Link: Joel Epstein: Educating Congress About Mass Transit
Article 4
Educating Congress About Mass TransitLink: Joel Epstein: Money for Mass Transit Is Precious
There's nothing better than when a good idea catches on. Especially when the idea concerns Los Angeles and mass transit. Over the past week the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have written articles praising Mayor Villaraigosa's 30/10 plan to build thirty years of overdue mass transit projects within a decade. The Los Angeles Times is also on board thanks to two forceful pieces by Tim Rutten. In the latest, the columnist notes that "Essentially, the mayor is proposing what federal officials are calling a 'big bang' transit construction program that would simultaneously address both Los Angeles County's grinding congestion problems and its desperate unemployment crisis."
The Mayor's recent back-to-back visits to Washington DC, and a meeting at Metro with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Senator Barbara Boxer have also played an important role in moving forward the inspired plan.
30/10, a job-creating machine which would bring 165,000 construction and 2,500 permanent transportation-related positions to the City, has found powerful allies in Senator Boxer, Secretary LaHood, House Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chairman Peter DeFazio and House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar. The Brooklyn-born Boxer, who grew up riding the sort of mass transit Angelenos are aching for, recognizes that 30/10 is self-help at a time when too many are out of work and construction costs are down 20 percent from where they were before real estate went bust. Boxer and company recognize a win-win for the City and State when they see one.
The smart thinking contained in the mass transit package championed by Move LA has captured the imagination of Congressional leaders from both the Tea Party and the Democratic Party because 30/10 is a nonpartisan opportunity to move beyond the uncivil discourse that has come to characterize Capitol Hill. But 30/10 is also catching on because it's a good governance idea that will work as well for tens of other infrastructure-starved cities. With health care lobbyists descending on Washington like locusts, 30/10 is just what the doctor ordered for a sick and dysfunctional Washington. The transit/jobs plan lets the federal government shine as the facilitator of loans to the City rather than as a lightening rod for the anger of partisans frothing at the mouth about everything from health care to the Second Amendment.
But mass transit and jobs aren't the only challenges this city faces. Public education has long been the elephant in the room and it still doesn't work for too many students. With Metro seemingly moving full steam ahead, it's time to focus as well on the schools.
To get a taste of how LAUSD operates, contrast the possibility inherent in 30/10 with the situation for 1,180 high school students from across the city who attend Palisades Charter High School, a California Distinguished School.
Imagine you are one of those students from South LA and you wake up Monday morning and have no way to get to class. The LAUSD bus that used to pick you up at 6:00 am to get you to Pali by 7:50 am never shows and you don't have bus fare for the 3 different Metro buses you would have to ride to get to school on time.
It's true that LAUSD faces a $640-million budget deficit. But rather than renegotiating what looks like an exorbitant (sole source?) bus contract and letting go of the still-ample fat that doesn't make sense even in the best of financial times, LAUSD has proposed eliminating busing for the committed students from over 100 poor performing school zip codes who head to Pali each weekday morning.
To read this you'd think I hate public education, but nothing could be further from the truth. In several prior blogs I've praised public schools and chastised LA parents with a good public school option for leaving the system. As the parent of three public school kids (albeit not Crenshaw or Dorsey High), silence is simply not an option.
When I learned about the district's plans, I googled "LAUSD," where right at the top of the homepage I read the laughable tagline, "Today's Learners, Tomorrow's Leaders." But no one is laughing about a plan that makes 1,180 of today's learners tomorrow's losers.
During his first term Mayor Villaraigosa made important strides toward transforming LAUSD by backing school board candidates favorable to education and to changing business-as-usual at the district. Unfortunately, a great deal of work remains to be done to change a school district culture that kills well-oiled programs like the LAUSD/Pali partnership. The fact that LAUSD formerly ran Pali and may be seeking to exact revenge on the highly-rated charter and the bused students for making the district look like a poorly-educated dropout is not lost on this blogger.
