Could we find our way to each other in this lonely city?

Sure, we were only 30 yards apart. But we were separated by Crenshaw Boulevard—and by the folly of transportation planning in 21^st century Southern California.

The object of my gaze was the driver of a Metro train on the Expo Line, which runs from Santa Monica to downtown L.A., and is also known as the E Line. The driver’s features, illuminated only by headlights and the passenger cabin behind him, gave him an air of mystery.

His train was approaching the light rail station on the west side of Crenshaw, one of central L.A.’s major thoroughfares, just south of Exposition Boulevard.

I stood on the east side of Crenshaw, across four lanes of cars from the station, with my train-loving nine-year-old son. We were weary from a long night of riding Metro rail lines around the city. But we also were excited. We had just ridden the newest Metro rail line in Los Angeles—the Crenshaw Line, or K Line—which opened earlier this fall, and which originates right at that intersection of Crenshaw and Exposition. It’ll eventually make its way to LAX.

We came up the escalator from the underground K train expecting to make what Metro calls an “easy transfer” to the Expo Line. The E Line tracks are just a few steps from the K Line exit.

Instead, we were confronted with a head-scratching situation, and a reminder that L.A. likes to make things hard.

When Metro planned and built the Expo Line—which opened back in 2012—it did not create a single stop at the corner of Crenshaw and Expo. It created two. The first, for trains that are heading west towards Santa Monica, was on the east side of Crenshaw, where my son and I were standing. The other stop, for eastbound trains, was across the street.

Splitting light rail stations in this way isn’t unheard of. Other stops on the Expo Line—at Vermont Avenue, at Western Avenue—have a similar setup, with space-saving platforms on opposite sides of a thoroughfare.

But the Expo-Crenshaw stop should have been designed differently, because Metro had been planning the line that became the Crenshaw/K for decades. The agency knew that two lines were going to have connect there, someday.

And Metro had many options for creating links. It could have built entrances/exits to the Crenshaw/K Line on both sides of Crenshaw, so that passengers who wanted to transfer to Expo heading east could exit on one side of the street, and westbound passengers could exit on the other. It could have built a pedestrian walkway over Crenshaw.

I, for one, would have liked to see a train station built over the entire intersection—a grand building, with restaurants and shops and a beautiful waiting area—to put the two intersecting lines under one roof.

Metro did none of that. Its excuses cited costs, mostly, and the difficulties of getting approval for such connections in the political cesspool of Los Angeles. But the result is now clear: Metro is forcing passengers to brave Crenshaw, and its traffic, to connect between the K and eastbound Expo Lines.

It was across this unnecessary divide that the Expo Line driver and I encountered each other.

Crenshaw was full of traffic, and the crosswalk signal was red. I stood there as his train approached the east-bound station on the west side of the street. If the light didn’t change, my son and I would miss it.

That’s when my eyes met the driver’s. A minute went by, the crosswalk light remaining red. The driver, maintaining his gaze, generously kept the train in the station, doors open. But after another minute went by, he gave me an apologetic look, and moved the train a few feet forward, up to Crenshaw.

We knew then that we would miss the train—but the moment wasn’t over. Now the driver was stuck, unable to cross Crenshaw himself.

Why? Because Los Angeles requires trains to stop for street traffic and street lights, as if the trains were cars. And the train driver had a red light. Why? Because the city prioritizes cars over transit. Technology exists to allow passing trains to change street lights, so cars that might cross tracks have to stop and give way to trains. But L.A. doesn’t use it there.

A minute more, and the lights changed. In theory, we should have been able to negotiate our crosswalk, and the train driver should have sailed through his green light. But once again, we were foiled.

Crenshaw had filled with cars during the long light, and vehicles now blocked the tracks and the crosswalk. I thought of snaking my way through them to rendezvous with the still-nearby train, but I didn’t feel safe doing so with my son.

The driver extended his arms, palms up, in the universal expression of “What Can You Do?” My son and I did the same. For five minutes, we had been stuck here, gazing longingly at each other.

As another two minutes passed, the driver inched his way through the intersection, cutting off the cars on one side. We still hadn’t dared cross the street.

The train was now less than 10 feet away. I raised my thumb, hoping our new friend might stop and let us hitchhike. He laughed, waved to us, and rang the train bell, which briefly delighted my son. And then he disappeared into the night.

After another cycle waiting for the light to change, we managed to cross. We’d wait 12 minutes for the next train.

“That was so stupid,” my son said.

“That’s Los Angeles,” I said.

The post My Missed Connection Riding the L.A. Metro appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know I should call you Mr. President, but there’s no time for formalities. You must move fast if you’re going to save California’s high-speed rail project.

No malarkey: It has to be you. California has shown itself incapable of funding, managing, or building deep popular support for this $80 billion train, which would be the first truly high-speed rail system in the United States. You—”Amtrak Joe,” with your personal devotion to riding the rail and your multitrillion dollar infrastructure proposal, now before Congress—are the last, best hope for making it a reality.

Is it worth the political risk of associating yourself with an epic failure? You and your advisors are cautious people who don’t want to give Republicans who oppose infrastructure spending a tempting target. Saving high-speed rail would enrage the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, whose hostility to progress runs so deep that he has spent years opposing the project even though it would run through his own Bakersfield district.

But should you succeed, the potential rewards extend far beyond California. If you can fix this problematic and high-profile project, you will show the world just how committed you are to remaking this country’s infrastructure, and fulfilling your campaign promise to “build back better.”

