[sustran] Re: Litman's Book Review

[Lee Schipper]

Interestingly, the red "rapid bus" runs all the way from Santa Monica to
whitter on Wilshire  (where I grew up) then on other streets east of
so=called Downtown. HAs cut
overal travel time some 20% through signal priorities. LA now has a
vision for a very wide covering BRT system and I think the first line,
which goes from the "end" of the boutique metro
to the Valley, is running.  Wish we could have that in WAshington DC.

>>> Eric Bruun <ericbruun at earthlink.net> 10/11/2005 3:43:03 PM >>>

As you can expect from me, I agree with Todd. But I just want to add a
couple comments specfic to
LA, not rail transit in general.
 
1) The GM et. al. conspiracy was only a "minor component" in most
cities, but not in LA. The combined yellow and red car systems were
together quite a huge network. The systems were worn out because of
extremely heavy use during World War II and needed reinvestment. There
was no reason to phase out absolutely everything. But first they cut
back service, so when ridership disappeared, they could justify an
eventual total shutdown. 

2) The LA Red Line was supposed to go down Wilshire Boulevard, but Rep.
Henry Waxman got 
it defunded when natural gas leaked into the tunnel, only one of many
problems and corruption scandals during its construction. Based on the
huge volume of bus riders and existing activity on this street, it would
have been justified.  The new route turned north along Vermont Avenue,
instead of Fairfax Avenue much farther to the west, as originally
planned. This affected its usefulness, but as Todd stated, there is
infill potential. And there actually is some infill going on along the
line. God knows LA needs somewhere to put infill, with projections of
another 6 million people adding to the 14 million already in the LA
Basin by 2025. In LA, if anywhere, the long view is needed.
 
3) Sure, cities like Copenhagen and Stockholm shut down their rail
lines in the post World War II mentality. I agree that this was the
trend at the time. But LA even in the 1950s was a very much bigger city
with very much longer travel distances.
 
Eric Bruun
 

-----Original Message----- 
From: Todd Alexander Litman 
Sent: Oct 10, 2005 12:04 PM 
To: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport 
Subject: [sustran] Re: Book Review 


These issues can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. Rail service
declined for a variety of reasons. I agree with Dr. Richmond that the
GM/Standard Oil/Firestone Rubber conspiracy was a minor component, but I
don't agree that the demise of rail in most U.S. cities, and sprawled
land use were simply a rational response of "the market" which benefits
consumers overall. A variety of market distortions (such as subsidized
parking and underpricing of roads), social problems (racism in
particular), and the enthusiasm with which people of diverse political
ideologies embraced the vision of an automobile-dominated transportation
system, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

Dr. Richmond's analysis is based on the assumption that redeveloping
rail transit in modern cities is a wasteful and misguided, based on the
relatively high unit costs of rail transit service compared with
alternatives such as Bus Rapid Transit (
http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm120.htm ) in automobile-oriented cities
such as LA. But this perspective tends to overlook many of the potential
benefits of rail transit ( http://www.vtpi.org/railben.pdf ),
particularly its ability to create more efficient and multi-modal land
use patterns, which provides a variety of economic, social and
environmental benefits. This perspective assumes that transportation
decisions should respond to existing land use patterns rather than try
to change them. It also assumes that transit has a fixed budget, so
money spent on rail would otherwise be spent on buses, but in many
situations money spent on rail would otherwise be spent on highway
capacity expansion. The criticism that rail investment decisions are
biased by federal match funding may be true, but it is even more true
for highway projects, which tend to receive higher matching levels and
less economic scrutiny.

The argument that LA should not invest in rail because it currently has
automobile-oriented land use and transportation patterns could be turned
around. We could say that LA is exactly the sort of place that needs
rail transit most: it has high density but a lack of mixed-use urban
centers, and it has a mature highway system with high marginal costs for
further expansion. People who support rail in such a city may be those
who have a long-range vision for what the city could become. That sort
of vision is badly needed. I suspect that many people who were skeptical
of rail will learn to appreciate it over time as its positive impacts on
land use development begin to take hold.

