What will the Regional Connector bring us? A new transformation in California life? Or has it arrived too late to change much of anything?

The June 16 opening of a two-mile rail tunnel under downtown Los Angeles might not seem like a big deal. But its potential—and its timing—mark a pivotal moment for the future of transportation.

L.A. is opening the smartest and most significant piece of its 21st-century Metro rail system at a moment of maximum peril for public transit, both nationally and statewide. The pandemic, along with work-from-home policies and fears of crime, cratered ridership on systems from BART to the San Diego MTS. Local trains and buses across California are often dirty, broken, and filled with unhoused people.

Now, at the height of the state budget season, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislature are preparing to address a $30 billion deficit by cutting more than $2 billion for transit infrastructure —which could be crippling for financially struggling transit systems.

As a result, the opening of the Regional Connector risks becoming a sort of triumph worthy of Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “Victory comes late / And is held low to freezing lips … How sweet it would have tasted.”

Please forgive poetry in a column on transportation politics, but I feel wistful as I think of all the people and places to which the Regional Connector might have connected me, had it been built decades ago. It was first envisioned in the 1980s, seriously studied in the 1990s, and planned in the 2000s.

The $1.7 billion Regional Connector’s purpose is right there in its name: It connects the L.A. region’s separate light-rail lines into one integrated system. In the process, the connector creates a north-south line, running from Azusa through downtown and all the way to Long Beach. It also creates an east-west line, from East L.A. to Santa Monica. And it adds three new underground stations along its downtown path.

Oh, how I wish the Regional Connector had been finished in the 2010s, when I worked in Santa Monica, and spent two hours on trains to commute from the San Gabriel Valley. It would have been marvelous in the 2000s, back when I worked at the L.A. Times downtown—the connector’s new Historic Broadway station is across the street from the old Times building, which no longer houses the Times. And I would have loved to have taken the new long, north-south line from home down to Long Beach to visit my aunt and my cousins on my father’s side. But they are all dead, or have moved elsewhere.

Transit delayed is transit denied. If L.A. hadn’t spent the second half of the 20th century dithering on transit, instead of building, we’d be better connected now. Indeed, transit investment would have given L.A. some ballast to help it withstand the economic retrenchment of the 1990s and the population stagnation since; it might even have prevented the shrinking and aging we’re experiencing now. More transit would have cemented connections, fostering new developments, new businesses, new housing, new friendships, new families.

The Regional Connector will arrive too late—unless we change our defeatist mindset, this toxic idea that wealthy California can’t transform itself. I hope its new, integrated rail lines bring many more people downtown and to other places throughout the city. I hope they become the favored way for people in East L.A. to travel to West Side jobs and beaches. I hope they draw travelers and ambitious young people here. I hope they pull us away from our screens and out of our apartments and houses, to see each other again. (I’m writing this late on a Sunday afternoon, in a nearly empty Grand Park downtown.)

This summer, I wish every Californian would read Henry George’s once-famous 1868 essay about California’s future, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” in which he contemplated how the state might take advantage of the coming arrival of a much larger regional connector, the transcontinental railroad.

George wrote at a time when, as now, California seemed stuck. Life was too expensive; people were giving up. But he counseled against pessimism. The state was struggling but not stuck. Indeed, its problems demonstrated its potential.

“For years,” George wrote, “the high rate of interest and the high rate of wages prevailing in California have been special subjects for the lamentation of a certain school of local political economists, who could not see that high wages and high interest were indications that the natural wealth of the country was not yet monopolized, that great opportunities were open to all.”

George was right that California’s best days lay ahead. Let’s try to recapture his spirit now. If we all get on board, if we all open new connections, maybe L.A. and California can relocate their true selves. And we can grow again.

The post What Will L.A.’s Regional Connector Bring Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

That’s the question I asked myself in Larkspur, in Marin County, after arriving on the ferry from San Francisco one morning earlier this summer.

I was on my way up to Petaluma to do some reporting, and had been looking forward to experiencing what promises to be California’s newest and most spectacular ferry-to-train connection: the Golden Gate Ferry to the SMART train, the light rail line running for 49 miles through Marin and Sonoma counties.

SMART may be little known statewide, but it offers big inspiration, as an example of Californians finding ways to build infrastructure that connects us, even in this era of division and polarization. It’s also a window on where California, even with its population falling, is still growing—on the increasingly urban edges of our larger metropolitan areas, in places like Fairfield, Riverside, and Escondido.