Taking on this California headache won’t be easy. To have any chance of success, you’ll have to change the mindset around the project. Most of the attention paid to high-speed rail focuses on its lack of money—it’s short tens of billions of the $80 billion-plus needed for completion. But the fundamental problem with high-speed rail, as with other mega-projects in wealthy California, is not money, but a lack of management.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is a failed agency. Thirteen years after California voters approved the railway, this agency still hasn’t managed the fundamental task of assembling the land it needs to build the first stretch in the San Joaquin Valley. It lacks the size, engineering expertise, and management chops to handle a construction project of this scale. Contractors have run amok, adding extra charges while failing to meet deadlines. And the authority’s board of directors is weak and part-time.

Leading state politicians, instead of supporting the project, are taking it apart. In early 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom abruptly and foolishly abandoned the plan to connect the first piece of the project, from the Bay Area to the Central Valley, leaving behind a diminished rail line running from Bakersfield to Merced. By making high-speed rail a Central Valley-only regional project, Newsom hurt support for rail in other regions. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon of Los Angeles has started pushing to redirect high-speed rail’s limited funds to Southern California.

Joe, this unwinding of the project will end in high-speed rail’s eventual demise—unless you intervene, and soon. The good news is that California’s vast mismanagement of the project offers your administration multiple leverage points to jump in and start calling the shots.

Two big leverage points involve money. The first is $929 million in rail funding that the Trump administration pulled back in 2019 after Newsom abandoned the Bay-Area-to-San-Joaquin plan (and made intemperate remarks about the federal government in the process). The second involves $2.6 billion the state received for high-speed rail from the 2009 federal stimulus bill that it still hasn’t spent. California is almost certain to miss a 2022 deadline for using the money, which means you have the power to take it back.

To put it in your earthy style, Joe, since you control $3.5 billion that this project badly needs to stay afloat, you have California by the balls.

You can force Californians to confront the question: Are we serious about completing this train or not?

Your demands should not be bashful. As a condition of California getting the money it needs to keep the project alive—not to mention the tens of billions of additional federal dollars that will eventually be necessary to complete it—you can demand major changes in the management and operations of high-speed rail. First, you should require the resignation of all authority board members—and insist that the governor and legislature appoint a board, and a new chief executive, of your administration’s choice. Second, you need to insist that the new CEO replace the current, ineffective contractors with a real corporate engineering and management heavyweight—I’m thinking Kiewit, or that California giant, Bechtel—that can handle a project of this scale.

And most of all, you must insist that the project plan take the high-speed rail from the Bay Area all the way to L.A. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Some California politicians will balk at such a severe intervention. But don’t give them an inch. When they object, go right after their pretensions of national leadership and say: “Well, if California is no longer interested in building the American future like the governor says, I’d be happy to send California’s money to high-speed rail projects in Texas or Florida, where they still have ambitions.” They should fall in line. After all, you’ll be stepping up to ensure proper management of a project they never bothered to oversee.

One cautionary note: You may be tempted to throw in tens of billions in federal money right now, when the pandemic has opened the door for big federal spending. But slow down. Only once your preferred team is in place should you offer a schedule of future federal payments. And that support must be tied to measurable progress in the construction and testing. Joe, we Californians need to be kept on a short leash.

You’ll have to shrug off criticism, including from Californians who say that the state, having put bond money and cap-and-trade dollars into the project, deserves to hold the reins. The hard truth about California is that we’ve never built much of anything big without federal assistance—our aqueducts, our highways, and our internet all required help from Washington.

But the biggest thing you’ll need is the resolve to walk away. If California won’t meet your demands, or if our leaders undermine the project, you should pull back the money and leave the state to clean up its own unfinished mess.

Your love must be tough, but high-speed rail is worth the trouble. The project also isn’t quite as big a loser as it looks right now. Already, thousands of people are building it in the Central Valley, starting with the replacement of dozens of at-grade crossings that will prevent deadly rail accidents, and free up capacity for freight rail. And high-speed rail, with a proven record of success in other countries, could one day provide a more convenient, climate-friendlier alternative to flying or driving around our state, and country.

But none of that will happen, Joe, unless you kick California in the butt right now.

The post Dear Mr. President, Please Save California’s High-Speed Rail  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We spent a lot of time learning about each other’s favorite places around Los Angeles. Our conversations motivated us to actually investigate the places we had long been curious about. Since workdays were intended for one destination and never allowed the opportunity to explore the stops we passed along the way, we replaced the monotony of going to work with trips to places across the city, learning about the history of our communities, and having fun. Transit stopped being a line from point A to point B. If we wanted to get to point B, we could—and did—make stops along the way.

Transit became not just our means of getting around, but also our way of feeling connected with the outside world. Taking the train to work each morning offered wonderful views of the mountains, the gleaming downtown skyline, and the neighborhoods we passed through. Our fellow riders gave us a sense of the lives we shared the city with, its vitality and diversity. Major events—like protests or strikes or championship celebrations—have a way of spilling out into the transit system and bringing out a sense of shared identity and community.

Union Station took on a deep personal significance. Under its high-vaulted ceilings, we would meet up on our way to work or before venturing out to explore the city. We would pause to grab a coffee and admire the station’s golden hues and tranquil courtyards, or watch the trains rumble out of the yard. Then we would get swept up in the throngs of passengers rushing to their next train as we set out to find something we hadn’t seen before. For one of us—a transplant to LA—changing trains in Union Station was literally their first experience of Los Angeles, making it the natural starting point to take in as much of this new, unfamiliar, and exciting place as possible. As a Los Angeles native, the other was rooted in local tradition and culture, with limited experience beyond East L.A. Exploring the city together led to conversations about the urban changes and development of each neighborhood. And we would trade historical knowledge for the memories and nostalgia for what L.A once had been. We experienced the city through each other’s eyes and witnessed the lives of all the amazing people who contribute to L.A.’s essence.

