As an addendum to that last post, it's worth remembering that there's no cosmic reason that Los Angeles doesn't have an integrated, comprehensive public transit infrastructure ready to catch fed up drivers. Rather, it's been a
political failure; a toxic combination of NIMBYism, bureaucratic incompetence, political opportunism, and, of course, Nixonland:
Inadequate transportation would be both a cause and an effect of the riots. One of the chief byproducts of the unrest was the embrace by the wealthy and white middle class of the city’s de facto segregation. Whether it’s called NIMBYism, racism or neighborhood preservation, a lot of people were in no mood after the riots to make it easy to come to the Westside from East and South L.A.The year 1968 was a rough ride for large American cities, especially L.A., where a dark-skinned man with a peculiar name killed Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. Against a backdrop of riots in 100 cities, the hapless Rapid Transit District tried to sell a target for more culture clashes: an ambitious $2.5 billion plan for a new mass-transit system. The “five corridor” layout featured rail lines running from downtown to El Monte, Long Beach, LAX, West L.A. and Reseda, and new bus lines feeding the trains. The plan had few takers.“The Hancock Park people were mortified that the same population that rioted in 1965 could come and have immediate access to their neighborhood,” said James Watt McCormick of the Coalition for Rapid Transit, a subway advocacy group. “The imagery used at the time was the guy hopping off the subway and grabbing your TV out of your house and disappearing on the subway.”
If that 1965 expansion had been built, and built on, we'd be in a whole different space. If the red line down Wilshire had been permitted to serve as the backbone of a subway system, something real and useful could have been constructed over the past few decades. Instead, we've built portions of a patchwork system around the edges of Los Angeles, which suffer from what David Willis
calls "the first draw-back of the LA subway system, it didn't go anywhere I wanted to go."The best article on the history of LA's stillborn subway is Erik Berkowitz's 2005
LA Weekly cover piece, so give it a read if you're interested in this stuff. The takeaway, however, is simple: A better subway could have been built. But it wasn't. There are lots of villains in this story -- notably Henry Waxman, who's otherwise got a good reputation on obvious, progressive initiatives -- but the end result is that Los Angeles now needs to play catch-up on transit, and the infrastructure is lagging far, far behind the need. The bright spot is that Antonio Villaraigosa is supportive, and there should be a
ballot initiative this fall for a half-cent sales tax that would push $40 billion towards a better transportation infrastructure. Here's hoping.
Image used under a Creative Commons license from CokeeOrg. 
