In previous posts, and one my last-and-final articles in National Bus Trader magazine (see https://transalt.com/article/low-income-certification-why-not-motorcoaches/), I discussed low-income certification as a moderate and reasonable compromise between free buses and the forty eight percent of New York City’s bus riders who evade paying fares altogether. And in several articles and posts I argued that the notion of “congestion pricing” would actually make sense in dozens of U.S. cities. Yet the two cities where this concept would make the least sense of all, for opposite reasons – New York City and Los Angeles – are the two cities where is has just been put in place (NYC) and where it is about to be (Los Angeles).
I covered the motorist-insensitive likely placebo this approach would have in New York City in many previous posts – a venue that already has $70/day to $90/day parking fees, $15/day [round trip] bridge and tunnel fees and now another $8 or so to travel below 60th street in Manhattan – an absurd burden to those who must travel into mid-town and Lower Manhattan because feasible bus and rail services do not exist where they reside, and the pieces to make a regional transit system work have been squandered by decades of inertia and bad policy decisions – some of which I suspect were steeped in corruption, and which, for starters, ruined the lives of thousands of taxi owners and their families, and effectively sentenced these drivers to a lifetime of indentured servitude, while inundating the City with roughly 100,000 Ubers whose driver-owners did not have to pay medallion fees deprived the City of vast sums of money it sorely needed to patch together the broken pieces of its outmoded transit system. (Subway derailments on straightaways at trains pulled into and out of station – what would seem like gravitational impossibilities). But all this must be seen in the contact that, in 2018 – two years before the emergency of COVID – New York City was capturing the highest percentage of its operating costs from fares – 35 percent. (More recently, when it was no longer possible to hide it from view, the City (or at least the NYTimes) noted that 48 percent of the City’s bus riders evaded the fares. Incoming Major Mamdami’s proposed solution: Allow the other 52 percent to not pay them. (Never mind the notion to charge lower fares to low-income-certified riders, and modifying buses to contain a few rows of luxury, First Class seating – like most of our commercial airlines do, and many or most passenger rail systems in Europe do – for which their passengers would likely pay a considerably higher fare than the current $2.90 – to ride seated, in plush, comfy seats, and helping them avoid the “riff-raff” riding in coach, as well as helping them avoid the stigma of a “bus rider.”
But Los Angeles has the opposite problem: That same year (2018), Los Angeles county’s unjustified combined bus and rail system captured a mere 8.5 percent of its operating costs from fares. Never mind what COVID did to this ridership. Plus, the system lost a full sixth of its riders this past summer when President Trump invaded the City with unmarked ICE vans, masked and ununiformed thugs augmented by the Federal takeover of the State’s National Guard and 500 military officers and foot soldiers – with ICE conducting raids on collector venues and services frequented by Hispanics, like the bus and subway system (which immediately eliminated a full sixth of the system’s riders and revenue).
Particularly still recovering from COVID, a sloppy guess is that fares on Los Angeles County’s subway system might now cover 5 percent of its operating costs (not including the cost of the bus, for which the Federal Transit Administration pays 80 percent of.) For perspective, the “operating ratio” in Tokyo is 160 percent.
In a commendable, important sliver of misleading journalism from State-of-California publication El Adelantado, Diana Orozco penned an eye-opening piece describing California’s asinine plan for this technology – in the second-worst place to introduce it in the country, following New York – for totally different reasons (see https://eladelantado.com/en/california-congestion-charge-traffic/). For a context, readers of this post should know that Los Angeles County’s obscenely-unneeded subway system placed the County $7B in debt just for its construction — never mind that a judge ordered to Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) to purchase an additional THIRTY TWO HUNDRED buses, to compensate for the decimation of the County’s bus system to provide the “matching funds” to construct the subway (see BRU v. LACMTA, CA, 1999).