A city this vast is too much to take in all at once; you can only wrap your mind around it by breaking it down into smaller pieces. For us, we broke it down along the transit lines, learning Los Angeles one route at a time.

We explored the different communities along the Gold Line, starting with Chinatown and Boyle Heights. It’s easy to recommend the beautiful and enchanting neighborhood in Chinatown, where the neon lights dance on reflective surfaces as you walk down the street. Or strolling through Boyle Heights on a weekend night, when the aroma of carne asada wafts from every corner taco stand. The more we explored, the further out we traveled, eventually finding hiking trails that offered an escape from the city, with tall shady trees stretching above your head and parakeets loudly chattering as they soar from one tree to the next.

Along the Blue Line through South Los Angeles, we found beautiful places and wonderful people. In Watts, while disappointed with the scaffolding covering Watts Towers, we found friends willing to talk to us about art in the community. A little further north we found the Alameda Swap Meet and El Faro Plaza, two large warehouse spaces bustling with Latino entrepreneurs and delicious scents from tacos to raspados. In these spaces we found people who showed us the true meaning of community and togetherness. If you have a creative spark in you, the friendly faces in Watts will take you in. And if you are looking for a lively space to watch a game and eat tasty food, the people in El Faro Plaza are there for a good time.

With the Red Line, we ventured past the Walk of Fame and through the Hollywood Hills. While known for impeccable homes, we found secluded streets with wide-open vantage points of the city and a neighborhood intended for pedestrians, with small walkways and staircases. It felt like stepping away from the city; our senses were tuned to the fragrant smells of flowers and fresh air, birds chirping, and dogs barking as we walked past. And even while we were standing in the center of the city, the sounds of cars and trucks were faint and barely noticeable.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

Riding the train at dawn is possibly the most peaceful way to encounter L.A. When the sun is rising over the east, you hear the city waking up. But even before that, you will find Latina women bundled up in scarves and sweaters already boarding buses and trains to move across town. They traverse the city as they travel from the Eastside to their housekeeping jobs on the Westside. Bundled all the way to the top of their heads, lugging large thermoses filled with coffee to drink and wake up as they move. These women would share stories about the large mansions they worked in. These large glamorous homes were meant to look untouched and pristine, and while they maintained these homes, these women would also have to keep an eye on the curious children who needed to be cared for. They would then take the transit system back home, where their work continued as mothers.

The pandemic has limited our movement and put a hold on our adventures. We can’t see new places or stumble upon old friends on our regular commute. The pandemic robbed us of the connection with the outside world that transit offered. We miss the community of people who used transit on a regular basis and were happy to share stories and chat. Now people limit their movement and faces sit behind masks as people protect themselves from the virus. Right now, the trains don’t feel like they have that love and energy we used to encounter, but we look forward to the day that everything begins to buzz with excitement again.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We’ve long wanted to illustrate how transit can be an excellent means of seeing the city. As the pandemic dragged on, we finally conceived Transiting Los Angeles as a way to share the places that we’ve fallen in love with to inspire others to explore them as well. We think of our blog like a series of postcards: “Wish You Were Here.” Despite our different perspectives, transit has shaped a common understanding of our home. While we try to pick up the pieces of our lives amid all this uncertainty, it’s nice to remember that there are still wonderful places within reach. Los Angeles will be forever changed by the pandemic, but whatever comes next, transit will always take us where we need to go.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Transiting Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The northern terminus of SMART, the new light rail system officially opening this weekend in the North Bay, is the Sonoma County Airport Station in Santa Rosa. But after my 8-year-old son and I disembarked from an Alaska Airlines flight, we learned that the airport is more than a mile away from the train.

We didn’t know how to bridge this transportation gap. My son wasn’t up for a long walk. There is as yet no shuttle from plane to train. The public bus that would take us in the train’s direction didn’t show up on time. Uber wasn’t picking up at the airport. My Lyft app kept crashing. And the four cabbies parked outside the airport all refused to take us, saying they didn’t want to give up their place in line for such a short, cheap trip.

The Bay Area is the richest large metropolitan region on the planet because of the ability of its people and institutions to connect with each other and the larger world. But if you need to make transit connections in the Bay Area, good luck.

Inspired by the soft launch of SMART—the 43-mile Sonoma and Marin County light rail has offered preview rides for months—I recently spent three days navigating the Bay Area without a car. And so I experienced beautiful rides on trains, ferries, subways, and buses. But I was also bewildered by the utter failure of a place that’s famous for integrating culture and technology to integrate its own infrastructure and transportation.

For all its global clout, the Bay Area remains, at the local level, a fragmented mess of nine counties, 101 municipalities, and hundreds of government districts.

“The counties grew up separately, and so we’re stuck with a mishmash of agencies and of transportation,” says Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council. “I don’t think this is sustainable anymore.”

After waiting 40 minutes at Sonoma County Airport, we called a new cab, which took us the 1.2 miles to the train station for $10. The new SMART trains might have been comfortable if they weren’t so jammed. My skinny son squeezed into a tiny spot between a seat and a bike rack. I stood in a mass of people near the front of the car. The first 43-mile segment of what promises to be a 70-mile train runs from the not-quite-airport station to downtown San Rafael. Given the distance and the length of the rides—more than an hour—the trains offer bathrooms and a café that sells wine. This is Sonoma after all.

