The View From the European Bus

Truth be told, one of things I most looked forward to about spending three months in Germany on a fellowship was not getting behind the wheel of a car. That’s how much I’ve come to resent the hours--probably years now--that I’ve spent driving to work in Los Angeles, ferrying children and running errands.

In Munich, as in so many European cities with public transit systems to die for, a car is nice but hardly necessary. My experience in Germany convinced me that public transportation in Los Angeles won’t improve until the system is seen as something for more than just the poor. Here, as in Paris or New York or Washington or London, virtually everyone uses the subways and buses. Munich opera-goers, willing to pay $150 a seat and decked out in their jewels, often arrive at the stately Bayerische Staatsoper via bus or streetcar or subway. A transit pass comes free with the price of their ticket. These folks would, no doubt, be quite surprised to hear debate over the future of Los Angeles’ public transportation system cast in terms of class and racial equity. Yet how often do Music Center patrons arrive by bus?

In Los Angeles, we have only the barest of bare-bones light rail and subway system. As a result, “public transit” most often means a slow bus ride with frequent stops. No matter how many new buses the Metropolitan Transportation Authority buys, those buses won’t move any faster than cars and for that reason the only riders will continue to be those too poor to afford a car or too young to drive.

The old excuses why Los Angeles can’t have a comprehensive transit system don’t wash. Downtown Munich is more densely populated than most of Los Angeles but certainly the metropolitan area is as far-flung as the Los Angeles city boundaries. Yet the rail network here now extends to farming villages and bedroom communities more than 25 miles to the south and north of the city limits, linking commuters there with the city center in 40 minutes. Two of the newest lines travel a circuit connecting all the major downtown stops with Munich’s international airport.

Although it is 18 miles from downtown, the trains, which leave every 10 minutes, deposit travelers inside the airport in just over a half an hour. No need to search for a parking place or hail an expensive cab.

Schoolchildren ride free between their homes and the transit stop closest to their school, and even primary graders travel with their teachers on school field trips on the Munich system. Imagine dispensing with our fleets of belching yellow school buses.

Nor is it “too late” for Los Angeles to build a meaningful mass transit system. Munich’s first subway and suburban train lines were built for the 1972 Olympic games. True, the city already had an extensive streetcar network in place but the tunnels were dug under a busy, modern city. Now that network tallies hundreds of millions of passenger trips each year on eight suburban train lines, eight subway lines and dozens of streetcar and bus routes. And new stops and even new lines are under construction or planned.

Nor are we Los Angeles drivers too addicted to our cars to give them up.

My commute here is almost as long as in Los Angeles (about 12 miles) and it takes me the same 40 to 50 minutes. But I can read or write on the trams and subways--a huge advantage, and I don’t pay for parking or fight the traffic. Rather, public transit has failed to capture the middle class in Los Angeles because there is absolutely no incentive to take it. It’s slower than driving and considerably less pleasant. More buses, even hundreds more buses, won’t change that.

Public transit in Los Angeles--the buses--will remain a substandard system reserved, de facto, for the poor only so long as it is spurned by everyone who has a car. Conversely, my experience here convinces me that the way to improve public transit for the poor may be to improve it for everyone. That means putting rail back into the mix: subways, street cars or light rail--modes that move faster than vehicular traffic. To do so is neither racist nor elitist; rather, it is the only sensible answer to a transit system that now segregates the poor and leads to growing gridlock on our freeways and streets for everyone.