Today’s Agenda

Will Southern Californians ever be freed from massive traffic jams?

Ralph Cohen, one of our readers, says yes, if only we would adopt his Modest Proposal. Cohen proposes the creation of a volunteer jitney system, one that operates from key pickup and drop-off points along densely traveled commuting routes.

Sounds reasonable. After all, we’ve been waiting for years for other schemes--diamond lanes, car-pooling, high-tech commuter systems, and on and on--to save us from endless hours of going nowhere fast. So Voices asked a transportation expert if Cohen’s proposal would work.

Here is what Martin Wachs, professor of urban planning at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, had to say:

Jitneys are a great idea for Los Angeles. In fact, they were invented here! In 1915, Mr. L. P. Draper was driving his Model T Ford on Wilshire Boulevard and he saw a crowd of people waiting for a trolley car. He came to a stop and offered to take anyone who would ride with him to any point along Wilshire Boulevard for the same fare as the streetcar--5 cents. In fact, the slang term for a 5-cent piece at that time was “jitney,” and that gave this form of transportation its name. Within weeks, hundreds of jitneys were operating in Los Angeles, and within months, thousands were in operation around the United States. Eventually, jitneys spread all over the world.

Jitneys provided such good transportation that they terrified the streetcar operators, who believed that jitneys were “skimming the cream” from their operations. Many of the owners of streetcar lines were then private entrepreneurs who benefited from their monopolies. They were politically powerful and succeeded in most American cities in getting protection from the jitney operators, who were described by the transit executives as “a cancer on the body politic.” Jitneys were outlawed in America, except on a few streets in a few cities.

While most Angelenos believe the Red Cars were destroyed by a conspiracy involving General Motors and others, some argue that the Red Cars were saved from bankruptcy by their own conspiracy against thousands of politically weak “jitneymen.”

Jitneys are not given serious consideration by official transportation agencies for the same reason they were originally outlawed, Wachs argues. They would quickly deplete the market for urban rail lines and bus routes, especially at the rush hour, depriving large public monopolies of their business and of their very reason for being.

Many argue that Los Angeles needs high-technology transit, but others also point out that in this region, which was shaped by the automobile, the best form of public transportation is one that mimics the automobile. Some experts say we don’t need large rail systems in just a few corridors, since our travel patterns are very dispersed among millions of origins and destinations.

Some argue passionately that jitneys--more efficient than automobiles because of higher occupancy--are better suited to our travel patterns than commuter railroads.