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IN DEFENSE OF RAIL - Los Angeles has been building some badly needed rail in the last few years, but now it looks like an odd coalition is going to put a stop to it.
You might remember the story of the movie, "Who Killed Roger Rabbit" a wonderful film about the really evil shenanigans used to kill rail and replace it with the car culture in Los Angeles in the '50s. Rail transit, in the form of the old Red Car system, was responsible for shaping Los Angeles. It made the city work. In the 1930s you could go from sweltering Pasadena to the cool seaside of Venice in about half an hour; today, on the freeway system, the same trip can take twice as long. But in the 1950s, the powers that be -- basically General Motors, Firestone Tires and Standard Oil -- decided to make some changes. So they formed private trusts that bought up trolley lines and replaced them with buses built by General Motors, running on Firestone tires and fueled by Standard Oil products.
The whole thing was well documented by a Senate Committee, but that didn't stop it from happening.
Oddly enough, the forces that traditionally opposed the investment that's been made in rail in Los Angeles, have now been joined by people who call themselves political progressives. Led by Eric Mann, a college student turned community organizer who formed something called the Bus Riders Union, writers with alleged left-wing credentials such as Mike Davis and other L.A. Weekly writers as well as the politician Tom Hayden, joined the pro-gas and oil and auto lobby in maintaining the status quo. They've joined with Roger Rabbit's killers.
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Hayden and his ilk are apparently reasoning that because bus riders are mostly poor people, we should have more buses, more "mass transit" for the poor. Did they ever consider that maybe the poor would also like to ride quickly and comfortably to their destination?
Trains are fast in part because they still remain the most inherently fuel efficient means of transportation there is. The basic reason has to do with physics. The point of contact between a train wheel and the track is less than the width of a dime, as opposed to the inherent ineffiency of a wide rubber tire rolling on cement.
To be sure, the Los Angeles MTA is a massively corrupt agency. Its asinine decision not to stop at the Hollywood Bowl, but to bore a tunnel through the ecologically unstable Runyon Canyon area, to bypass the Hollywood Bowl but to end up at Universal City, certainly suggests that. And there isn't much excuse for contractors who have used wood when steel was called for, or who have substituted cement bags where the contract called for pouring high tech plastic caulking, or who have seen fit to reduce the thickness of the subway walls to save a few bucks.
But then, most high rise buildings and freeways in Los Angeles are built the same way. Look at how many freeway bridges collapse in an earthquake. Building subways is expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as building more freeways, which in a short period of time become clogged with increasing traffic anyway. Surely the MTA could have made better use of the freeways, which after all were mostly built following established Red Car lines.
Watching an elevated train pass you by at 90 mph on an immobilized freeway would be a good inducement to getting people out from behind their wheels. You can get along without a car in London, for example, because the subway usually ends up within a few blocks of anywhere in the city. In London the bus system's main function is to feed passengers into the tube, and to facilitate them when they come out. Like Los Angeles, London is spread out -- and not very high rise.
Perhaps Los Angeles needs to send a few MTA board members to jail for allowing such rampant corruption, but to stop the construction of rail in favor of more buses -- well, that's no solution to anything.
*****
Lionel Rolfe is the author of FAT MAN ON THE LEFT: Four Decades in the Underground (California Classics Books, available from Amazon.com) and DEATH AND REDEMPTION IN LONDON & L.A. (which will be forthcoming from deadendstreet.com, a premier ebook publisher).
RDR RECOMMENDED SITE OF THE DAY: Thousands of Black Americans were lynched, almost as sport, at the beginning of this century. James Allen has done us all a service by documenting the lurid practice of members of lynching parties who made postcards of their deeds. What you'll see at this site is unbelievable and maddening and saddening. But it's part of the American heritage. It bears witness to the dark soul of this country. Without Sanctuary.