SMART opened in 2017, offering 43 miles of service from Marin’s San Rafael up to Santa Rosa’s Charles M. Schulz airport. It was built for peanuts—just $400 million. (For comparison, the estimate for a 12-mile light-rail extension from Glendora to Montclair in Southern California is $2.1 billion). An extension south from San Rafael to Larkspur and its ferry opened just before the pandemic hit, crushing demand for trains and ferries.

But ridership has been rebounding. And SMART is still doggedly working to expand. It’s adding a second Petaluma station, on the north side of town; further developing its successful #BikeTrainSynergy (20 percent of riders bring bicycles on board); and creating a micro-transit service to carry passengers the mile from its airport station to the actual airport.

It’s also working on becoming bigger, in ways that might better accommodate a post-pandemic future.

SMART has begun construction on an extension up the 101 freeway corridor to Windsor, though it’s paused that work while awaiting a state Supreme Court decision on the validity of the bridge toll increase funding the project. Eventually, SMART plans to take the train farther—to Cloverdale, on Mendocino County’s doorstep, 80 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

SMART also has studied a new line east from its Novato-Hamilton station across the North Bay to reach the Interstate 80 corridor at Suisun City, which is slightly closer to Sacramento than San Francisco. There, SMART would share a station with Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service, which connects the state capital and San Jose.

A feasibility study suggests such a line could be constructed quickly—in six years or less—and perhaps for just $1 billion. That’s good news, because climate change makes establishing new North Bay links important. The state has said that California State Route 37, the area’s main east-west thoroughfare, could be “permanently submerged” by 2040 because of storms and rising sea levels. The highway is already seeing closures because of flooding.

With all these projects, SMART is seeking to serve both visitors to California, and Californians who may be less likely to live in the middle of our biggest cities, but still want to be connected to them. Indeed, transit projects like SMART and the ACE train, which runs through the Altamont corridor and is being extended south and east through Modesto to Merced, are helping to knit Northern California into what some wonks call “The Mega-Region.” That conception imagines the “Bay Area” reaching as far as Lake Tahoe or Fresno.

Of course, serving such a large area requires making smart links accessible to real people. I couldn’t find such a thing at the Larkspur ferry.

The experience was mortifying because I had been bragging about SMART to my companion that day, a Swiss-Swedish journalist-colleague. After decades of traveling the world by rail, he is a train snob, and he began making little jokes as soon as I turned left off the ferry, wandered to the edge of its parking lot—and couldn’t find the train. Unable to locate the platform using the navigation app on my balky smartphone, I started moving toward a tunnel used by bicyclists and pedestrians. Still no train.

Eventually we wandered to the right side of the parking lot, crossed busy Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and meandered around a curve in a smaller street, through two office parking lots, and up a narrow driveway to reach the train station. On board, the ride was fine, though my European friend pressed a conductor on why the train runs on diesel, not electricity (the answer to the wisenheimer: to save money in an America that doesn’t invest much in trains).

The good news is that, if my colleague ever comes back to the North Bay, the problem should be solved. After making some calls, I learned that SMART has repeatedly put up sandwich boards and posted signs to show the path from ferry to train and back—but these keep getting stolen or blown away by winds. As I write this, they’re enacting a more permanent solution: Vinyl decals will be applied to the pavement to mark the safest route.

These decals are called breadcrumbs, and you can follow them, slowly and carefully, to California’s future.

The post Will California Get SMART About Mass Transit? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, Los Angeles is known as a world capital of traffic, a place of extreme mobility challenges and a pollution-choked smog-burger. Low-income communities bear much of the burden of our failures—in worse access to jobs and opportunities, more severe health impacts from pollution and long commutes, and higher rates of injuries and collisions in transportation-related accidents.

And despite strong recent efforts, including unprecedented amounts of investment in rail and other transit infrastructure, things are poised to get worse. Vehicle purchases are on the rise, continuing a pre-pandemic trend. Despite more telecommuting, traffic is back with a vengeance and transit ridership remains depressed.

How did we get here? Because over the course of our history we have chosen to provide the benefits of that massive public investment in transportation almost exclusively to private vehicles, and at almost zero cost to drivers. Those vehicles mostly carry only one person at a time, churn out dangerous pollutants, and are not available to a very large segment of the population who cannot drive, choose not to drive, or cannot afford to drive. We should not be surprised at the outcome.

Yes, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians can use roads—but buses must combat traffic while biking and walking are often dangerous. Every year in L.A. County, speeding cars strike and kill hundreds of people and injure thousands more.

These realities have been produced by the choices we made as a region, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Los Angeles has the infrastructure to support the greatest transportation system ever known. We are just completely misusing it.

