I grew up and lived in LA for most of my life, however grad school took me out to NYC. Which in a lot of ways have given me a certain amount of perspective on how vastly different the cities operate and the effects of public transit.
In NYC you have a very small land area that is extremely dense population wise. LA is as we know spread out and diffuse and sprawling with many different neighborhoods and cities that are encompassed by LA county and neighboring counties. Therefore you end up with two major problems with mass transit, the first being decentralization of the population that needs to be serviced which often requires traversing longer distances than cities with large mass transit systems. The second problem is how to effectively plan and build transit lines to service all these areas effectively and equally. NYC may not have such a large issue with population decentralization but they definitely still deal heavily with the issue of effective planning and location of transit lines. They essentially have done very little to address the push of people having to leave Manhattan due to rent prices, to the outer boroughs. They have essentially done nothing or very little to address this problem which makes commuting a nightmare for a large amount of people with commutes taking as long as or worse than LA gridlock. This is because the system is completely Manhattan centric and does not effectively allow for transportation between the boroughs coupled with less service.
I see this same problem for when I used to ride the Metrolink in LA. The time between trains was ridiculous, miss one train (oh and they used to leave early often times) and your waiting 20-40 minutes. There is no margin for error. At least most of the time in NYC they run enough trains to actually make it feasible to catch the next one. However, LA may fall into the same trap as NYC with becoming downtown centric or limiting service only to specific select areas and completely disenfranchising areas. However can this be avoided with the current structure of LA?
Another aspect is once you get off the train, how fast or how hard is it to get to your destination. When I was taking the Metrolink, my destination was anywhere from 20-30 minutes by bus from the train stop versus a 5-minute car ride. This is yet another deterrent and problem with the train system that being the low number of stations along the lines and infrequent and slow bus service to pick up where the trains leave off.
Lastly in regards to fare prices, I saw the rate hiked during the course of my riding the Metrolink without absolutely any change in service at all save for the impact it was having on my wallet. Yes there is needed more funding needed but if it is not spent to improve the overall infrastructure it will ultimately be a band aid over a wound that needs surgery stat. There needs to be broad and coordinated restructuring and re-evaluation of the transit systems of LA. Those are my thoughts.
You can read the original article here at the LA Times
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)