There are certainly cheaper ways to encourage urban redevelopment. I
would rather see road pricing and large investments in bus service
improvements first, although that would likely lead to rail development
as transit ridership grows. But if the choice is between urban highway
expansion and rail transit development I'm pretty sure that a
comprehensive, long-term analysis will favor rail.


Best wishes,
-Todd Litman


At 06:48 PM 10/9/2005, Lee Schipper wrote:

And the problems light rail had stemmed from the 1920s, when their
fares
were too low and they started to fold. People begrudgingly got cars --
so said a UC Berkeley
Geography Prof in his take on this in the late 1980s.. 

How about the Delhi or Bangkok metros? The LA "Metro" with the
boutique
stations? How about the outer parts of US systems like Metro in
Washington DC or BART?

>>> "Jonathan E. D. Richmond" <richmond at alum.mit.edu> 10/9/2005
9:38:09
PM >>>


All good questions.

The point is that while GM did indeed want to get rid of rail lines,
the
demise of rail was not the result of any such conspiracy but a
response
to
the market which had made rail uncompetitive. Rail companies were
making
big losses as automotive-induced decentralization became a fact of
life, and trying to get out of the business.

                                                     --Jonathan

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Lee Schipper wrote:

> Thanks, this looks very interesting. It's always fun to fly in to LA
and
> see if you can spot the Blue Line train (I usually only see one)!
>
> I am just old enough to remember the Red cars in LA in the 1950s. WE
> lived about 1/2 km from Venice and La Cienega, where the red car
went
by
> on an overpass.  I wonder, how much longer would have the old red
car
> light rail lasted in LA without the alleged "conspiracy"? Maybe the
> problem was people were not clustering homes at the stations or
along
> the lines?    Why did the French remove their rail from Paris in the
> 1950s? Why did the social democrat Swedes do this in Stockholm too
(as
> well as ripping up lots of the key diesel-based rail lines
connecting
> small towns)?  Why did Hanoi rip up its light rail decades ago, only
to
> let the French donate one last year?
>
> There seem to be a message here, GM conspiracy or not.
>
> >>> richmond at alum.mit.edu 10/9/2005 9:07:24 PM >>>
>
>
> Here's a review of my book in Technology and Culture, which most of
you
> on
> this list probably would not otherwise see!
>
> Best,
>
>             --Jonathan
>
>
> Technology and culture, July 2005
>
> Transport of Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los
> Angeles. By Jonathan Richmond. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron
Press,
> 2005. Pp. xix+498. $49.95.
>
> "This book is a study about the failure of thought and its causes,"
> writes
> Jonathan Richmond in his introduction to Transport of Delight. "It
> starts
> with a bizarre decision: to construct a comprehensive rail passenger
> system in an environment where it appears incapable of providing
real
> benefits." Richmond analyzes the decision to redeploy rail-borne
> public
> transit in a metropolitan area infamous for its congestion, smog,
and
> sprawl, and, most importantly, where he believes that by any
rational
> measure buses provide a superior mode of transit. He finds the
> explanation
> for this decision in the power of myth and symbol, image and
metaphor,
> citing extensively from linguistic experts such as Susan Langer,
> George
> Lakoff, and Martin Fossand on his first page quoting a passage from
> Russell Ackoff's The Art of Problem Solving: "We usually try to
reduce
> complex situations to what appear to be one or more simple solvable
> problems . . . sometimes referred to as 'cutting the problem down to
> size.' In so doing we often reduce our chances of finding a creative
> solution to the original problem." This is exactly what Richmond
> believes
> happened in Los Angeles beginning in the 1980s.
>
> Richmond has done his homework. His book is based in part on more
than
> two
> hundred interviews with public officials. He presents a history of
> Henry
> Huntington's Pacific Electric, the storied Red Car system that once
> operated 1,100 miles of track radiating in all directions from Los
> Angeles. He evaluates the case for modern light rail and the
> forecasting
> methodology used to predict passenger demand for the first route