Imagine a world where this fantastic infrastructure investment really works, for everyone. What if Angelenos—whether they choose to drive, walk, bike, take transit, or even stay home—could be free from traffic, pollution, and physical harm? It’s achievable if we change how we choose to use our road space.

To start, we can put exclusive bus lanes and protected bike lanes on our major thoroughfares. Then we can run more and faster bus service, expand our bike share programs, and perhaps even distribute bicycles to those who cannot afford them. We can ensure sidewalks on every street and curb cuts on every corner, plus bus shelters to protect waiting passengers from the sun. We can lower speed limits even more on city streets, enforce traffic laws, and create more pedestrian crosswalks that give people more time to cross.

Then we get to the hard part: We need to stop giving away roadway space for free.

Have you ever tried to get an ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s on free cone day? Have you noticed that there is always a line, so that even though the cone is free, you wind up paying with your time? If you don’t mind waiting in line, or if waiting in line is fun because you are with friends, it’s no big deal. But imagine you need that ice cream cone to survive, so you must wait in line for it every day.

This is what it is like to be a commuter in Los Angeles. Your roadway space is free, but because you need that space to get to work or school or wherever you have to be, you have no choice but to wait in line to use it. So, you listen to music, or books on tape, or call your mom as you sit in traffic. This is the life we have chosen for ourselves.

But what if our roads looked more like a Ben and Jerry’s the other 364 days of the year? What if we sold the product that is in high demand instead of giving it away for free? The result would be the same as with any other product—shorter lines (i.e., less traffic). The concept is known as congestion pricing and has been used for years in cities such as London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore. New York recently approved a similar concept.

Taken as a package, congestion pricing, in combination with improvements to our road network, would dramatically transform Los Angeles. Traffic would drop, pollution would drop, and the entire system would become far more equitable. The net cost of these changes would be zero, since congestion pricing revenues could likely pay for the improvements to biking, walking, and bus commuting—all of which cost much less than highway improvement and new rail projects.

So why do we insist on making every day free cone day?

Each of the above ideas faces serious obstacles. An exclusive bus lane or a new bike lane typically requires taking away a lane of existing traffic. The new lane could potentially move far more people far faster, and those people are likely to be predominantly low-income and minority. But drivers typically balk at giving up a lane—and take their concern directly to their elected officials.

Adding sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and bus shelters might seem relatively non-controversial, but many neighborhoods resist these as well on the grounds that they might slow traffic or “change the character” of a neighborhood, and they are typically not a budget priority. Reducing speed limits and enforcing them is not only unpopular, but also challenging due to state laws and limited resources.

But the largest problem is cultural. In the land of the freeway, what could be more controversial than charging people to drive?

Fortunately, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), is undertaking a traffic reduction study to examine how we might package together a combination of street improvements and congestion pricing for Los Angeles County.

Fun fact: we call them freeways because they’re supposed to be free flowing. The name has nothing to do with the cost, but rather with the operational intent. An intent we collectively have the power to fulfill.

LA Metro’s study is aiming to build support for a pilot program that could test the ideas above. Some lucky area—one with terrible traffic—will be a proving ground for whether they improve the health, safety, environment, and access for everyone equitably. If it works, perhaps more parts of L.A. will demand these changes, too. If it doesn’t, well, we can always go back to our traffic-choked ways.

Moving forward with congestion pricing, exclusive bus and bike lanes, better bus service, and other improvements will take greater political courage than we have seen in recent years. These changes inherently disrupt and expose the existing inequities in our society by improving services for non-drivers, who tend to be low-income and people of color, and asking drivers to pay their fair share. But isn’t this what most of our elected officials claim to stand for?

We already have the solutions to L.A.’s longstanding traffic, pollution and mobility inequities. Now we just have to decide whether to choose them.

The post How to Imagine a Los Angeles Without Traffic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This collective disdain, born of class warfare and the American obsession with cars, does buses a disservice. They’re democratic institutions, sight-seeing stalwarts, and the delivery system for poetry—both found and made. To ride one among neighbors, the stamp of your municipality affixed to its hide, is to bind the communal and the commuter. Of course, buses break down. Of course, they’re late. But it’s the gap between their purpose and their product, their design and their delivery, that tells the story, in miniature, of the U.S.’s efforts to fulfill its obligations to us all.

I’ve missed countless buses. More than a handful have missed me. I know the taste of exhaust, the bite of the rain. And yet I still swoon over the routes and the timetables, the stops and the seats, of my bus-riding life. My swoon grew only more swoony after a pandemic and a move reduced my ridership to near nil. Since 2016, I’ve lived in rural Indiana. There are no buses. And so I am nostalgic for a time when cosmopolitanism and contagion-free air were commonplace.