The ride south took 90 minutes and offered a grittier view of Sonoma and Marin Counties—mobile home parks, big empty parking lots, old industrial properties (all of which could be used to build housing, but that’s another story)—as well as views of the Petaluma River, Mt. Tamalpais, and even Mt. Diablo.

The SMART train is eventually supposed to reach the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, from where it’s a 35-minute boat ride to San Francisco. But the first segment ends two miles short of the ferry. There’s a bike path to the terminal that’s walkable, and a bus station in San Rafael that can get you to the ferry, but that bus ride takes between 14 and 26 minutes. We wanted to get there faster and opted for an Uber.

The ferry, which left 10 minutes late, entered the bay next to San Quentin Prison; inmates waved at the boat. It was a clear day and so we enjoyed views of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Once at the Ferry Building, I kept my son happy with soft serve ice cream from Gott’s.

After two hours of interviews for other stories, we found ourselves at the BART Embarcadero Station in San Francisco, eager to get to the Oakland Airport and fly home. But the first six trains were too full to board. This wasn’t a surprise. BART is a system built for 60,000 riders that moves more than 400,000 daily. The system badly needs more and newer cars, better maintenance, governance that isn’t dominated by unions, and a second tunnel under the bay.

When the seventh train arrived, we couldn’t wait any longer, and pushed our way in. “That’s rude,” said one rider.

“We’re from L.A.,” I replied.

We made the flight, but with significant sticker shock. The six-station ride from San Francisco to Oakland’s Coliseum Station, from which a tram takes you into the airport, cost $10.20 each. Add that to my $11.50 ferry ticket (my son’s was $5.75), the $9 Uber ride to the ferry, the $11.50 one-way fare on SMART, and $10 for the airport cab ride, our journey was pushing $70.

In Los Angeles, I pay just $1.75 to board a Metro train, and all transfers are free for two hours. In the Bay Area, even public transit is pricey.

A couple of days later, I flew back to Oakland for another expensive and overcrowded BART ride, this one into San Francisco. After switching to the local Muni system, I arrived late to an appointment because of a train breakdown.

Later, I found myself at BART’s Powell Street station, needing to get to San Jose, a city that BART doesn’t quite reach (though an extension should be complete next year). I needed to take the Caltrain, but how to get there? BART and Caltrain share a station in Millbrae, but the schedules aren’t synchronized, meaning I could wait for 45 minutes. So, carrying luggage, I did a 25-minute walk to the Caltrain station at 4th and King, where I purchased a one-way $9.75 ticket to San Jose.

In San Jose, I disembarked at Diridon Station, which may have a bright future as northern terminus of high-speed rail. But for now, it is just another setting for connection frustration, as I waited a half-hour for a light rail train on Santa Clara County’s VTA system. I contemplated getting on ACE, a railway connecting San Jose with Stockton, but the limited schedule meant there was no return train until morning.

The next day, I needed to get to San Jose Airport, and so I took Caltrain to the Santa Clara Station, which is close to the airport and offers a VTA bus shuttle. But the bus driver refused to open the bus door for passengers for 15 minutes, even during a brief squall of rain. The station is only five minutes from the airport, but the shuttle took us on a meandering route that included a stop at San Jose’s pro soccer stadium.

Here’s what gets forgotten in this crazy quilt of disconnected systems: the people riding them. No wonder that for all the different transit offered in the Bay Area, a relatively small share of residents (less than one-third) actually use it.

If the Bay Area is ever going to resemble the design-savvy ecotopia it purports to be, it will need to get majorities of its people on its trains and buses. And that will require combining operations and linking schedules of these different systems. As any good Silicon Valley company knows, any service—from public transit to email—requires that the user have faith that the system will work, that it will be affordable, and that it won’t drop you off a mile from the next station, or be a half-hour late, or offer trains so full you can’t get on them.

Right now, using Bay Area transit makes you feel powerless. And that should be unacceptable in California’s most powerful region.

The post Connect the World? The Bay Area Can’t Even Connect Its Trains 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 may seem a strange question, given the size of the L.A. region. But Los Angeles is of at least two minds. Yes, we’re home to world class universities, two pro football teams, the nation’s largest port complex by volume, the third-busiest airport in the U.S., more manufacturing than any other American city, and we’re bidding to host the Olympic Games for the third time. But many people in L.A. also expect the city to be as open and livable as any suburb.

How we Angelenos see our city, and what we want for its future, is coming to a head not in a pitched street battle out of West Side Story, but at the ballot box. On March 7, Los Angeles voters will consider Measure S, an anti-development ballot measure that proposes to put a moratorium on certain types of building projects for two years.

Many of the measure’s details address rather arcane urban planning codes that are admittedly outdated. But the campaign for Measure S has secured a base of support by tapping into a sentiment closely held by older residents, suburban dwellers within in the city limits, and NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) constituencies that Los Angeles is changing too rapidly into a dense, mega-city.

As Los Angeles residents experience record-high rental rates and property values, developers are constructing larger infill projects, building multi-story apartment complexes akin to more traditional urban forms. The way Measure S supporters see it, these denser developments create more traffic, change the character of neighborhoods, and create more luxury housing at the expense of more affordable housing in older, smaller complexes. In short, L.A. is becoming too much of a metropolis.

But the coalition opposing Measure S—developers, businesses, affordable housing advocates, urban living enthusiasts, and most of the political establishment—have a fundamental disagreement with the basis for Measure S. These opponents say L.A. must preserve any and all avenues for construction of schools, hospitals—and especially scarce housing. Cutting off the supply of housing with overly restrictive regulations in the midst of a well-documented housing shortage is a prescription for land use malpractice. Without needed supply, rents and property values increase to match housing demand. It’s a simple argument, which also happens to make tremendous sense.

