I'm Worried About Our Commitment to Safe Transit
Outside a bread line on Broadway in Morningside Heights. February 2023.
What is happening to us and to the cities we love?
Today on Broadway on the Upper West Side a panhandler cursed me out in a menacing tone for passing him by without giving him a dollar “for food.”
The Mayor and public health officials blame a fentanyl (synthetic opioid) epidemic. Didn’t we just emerge, by the skin of our teeth, from a pandemic?
Since 1979. The changing Upper West Side.
Haven’t we learned anything since the heroin epidemic of the 70s and 80s? That was when a nearly bankrupt New York City shuttered its residential mental health treatment facilities “deinstitutionalizing” thousands and encouraged the conversion of single room occupancy hotels (SROs) to market rate housing dumping legions of poor New Yorkers onto the streets?
Still, perhaps that is nothing compared to what is happening in Los Angeles now on LA Metro’s trains and buses.
As someone who worked for years for expanded transit in Los Angeles, I am saddened and unsettled about a 99 percent increase in year-over-year complaints from transit riders of passengers possessing or using illegal drugs on LA Metro’s buses, trains and platforms. In raw numbers, in 2022 LA Metro received 1,385 incident reports of narcotics use, possession or sales via the Metro Transit Watch app.
The growing LA transit system which has received piles of public cash for its expansion thanks to Measure M, a County voter-approved transportation sales tax initiative, is also seeing an increase in people who die aboard trains and buses. In 2022, there were 21 fatalities reported system wide. The number of fatalities in 2023 has already reached 21 and we are only two months into the new year.
Discussing the data, LA Metro board member and City Councilman Paul Krekorian said witnessing a death on a bus or train can also turn riders away from using Metro in the future.
“This is an existential threat to the Metro system,” he added.
No kidding, Paul!
Rolling homeless shelters are what fake news has delighted in calling urban transit systems in American cities. Let’s prove the tabloids and cable “news” wrong by making our systems safe and welcoming again.
It might help if law enforcement officers including more of the 109 LA Sheriff deputies who patrol LA Metro got out of their cars and rode the system’s buses and trains. In LA, only 16 of the 109 LA Sheriff’s Department officers actually patrol the buses, trains and station platforms they are charged to serve and protect.
Who is the genius at Metro who negotiated that contract?
“If they are not riding, what are they doing in their cars?” asks LA County Supervisor and Metro board member Kathryn Barger.
Is New York that much better? On a recent night, waiting for a downtown A train at 125th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue my friend and I and a hundred or so other riders on the platform huddled together as far away as possible from two crazies at either end of the platform ranting about god knows what. During the 15 minute wait there was not a police officer in sight, though a search of officers’ private cell phone activity would likely show that there were officers elsewhere in the station. But where? How many New Yorkers have heard of officers reluctant to make arrests on the trains or on the streets these days?
Ditto my experience on several recent occasions at the north end of the West 4th Street station. As anyone can see, the north end of the uptown A train platform functions as a transit oriented illicit drug market. Anyone it seems except the NYPD.
While there are sometimes officers upstairs at the turnstiles watching for farebeaters, I have never seen anyone ticketed or turned away for jumping the turnstile or going through the open exit. Remind me again, are transit officers paid to watch fare beaters jump the turnstile or to ticket or arrest them for doing so?
When did it become acceptable (again, as in the 70s and 80s) to subject riders (“customers” in transit speak) to unsafe trains and buses and why has it become acceptable that aggressive panhandling, muggings and rising crime generally are blamed on a drug epidemic, freeing the Mayor and Police from accountability?
Still, I am blessed to have the resources to take my mother away on a mostly car free trip to the Bay Area. As much love as I have for LA, my home for many years, I am just glad we didn’t go there instead with plans to travel around on Metro. Very much a New Yorker, my mother like me, has no intention of fleeing the buses and trains for a cab or Uber if she can help it. I hope she and the rest of us can continue to help it.
In spite of all the bad press the Bay Area is getting lately, once there, my mother was as enthusiastic about everywhere we went as I was. She loved the flowers and trees beginning to bloom in Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco, the coffee in the Gourmet Ghetto in North Berkeley and the pastries I insisted we wait in line for at Acme Bread on San Pablo. My mother also loved the Seek app added to her phone for identifying flower and tree species. She loved the view of the Bay from Grizzly Peak and walking in the Oakland Rose Garden.
On a clear day, how could anyone not love the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco?
And SFMoma and walking in Golden Gate Park.
Golden Gate Park with the Marin Headlands in the background.
My mother is healthy and a strong walker and was game for most everything we saw and ate and experienced in San Francisco where I was born and at Cal where she finished her first Masters degree 63 years ago.
In Berkeley, we walked past the bedraggled homeless men downtown and onto the beautiful Cal campus. We strolled through the towering redwoods and up to the Campanile where nothing was the same to her except the street names - Telegraph, Bancroft, Shattuck.
UC Berkeley.
In San Francisco, along the Panhandle and in Golden Gate Park, my mother talked about seeing a free concert back in the day by a band that later became The Jefferson Airplane.
We are in The Bay visiting family who my mother doesn't get to see very often. And we are mostly carless. We are riding BART and AC Transit and there is no nail biting because I am not behind the wheel.
A happy passenger on a new BART train on the 50 year old system.
Though I am not a travel agent, as I am often told, I could probably play one in a B movie. Whether it’s Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside, Queens, Redwood Regional Park and Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve above Oakland, or Bairro Alto in Lisboa, Portugal, I am there. And whenever I can, I try to travel car free.
Cork seats on the Metro, Lisboa.
And, no, I am not holding my breath for driverless cars. I find this driverless car stuff, a not uncommon sight in San Francisco, disconcerting.
Oy!
Get on the Bus!
While in most of the U.S., transit and regional rail is still far from the public amenity that one comes to expect in urban and even rural parts of Europe, for millions of us visiting the Bay Area for example, there is no reason not to take BART to your destination or at least close to that last mile of the trip.
A regional rail station in Mosteiro, Portugal.
Though as transit goes BART is expensive, it is still a bargain compared to the price of an Uber plus tolls and the surcharge that SFO and some nearby cities slap on top of the cost of the ride.
Which is what is so maddening about the rise in crime on LA Metro and other urban transit systems. While transit may not yet be a part of the American birthright, safe transportation free of people dying or threatening one’s safety must be ensured.
Transit has to be safe if we expect the public to ride it. That LA and so many other cities have allowed the trains and buses to become unsafe is unacceptable.
This week in New York the Governor and the head of the MTA are taking a victory lap because they achieved the opening of full LIRR commuter rail service to Grand Central Madison for just over $200 million this year and an estimated $239 million by 2026. The project which serves mostly suburbanites rather than City residents has cost more than $11 billion to build and was more than a decade behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
There is nothing safe or fair and equitable about that.
No one should feel like they are taking their life in their hands when they ride the train or the bus. No one should fear that they are in danger when they stand on the subway platform waiting for the train to pull into the station.
Before the MTA and LA Metro and BART and every other transit system in the Country wastes another dime on bells and whistles for the suburbs (and the contractors who built the over-engineered vanity projects like Grand Central Madison and Hudson Yards ) they should make damn sure that core transit dependent and discretionary urban riders are safe and well served by accessible buses and trains they can rely on daily.
This isn’t rocket science or even driverless cars; it’s keeping trains and buses safe to ride.
Yours in transit,
Joel
Joel Epstein is a New Yorker and an advocate for public transit, livable cities and public space.
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