What do I love about buses? Repetition comes to mind. Eavesdropping too. I love watching the glass shelters of bus stops sail by like diving bells. I love knowing, by the sound of a speed bump or the scrape of a pendulous branch, how near I am to home. This reminds me of verse, which—formal or free—thrives on patterns. And it reminds me of the poetry of my fellow passengers: “Nope, you’re good,” a woman reassures a man, “we could eat off your face.” (Was his beard mangy? His brow stained?) Later, a few seats over, a daughter shares a cookie with her dad: “Daddy, don’t eat the crumbs!” (He stops.)

Such found poetry flourishes just below a published kind: those colorful signs, linked up like train carriages, that line a bus’s interior. They usually advertise bail bondsmen or prohibit loud music. Their language is boilerplate or cant. At least it was until, 30 years ago this year, the Poetry Society of America and New York City collaborated on a series of poems that went—in a spatial sense only—right over our heads. They called it Poetry in Motion, and it recast the poem, that most highbrow of literary artifacts, as a public good.

That project spawned other projects in other cities. All offer a respite from the hectoring advertisement or the moralizing drone of the PSA. In the era before smart phones, the bus poem gave us a little entertainment. Now, it releases us from our screens.

What was the first Poem in Motion? Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” It’s there that the poet declares, to riders of ferryboats past, present, and future, that he too “was one of a crowd.” It’s a democratic statement, and democracy, to my mind, is what makes poetry and buses so symbiotic. Metaphor is an equal sign, a union, a democracy of the world’s disparate parts. Poetry thrives on it, and short poems rely on it more. Here’s the most famous Anglophone poem about public transportation, as it first appeared in 1913, by Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Metaphor makes dissimilar things seem suddenly, surprisingly alike. These ghostly faces, for instance, and “[p]etals on a wet, black bough.” In Pound’s poem, the colon unites these opposites. Among American democracy’s disparate elements, it’s the franchise, the social contract, and—I like to think—public transportation. Is it any wonder that the literary critic I.A. Richards named the second half of any metaphor, the imagined part (here, “petals”), the vehicle? It’s where the imagination goes.

In America, Whitman saw this link first. Plenty have seen it since. The rush hour crowd is a stand-in for the demos. The confines of the carriage are a metaphor for the country. Poems about public transportation are always already poems about ourselves. “[M]ingled / black and white / so near / no room for fear,” Langston Hughes writes in “Subway Rush Hour.” Where urban density meets urban diversity, Hughes argues, racial acceptance stands a chance.

In “Flat American Waltz,” a double sonnet that replicates, in its elaborate, circuitous syntax, an urban bus route, Kevin González reminds us that bus riders enter an American experiment that’s still hurtling forward, herky-jerky and unsure. “Let’s all believe,” he writes, “in the place, / these hard plastic seats are taking us.”

That’s harder to do these days, what with the republic in peril, and I wonder if my nostalgia for buses isn’t just a nostalgia for better times. From 2008 to 2016, I lived in cities and rode buses all the time. Violent insurrections felt foreign and a skinny Black guy from Chicago was president, buoyed by a coalition—people of color, white liberals, urbanites—that looked a lot like my fellow bus riders.

That’s when my belief in ex omnibus unum—what I’ve come to call this rumbling urge, this latter-day hope, that public transit can rejuvenate public life—was born. But ours is an era of the MAGA caravan and the Google bus, the Uber infiltration and the airplane mask fight. Today I wonder if we can pull the stop cord on our current predicament, hop off, and walk home. The trouble, of course, is that we’re already there.

But I wallow. I detour. At such moments, when I get lost in the now, I remind myself that any good poem exists in the now and the after. I think of Allen Ginsberg’s “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound,” a poem in which the poet—depressed, working as a luggage clerk—“realized shuddering / these thoughts were not eternity.” Or I consider the school bus, which is, for so many, the first taste of shared transit. All across America, school buses are pressing a connection between jostling rides and dense reads into the hot pleather seats of kids’ minds.

Or I rewatch Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, a movie that taught me how riding a bus is like reading a poem. Both take you, once you’re on board, wherever they go. And the poet, like the driver, played here deftly by Adam Driver, leads you around its turns. And Driver here is both a poet and a driver; he writes poems at lunch. And the word “verse” comes to us from the Latin versus, “a “turn of the plow.” Every stop is a stanza break. Every segment shows you a little more of your world.

