On the way up to Dodger Stadium today, I took care to look at the busway. It's a series of special lanes and stations built alongside and in the median of the Harbor Freeway, and it cost about $25 million to build. As the L.A. Times noted this weekend, nobody uses it:
Most of the eight stations are 30 feet from freeway traffic, with the rush of nearby cars creating a head-splitting roar. Plumes of vehicle exhaust choke the lungs and sting the eyes. Because there are usually few riders and rarely any police in sight, the stations appear isolated and dangerous. Vagrants find them a good place to camp out.
Oh, did I say $25 million? That was just for the stations. Throw the special bus and carpool lanes and the elevated don't-get-caught-near-them-in-an-earthquake elevated carpool/bus lanes south of downtown and it's a $500 million pricetag.
Caltrans promised the bus and freeway stations would relieve congestion with as many as 74,000 boardings a day — the equivalent of about 37,000 round-trip riders.
But eight years after the stations opened, the buses tally about 3,000 boardings a day, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. By contrast, dozens of bus corridors in Los Angeles register more than 10,000 boardings each. A single MTA bus route on Wilshire Boulevard has nearly 50,000 boardings a day.
If there's one thing guaranteed to be inaccurate, it's a government estimate of mass transit ridership. We've had billions of tax dollars spent on this thing and our subway system and light rail lines, and the things are largely empty. One line, the Green Line from El Segundo to Downey, was projected as a huge success, yet when they built it, nobody seemed to notice that it travels a route few commuters use, and, as a result, it's empty. They also managed to build it near, but not quite at, LAX. That's right- it comes within a couple of miles of LAX, but veers south and misses it, making it useless as a route between downtown and the airport- it just takes too long and it involves too many changes from train to train to bus. Nobody figured that out in advance. Mass myopia. Amazing.
"You don't want to be here for more than five minutes," said Antonio Rodriguez as he waited alone at the Carson Street station. "Anything more and your head hurts…. A lot of times, I am the only one here."
The Carson Street station has an average of 20 people a day boarding northbound MTA buses, statistics from the transit agency show; three people a day get on southbound buses.
$25 million for the stations, $500 million for the project. Three southbound riders a day. THREE.
Like other officials at the MTA, which operates most bus service on the transitway, De la Loza was quick to pass blame. "That was a Caltrans project," he said. The statewide transportation agency designed and built the transitway with little coordination with the MTA and its predecessor, the Southern California Rapid Transit District.
Doug Failing, the Los Angeles-area regional director for Caltrans, said his agency did not control bus planning and operation on the transitway. In defense of his agency, Failing said there aren't enough buses on the transitway and few convenient bus connections.
Asked to grade the transitway's bus lanes, given that ridership is less than 5% of the total promised by Caltrans, Failing said: "I can't answer that."
The man's name is Failing. Perfect.
So we have a busway nobody uses. We have a subway nobody uses, in an earthquake zone, no less. We have an elevated rail line that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And we paid for all of it. We're still paying. We'll always pay.
It's eerie, actually- the stations are only a couple of years old yet they look abandoned. From the highway, you can't tell if they're open or not. From the side streets, you can't tell if they're open, either. You CAN tell that you don't want to be caught there at night, or during the day, either. In the middle of a busy ten lane highway, no one can hear you scream.
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