Maybe the answer is even simpler than we wish to acknowledge: We’re not just metropolitan; we’re a metropolis. We just need to be a better one.

Reality, if not perception, is with the opponents. Angelenos don’t realize it, but L.A. is already the densest urbanized area in the nation, with some 7,000 people per square mile. (New York is in third place, at a mere 5,319 people per square mile.) But the enormous growth of the suburbs in post-WWII Los Angeles gave Southern California an ethos that’s been hard to shake, even in the 21st century: The relic of a notion that we’re entitled to two cars in every driveway and a Weber grill on every backyard patio.

Of course, L.A. has evolved into a metropolis as it has grown in population, driven by domestic migration, immigration from Asia and the Americas, and the simple math of the birthrate for Angelenos already here. But it can be hard to understand that because, as Reyner Banham wrote in his 44-year-old book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the city is so multifaceted. Banham saw his four ecologies—the hills, the flatlands of the coastal plain, the beaches, and the freeways—as being so disparate that there was no shared narrative about the place.

“Los Angeles does not get the attention it deserves,” Banham wrote. “It gets attention, but it’s like the attention that Sodom and Gomorrah have received, primarily a reflection of other people’s bad consciences.” Could it be we have finally matured as a city so that we are no longer seeing reflections, but a new urban reality?

Today, it can feel as if different generations are living in very different L.A.s. While older residents cling to suburban neighborhoods, young people are living more urbanized lives, with Lyft and Uber and Metro trains coexisting with fusion restaurants and food trucks. Downtown Los Angeles loft-dwellers—a species that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago—walk their dogs, zip around via our expanding transit system, and enjoy a thriving culinary scene that’s nationally—and internationally—recognized as one of the most vibrant anywhere.

I’m not young anymore, but I appreciate how this newer metropolis allows me to live in Valley Village, an increasingly urban environment near Studio City and North Hollywood that is less dependent on the automobile, and that has more to offer as a result.

From my San Fernando Valley neighborhood, I take the Metro Red Line to my office in downtown Los Angeles’ Historic Core, getting to work faster than I did driving surface streets from where I previously lived in the Miracle Mile. I walk to my local grocery store, the dry cleaners, and my daughter’s elementary school.

I’m also within walking distance of the Los Angeles River Recreation Path, and I’m about a six-minute drive from hiking trails maintained by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Another two minutes in the car (yes, I own and use a car) and I can take Parker, our family’s terrier mix, to one of the city’s largest dog parks. And I’m comfortably within the delivery radius of a brand new restaurant that’s easily the best Thai food I’ve ever had. (Measure S would have been smart to exclude ethnic restaurants from its building moratorium, don’t you think?)

To be sure, my neighborhood has all the plagues that Measure S supporters worry about: traffic, police and ambulance sirens, and, yes, noise from construction sites building much-needed housing. But on the whole, I feel fortunate to live in a place where I’m not stuck in the backyard. I feel connected to the city, literally and figuratively.

For me, that’s progress. And the moment we realize that we are a metropolis, restrictions like those proposed by Measure S will be seen as a relic, too.

The post L.A. to Vote on Whether It’s a Metropolis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now, San Franciscans are, on average, younger and more prosperous, and when they ride the bus they are looking at their phones, where they can track the 22 Fillmore in real time. They can also probably see a digital readout of arriving buses at a stop, or receive texts and social media updates from San Francisco’s municipal transit agency. Any traveler can also open up all sorts of other smartphone and desktop apps to navigate the system, like Google Maps, Moovit, Rover, and Routesy. These days, when you ride the bus, you ride with Big Data.

The world of apps for transit started with a great deal of promise. Evidence from Seattle suggested that merely letting riders know when the next bus would arrive could actually make people happier with their bus and more likely to take another trip. Fully integrated apps now let people plan trips that move from trains to buses and private cars or bicycles at the ends. Eventually, this data-rich universe may encourage city dwellers to give up their cars, reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and greenhouse-gas emissions. So on a recent trip back to San Francisco, I tried using some of the local apps to see how they changed my experience.

I was taking part in a big civic—and economic—experiment. Though there aren’t yet any studies showing whether apps increase transit ridership, apps themselves are much cheaper than buses and trains and tracks and drivers. When apps are used to pay for fares (as they are in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, among other cities) they shift the cost of fare machines from the transit company to the riders. These complex changes in investment, risk, and time will continue as 10 percent of the world moves into cities in the next 15 years, and as self-driving cars start to prowl the streets. Uber has raised $15 billion in venture capital to move into the space between public and private transit around the world. And in the long run, these changes could create a richer transit universe for everyone, or a poorer one accessible mainly to the rich.

Munimobile’s ‘Rate My Ride’ feature.

I first pulled out my $29 Android smartphone along the T line on Third Street. The app produced by MUNI, the local transit system, required that I give it my email and create a password. Even though I’d given up my anonymity, the app didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. So I walked towards where I thought the stop was, only to find a digital readout saying that the next trains were coming in 12 and 14 minutes. Aha! Poorly spaced trains are a problem no app can fix.

That problem is important. As nice as information is, what riders really want is service. Candace Brakewood, assistant professor of engineering at CUNY, did research across three boroughs of New York from 2011 through 2013 and found that lines giving riders accurate information on arrival times increased ridership by as much as 2 percent on an average day. “When you aggregate that across NYC it’s very significant,” she told me. But she also looked at the impact of the weather, the economy, service changes, and multiple other factors and found what really increased ridership was more frequent buses and shorter trip times. This is hardly a Moneyball-type revelation from the crunching of Big Data. “Yeah. Commonsense,” Breakwood said.

