Ryan Nelson: Public transit improvements can only come with shift in attitude

For more than two years, in an attempt that would’ve made the Simpsons proud, the city of Beverly Hills has argued that L.A. Metro should scrap the Purple Line extension, a Westside-to-downtown subway extension that will run underneath Wilshire Boulevard in favor of a comprehensive, above-ground monorail system, citing faulty scientific research and a lack of demand.

It’s this kind of misguided and silly argumentation that prevents real, tangible projects from being implemented.

And those projects are desperately needed, especially here in Los Angeles’ Westside. It’s a crime that UCLA students are led to believe, from the beginning, that one has to have a car to leave the Village. It’s been sold as living between a rock and a hard place; pay hundreds in parking and gas costs, or spend an inordinate amount of time in traffic on the bus.

There’s this specter hanging over public transit in Los Angeles – only the weirdos take it, it sucks, it goes nowhere – which is, quite frankly, false. Metro is growing, just not growing quickly to the Westside, and it’s not really the agency’s fault. Most of the press coming out of Metro’s hallmark extension of the Purple Line down Wilshire Boulevard has been about its timetable – the project is expected to be completed in 2035 – and its bureaucracy, headlined specifically by the obstructionist tendencies of Beverly Hills, which has taken Metro to court multiple times over the route and lost.

But if we want to bring about any real change, and quickly, it comes down to one thing. When asked why it takes so long to build these direly needed projects, Roger Martin, a Metro employee since 1998 and a transportation planning manager, gave a succinct answer: money.

The only real way to get money is to show that there’s a demand, and the only real way to show that is to give the agency a tuneup in the public’s eyes – something that can only be achieved through a commitment to dispelling the myths regarding public transportation.

Metro operates more than four bus lines throughout the Westwood area, and some go farther east than even downtown Los Angeles. While the buses have a reputation for taking a while or running late, going anywhere on a bus, in my experience, only takes some extra time and comes with the added bonus of not having my blood pressure spike every time someone cuts me off.

Wilshire Boulevard at rush hour operates like an immovable object, regardless of what mode of transportation is used. There are conditional bus lanes being prepared that are expected to open in November, which will cut down time, but the fact remains that above-ground transportation on Wilshire is terrible.

This makes the subway – electronic, clean and underground – so important, especially for UCLA students looking to escape the Westwood bubble, or for commuters. It becomes very pertinent since the Los Angeles Country Club makes it nearly impossible to go east without using Sunset or Wilshire boulevards.

But there are options. The Expo Line, currently terminating in Culver City and easily accessible by bus, runs all the way downtown past USC. Once the project’s extension to Santa Monica is completed, students will be able to take a train from the beach to downtown in about 45 minutes at rush hour.

The point is that there are options, a bevy of which disprove this notion entrenched in our Westside DNA that says public transit can’t and won’t work. It’s not perfect, but if you take some time to research routes, it works.

The only way anything can get better in a time span in which we’ll all still be alive and working here, is if the Westside, and the large constituency at UCLA, shows its willingness to cooperate by increasing usage and changing the general attitude toward transit. It might need to even cede some of its automobile obsession along the way.

That starts with expunging Metro’s terrible reputation, followed by riding it for yourself. Even if some don’t like it, I’d wager – and Metro would too – that you’ll find it’s not that bad. You might even enjoy it.