No? OK, maybe you’re not ready to recognize how much you need me. I understand.

I know you’ve never liked me, and for that I’ve never blamed you. You Californians like to live your lives fast, and I’m all about slowing you down. So I try not to let it bother me that you complain about me more than drought or Donald Trump.

I understand that I make you late to school and to work. I lengthen brutal commutes that keep you behind the wheel for hours when you’d rather be working out, watching a game or playing with your kids. And I contribute to pollution that causes everything from asthma to climate change.

But give me this much: When COVID-19 came, and I took a vacation, California suddenly didn’t feel like California anymore.

At first, you celebrated my disappearance as a rare ray of light in a dark time. The roads were wide open. You could actually get from downtown San Diego to North County, or from Pasadena to Long Beach, or from San Francisco to Palo Alto, in 30 minutes. The Bay Area bridges were no longer jammed. Even when businesses started to reopen, traffic was less than 80 percent of normal around the state.

But as the pandemic drags on, I suspect many of you secretly wish I would come back. There is something disorienting, even apocalyptic, about all those empty roads. Your state just isn’t the same without me.

Truth be told, under normal circumstances, California isn’t the most congested place in the United States. Much of our giant state is empty, while Hawai‘i’s small island roads are packed with too many Californians who like to drive. My fearsome reputation is really based on the fact that California’s giant urban regions have some of the world’s worst traffic.

People also tend to dwell on my costs—in gas, vehicle maintenance, air quality, and lives—without appreciating the many benefits I provide. Now that those benefits have vanished, I wonder if you might give me a little more respect.

For starters, I’m the best excuse you have for your flakiness and irresponsibility. When you’re ludicrously late to school or work, or when you miss your brother’s wedding, all you need is to invoke me, traffic, and your fellow Californians will absolve you of your sins. Now, in the pandemic, you probably don’t have to be anywhere, but if you do, and you’re late, you’ve got no excuse. You’re just rude!

So, in the spirit of forgiveness, I hope that COVID has given you a more permissive perspective on time. Transportation agencies across California like to issue studies that accuse me, traffic, of being a thief, by robbing from you 60 or 80 or 100 hours of time each year that you could instead have spent with your families. But now that so many of you are stuck with your families all the time, I detect a new appreciation for all the quality time you used to spend stuck with me. I let you listen to whatever awful music you like without ever complaining. Can you say the same of your kids?

Those points may seem trivial, but the carnage on our roads—more than 3,500 traffic deaths annually—is serious. And the pandemic suggests that my talent for congestion actually keeps you safer. In the early weeks of the lockdown, traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths dropped precipitously. But since then, without me around to slow people down, drivers have been speeding, and the roads have gotten much deadlier. In fact, even with much less traffic, we’re on track to have just as many deaths on the roads this year as we did in 2019, which is why Californians are seeing roadside warnings to slow down.

Controlling speeding is just one of the many social goods for which I, traffic, deserve more credit. Research shows that, despite conventional wisdom that traffic slows commerce, congestion is good for the economy and jobs. So you won’t escape economic depression without me.

I support millions of jobs directly, from car dealerships to car repair shops and car washes (I’m very proud of the fact that California leads the nation in per-capita car washes). But I also create positive economic incentives. I’m a force for innovation, encouraging the concentration of high-tech and other industries. And the gas taxes that drivers pay is how our society funds much of its transportation infrastructure, and the construction jobs that come with it.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m also a huge proponent of public transportation. People get on trains and buses to avoid dealing with me. Now transit ridership has completely collapsed, and that’s not all because of fear of the virus. I’m no longer there to scare drivers. My buddies at BART have lost most of their ridership, and Caltrain, which connects San Francisco and San Jose by rail, may go under. Local and state governments will have to bail out transit systems until I can return to do my essential artery-clogging work.

I don’t limit my environmental work to supporting transit. Fear of my congestion also creates incentives for infill development in dense urban areas, and for people to live closer to work, to walk and bike more, and to use ridesharing rather than owning cars. Best of all, congestion forces people to congregate in places, where they can talk, plan a rally, or meet a significant other.

You may still hate me, but I create opportunities for you to fall in love!

That’s why I’m asking you to wear those masks and maintain social distance. The sooner California can beat back the pandemic, the sooner you and I can be together again.

The post Don’t Be Ashamed to Admit It<span class="colon">:</span> You Miss California Traffic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If California is as serious about public transit as its urban leaders claim, why isn’t there a commuter rail service running over the Golden Gate Bridge?

There’s no good reason why our state’s iconic span must devote all six of its lanes to cars. For more than 50 years, engineering studies have shown that the bridge could accommodate trains.

And now would be the perfect time to establish a rail line across the Golden Gate. On the level of symbol, train service would send a powerful message to the whole state and to the world that California offers more than just car culture. And, practically, the dense and traffic-plagued Bay Area would benefit immensely from a rail connection between San Francisco and the North Bay counties of Marin and Sonoma.