Once the T arrived it was pleasantly crowded, with a mix of ages and ethnicities, and the ride on the tracks was mostly smooth. Some older black folks in suits were still enjoying Juneteenth, singing a song from another era. A younger woman with pink hair was drinking from a can. And a guy with long arms was waving them exuberantly as he talked on the phone. As we rolled past the ballpark it occurred to me that the city had spent a lot of money establishing itself as a party town, and the crowd of us here on the train was a truer reflection of that happy civic spirit—the 22 Fellini of it all—than many of the recent expensive infrastructure investments. An Asian grandmother with two little children boarded. The train lurched, they all nearly fell over, and then started giggling. The arm-waving man shot out of his seat and offered it to them. Our civic project rolled along.

What does this all have to do with apps? SF MUNI plans to release a new app component this summer that allows passengers to comment on the etiquette of fellow riders, along with train cleanliness, trip time, crowding, and comfort. Rate My Ride encourages readers to swipe right or left—in homage to Tinder, I guess. MUNI employees will monitor these swipes and “target specific train routes and bus lines” for improvements, according to Paul Rose, spokesperson for MUNI. “It’s one way to make it easier for riders to let us know how we can improve their transportation experience and further engage our riders,” he explained.

I tried to imagine myself swiping my fellow passengers on my phone, but to me the beauty of the bus is enjoying the way everyone gets along and ignoring the ways that we don’t. The singing was nice. I had no problem with a quiet drink. The seat hog at 23rd Street was an angel by Fourth and King.

So how do people rate other passengers’ etiquette, and how should the transit agency react to them? “There’s an idea that because apps are software they’re non-discriminatory and egalitarian. And if you put them in the hands of people they’ll naturally lead to good,” said David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Arizona State University. But, King worries, it’s likely that the app will be hijacked by racist, sexist, or anti-poor opinions—just like platforms including Nextdoor.com, AirBnB, and Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, which became a raving fountain of hate-talk within hours.

What’s more, in the world of public services, some voices—particularly those perceived as white and middle class—are more powerful than others, attracting more sympathetic policing, more funding for potholes, more municipal love. MUNI’s app will be available only in English to start, even though bus announcements are often in English, Spanish, and Chinese. The agency says they expect to release the app in other languages. It could be harmful to only collect complaints from English speakers, but wouldn’t the very idea of the city itself be challenged if we all secretly complain about each other in multiple languages?

Perhaps more important, if the core issue with increasing transit ridership is train frequency and travel time, should MUNI spend its precious resources tracking and responding to passenger etiquette? Transit needs to be more rider-focused, but the meaningful difference comes when public transit is more plentiful and convenient. And citizens change that through engagement in the budgeting and planning process, not by writing bad Yelp reviews. At the moment, apps offer riders an illusion of control. In the long push-pull over transit service, though, the apps aren’t automatically a force for good.

On a trip back from the East Bay, I used Moovit to calculate my route. Taking BART and bus, the app said, would take 86 minutes, while an ad offered a button to call an Uber that would cost $21 and take 56 minutes. As it turned out, the app was wrong, and between BART and the 5 Fulton bus I got back home in 72 minutes for about $6. And of course, I got the whole Fellini too.

The post When You Ride the Bus, You Ride With Big Data appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the last century, Southern Californians dreamed so big and global that the size of our aspirations came to define this place. We created a 20th century cosmopolitan metropolis, extending from the mountains to the sea, a cultural and commercial trendsetter. We shaped the city into the entertainment capital of the world, and sought to be the sunniest, wealthiest, best educated, most sports-friendly, most entrepreneurial, most beautiful (in terms of people and landscape), and coolest region anywhere. L.A. was a place where the lives of poor and middle-class people would be transformed, where—in the words of Mayor Tom Bradley—“the only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you.”

“People cut themselves off from their ties of the old life when they come to Los Angeles,” said Bradley, who served as mayor from 1973 to 1993. “They are looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.”

Today, ambition has given way to trepidation. Our most powerful aspirations are no longer about growing the city or its global footprint, but about splitting it into pieces, shrinking it into smaller communities. With our working class squeezed and the number of children in decline, we dream not of economic advance—but of finding a grip on some small ledge of L.A. that we can make our own, and hold onto as we age.

Our region’s current visionaries have convinced many of us that the best way to cope is to turn L.A. into a group of small villages, self-contained and sustainable—on the scale of the sorts of places previous generations fled to come to the big city.

We no longer want to attend big school systems (reformers are busy creating charter schools), work in big industries (we’d prefer one of those downtown or Playa Vista start-ups), or drive on big roads (we’re narrowing them to fit in bike lanes and new rail lines). We don’t even want a sprawling regional Olympics; our bid for the 2024 Games envisions a sporting festival divided up into five tight clusters in different parts of town.

And when it comes to the innovation and creativity that shape the future, we’re content to cede leadership to Silicon Valley. Hollywood now goes to great lengths to do much of its creative work elsewhere, at least when it isn’t cashing in its state subsidies.

We’re told a splintered L.A. will be a better L.A. because it will run at a slower and more human pace, organized around everyday needs, not unrealistic global ambitions. We will live narrower lives on narrower streets that discourage driving, but those lives will be healthier and more comfortable, and we will feel a sense of belonging in these small places.