> planned
> for the Los Angeles area, the Blue Line connecting with the region's
> second-largest city, Long Beach. He reports that ridership forecasts
> were
> initially inflated. Then, just before the line opened, they were
> deflated
> in order to make the actual numbers look good.
>
> Transport of Delight devotes considerable attention to the political
> decision-making process that led to passage of Proposition A, the
> local
> half-cent tax that funded the return of electric railways, a process
> ultimately dependent on "availability of a set of symbols, images,
and
> metaphors which come together coherently to create a myth that acts
> with
> the power of truth" (p. 6). The human body's circulation system, for
> example, became a powerful metaphor for transit planners. Likewise
> valuable was the perception among civic leaders that electric trains
> were
> "sexier" than buses, a perception Richmond addresses at length in a
> section titled "The Train as Symbol of Community Pride: Penis Envy
in
> Los
> Angeles."
>
> Richmond notes the power of the mental image that remained after the
> last
> Red Cars disappeared in 1961, an image that gave rise to the notion
> that
> [End Page 661] the demise of a superior mode of transit was the
result
> of
> a conspiracy in which General Motors played a key role. The first
> local
> railway started running between the harbor and downtown Los Angeles
in
> 1869, the last Red Car line operated along this same corridor, and,
> thirty
> years after service ended on that line, rail-borne transit was
reborn
> in
> the form of the Blue Line. This, Richmond feels certain, was a big
> mistake. In his view, buses are a superior mode of transit for Los
> Angeles, particularly in terms of their cost-effectiveness; just
about
> everything involving an electric railway is vastly more expensive
than
> rubber tire on paved roadway.
>
> The Blue Line was brought into existence not on the basis of any
> rational
> assessment of available choices, but to reward political acumen,
> particularly that of County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn (now deceased,
> though
> his son became mayor of Los Angeles), through whose Fourth District
> was
> routed not only the Blue Line but also two other new electric rail
> lines -- all this in the wake of devastating riots in South Central
> Los
> Angeles and repeated recommendations that improved transit would
have
> beneficial social consequences.
>
> The problem was "cut down to size," yes, but Richmond is certain
that
> it
> was the wrong size. Whatever one may happen to think about the
virtues
> of
> different modes of urban transit, Transport of Delight presents an
> excellent case study in the power of myth, and it provides us with a
> compelling picture of a place where culture and technology blend
> seamlessly.
>
> James Smart
> Jim Smart is adjunct professor of journalism and public speaking at
> California State University Fullerton and Cal State San Bernardino.
> From
> 1981 until 1998 he served as head of media relations for the
Southern
> California Rapid Transit District and the Los Angeles County
> Metropolitan
> Transportation Authority.
>
> Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only
> from
> the reviewer.
>
>
> -----
> Jonathan Richmond
> 182 Palfrey St.
> Watertown MA 02472-1835
>
> (617) 395-4360
>
> e-mail: richmond at alum.mit.edu 
> http://the-tech.mit.edu/~richmond/ 
>
>
> ================================================================
> SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred,
> equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing
countries
> (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main
focus
> is on urban transport policy in Asia.
>


-----
Jonathan Richmond
182 Palfrey St.
Watertown MA 02472-1835

(617) 395-4360

e-mail: richmond at alum.mit.edu 
http://the-tech.mit.edu/~richmond/ 



================================================================
SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred,
equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries
(the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus
is on urban transport policy in Asia.

Sincerely,
Todd Alexander Litman
Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org)
litman at vtpi.org 
Phone & Fax 250-360-1560
1250 Rudlin Street, Victoria, BC, V8V 3R7, CANADA
"Efficiency - Equity - Clarity"