Why We’re Screwed on Global Warming: Reason No. 5726

An anecdote from the trenches…

In my day job, I work as an environmental and transportation advocate for low-income people in Los Angeles. Recently, I was fairly stunned by a meeting I attended organized by local environmental groups to discuss the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP). The “bottom line” in the LTRP can be found at page 53, wherein it is stated that if all goes as planned, L.A. will spend tens of billions of dollars on transportation improvements over the next twenty-plus years, only to see surface transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in L.A. County will rise from 72,670 metric tons per day as of 2004 to 98,900 metric tons per day in 2030. According to the MTA's own numbers, that total represents a less than 1% reduction as against what would would happen if we did absolutely nothing.

What you might find even more amazing is that this plan will likely enjoy the support of the so-called “environmental” community here in Los Angeles, because it includes a plethora of long-sought after multi-billion-dollar rail projects. See, an unholy alliance between MTA planners, rail advocates and housing developers (hereinafter collectively referred to as “rail fetishists”) have framed the debate about public transit in LA as exclusively about whether or not we could find the funds to build this or that billion-or multi-billion dollar rail project, while any further expansion or improvement of bus services are quickly dismissed as not financially feasible, even though improving basic bus service has shown itself to be the most cost-effective way to improve public transit ridership in Los Angeles and other similarly laid out cities around the country and the world. Many of these same groups supported, or at least failed to oppose, a draconian fare increase proposal last spring.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love riding trains. I happen to own a home within walking distance of new rail line currently under construction. I went to planning school at Berkeley and recognize that every mode of transportation has a place within a well-functioning transportation system. But at the same time, there are few things in life that I find more disturbing than watching a “snow job,” i.e. a presentation of opinion masquerading as fact. And that’s exactly what happened at this meeting. The fact that rail fetishists such as MTA and the Transit Coalition would present the debate on transit in LA in such a fashion is not particularly newsworthy. What I find particularly disturbing was the presentation of such as the perspective of the environmental community.

I’m not sure how this is all going to shake out, but from my perspective, the MTA’s LRTP by its own terms does almost nothing to address the environmental challenges that we face here in Los Angeles. They are projecting that twenty years from now, the mode share between private automobiles and alternative modes will be exactly the same as it is now and that emissions will be reduced by less than 1% not from where they are now, but from the increase that they project to occur were we to do nothing. These numbers utterly fail to fulfill LA County’s responsibilities in terms of global climate change pursuant to a landmark anti-global warming law (AB 32) signed by Governor Schwartzenegger last year.

When pressed on this point, the MTA called on the environmental community to help them to magically bring about some kind of “behavior modification” whereby people would become so guilt-ridden about their emissions-spewing ways that they would just stop driving so much.

I asked a question during the meeting about why an expansion of the very popular and cost-effective “Rapid Bus” program was not in the plans. FYI, “Rapid Bus” is a program of introducing greatly improved service on heavily used transit lines in Los Angeles that has lured thousands of new riders with very modest investments (essentially the cost of additional buses at approximately $500,000 each), while simultaneously vastly improving mobility for the transit-dependent. The answer was very revealing, I thought: in the bizarro world of MTA, the Rapid Bus lines are a problem because they tend to stimulate ridership. Yes, you read that correctly. The MTA had hoped that the Rapid Buses would be revenue-neutral because the faster service would require fewer buses to move the same number of people. In fact, however, because the reduced travel times led to increased ridership, they have not seen the cost savings they were hoping for.

So, here we have MTA planning to spend tens of billions on wonderful new rail lines that are not projected to result in a shift in mode share or significant reduction in pollution, while leaving it up to divine intervention to somehow get people out of their cars. At the same time, simple and inexpensive improvements in bus service with proven effectiveness at luring people onto transit are casually dismissed as infeasible due to the financial effects of that increased ridership. And this is something that the environmental community appears ready to get behind? My head was spinning, indeed.

Thankfully, the LA Times published an article on Thursday morning that reassured me that I am not bat-shit crazy. The Column One article for that day’s paper entitled “London’s levy for sins of emission,” detailed the measures being taken by that city to effect the kind of “behavior modification” that we can apparently do nothing more than pray for here in Los Angeles. The solution there is exceeding simple: charge people who drive (upwards of $50 a day under the latest proposal) and apply the proceeds toward improved bus service: “Much of the $252 million a year raised under the existing congestion management charge has been poured into the city’s bus system, which has undergone a remarkable transformation and now offers citizens clean, reliable and frequent transit alternatives.”

So there you have it, all ye rail fetishists! Even a city that boasts one of the world’s best rail systems, when pressed to actually reduce pollution and congestion, has devoted the lion’s share of new transit resources to building a better bus system! No longer must we gaze in envy at Europe or the East Coast, or even our lovely City by the Bay to the north, wishing that if only we had a decent rail system, then maybe we could do something about getting people out of their cars. No, we can do something right now, and it’s very simple: adequately fund the damn buses!

I suppose, maybe my personal perspective grows out of my own personal experience with Metro Line 212/312. The “212” is essentially the La Brea Avenue bus. I live near the corner of Rodeo and La Brea, so I take it a lot. It’s a pretty great bus line actually, in terms of where you can go. It connects Hollywood and Inglewood, and travels through quite a few densely-populated and very walkable communities along the way. It also crosses paths with a lot of the major East-West bus lines in the city and it even connects with the Red Line, the Green Line, and soon, the Expo Line as well. You can take care of business in downtown Inglewood’s civic center, party in Hollywood, shop in the Fairfax district, recreate at Rancho La Cienega, and so much more, all within mere steps of Line 212 bus steps.

