CommentsMIS-DIRECTION MISERY-This famous experiment helps explain why Angelenos cannot see the mass transit disaster that already is afflicting them. For those who do not already grasp my cryptic reference, click this link before reading more.
Religions operate in a similar manner. They direct your attention in one direction so that you completely miss something else that is extremely important: they are looting our pocketbooks. Wild animals that lurk in hallways by elevators is something humans would normally instantly spot. But when our attention is directed elsewhere, we do not get the whole picture. That is why Angelenos are unable to see the great mass transit disaster in front of them.
The media misdirects our attention away from a problem by telling us to look at other things. The recent CurbedLA article, “Metro’s Declining Ridership, Explained” never mentions the gorillas – yes, LA’s mass transit has a few unseen gorillas.
(1) Centralization and dense construction causes traffic congestion.
Just as one would think that people would see a gorilla hanging around, one would think that Angelenos would notice that, as the city’s concentration of office towers densifies in DTLA, Hollywood and West LA, traffic congestion has also become worse. In the decades before we were pushed into constructing mass transit, comedians’ jokes would joke about LA traffic -- mostly about how dangerous the freeways were due to excessive speeds. If you missed your turn, you’d end up in Bakersfield. Today, it’s about freeways as parking lots – too huge a cultural transition to miss.
Cars do not make traffic congestion; density makes traffic congestion. That’s why the Mojave Desert does not have traffic jams.
(2) Mass Transit makes traffic congestion worse.
Each time our “controllers” want us to spend several billion more dollars on mass transit, they peddle the same misdirection: it will reduce traffic congestion. We spend the money and traffic congestion gets worse. According to the Inrix 2016 Traffic Index, Los Angeles now has the worst traffic congestion in the entire world. That’s like being invaded by a troop of gorillas.
At the same time, Angelenos voted to pay an additional $200 billion for more mass transit. The City’s annual budget is $8 billion. Caveat: Metro covers a wider area than just the City. Due to the haphazard manner of reporting a lot of demographic data, it can be hard to make comparisons. Population-wise, the city is about 40% of the County. Thus, $200 billion for Metro may be only $80 billion for the City. Area-wise, the City is about 10% the size of the County.
The reason mass transit makes traffic worse is that as soon as you agree to build more mass transit, the financial needs of the subways is used to justify increasing density along the subway route. If all the apartments they want to build along the subway to the sea were single family homes with only 60-foot wide yards and they were placed side by side, they would stretch 125 linear miles. This shows how many more people the City wants to crowd in along Wilshire Boulevard. Mass transit is always used to justify dense high rises because that is what maximizes the value of the developers’ land.
(3) Los Angeles’s Population is Declining
The most important factor in a mass transit system’s viability is being in an extremely dense area. Parts of Los Angeles are being ruined by excessively dense construction and those projects are driving Family Millennials away from LA. The term, Family Millennials, as the name implies, refers to the age range of people having children. The Hollywood subway and the CRA construction in Hollywood resulted in Hollywood’s population, which was 214,000 in 1990, declining to only 198,228 people in 2010. This population decline was directly related to proximity to the subway and the CRA projects. When one got far away from them, the population for those census tracts modestly increased.
No one knows how many people reside in present day Hollywood since the City simply lies about its population data. It invents a number it likes and says SCAG provided the number, but upon checking, one finds that SCAG has had no Hollywood population data.
Thus, we are left to consider the impressions of people who have lived in Hollywood for several decades. It seems that after the Infill projects were constructed in 2013 and 2014, Young Millennials moved into Hollywood and the population increased.
But the population increase may not have been as great as it seemed; it was concentrated in a narrow band between Franklin and Santa Monica and that made already bad traffic much worse. Since Young Millennial’s highest birth year peaked 26 years ago, there will be fewer Young Millennials each successive year. Meanwhile the Family Millennials will continue to flee the City. The alternative is to gentrify East LA and South LA and that will expel the Mexicans and Blacks. Either way, Los Angeles will lose people.
Although the City Hall goniffs do not tell us this, the City cannot afford to pay for more mass transit, but they will not stop the construction. Metro’s annual deficit will easily match NYC’s $8 billion per year it pays for just its subway maintenance and operations. With fewer people and without a vibrant middle class, i.e. the Family Millennials, who will pay an $8 billion Metro deficit?
After squandering $200 billion to construct the system, can the City afford to just let the subways rot? But the City won’t have the money to keep up repairs. Could the Hollywood subway go bankrupt? That’s a trick question. People who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw