Dept. of What I’d Like to Write:
After three days of hanging out at the J.W. Marriott at the annual meeting of the American Public Transportation Assn., I’m back in my cage/cubicle. I wish I could remember more of the past three days, but those APTA guys — man do they know how to hit a convention hard. The bus guys from Steubenville…I’m not even going to say what we did after hours at the Zoo with a TAP card, elephant and case of Iron City, but that was definitely one of the best nights of my life. You go, Steubies!
Dept. of What I Will Write:
Thank you to the American Public Transportation Assn. for bringing the annual meeting to Los Angeles. We hope that everyone had a great and informative time here. The panel discussions were honest, frank and the exchange of ideas addressed many of our industry’s most pressing challenges. Bringing mobility to the lives of Americans — especially those without choices — is a noble deed and it was great to see so many people taking that task so seriously.
Art of Transit:
Another attempt at capturing the many construction cranes over DTLA these days. Photo by Steve Hymon.
Note: This post is a little bit of a work-in-progress. There has been a lot of transpo stuff spinning around my head this year and this is an attempt to organize my thoughts and try to explain mobility issues.
Can L.A. get 100,000 cars off the road in five years? (Curbed LA)
A nonprofit group released a plan on Wednesday, holding a presser at the aforementioned APTA conference. Even though this was an advocacy group’s plan and not an official Government Thing, city and Metro officials participated and generally expressed support for the region having more transit, Zipcars, cheap taxis* and bike sharing — all things that sound peachydandy to me.
As for the event/panel discussion, it felt to me like a bit of an exercise in transportation buzzwording. But then LAT transpo scribe Laura Nelson asked a question: what’s the baseline? In other words, how does this group intend to measure success? No great answer was forthcoming, perhaps because it was a good, tough question.
In my notes, I typed “where’s the goal line?” Meaning….what are we really after here? Fewer cars in L.A. County? Less traffic congestion? A complete land-use makeover? (I’m pitching that to HGTV, btw).
Delving into the Shared Use Mobility Center’s report, it seems like the baseline might be the number of registered vehicles in the city of L.A., which is almost 2.1 million. But let’s think bigger. Because Metro is a county agency, let’s consider that L.A. County has nearly 6.3 million autos, 7.8 million vehicles and about 10.1 million people.
As baselines go, the number of vehicles isn’t bad. But I’m hesitant to call it good. L.A. — like many big metro areas — has had hair-raising traffic for decades, even in days of yore when there were millions fewer cars and people. So there’s that.
A lot of cars don’t spend much time on roads in our area, and a lot of cars travel into/through L.A. County from elsewhere. Emissions don’t stick to boundaries. Both the city and county of Los Angeles are so large, I wonder if we would really notice the difference if 100K cars suddenly went poof.
By coincidence another set of numbers burped forth today: the Census Bureau’s year-by-year commuting breakdown. Guess who posted them?
With the caveat that 1-year data sets have higher margins of error… take a peek at the new census commuting data: pic.twitter.com/QCBWNwUL8f
— Laura J. Nelson (@laura_nelson) September 15, 2016
Another trio of tweets worth mulling:
Drive alone shares at the metropolitan level also are down in most large MSAs. pic.twitter.com/znWke445sc
— Yonah Freemark (@yfreemark) September 15, 2016
Looking at share of workers driving alone to work, you get larger view. Here, trend toward bike, walk, home clearer pic.twitter.com/46iNt57tjY
— Yonah Freemark (@yfreemark) September 15, 2016
In other words: there is no national trend toward transit use. Some cities are attracting more transit riders, some aren’t. Depends on place
— Yonah Freemark (@yfreemark) September 15, 2016
There are some margin of error issues with the numbers, as Laura noted in another tweet. But I think they basically capture what’s happening: in our region, the old commuting patterns — which center around an extremely large road network — are proving very tough to break.
Which leads back to the question posed above: what is success here? Is it removing X amount of cars from the road? Is it perpetual free-flowing traffic? Meeting federal air pollution standards every day of the year? Is it sky-high transit ridership? What is it? What are we after here people? When are we done doing what we’re doing?
In that spirit, I summoned Comrade Joe Lemon over to my cubicle and asked him what he thought about hatcheting 100K cars from local roads.
“This is urban planning 101,” Joe said. “These solutions really only tackle the top layer of a much deeper issue. If you really want to gain ground against car traffic — assuming that’s the enemy — then you need to look at how the city was developed and will be developed. And that’s not only politically difficult, but the rabbit is kind of out of the hat in terms of the built landscape, at least on a countywide scale.”
Not bad for a Buffalo Bills fan suffering pre-game anxiety.
But it still didn’t feel like we had answered the question. So we did what all Great Thinkers do when faced with a difficult problem. We started writing bullet points:
•We think giving people a real transit network on par with the road network for private cars is probably the most important of the non-driving options in terms of giving people an alternative to driving. Metro does have a sales tax ballot measure going to voters this fall that would accelerate and add transit projects to what’s already planned under Measure R. Please study the plan before casting your ballot.
•We think all the above statistics all have merit but the stats that we think might be the best guideposts for mobility in our region: transit ridership (with the understanding to some degree it waxes and wanes, like many other things in life), the percentage of commuters who take transit, the ratio of residents to cars, new car sales, the percentage of electric cars on the road, the percentage of commutes under one hour and the county’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.
•We really do like the mobility that cheap taxis provide — especially for seniors and those who go car-free or car-lite — but we don’t see Uber, Lyft & their bretheren as traffic killers.
•We think that people despising traffic does not equal people despising their cars. In many places across Planet Earth –including here — when people get money they buy a car. Many people like having a car. Many people like living in places they can have a car. It would take considerable social engineering, we think, to eliminate that desire. And the political capital may better be spent elsewhere (like building more transit and protected bike lanes, for example).
So we’re back to the whole question about measuring success. I wonder if the answer is not a single statistic but a sentiment. What if I asked you this: do you have enough freedom and transpo options to go where you need to go in our county without too much hassle and expense?
On the day a vast majority of you say “yeah,” well maybe that’s success.
*The term “ride hailing” has been banned from HWR mostly because I was hailing rides with my arm a good 15 years before anyone uttered the phrase “iPhone.”
