Class and Mass Transit (Part 1 of 2)

Right now, there’s a battle going on in Cheviot Hills over a proposed light rail line from Downtown to Santa Monica that will run through the community. The Cheviot Hills residents are making safety arguments against the line—cars will be hit at crossings, kids and dogs won’t be able to cross the tracks safely. These arguments don’t hold much water, of course—San Francisco, Portland, Philadelphia and hell, LA itself (the Gold and Blue Lines) manage to have light rail without mass killings of children and animals. It’s not a matter of safety, it’s a matter of class — where do you stand on the socio –economic ladder?

Gas is heading towards $5 a gallon and the word green is being used as a verb, yet mass transit still isn’t being used by the majority of Angelenos. The reason why isn’t simply convenience — when I worked at UCLA, it was both cheaper and faster for me to commute by bus, yet the two other people living in my apartment building who also worked at UCLA still drove to work. Why? People want to be thought of as being environmentally conscious, but as Thorstein Veblen pointed out in The Theory of the Leisure Class, people consume goods and services as a way to signal their social class. And mass transit sends out all kinds of class signals that are problematic for the majority of people in Los Angeles.

So if you’re the average middle-to-upper middle class person in LA, buying a Prius is a socially acceptable way to demonstrate your commitment to the environment. Sure, a Prius isn’t actually all that fuel efficient and it has that pesky battery that eventually has to be recycled so that it doesn’t poison a landfill. But if you’re driving a Prius, you are letting the world know that you are likely college educated, politically liberal, have an interest in the environment (even if you don’t actually know much about environmental issues) and you can afford a down payment and monthly loan payments for a brand new car.

Biking to work is another socially acceptable transit option. It’s not only “green”, it lets people know that you’re fit and it gives you a chance to blow $1,500 on a titanium bike with Shimano gears. Conspicuous consumption, but because you’re not polluting the environment, you can feel smug about spending all that money.

If you look at it in this context, mass transit is a vastly inferior option. Riding the bus doesn’t give you the options for all that class-based signaling. There is no special gear needed to ride the bus, no big outlay of money required. In other words, no way to signal that you belong to the middle or upper class and are not one of the poor masses who are also riding the bus with you.

And speaking of those poor masses, when you ride the bus, you are in a space that puts you all on equal ground. Normally, when middle or upper class people encounter poor people, they do so in a rigidly proscribed context. If you’re at work, the poor people you meet tend to be service workers, people with a clearly defined and inferior status to your own. Many of them even wear uniforms to more clearly delineate the difference.

But when you’re on the bus, it’s an uncontrolled environment. Those poor people don’t have to be polite or deferential to you. And this is a dangerous situation for someone who is middle or upper class. Not physically dangerous (though of course people in those classes do fear being assaulted if they encounter poor people outside of an employment context), but dangerous in the sense that by mixing with the poor, they lose class status. And as Veblen pointed out, losing class status is comparable to death. People will go into debt, even risking bankruptcy, in order to avoid losing class status.

So what does this all mean for mass transit and for communities like Downtown? More on this in the next post.