Crossing the street and surviving

Kidlo and I went to the California Science Center on Friday. I decided to take the bus since I'm a big believer in public transportation and I just didn't feel like driving.

The bus trip itself was great. I caught the DASH F line on Flower & 7th with no problems--bus came quickly, I was able to get Kidlo's stroller folded and on the bus with minimal hassle and Kidlo loved being able to check out fellow passengers and look out the window. In fact, he liked the bus a lot more than he likes riding in the car--being able to sit on mom's lap and check out scenery is way cooler than being strapped into a car seat alone with nothing to look at.

But when we got to Exposition Boulevard, things got a lot more unpleasant. Phase 1 of the Expo Line is under construction and it's a complete pain in the ass to get across the street. I won't complain too much about that since it's for a good cause and I'm sure I'll use the light rail once it's built.

But I will whine about the traffic lights at that intersection. They just don't give you enough time to get across the street. I practically had to sprint while pushing Kidlo in his stroller--what about older people or disabled people? What if you're just loaded down with packages and can't get across in the 22 seconds allotted? And this is in a university neighborhood where presumably there are a lot of students without cars. This is a dangerous situation, made worse by the fact that Exposition and Flower are big streets and adjacent to the freeway.

C'mon city planners. I know that you have an interest in keeping traffic moving. But with oil prices up and mass transit becoming more popular, you have to start keeping walkers in mind too. Don't make pedestrians feel like they're in a remake of Mad Max every time they cross the street.

Teaching yuppies how to ride mass transit

Remember my post on class and mass transit? I ended it by wondering what it would take to get middle class people out of their cars.

The answer: $4+ a gallon gasoline. Alrighty then.

Now that those middle class folks are riding the bus and trains, it seems they need schooling on proper transit behavior. There's actually a new blog, Muni Manners, that bills itself as an "etiquette guide for the transit savvy." Some highlights:

Etiquette Rule #1: Boarding the Train
...the code of conduct when embarking a bus or train is quite simple: stand to the side of the doors to allow passengers clear berth to exit the train. And by ‘side’ we don’t mean positioning yourself on the platform where the door typically opens. Remember, if people can’t exit, there’s less room for you to board. So if you’re running late for a meeting, need to post bail for a friend, get your child to daycare, or that bakery on Clement is about to close, basic laws of inertia indicate you are not making your commute (or ours) any shorter by plowing through an opposing melee of passengers.

Etiquette Rule #3: Exercise Reasonable Groin Proximity
While you’re busy tuning in to that bown chicka bown bown soundtrack on your iPod, you may not realize that your lump of coal is providing a gentle rub to the shoulder of the passenger seated directly below you.

Etiquette Rule #7: Keep Your Eyes Open
Hey sleep slut, innocent riders next to you are mortified when you fall asleep and start leaning on them. Repeat after us: body spam, bam, no thank you ma'am. Remember, no one wants to hear your nostril opera or see your drooling mouth agape as you slumber across the city.

The LA Times also has a blog post on transiqette. The best part is the photo.

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.