It’s worth noting that the words Southern Californians use to describe their aspirations haven’t changed—L.A. was always driven by visions of efficiency, health, and coolness. But the meanings of those words are different now. Cool was once big and fast and loud; it’s now intimate and slow and quiet. Efficiency once meant building great highways and waterworks across great distances; now the height of efficiency is to retrofit and redesign existing infrastructure, as we aspire to do with the L.A. River.

We once defined health by what we did—to be healthy was to do it all and see it all and eat it all, to not be tied down to one place. In today’s L.A., health is defined by our ability to deny ourselves. Health is to not smoke or eat too much, to not drive or spend too much time away from the familiar—our families, our homes, our neighborhoods.

But there is something hollow about this new aspiration of health. It’s health as an absence—of risk, of pain, of conflict. Get your kid into the charter school that suits her perfectly, that won’t cause her any distress. The city of Los Angeles’ highly touted Mobility Plan even suggests we regulate the city’s recreational trails so that bicyclists, hikers, and horseback riders aren’t in the same place; “The first priority is keeping trail users safe and preventing conflicts between various users,” the plan reads.

Are we becoming The Agoraphobic City? There are risks to mitigating risk. Great cities, the urban theorist William H. Whyte argued, are about the unexpected collisions between strangers. And a city can’t be great when its people are keeping their distance, glued to their smartphones, and staying at home in their respective enclaves.

We know all too well the dangers and unintended consequences of our sprawling, car-centric, hyper-diverse, globally ambitious metropolis. But there are obvious threats in our desire to split apart into smaller like-minded enclaves—to our diversity, to our economies of scale, and to the very idea of Southern California as a single entity itself.

The biggest threat is to our already frayed commitments to equality and democracy.

It’s disturbing that so many of our grand planning exercises amount to democratic dodges. For example, the Los Angeles 2020 Commission was created by the city council during the 2013 mayoral election explicitly to push big questions about our future beyond the election season. You will not find the word “democracy” anywhere in the 200 pages of the Mobility Plan, nor will you see democracy discussed in school reform or economic plans for the city. Los Angeles’ leaders may have big plans to confine us to smaller communities. But they have no plans to let these communities govern themselves.

In some ways, today’s L.A. elites are even more self-confident and self-righteous than those who came before. They are more diverse (though not as diverse as L.A. itself) and better educated. In this city of cool, the nerds are now ascendant, led by Eric Garcetti, Rhodes scholar and nerdiest mayor in our history.

These elites revere systems and data and technology, and they have a bad habit of talking about L.A. as if it were a controlled test lab, not a wondrously chaotic home to millions of independent-minded people. Our elites talk endlessly about using the city as a stage for creating “models”—business models, education models, technological models, innovation models, water conservation models—that they can export elsewhere.

Take the Broad Foundation’s plan for charter schools, which states that Los Angeles offers “an opportunity to create a national proof point for other states and cities.” Or look at the Mobility Plan, which suggests we should all be planning every trip we take outside our front doors, calculating all the costs and benefits of our multiple transportation options. Serendipity? Bury her next to Grandpa at Forest Lawn.

Much of what passes as visionary planning for L.A.’s future amounts to small think, answering the challenges of a giant metropolis with plans to create small towns.

If our thinking were bigger, our aspirations would not be to create small models, but to create a shared sense of community and citizenship across the entire metropolis. We should be working to attract new industries and new families and new immigrants to renew our region and its culture. We should be building on our regional progress (in areas like trade infrastructure, smog reduction, and transit) and working to break down the barriers of class, distance, and governance. Why, for example, does L.A. County still have 88 separate (and often poorly run) cities?

The good news is we are building bridges—particularly public transit—to try to connect ourselves better. The bad news is that we’re not building nearly enough. California’s dysfunctional governance and 2/3 vote requirements are huge obstacles to creating sufficient transit, housing, parks, and other improvements to fulfill the aspiration for more separate neighborhoods.

Our abstemious culture also works against investment and transformation. In today’s California, we have tragically married the essential fight for environmental protection to a crippling obsession with government frugality—and fashioned the combination into a club for saying no to just about anything not backed by a billionaire. And so it’s a safe bet that—without much deeper and more democratic integration across the region—we will leave the transit job half-finished at best, our enclaves still too cut-off from each other.

There’s another problem: In a big metro area, connections can’t be made just through transportation. They come through shared culture and experience. We already have too little of this. Many of the institutions that connect us—from the waterworks to the news media—are decaying. Most of us can’t even watch the Dodgers on TV anymore. Will splitting us up into separate neighborhoods and schools really simplify our lives and give us time to connect in other ways? Or will these aspirations for smaller L.A.s merely add to the complexity of navigating this complex place?

Los Angeles is already too separated, its places walled-off, its culture and politics too top-down. We can’t manage to unify our two ports, sitting side by side, a failure that comes with significant costs to our global competitiveness. As several scholars show in the new book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons From San Francisco and L.A., the Bay Area surpassed L.A. economically over the past 40 years by adopting a far more open and democratic culture, with less hierarchy and more exchange of ideas and capital between people, companies, and academia. The Bay Area, in other words, built networks. L.A. remains too much a land of separate empires.

These days, there is a strange nostalgia among governing elites for early 20th-century Los Angeles, a smaller, dense, and segregated city with streetcars. According to this revisionist history, Southern California’s departure from the straight and narrow came in the second half of the 20th century, when we sprawled and built too many freeways and unsustainable infrastructure. What’s forgotten is that the late 20th century also made L.A.—through great struggle and pain—a more diverse and international, safer and less polluted place. Southern California needs a revival of that spirit of breaking boundaries, not plans to erect new ones.