If I were a flaming radical I'd say that the school board's move against the Pali students is equivalent to educational apartheid. After all, under the 1963 ruling, affirmed in 1982, in Crawford v. Board of Education of Los Angeles, LAUSD has to find ways to integrate its student body. Whether the district likes Pali or not, since the desegregation program's creation Pali has educated 10,000 district students from outside of its West Side catchment area. In a district where 91 percent of the students are of color, one might say that depriving the bused students of the chance to attend largely white and academically rigorous Palisades Charter is unacceptable resegregation.
African American and Latino students at Pali perform significantly better as a group than students of color at Crenshaw, Dorsey, Manual Arts, Los Angeles High and Jefferson High Schools, the schools that many of the Pali students would otherwise attend. These schools are household names, thanks to their reputation as among the worst performing schools in Los Angeles. The Pali difference is measureable. Bused students there are achieving Academic Performance Index (API) scores that are routinely 200-300 points higher than the API scores earned by students at the neighborhood schools. Under the circumstances LAUSD should be encouraged, assisted or forced to sharpen its pencil and take another look at its budget before cutting the buses for students from across the City going the extra miles to attend a school that delivers.
As civic endeavors, 30/10 and schools that educate today's learners to be tomorrow's leaders go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, for too long both transit and education have been held hostage by a governing structure that leaves the mayor at the mercy of a divided and bloated city council and an unhinged school board. The LAUSD Pali spat is just the latest example of a school board that lacks the sense to educate the district's students.
When 30/10 moves forward, the new trains and light rail will help ease LA's crippling traffic as well as help sew together the City's diverse neighborhoods. Maybe someday it won't take students and others an hour and a half to travel by mass transit from south LA to the Palisades. More importantly, maybe soon South LA's schools will be good enough that local students won't need to leave home before sunrise to head to class on the West Side. Until this happens however, LAUSD should honor its mandate by continuing to offer bus service to students going west for the quality education all students deserve.
Congress should give LA the loan it needs to be a light unto the nation on mass transit. LAUSD needs to become a bus ticket, rather than an obstacle, to the future for LA's students. Today's learners will only become tomorrow's leaders if they can get to class.Article 5
Money for Mass Transit Is PreciousLink: Joel Epstein: Rebuilding America From Ore to Assembly
Every time I see a picture of President Obama at a health care meeting earnestly imploring the public and Congress to give him the win we all need, I can't help feeling nostalgic. As I jones for that more innocent time of possibility when Hope had just taken office and before he'd hitched our wagon to health care, it pains me to think of the lost honeymoon period when anything seemed within reach. Everyone's got their fantasy plan for rebuilding America after eight years of W and if you haven't guessed by now, mine's got to do with mass transit. If I were running for office, my slogan would be "A Train or Bus For Everyone."
What if, instead of shelling out $182 billion for AIG, $45 billion for Citigroup and countless billions more for those other Wall Street saviors of Greece, Iceland, and the US of A, America had invested in itself? What if even a healthy fraction of the US taxpayers' cash went instead into building subways and light rail that move people fast, efficiently, and with far fewer emissions?
A little after 8 this morning I found myself at La Cienega and Jefferson staring up at the new El going up over the intersection. At this stretch of track, LA Metro's new Expo Line will be elevated just like the, um, Loop in Chicago and the 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 trains rumbling overhead in the Bronx. Well actually "just like" is quite a stretch -- and El is still a funny word in Los Angeles, which doesn't really have much other elevated track if you overlook the Gold Line as it skirts Chinatown and crosses over N. Spring Street in front of Homeboy Industries and the Green Line to nowhere.
But on a clear day looking south on La Cienega past the El my mind is racing imagining the possibilities. With the hills of the Hahn State Recreation Area dead ahead pleasantly serene, and looking beautifully lush and green after all the winter rain, I envision Expo destined for greatness like other celebrated urban train lines. Think of Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle huffing and puffing up the stairs to the Expo El platform as he pursues a drug dealer in French Connection III. I have a call in to Billy Friedkin about directing, but he's not getting back to me.
While Expo's coming along and the hills sure look pretty, the current streetscape on La Cienega and Jefferson, not so much. For now it's a ragtag jumble of unattractive storefronts and mini malls like too many other parts of LA. To some extent this will change when Expo opens and the businesses and developers realize the transit-oriented development possibilities. What do they say? "Gentrification Happens." So let's just make sure some building codes are in place and the routes lining the light rail don't become one long billboard worthy of the miscreants who would wallpaper over the whole city with supergraphic ads if they could.