As our major regions plot new transit investments, there is no more glaring hole in California public transportation than the one across the Golden Gate Bridge.

North of the bridge, Sonoma and Marin are about to open the first phase, from Santa Rosa to San Rafael, of their new SMART light rail service (Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit). SMART, which also includes a bicycle-pedestrian pathway, will eventually serve a 70-mile corridor from Cloverdale to Larkspur, just 10 miles up the 101 Freeway from the Golden Gate.

South of the bridge, San Francisco is spending billions to construct the Transbay Transit Center, which has been billed as the Grand Central Station of the West. It is supposed to be the northern terminus of high-speed rail someday, and it should accommodate Caltrain, the commuter rail service that extends down the peninsula and all the way to Gilroy, the garlic capital at the bottom of Santa Clara County.

Toll booths at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, May 2002. Photo by Paul Sakuma/Associated Press.

But there is no plan for a train—be it via expanded BART service or a cross-bridge extension of SMART or some new service—to connect the new SMART train with the new giant train station. Which is sort of shocking for a place full of do-gooders who love to lecture the rest of us on the need to live sustainably and go boldly into the future.

So a question for the Bay Area: What in the name of progressive enlightenment are you waiting for?

The idea of a train on the Golden Gate Bridge is not a new one. To the contrary, such train service was envisioned as part of the original plan for the BART system. Michael C. Healy, in his excellent new book BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, recalls that Marin County leaders in the early 1960s badly wanted to be part of BART. They were seeking to restore train service lost with the dismantling of the railroad that once took riders from Sausalito to Eureka, with a famous stop in Santa Rosa (the train plays a role in Alfred Hitchcock’s early classic, Shadow of a Doubt).

But in the fall of 1961, the governing authority of the Golden Gate Bridge balked at allowing trains, claiming that they would put too much stress on support cables. BART’s own engineering studies found that the bridge was plenty strong enough, but the bridge authority, out of what critics have maintained was fear of losing toll dollars, wouldn’t budge and produced its own competing studies. In the end, BART dropped Marin from its plans, to the frustration of several county officials. It would take more than half a century to bring rail transit to the county—in the form of the new SMART.

The idea of a Golden Gate train didn’t die. In 1990, renewed talk of BART to Marin led to a study that found the bridge could handle trains. But during the big California recession at that time, the multibillion-dollar cost of taking BART to the North Bay ended the conversation.

In this history, there’s a lesson even more dramatic than the Golden Gate: There are huge costs when California skimps on infrastructure, and fails to build the big and essential connections between our communities. A bridge train to the North Bay would have been easier and cheaper in the 1970s than now, and so for 40 years North Bay commuters have paid a rapidly rising price—in traffic, bridge tolls, time, and the extortionate cost of parking in San Francisco.

Just how much cheaper and easier would high-speed rail have been to build 30 years ago, when the idea was first suggested for California? There is real wisdom in the phrase that Healy attributes to Bill Stokes, the founding father of BART: “Build it now. It will never be cheaper.”

That’s why a train link over the Golden Gate Bridge would make sense today. Yes, such a plan would be attacked—this is the Bay Area and this is California, after all. Preservationists and aesthetes would say an iconic American landmark is being sullied by any change, as if adding rail to a roadway were the same as painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Marin’s anti-growth zealots would oppose it, arguing that the train would encourage new development in their idylls. Engineers would wonder about the cost and difficulty of tunneling through the Marin Headlands to get to the bridge. And pointy-headed accounting types would cite the cost and point out that most commuters in the North Bay are going to jobs that are in the North Bay, along the very busy 101 Freeway corridor, and that with the rise of telecommuting, the number of commuters may shrink in the future.

And those who follow BART closely will argue that that system is at a difficult crossroads, and needs to focus on maintenance and other pressing projects, like a second tube under the Bay between Oakland and San Francisco.

To all such objections there is one answer: Why is the Bay Area thinking so narrowly and with so little vision for the future? As an Angeleno, I can’t resist pointing out to Bay Area friends that in the realm of public transit, we in Southern California are surpassing you, having passed sales tax increases to fund a transformational 50-year plan for a regional system that makes yours look like a disjointed joke. Are you really going to just sit there and let yourself be embarrassed for the next century by L.A.?

If done well, imagine how powerful a Golden Gate Bridge-traversing train would be. It could stop at Union Square, connecting with BART, on its way to the new Transbay Transit Center. It would draw commuters. It would draw tourists. It would draw rail fans. And it would make the planet’s greatest bridge even greater.

Such a train could be the inspirational showpiece of what the Bay Area badly needs: a new regional plan for transit that connects all nine of its counties. And when you pair the utility of such a train with its status as a powerful symbol of California’s commitment to a connected and sustainable future, you know what, Bay Area? You’ve come to this bridge. It’s time to cross it.