That movie helps me to remember that I’ve lived a privileged life, a life where the bus is a study not a slog, while Michael Spence drove a Seattle bus for 30 years, then documented his experience in The Bus Driver’s Threnody. Or I’ll reread Terrance Hayes’s “Woofer (When I Consider the African-American).” It begins when the poet forgets his “father’s warning about meeting women / at bus stops” and ends, well… I’ll let you read the poem.

Poetry lifts us and persists past us. It time travels. It makes you miss your stop. And when the era seems hellbent on collision, and you’re forced to watch it, bracing for an impact that you cannot avert, poetry reminds you that others lived through worse. “I am with you,” Walt Whitman writes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “[j]ust as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt.” This from a guy who survived a Civil War. Who saw the limbs piled high.

But it’s not Whitman that I’d choose for a seatmate on a long bus ride. No, that’d be Elizabeth Bishop, whose shoulder I’d look over, sharing her prismatically sure vision of the world.

Take “The Moose,” the poem where she and a busload of passengers spot the eponymous beast in the middle of the road. The driver stops. No one moves. “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” she writes, as the moose loiters, majestically unaware. Because we’re in this together. Because we’ll soon be moving on.

The post Ode to the American Bus appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

“We’re finding more and more people moving into Los Angeles who are earning high salaries and they’re gentrifying neighborhoods and driving people who are of lower income out of the city, and out of the county for that matter. It’s a fact and it’s happening, and it’s one of the great challenges that we have. So nothing ever stands still and things are changing,” Yaroslavsky told a full house at Cross Campus in downtown Los Angeles. They had gathered to hear the former Los Angeles County Supervisor reflect on Los Angeles’ past and present.

During the wide-ranging conversation, which touched on housing, homelessness, and public transportation, Yaroslavsky took time to look backward. “When I entered the city council, there were five Republicans on the city council and two Democrats who voted like Republicans, and it [was a] different ballgame then. I don’t want to say it was better, but first of all, we had debates on the council. We actually had divided votes.”

Speaking of the Los Angeles City Council of the last 25 years, Yaroslavsky called its decisions “basically consensus.” “And it can be consensus,” he said, “because it’s almost like a one-party state. In those days, everybody was different.”

The evening’s conversation, titled “How Can L.A. Use Its Past to Build a Brighter Future?,” was moderated by Zócalo’s Joe Mathews, who asked Yaroslavsky what the politician would tell his 26-year-old self if he were running for city council for the first time today, instead of in 1975. “Would you tell him to run?” Mathews asked.

Yaroslavsky countered that his early ambition had been to be a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill. But when a window opened up to run for the council after Ed Edelman got elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, he threw his hat in the ring—supported by $1,000 loans from his mother-in-law and a few friends. “My wife and I talked about it, and she said, if you’re going to do it, now’s the time to do it. We don’t have any kids, you can take a leave of absence from your job, and then, when you lose, you can go back to work,” Yaroslavsky recalled.

At the time, he said, he had been admitted to business school. He applied for and was granted a deferment to delay his studies until after the election. That was the plan, at least. “Funny thing happened on my way to my MBA. I got elected,” he said.

Describing himself as the quintessential anti-establishment candidate—“my hair was not above my ears, my clothes were baggy, my car was smashed up”—he won. The climate was right. President Nixon had recently resigned from office, and Los Angeles was primed for change.

When Yaroslavsky was sworn in by Tom Bradley, he remembers the mayor saying: “You are now part of the establishment.” He pushed back. “I may be part of the establishment but the establishment is not part of me.”

Yaroslavsky turned to his favorite quote, by 19th-century British historian Lord Thomas Macaulay—“No man is fit to govern great societies who hesitates about disobliging the few who have access to him, for the sake of the many whom he will never see”—as his mandate. “That became, basically, not the Ten Commandments, it became the One Commandment. To me and my staff—and I had a great staff—we were always about the people we would never see. And that was about as anti-establishment as you can get.”

But, Mathews asked, could an outsider’s candidate like you get elected today? “You’d need richer friends, right?”

“Money is necessary, but it’s not sufficient, as we see every election,” Yaroslavsky said, pointing to politicians such as councilmember David Ryu, who represents Los Angeles’ Fourth District. “He’s a Korean American who won in a district that is close to 90 percent Anglo, [and he] represents Sherman Oaks, Sunset Plaza, Hancock Park. If he had asked me for my advice, I would have said probably not the district you’d want to run in. But he did. He snuck in in the runoff as I did when I first ran … I said knock on every door you can knock on and meet as many people as you can.” Ryu did that, Yaroslavsky said, “sometimes going to the same door twice, and he was able to win.”

