The Expo Line’s opening marks the end not only of UCLA’s transit isolation from the rest of the city, but of LA’s era of being made to put up with transit half-measures. The Expo Line is completed, the Purple’s heading westward, the Green’s being finished, and the Orange’s planned for conversion. LA still remains decades behind on rail development, the Blue opening only in 1990. The thousands riding the Expo will have no idea that there had ever been opposition from Cheviot Hills or Santa Monica. With transit held back for so long by militant and well-funded anti-rail pressure, the only alternative allowed was buses – but those have proven to be no substitute, and in fact have badly distorted transit operations, blocking fast and high-yield modes of transit from where they’re needed most.
I’ve been commuting to UCLA on the 720 weekly since 2009: I’ve experienced every mode of transit in the county, surviving only by becoming a transit wonk. With the Purple blocked – mainly by Beverly Hills, the worst of the anti-rail neighborhoods, even to the point of producing videos – Metro made the Wilshire corridor its top priority for the interim: they’ve even synchronized traffic lights and added signal priority to the Rapid buses – the same system used by emergency vehicles. And it’s the same limping slog through Wilshire’s stem-to-stern parking lot. In 2010, 2013 and 2015 Metro introduced and extended lanes restricted to buses, with exceptions for cars turning right. Therefore the “bus” lanes are perpetually full of cars either merging left into packed lanes or waiting for the crosswalk to clear, leaving them as crowded as the neighboring lanes. Buses are as reliable as the traffic they’re stuck in – and almost twice as slow. The Wilshire Rapid typically times in at 8-9 mph east of Santa Monica (while the Expo maxes out at 64 mph).
Bus is no substitute for rail simply due to speed and unit density: one tram or subway car every five minutes can hold far more people than a double-jointed bus every two minutes, and with a far smaller physical footprint. Transit costs are proportionate to their capacity: you get what you pay for, as the saying goes, so cheaper doesn’t mean more cost-effective. At the stub-end of the Purple Line, a hundred or so riders pile out the stations every five minutes and try to pack themselves onto Rapid buses that come every four to five minutes. Empty buses have to be injected at each stop to keep the people boarding and you still can’t see out the windows given all the passengers. Bus lanes are no savior for LA transit, no more than widening the 405 was – in fact they contribute to the congestion.
Proper Bus Rapid Transit eliminates all the problems on Wilshire or Sunset: the Orange Line is fast, reliable, and convenient – so it quickly hit capacity and will now have to be tracked, costing the Valley time and money that could’ve been saved in the first place. BRT is always advertised as a fraction of rail’s price, but it quickly incurs more than the full cost with its very success at attracting riders. The Green, too, is costing much more inflation-adjusted to complete than it would have in 1995. Going with the initially-cheaper option drives up the final bill – but this suits LA’s rail opponents.
With transit measures surreally failing with 66.11 percent of the vote, the proposed solution to the transit drought has long been bus expansion, even if at rail’s expense – small bus-only forces were even given a 10-year consent decree over the county. Metro now operates the country’s second-largest city fleet, at 2,959 vehicles: this is 41 percent more than in 2001, but only produced a ridership doomed to contract much harder than rail’s is. There are 20 Rapid routes and 29 24-hour routes, joined by 21 other transit agencies which run 2,000 additional buses in the county alone – hardly struggling in need of any extra cash. Anti-rail activism works by posing bus and rail as rivals, directly producing today’s severely distorted and unworkable transit system: it argues simultaneously that rail is too fast or slow, too expensive or cheap, too crowded or empty, its riders too rich or poor.
LA’s sad state of overall transit is because rail’s been held up, not because we aren’t spending enough on the roads. We’ve been stuck with a century of road spending, decades without any rail whatsoever, and incomplete lines: it’s a shock to me as a bus rider to say there’s even such a thing as Big Passenger Rail or to suggest that 35 percent of the R2 money for rail is some staggering excess that has to be cut back. Steel-on-steel isn’t sucking the air out of all the other alternatives – there’s only so much you can even spend on bus and bike lanes and pedestrianization projects. A world-class city needs a world-class transit system: the buses got one, now we have to catch up on rail.
Daniel Beckman is a 7th year Latin American history graduate student.