‘Reshuffling RTD Won’t Move Us’

Wachs and Contini write as if this were 1957 and they were on the staff of the Automobile Club of Southern California. All that center city Los Angeles really needs for the 21st Century is more cars, more surface buses, a lot of one-way streets and some major streetes for buses only. (Which ones would they ban cars from?)

Are any off-the-street rapid transit lines--rail or bus--needed or useful? Not at all, these two gentlemen blithely assure us. And they cite Minneapolis and Chicago as proving their point.

But they are fudging transit data here: Minneapolis is a comparatively small and uncrowded city. And the only reason why Chicago’s buses work adequately on downtown streets is that they are backed up by a network of elevated and subway rail lines which replace hundreds of surface bus runs daily on those same streets. Haven’t Wachs and Contini ever seen Chicago’s Loop area?

They complain that Metro Rail will replace “less than 20%” of surface bus runs into and out of Downtown. But that’s around a fifth of Downtown mass-transit passengers per day--on only one route. And with the Long Beach light rail line, the daily surface reduction would be rather more than 20%. No small reduction of traffic.

In any case, thank heavens Los Angeles’ leadership is no longer listening to our local automobile propagandists. Too bad we followed their unbalanced--and unwise--advice 30 and 40 years ago.

CHARLES STINSON

Hollywood