Ms. Orozco’s piece noted that (in contrast to the New York City program that charges vehicles for using inner-city streets) California’s congestion pricing program was targeted to “…require fines for drivers who fill every available space on the freeways.” According to Ms. Orozco, “congestion pricing has been confirmed as the only effective way to address freeway congestion.” Since this approach has never before been tried before in this country, it is puzzling how anyone could “confirm” this approach as the only “effective way” to bring this solution about. But to its credit, a previous study at least considered the inclusion of “supporting low-income drivers” – what was coined as low-income certification roughly 55 years ago, when this approach held great promise but was introduced nowhere.
This article noted that such an approach had been implemented, in Singapore, London, Milan and New York – although having just been introduced into Lower Manhattan, is it simply not true that the approach the New York City experiment will last (partly for the hardships it will place on tens or hundreds of thousands of motorists – no less an insufficient volume of data to verify or refute it). What this article does not mention – hardly Ms. Orozco’s fault – is that in the mid-1970s, USDOT offered $1M to any city in this country willing to initiate a “demonstration project” for this approach. Not a single city stepped forward – even while the approach had, by then, proven successful in Singapore. News travels slowly to Americans.
The plan (a derivative of some phantasmagorical fantasy titled “Vision 2028” on which taxpayers’ money was squandered) mischaracterized the approach by claiming that it was “..not a war again a vehicle owner, but rather a regulatory way to ensure that all cars travel at a moderate pace without clogging the roads.” Sure. And killer sharks have beautiful blue eyes that Frank Sinatra would likely have envied.
Closer to the truth is the fact that other measures – ramp metering in particular – had been employed for decades in Los Angeles County and made a contribution to keeping travel speeds marginally functional on the freeways. In contrast, during my 17 years living in Los Angels, I found that HOV lanes were hopelessly counterproductive – partly because once the vehicles in these near-empty HOV lanes left the freeways, they emptied out onto other gridlocked portions of the same or different freeways, and of course the congestion of inner-city streets to which the L.A. Metro appears to have contributed by decimating the County’s bus system to pay for it. (From a previous source, the LACMTA actually purchased fewer than 600 of the 3200 vehicles mandated by the court in the BRU case noted above).
Otherwise, the elected officials’ and city planners’ claims that “with congestion pricing, drivers would ensure they don’t spend too much time on the road” – was perhaps the dumbest, least-supportable statement about public transit I have seen in years. This freeway-only congestion pricing experiment will accomplish nothing of the sort. What it will do – in the absence of a plethora of motorcoaches, park-and-ride lots, feeder service and other measures to support it – will be to further penalize low- and medium-income riders by pilling this new fee (the article failed to cite the fees or the bases for them) onto the parking fees, gasoline and maintenance costs they are already paying, unless they are willing to mode-split to the skeleton of buses traveling in these freeways’ near-empty HOV lanes, where one finds them. And with no improvements to inner-city bus service, what can the minutes and hours traveling to a park-and-ride lot possibly do to offset the savings from these congestion pricing scams – when the buses will be able to travel not more quickly on the inner-city streets?
The Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) plan estimates that this plan will generate $9.5B in new revenue over the next 20 years. The shame of it all is that not building a millimeter of heavy rail, and pouring some of these funds into a larger bus system (ideally with low-income certification and few rows of higher-priced First-Class seats) would have saved this hapless County from such a loss four decades ago.
The fact that all this could be explainable to a bunch of Middle School students with C+ averages in a few sessions only illustrates that there is no limit to stupid thinking in U.S. public transportation. And for those quick on the trigger, this nonsense is one thing that cannot be blamed on the current President (whom I suspect has not taken a bus ride his entire life, and whom I suspect has appointed sycophants to USDOT who, unlike our seventh-graders, would have never given a dollop of thought to the magnitude of funds wasted by this sector of the genuine “Deep State.”). And while uber-phony Elon Musk never found it, there genuinely is a Deep State, and it would be helpful for those at both extremes of our political spectrum to accept it. Only most of it lies in the public transportation sector – mostly in transit, paratransit and non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) service funded by USDOT and HHS.
#congestionpricing #transitfraudandmisdirection #publictransitexpert #transalt #snookeringamericansabouttransit