Switching to housing and homelessness (an “easy, non-controversial topic,” Mathews joked), Mathews asked Yaroslavsky if he had any regrets about legislation such as Proposition U, a ballot initiative that he coauthored with councilmember Marvin Braude in 1986. Critics have declared the initiative, which aimed to limit commercial development as part of a backlash against the rise of massive buildings like the Beverly Center, the Westside Pavilion, and the Fujita Building, as one of the reasons Los Angeles has a housing shortage.

“Absolutely not,” Yaroslavsky said. “Prop U had absolutely nothing to do with residential housing,” he said. “The reason we put Prop U on the ballot, and the reason it resonated with the public and it passed with 70 percent of the vote in L.A., is not because of residential. It was because of commercial development.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, Yaroslavsky was asked about what to do when locals don’t want homeless people in their neighborhoods but are unwilling to build new housing—the so-called “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, phenomenon.

“From 2007 to the time I left office, we built nearly 1,000 housing units for homeless people, for chronically mentally ill homeless persons—and never had a NIMBY problem,” Yaroslavsky said. “Why? Because if you want to make a statement then you try to make a homeless housing project in Bel Air. Or a drug rehab facility in Bel Air. Then you’ll be in court for 10 years. If you want to solve the problem, you’ve got to be more intelligent about how you do it.” Instead, he worked with non-profits like Step Up on Second, on whose board he now sits, to buy motels and hotels and repurpose them as housing. In addition to being cost-effective, he says, “the great thing about motels is that they are in every community in Los Angeles.”

Repurposing these motels and hotels while working on longer-term solutions, he says, is the way forward “if we want to solve the problem and not make a statement.”

The post An Architect of L.A. Government Looks Forward and Back 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.

Jevons’ observations on coal also have something to say about the Oshiya (train pushers) who squeeze every last person onto subway cars in Tokyo, and about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent declaration of a transit emergency for New York’s famed subway system.

Jevons wrote that an increase in the efficiency of coal production would stimulate increased demand for coal. Jevons’ reasoning was that more efficient coal production would lead to lower prices. And Economics 101 tells us that lower prices lead to more consumption—perhaps, in this case, creating so much more demand that it would outstrip the capacity to produce coal.

In such a scenario, the production of coal might be increased to meet the heightened demand, but that would require marginal mines to be brought into operation. Given that these mines would be less efficient, prices necessarily would rise to cover the additional cost. Prices would not initially increase back to their old levels, but as the population grew it would generate additional demand for coal and such a rebound in prices might well occur.

These same insights about coal are applicable to mass transportation systems—particularly freeways. Last February, the Dutch firm TomTom, which produces traffic, navigation, and mapping products, drew on the brave new world of big data to release their 2016 index of traffic congestion. Our region, the Pacific Rim, was the clear “winner”—or, I should say, the clear loser. Seven of the top 10 congested cities are on the Pacific Rim and Los Angeles leads the list of American cities.

Anyone who travels the cities around the rim can attest to snarled traffic in Jakarta, Beijing, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The question “What are we going to do about traffic?” is a constant source of conversation, particularly here in L.A., and it is pervasive enough to have given rise to the parody “The Californians” on Saturday Night Live.

There would seem to be two ways to ease traffic congestion: build more capacity, or reduce the number of people who use the existing capacity. Yet, just as with Jevons’ coal demand, traffic seems to expand to meet whatever capacity exists. And this is not just a Los Angeles or Beijing problem. In 1990, British transportation analyst Martin Mogridge observed it as a more general characteristic of highways, and it is now enshrined in transportation planning circles as the “Lewis-Mogridge Position.”

Why is it that cities cannot build enough capacity to solve the problem? The answer may lie in two factors: the price of housing, and the pricing of congestion.

Let’s start with the price of housing. The purchase or rental price of a home reflects the sum value of many characteristics of that home. In this column, I have often written about how proximity to natural amenities, such as beaches and mountains, makes housing more expensive. But proximity to work also is an important consideration. The closer to work, the shorter the commute time, and the more valuable will be the home.

But it is commuting time and not linear distance that matters most. Consequently, when you increase the capacity of transportation infrastructure, you get shorter commute times—at least initially. And that makes homes close to the new infrastructure initially more attractive.

Intensifying congestion, however, will affect a home’s price. At 3 a.m., the opportunity cost of traveling the freeway to a destination is practically zero. It takes a little time, and that is a cost, but not much. But in rush hour when freeway speeds are slow, the opportunity cost increases with the additional time spent sitting in your car listening to The Grateful Dead on the radio. The more cars there are (higher demand), the more time is required to crawl through rush hour (the higher cost).