The return to a smaller L.A. is not an inspiring dream. It reflects an understandable weariness with all our earlier growth and ambition, but it isn’t a recalibration for a new century. It’s more of an abdication.

The post The Downsizing of the City of Outsized Dreams appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, those three things are not merely wrong; they describe a city that is rapidly receding into the past. Los Angeles and its people have changed—whether we’re talking about sprawl, cars, or conflict. Our aspirations for ourselves and our future have changed, too.

Today, the hottest neighborhoods in Los Angeles are not far-flung suburbs but enclaves close to the center—Echo Park, Silver Lake, Highland Park, and downtown itself—while the most tattered areas are older “inner-ring” suburbs that were the traditional stepping stones to the American Dream.

Today, this region is now spending $40 billion of its own money on mass transit, combining rail and bus rapid transit expansion with a new mobility plan that puts roads on a diet and creates more space for transit, pedestrians, and bicycles.

And while our conflicts aren’t over, Los Angeles has become a paragon of multicultural organizing, with social movements successfully pushing for a higher minimum wage, more community policing, and a broader embrace of immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants.

It is understood that the city is having a comeback, but it is not well understood just how different the city already is. Los Angeles is not restoring itself or merely updating itself and its dreams of the future. The city is reinventing itself in ways that are leading its people to reimagine what the place could be.

If our aspiration in the past was a bungalow with a lawn, our aspirations now are to have important public spaces, like the new Grand Park downtown, or shared places to play, like the newly rejuvenated Martin Luther King, Jr. Park on Western Avenue in South L.A. If in the past we wanted fast cars and the open road, we now aspire to be free from auto payments, insurance charges, and impenetrable traffic. Mobility is the real goal: My own kids use mass transit, ride sharing, and their own two feet in ways that make their days a lot easier, and I’m following their lead.

If Angelenos’ past aspiration was to live in separate, safe, and carefully defined communities, our aspiration is now to be in mixed and inclusive communities. Los Angeles, a city famously without a center, now finds itself home to multiple centers with dense rental housing, walkable streets, and concerns about gentrification. Another highly significant change: the L.A. that once prided itself on defying nature—creating a port where none existed, importing water to build in a desert, perching homes within easy reach of wildfires—has dramatically cut its intake of water and launched some of the most ambitious plans of any U.S. city to cope with climate change.

Our architecture reflects our changing aspirations. In the 1970s and 1980s, architects built up downtown’s Figueroa corridor and Bunker Hill with big imposing buildings that direct you to their garages and away from the streets. Compare the Bonaventure, built in the mid-1970s, with the Ace Hotel, which opened in 2014: The former is almost impossible to reach on foot (unless you take an elevated walkway that connects you with nearby shopping), and the latter almost literally grabs at the street. Or go to Pasadena, where the Plaza Pasadena mall opened in 1980 with no windows onto the street, surrounded by just a few other businesses. Today, on the same site, sits the Paseo Colorado, a development that literally cut up the mall to create pedestrian access to the revitalized older business district it abuts.

The reworking of downtown Pasadena reflects another reality: Reinvention now means recycling. L.A. used to be about the shiny new thing. But today we try to remake spaces and infrastructure, rather than toss things away. We are recycling old buildings into lofts. We are resurrecting old rail lines. We are choosing not to build more roads and instead repurposing the ones we have. And we are taking the L.A. River and making it a grander connecting link through our city and region.

It is not just our physical infrastructure being remade. L.A. was once known as the wicked city, not because of Hollywood sins but because it was virulently anti-labor, and proud of its open shop. When I was growing up, those of us on the left would look to the Bay Area when we dreamed progressive dreams. Today, with powerful labor groups and social movements, it can feel like L.A.—and not the increasingly expensive and out-of-reach Bay Area—is the best example of what a more inclusive future might look like. Big changes can happen here. Mayor Garcetti proposed a $13.25 minimum wage, a goal that seemed bold; labor and community pushed even harder, and the city council raised the wage to $15.

Too many of us—particularly people who are from Los Angeles—are stuck in the old vision of who we are. Do you know the hardest people to get onto mass transit in Los Angeles? The people who grew up here. The easiest people to get on transit are the newest arrivals, who learn quickly that the growing Metro serves their needs (and leaves them more time to be on their smartphones).

In this new L.A., we must also rethink our past polarities. We can promote entrepreneurship and raise the minimum wage. We can allow for higher density and raise the quality of everyday life. We can take away lanes for cars and improve our ability to move across this city. We can revitalize distressed areas and work against the displacement that redevelopment often induces.

Most of all, we can pursue our separate dreams and be connected to the city and to each other. Today’s Los Angeles may still be a special city, a place apart. But it aspires to be closer—to itself and to all its residents.

The post Once Upon a Time, the City of Angels Was Defined by Sprawl, Cars, and Racial Conflict appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some Angelenos walk or bike to work, but most of us are getting where we need to go via bus, train, or car. Every day, 2,000 Metro buses crisscross L.A.’s streets, trains traverse 87 miles of light rail and subway tracks, and—well, then there’s the 405 at rush hour.

On the heels of new city plans to add bus and bike lanes, it’s a good time to take stock of the big picture in this big city. What should L.A. look like for pedestrians, bikers, drivers, and transit commuters? And what do we need to be thinking about as we look ahead? In advance of the Zócalo/Metro event “What is the Future of L.A.’s Transit?” we asked a variety of transit experts: What is missing from the current vision of L.A. transit future?

The post Trains Are Great! But What L.A. Needs Are Bus Lanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.