The post Golden Gate Bridge Train Service? It’s Time to Get on Board appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the question Henry George sought to answer for California in his famous 1868 essay, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” on the eve of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The renowned political economist’s vision—that the railroad would help make California a global giant of business and trade—was so prescient, it was taught in California schools well into the 20th century.

Now the question is timely again for Californians, as Metro in Los Angeles County opens two new light rail connections—one through the San Gabriel Valley this Saturday, the other connecting downtown L.A. to a station four blocks from the beach in Santa Monica on May 20.

That Southern California, of all places, is leading the way in building new rail links (and there will be many more new lines, funded by local sales taxes, opening in the years ahead) suggests we have entered a new era of California transit. It also raises questions about the rest of the state

Will the Bay Area further develop its expensive and union-plagued BART system, including adding a second tunnel under the bay? Will San Francisco ever revamp its embarrassingly slow and dirty MUNI system? How can San Diego best expand its trolleys, and Sacramento its light rail? Can the Inland Empire, the 13th largest metropolitan area in America, raise its transit game? And when will greater Fresno, more than one million people and growing, realize it’s a major American city in need of a real urban transit system?

For now, progress outside L.A. is slow. Maybe that’s because as we consider the possibilities, Californians are asking questions the wrong way. Journalists, environmentalists, and other boring people obsess over the math—what new rail lines might cost us in dollars or what they might save us in traffic or car trips. That’s a losing game—traffic is driven by large, hard-to-predict trends—in the nature of work and technology, in telecommuting patterns, in immigration levels, in the aging of the population, and in the price of gas.

The smarter, more inspiring question about transit projects is George’s old one: What new things do these new rail lines bring us? Do they connect us to places and events in powerful new ways? Do the trains provide comfort and reliability? Is riding the rail a compelling experience in itself that it changes us?

For me, these questions are urgent and personal. I spend as many as four hours a day commuting by car. But the new rail lines could change my life. I live five blocks from the Metro Gold Line, which is opening its 11-mile extension through the San Gabriel Valley to Azusa this weekend. And my office is in Santa Monica, seven blocks from the terminus of the Expo line extension that opens in May.

What might the light-rail bring me? The promise of a healthier, more productive, and more fun routine.

Riding the trains to work could take 90 minutes, with two changes between lines, but that’s no different than driving takes me many days. If the trains are on time, the commute will be more predictable than it is now. And so I’ll start riding the trains with the following hopes. I hope I’ll get more exercise from the extra walking to get to the stations. I hope I’ll be able to read and get work done in transit. And I hope that, as I don’t have to spend as much time in the evening working, I can sleep more and spend more time with my family.

On weekends, I want to ride the new Gold Line to the east with my three train-crazy boys, and explore places near the new stations. Tops on my list are playtime at the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area and Friday nights at the Family Festival on Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia. I could even see an old-school date night for surf-and-turf at the Derby (the horse players restaurant once owned by Seabiscuit jockey George Woolf) if the owners were to grant me and other rail riders a special exemption from the dress code.

This is what the light rail could bring us. The Gold Line extension could make Azusa Pacific, an ambitious Christian university at the end of the new line, a bigger factor in civic life here. It should allow more people to discover, or re-discover, the enchiladas at La Tolteca in Azusa, the Justice Brothers Racing Museum in Duarte, the old movie theater (now a 12-plex) in Monrovia, and the Santa Anita Park race track, and the 626 Night Market in Arcadia.

The Expo Line could be even more transformational. It’ll get you to the beach or the Santa Monica Pier without a car. The delicious Japantown along Sawtelle Boulevard, a spot to be avoided if you drive, should see a surge in customers with the nearby Pico/Sepulveda stop. And more people will find their ways to art shows and studies at the Bergamot Station arts complex, which has its own stop on the new line.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed. Metro needs to make sure the trains are safe, reliable—and, most of all, fun. The new Gold Line cars looked great in a recent preview, with big windows and comfortable seating. And on the Expo Line, those trains better have strong Wi-Fi and maybe tables for us working commuters.

I’m most excited about the surprises that these new rail lines—and other lines under construction—will bring us in the future. What new communities, new downtowns (the city of Duarte sure needs one), new businesses, and new friendships might emerge of which we can’t conceive? What new ideas might come from, say, a doctor riding to her job at the City of Hope meeting a Caltech computer scientist on a Gold Line train?

Re-reading “What The Railroad Will Bring Us,” I was struck by how George, even in making grand predictions about California’s future, underestimated the cultural and economic impact of the railroad. Yes, he correctly saw San Diego becoming a vital second city of California. And he was right that the Bay Area would become a future global capital of commerce.

But he never once mentioned Los Angeles. It was unimaginable then that such a small town could become our greatest city, now featuring the best public transit in the state.

The post How Riding the Rails Can Change Cities and Lives appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.