Here is where Jevons’ idea comes in. When there is not much congestion, one can live further away from work where home prices are lower, and still arrive at work on time without spending too much more time commuting. Consequently, building another lane on the freeway opens up more residential options.

So adding capacity makes two big things happen. First, there is an increased demand for the housing that is now within driving distance to work; and second, more people will use the freeways to get to work. This leads to more freeway congestion and ultimately longer commute times for everyone. Empirically we see this happening quite fast, and eventually the new lane has done nothing to ease congestion.

There are a number of solutions to this. One is to build mass transit and induce people to use it. This is the favored solution of urban planners today because mass transit is a more efficient means of transportation. It can carry many more people per dollar spent on building, maintaining, and operating the transit than the highways can.

But with mass transit, as with highways, the same principles of capacity and demand apply. When Japan began building the Tokaido Shinkansen (high-speed rail) in 1959, it was, in part, intended to ease the burden of commuting in densely packed Tokyo. Today, anyone who rides the rail line, especially in rush hour, knows what a sardine feels like when packed into a flat tin can. In this case the cost is not time, but the discomfort of cheek-to-jowl train ridership.

Another solution to the problem of increased capacity driving demand is to convert lanes on the freeways to toll lanes. This is a favorite of economists because people who value time more will pay a premium to avoid the costs of congestion. Consequently, the scarce resource—road space—will be rationed according to its relative value to consumers. Of course, it is not only the value of time that matters in the decision; income—the ability to pay tolls—does as well. Adding a toll lane allows rich people to drive fast and reduces the capacity on the freeway for everyone else. And that raises issues of equity for infrastructure built with tax dollars.

The other problem with toll lanes is that there is an alternative to either paying for the less congested toll lane, or driving in the now more congested free lanes: driving on surface streets. With navigation apps such as Waze, drivers can take the nearest off-ramp and motor through residential neighborhoods. When they do that, they expose residential neighborhoods to the congestion, noise, and pollution that the freeways were originally built to eliminate.

Moreover, a 2001 article by Ingo Hansen of Delft University of Technology suggests that transportation analysis of toll roads gets it all wrong. His research indicates that when fed-up freeway commuters start taking app-directed shortcuts through residential areas, the local roads quickly become clogged, hampering residents’ ability to make short trips or run errands. These residents are now competing with longer-distance drivers, and so they, too, pay a cost in congestion, safety, and pollution. Indeed, this Waze phenomenon induced L.A. City Councilman Paul Krekorian in 2015 to suggest new government regulations for local street usage.

So, toll roads don’t seem to be a complete answer either. Recognizing this, Mexico City, Beijing, and other cities have followed the example of Julius Caesar, who in 1st Century BCE Rome banned chariots from the center city during the day, except for two hours in the morning and two hours in the late afternoon. Romans responded by moving their trips to the allowable four hours each day—thereby creating epic chariot jams.

Today Singapore uses a combination of policies to limit the number of cars on the roads. First there is a quota system that limits the number of cars on the island. Second, those who have cars are charged for driving them through a sophisticated system that measures where they are and when they are driving. This system will be improved shortly with the installation of GPS monitors in each car.

These are useful alternatives. But let’s remember our friend Jevons. Policies to limit traffic might not do much, even with the best of planning, so long as the city we live in is attractive to a lot of people. An oft-heard refrain about my hometown is: “I would love to live in L.A. but couldn’t stand the traffic.” If you make traffic better, more people would move here, and traffic would get worse. Congestion costs ration limited space and this reduces the number of people moving in.

All we can do for now is stay ahead of the game in the best way possible. Provide incentives for people to use the least-used modes of transportation and plan for the increases in population that will invariably happen to cities that are attractive to people from far-flung lands. Perhaps the advent of self-driving autos will provide the bandwidth to break the traffic jam for good, but perhaps not. What will be required is to engage transportation planning with housing planning in a way that recognizes the close tie between the cost of congestion and the price of housing.

On the bright side, if you are late for something in one of the Pacific Rim’s notoriously congested cities, simply saying “Sorry, traffic!” is sufficient to get you by.

The post Why Building More Freeways Makes Traffic Worse, Not Better appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m a regular rider of “The Brain Train,” officially known as the Gold Line on the L.A. Metro system. The Gold Line is a light rail running from the eastern San Gabriel Valley into downtown L.A. and then back out again to East L.A. Along the way, it connects enough smart institutions—from innovative community colleges, to a leading cancer center, to the world’s greatest scientific university—to explode stereotypes about public transportation and Southern California itself.