For now, a late-model Starbucks at the corner is pretty much the only sign, apart from the El construction itself, of things to come. But who knows? Will See's Candies, with its headquarters just south of the Expo station-to-be on La Cienega, soon be joined on the block by Old Navy, Pottery Barn and the Apple Store?
In all likelihood, not so fast. But Starbucks isn't stupid. They see the writing on the subway wall and know that their corner location across from the station will be where every third Expo-bound rider stops before boarding the train to downtown LA, Culver City and (ultimately) Santa Monica.
With our sight lines out the train windows preserved by LA's aggressive City Attorney, I hope Metro is planning to tout the views from the elevated stretch of Expo in its promotional campaign. Once it opens with its bird's eye views of the LA basin framed by the rugged mountains, Expo should offer stiff competition to New York's Number 7 train's close up of midtown Manhattan as the El crawls noisily north through Queens.
If the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau can sell us all on an old billboard for Hollywoodland, the least they can do for Metro and the City is get a good percentage of the millions of tourist who come to our fair city to shell out $5 apiece for a Metro day pass that leaves the driving to someone who isn't texting or talking on their cell.
It's my guess though that many tourists are already better educated about LA's good/excellent public transit options from the Bureau's well-done Los Angeles Public Transit page than the hundreds of thousands or millions of Angelenos who have never ridden Metro and can't even tell you the fare.
Still, I can't help but be sad about what might have been. What if, a year ago instead of pushing health care, President Hope had focused on restoring the country's confidence in America by rebuilding the economy through an unprecedented investment in mass transit and other long-neglected infrastructure projects?
Let it go, you say. Just accept that Hope didn't take that track and that the infrastructure train has left the station. The beauty though of support for urban mass transit is that it's never too late to get on board. With cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Charlotte and Phoenix building or expanding their mass transit systems, large and small city residents and civic leaders alike from across the country have come to recognize they need these projects to move beyond the traffic gridlock and to jump start or keep moving the local economy.
O, are you listening? There's the independent base if there ever was one.
The Expo Line and the new Gold Line to East LA are great backdrops against which to hold the next Presidential press conference. So I'm shouting out to President Obama, imploring him to accept this invitation to come to LA and grab a latte or café con leche and churros before climbing a train platform that may even remind him of the El at Wrigley Field if he uses his powerful imagination. Just don't eat or drink on our trains.
With Mayor Villaraigosa back this week at the circus known as Washington, let's hope he's walking the walk by riding the DC Metro from Reagan National Airport to his appointments on the Hill. What I would give to read about that in tomorrow's paper rather than another story about the sexual proclivities of retired New York Congressman Eric Massa and California State Senator Roy Ashburn, the flying Toyota Prius or what Howard Stern thinks about Gabourey Sidibe's future acting career.
Even if Villaraigosa's not taking the train, may the gods be with him, and may he come home with the support Los Angeles needs to keep on building our way to a better transit and economic future. Now that would be Precious.Article 6
Rebuilding America From Ore to Assembly
On Thursday, within earshot of a big noisy rally against education cuts at California's public universities getting underway outside, I found myself inside the UCLA School of Public Affairs. What brought me to the leafy Westwood campus was a talk by Metro Manager of Community Relations Jody Litvak and Metro Executive Officer/LA City Planning Commissioner Diego Cardoso. Litvak and Cardoso's presentation to a group of urban and environmental planning graduate students and the lively conversation that followed focused on Measure R (the recently approved 1/2 cent transit tax) and the future of mass transit in Los Angeles.
Now both because education matters and as a parent who hopes his hard-working LAUSD-educated kids have the chops to get into a University of California school in just a few short years, I guess I should have been out there protesting too, but I wanted to hear the talk I'd come to Westwood for.
Nonetheless, as I listened to the interesting presentations mingled with the sounds of protest coming through the open window, I found my mind drifting back to my days at the University of Michigan, protesting cuts to the University's undergraduate program and smaller departments like Geography. Indeed, as a student I once had my head handed to me while testifying on behalf of the Geography department. You see, though I'm pretty good in the subject I'd never actually taken a college Geography course and a professor representing the University lost no time in discrediting me for as much and for taking too long to find the Cape Breton Islands on a map.
