming into their neighborhoods (one of the reasons Westsiders have been able to block the western expansion of the Red Line past Wilshire/Western. In the mean time the Metro system continues to expand east, with a new section of the Gold Line connecting East LA sometime next year.
While we wait for more metro lines to be built, the system does integrate really well with the bus network which serves the entire LA basin. Virtually all of the buses run on compressed natural gas, giving LA the largest clean-burning bus fleet in the country, if not the world! An added bonus, with diesel prices going up so fast, the cost to ride LA's buses remains very low. Natural gas continues to sell for much less than petroleum gas or diesel. See what a little forward vision can accomplish! Now if they could just get those buses to run more frequently then more people would start using them. And please bus drivers, turn down the air condition, you're not running a refrigerator car!
Even with the small steps LA has taken so far, I'd have to say that the air quality is definitely better than it was 10 years ago. I think people are starting to drive less and it's making a difference. Smaller cars are selling like hot cakes; the
MINI Cooper is now the hippest car to drive, closely followed by the
Toyota Prius, and they are everywhere! Cadillac SUVs with 20-inch chrome wheels are no longer cool. Way to go! We're halfway to $10/per gallon now, this city could be an amazing place once it kicks the oil habit. I might even consider moving back here. Imagine an LA with a real public transportation network, with more stations and frequent connections. 50% fewer cars on the road and half of those low emission vehicles. Imagine being able to clearly see the snow-capped San Gabriel mountains everyday from a beautiful, and revitalized downtown. This could be the promised land once again.
Labels: bus, Los Angeles, Metro, Mini Cooper, save gas, subway, Toyota Prius