I’m not the only person enamored with the 212 -- it’s very popular. The 212, however, is a local bus and thus stops at every other corner. The 312 is supposedly a “limited” but I’ve seen a 212 beat a 312 plenty of times, so I have no idea what the limited designation really stands for. One could say that it’s limited in the sense that it won’t stop for you if it’s already full, but that is the case with the 212 as well. And this is what happens all day every day on this line: the bus gets even fuller than it’s usual sardine can-like state, and the bus driver has no choice but to drive right past stops crowded with riders.

All day every day there is a battle between the bus driver and the passengers, with the bus driver urging the passengers to “move back,” and the passengers trying to not get crammed too deep into the rear of the bus. My natural inclination to give up my seat to elderly passengers or those with young children in tow is rendered quite meaningless when at any given time there are twenty such passengers standing on the bus.

But according to the current MTA LTRP, when I walk out of my house in 2025, I can expect to be dealing with the exact same bus service, local or “limited” only, except that I can also expect that the car traffic with which the bus must compete for road space will have gotten progressively worse, and thus my ride will likely be even slower and more crowded than it is now. There are no plans in the medium- or long-distance for a Rapid Bus on La Brea. If I’m “lucky”, I might get an articulated bus, running at decreased intervals. What a lovely vision of the future indeed!

So it kind of rubs me the wrong way when I hear mainstream environmentalists and MTA staffers baying on about what kinds of magic words need be spoken in order to finally guilt people into leaving their cars at home. That’s not the problem right now on Line 212, nor is it the problem on hundreds of other bus lines across LA County. Nor is it the problem, by the MTA’s own admission, on those bus lines that have gone “Rapid.”

There’s no magic to getting people out of their cars in Los Angeles, or lots of other places for that matter. The solution has already been proven. Better bus service equals more ridership. In a sane world, increased ridership would lead to more frequency. More frequency leads to a further increase in ridership and so on and so forth. And this is not even to get into the proven effect that radical fare reductions have also had on ridership in Los Angeles (see the 1980’s three-year experiment with 50 cent fares that was used to sell one of the half-cent sales tax that we’re now so thankful for).

I do understand the environmental concern about emissions from our naturally gas-fueled buses, which, while significantly better than diesel, are not perfect. To this I would say two things. First, it seems clear that the technology for zero-emission buses is close at hand. Hydrogen fuel buses are on the roads today, as are all-electric ones. With the automobile industry seemingly on the brink of a major shift toward hybrids, this technology can only get even better, cheaper, and more effective within the 20-year planning horizon of the LTRP. Secondly, rail has its own significant environmental costs as well. Aside from the fact that we’re still getting 80-90% of our electricity from non-renewable sources, there’s also the environmental destruction that comes with the construction process itself. Trees and vegetation must be cleared, houses and businesses too at times. Millions of tons of concrete are poured and even more steel is riveted into place, all of which in the long-term will end up as pollution somewhere.

There’s also the growth-stimulating effect of the lines themselves, which actually goes to the central point around which this whole global warming debate really revolves: growth vs. sustainability. I see this all over the place in my work – planners treat growth as an inevitability, and they then work to accommodate it. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, as we in fact not only accommodate growth, but also enable it. Rail seems at first glance to be an environmentally friendly alternative, and compared to new or expanded highways, it is (though there’s plenty of those in the MTA plan as well). But in actually, rail grows out of the same paradigm of accommodating growth, only with recognition that as the city urbanizes, there is just not enough space to accommodate growth by building highways.

There is an immediately poignancy to all of this long-range planning because transit advocates in Los Angeles are right now organizing to place an initiative on the November ballot for a new tax or fee for transit, the money from which would dedicated to implementing the LTRP. As things now stand, I’m not sure that I would support such a tax. The fact is that Los Angeles County has been collecting similar taxes for the past twenty-plus years, and yet, year after year, the situation gets worse. The roads are more congestion, the buses more crowded, the air smoggier (with any improvements in air quality coming not from reduced traffic flow, but instead for better technology) and the trains are just never going to do a particularly great job of covering our 400 square mile wide metropolitan area.

The MTA’s main objection to expanded bus service seems to be that it’s too operationally expensive, and that most new money (federal and state) is for capital projects, not operations. If the problem in our transit system is that we don’t have enough money to operate more buses, then why not dedicate the new money to that? If the new money is going to do nothing other than implement the MTA LTRP, as currently constituted, what are we really offering to the voters of Los Angeles? Doing our part to combat global warming? No, not when the plan contemplates a huge increase in emissions in the County, even given full implementation. Reducing congestion? Not in the cards under the current plan either.

My alternative would be to come up with something that, if it goes as planned, will actually solve the problem by providing an inexpensive, efficient, clean-air transit system that can take riders anywhere they want to go in the County in a reasonable amount of time? I believe that such a system could be implemented for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time of the proposed expansions of the rail network. With the same money, we could reduce fares, bring top-level Rapid bus service to every major street in LA County, and phase in a new clean fleet of buses running purely on electricity or hydrogen. Add in some additional freeway express buses and local circulators, along with a greatly improved pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and I think we’d be in business. If a radically progressive federal government ever comes into being, maybe they would allocate the tens of billions that it would take to build out our rail network.

For those of you who are in the LA area and want to comment on the draft LRTP, go here.