Though I didn't much like being made to look like a fool or reading about it the next day in the Michigan Daily, Ann Arbor was a great place for me to go to college. Not only did I love classes and all of the extra curricular activities, but it was also a chance to learn about Detroit and the rest of the so-called rust belt. My best classes were in urban history and politics. It was there that I came to the correct conclusion, subsequently disavowed for law school, that I should go to graduate school in urban policy or planning.
I'll never forget exploring Motown and southeastern Michigan, which in many ways still hasn't fully recovered from the 1967 riots and the multi-generational contraction in the auto industry. Most striking then (and now) was the perpetually sad state of the economy. For a while I worked as an after-school tutor in Ypsilanti, a nearby depressed and somewhat depressing city then with its own Ford plant. Some of the parents of the kids I tutored were even lucky enough to work off and on at Ypsilanti Ford, which I understand later became a Visteon plant and then an ACH factory before shutting down for good in 2008.
Even today, when people talk about Detroit, it's usually about the riots, its unparalleled musical heritage, the massive Ford plant at River Rouge in its varied incarnations since opening in 1917 as an automotive "ore to assembly" complex; or maybe Eminem and 8 Mile.
But Detroit says a lot more about this country's decline as an industrial powerhouse than just the closed auto plants like Ypsilanti that litter the landscape and the stunted careers that are the result of Motown's main industry's bad business decisions. It must have been the last gubernatorial election cycle when Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm called me in my role as a local political director. As we made polite chit chat about her upcoming race I couldn't help going off script and asking the Governor what she was doing to goose the auto executives into doing more about emissions and building more fuel-efficient vehicles. As Granholm launched into an unconvincing spiel about how she had just returned from an industry conference in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where they had discussed just that, all I could think about was the depressed cities and ruined lives I saw in southeastern Michigan that the misguided industry had left in its wake. Sure, for generations Detroit had offered a high wage long-term career, but for too many today that dream is just a Motown memory.
All those thoughts of Detroit, and the decline in the country's industrial might, have me thinking about Tom Friedman and how he got to be so good at what he does. I guess the answer is sort of like the punch line to the old Borsch Belt joke, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" This week Friedman's captured my imagination with this statement, "We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance," in an opinion piece entitled A Word From the Wise. The op ed, which goes on to talk about America's anemic investment in infrastructure, education and innovation and the consequences for the country's competitiveness, is must-reading for everyone in Los Angeles City Hall and in cities like Detroit. We all need to start thinking and acting differently if we want to extricate ourselves from the economic and educational malaise that ails us.
A public works project here in Los Angeles, as outlined in LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's 30/10 plan to build three decades' worth of mass transit projects in a decade, and smaller projects in the 80 other cities across the country looking to expand their light rail, subway, and bus systems, is an excellent start. And along the way perhaps Los Angeles and the other cities can learn a thing or two from United Streetcar, a subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works in Portland.
With cities across the country poised to construct or add trolleys to their mass transit systems, United Streetcar is building for the domestic market a product that many cities would otherwise have to import from Europe. And these are expensive babies, selling for over $3 million each, and requiring proud, skilled workers. Portland knows a good opportunity when it sees one.
One can only hope that going forward Los Angeles companies will be as successful as United Streetcar in leveraging the resources provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. With a new deputy mayor focused on jobs and investment we are at least moving in a good direction.
As anyone who has tried to navigate Congress or City Hall knows, the sausage making of government and applied public policy isn't always a pretty business. But like becoming a great musician (or getting great at anything else) you have to practice to get to Carnegie Hall. This politically and economically divided country is out of practice and the signs of this are everywhere.
Don't think I miss the irony in calling for new investment as the states and cities further slash their budgets and payrolls and thousands protest deep cuts to education in California. So be it. Finding the money to proceed with job-creating infrastructure projects, like Mayor Villaraigosa's 30/10 mass transit building plan, and a renewed investment in public education, can get this city and country back on the right track.
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