Yes, other parts of California may claim brainier trains: The Caltrain commuter rail runs the Silicon Valley from San Francisco to Stanford to San Jose; San Diego is in the process of extending its trolley to UCSD; and Sonoma and Marin Counties are about to inaugurate the SMART train (although that’s an acronym, not a judgment of the intelligence of a delay-plagued project).

But for Los Angeles County—where we’re known for our good looks but not for our brains or public transportation—the Gold Line is a revelation. And over the next several years, the line will be extended at both ends in ways that could make it a candidate for the title (with apologies to the Red Line connecting Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.) of “the best educated rail line in the country.”

Even today, you can reach a startling diversity of intellectual institutions on the line. Starting at the Brain Train’s current eastern terminus on Atlantic Avenue, you’ll be within walking distance of East Los Angeles College. Get on the train there, and you can stop for a drink at Eastside Luv (a Boyle Heights hotspot offering art, music, and poetry) and then take the line downtown, where you’ll pass by the Japanese American National Museum and SCI-Arc, one of the world’s leading architectural schools. North of downtown, the Southwest Museum, a library and archive devoted to Native American history and artifacts, is at the Mount Washington Station. And if you disembark at Highland Park, you can ride your bike to Occidental, the elite private college that is one of President Obama’s alma maters.

When the train enters Pasadena, it goes right through the south campus of ArtCenter College of Design, a globally distinguished school, and later stops at Memorial Park, a block from the headquarters of Parsons, the leading engineering firm. Then the Gold Line turns east, with stops that are a walk to innovative Pasadena City College (among the best in the state at transferring students to four-year institutions) and a short bike ride to that wonder of science, Caltech, where planets are discovered and Nobels are won.

The Gold Line also connects the neighborhood where the Caltech-affiliated characters in the longstanding CBS sitcom hit, Big Bang Theory, live. (I have a question for the screenwriters: Why doesn’t Jim Parsons’ character, Sheldon, ever take the Brain Train?)

Further east, the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte has its own stop on the Brain Train. And for now, the Gold Line ends at two higher education institutions: Citrus College, which the Brookings Institution has called one of the top 10 community colleges in the United States, and Azusa Pacific, a major Christian university. But plans are already underway to take the Gold Line further east, with a stop near the University of La Verne before eventually reaching the Claremont Colleges, the seven-school consortium.

The Brain Train’s educational resume runs beyond universities. The line runs right through two of the state’s top school districts—Arcadia and South Pasadena—and connects easily through bus transfers to two others, San Marino and La Cañada. The Gold Line also offers thought-provoking views of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains and of Mt. Wilson Observatory, once essential to the study of astronomy.

But do all the nerds along the line ride the train? No, but many cost-conscious ones do. The 31-mile-long Brain Train costs just $1.75 per boarding, and transfers to other lines are free. While ridership is flat overall on Metro, ridership has been growing on the Brain Train, which registered an all-time high for weekday boardings (more than 53,000) in June.

I’m often struck by the nerdiness of my fellow passengers. The Brain Train offers a smooth, quiet, and comfortable ride, and so it’s one of the rare public spaces where you’ll see people reading actual books. On recent rides, I encountered Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846-1873, two volumes of the late Richard Feynman’s legendary lectures on physics, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and Salvador Dali’s cookbook, Les diners de Gala.

The Brain Train is likely to get brainier, particularly if the transit connection ends up encouraging more cross-enrollment in classes for students or research collaboration between faculty at Gold Line-adjacent institutions. Schools along the line are already encouraging their students and staff to use it. At a public event late last year, a Citrus College administrator argued that the Gold Line is making it easier for students to reach the campus and complete their degrees, and the CEO of the Claremont Colleges said it would make field research by students and faculty much easier.

There also are efforts by educational institutions to enhance the Gold Line corridor. Most notably, ArtCenter, in Pasadena, is preparing a 15-year master plan that would launch a new bikeway near the Gold Line and build new student housing with green public spaces—Quads—that would be directly over the rail line, linking buildings on either side.

The Gold Line is “our extended classroom,” said Art Center’s associate vice president Rollin Homer at the 2016 public event. “We’re embracing it—we’re going to live and create alongside it.”

The Brain Train is still an urban rail line with typical problems. (I encountered a pile of human excrement on a seat on one morning, and recently assisted a half dozen fellow passengers in subduing an intoxicated rider.) But as someone who grew up in Pasadena before the line arrived in 2003, and now lives four blocks from a stop, I love the way the Gold Line connects me to familiar places in new ways.

The Brain Train, in other words, can really make you think.

The post L.A.’s Revelatory Light Rail for Nerds appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.