Riding the Rails with the Mayor
Come on Henry, join Antonio on his weekly subway ride to City Hall
You can’t very well barge into the Getty House and tell Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that you’re tired of waiting for him. So I stood outside the house for 45 minutes. Finally around 8 a.m. he showed up and we rode together to City Hall.
No reason to be insulted that the mayor asked no one in particular three times whether his plans to take public transportation to work had been listed on his public daily calendar. Let him think that a guy who works at a newspaper might actually be able to read minds.
The mayor lives in the city-owned, decent-sized spread within a few hundred yards of a bus stop at Wilshire and Crenshaw. What great symbolism had he and his small entourage waited for Line 720, a standing-room-only bus that serves as a screaming reminder that a subway is needed on the boulevard. (Screaming, because it’s impossible to board the bus without wanting to yell about how absurd it is that the subway stalled out along the route two decades ago.) But I can understand. Maybe he wanted to make sure he could find a seat. So the first bus to show up happened to be the 710, which had just made the right turn from Crenshaw onto Wilshire on its way to the Wilshire/Western Red Line station.
“We can take this one,” the mayor said, ignoring a request to wait for the 720.
The mayor’s a champion of transportation projects, but he’s usually driven around town in a black GMC Yukon. When he wants to utter public statements about traffic, he’s been more likely to call a press conference to tout incremental changes in traffic-light synchronization or parking enforcement or pothole repairs than to play the role model of commuter on a bus and subway.
The 720, dubbed here the Henry Waxman Limited Vision Line a few months ago, is the workhorse of the Wilshire corridor, which sees nearly 100,000 bus passengers every day. It’s the most crowded network in the web of L.A. bus routes. Even transportation experts who study these things in the region’s Ivory towers, and are loathe to recommend that government subsidize costly rail and subway projects, say a subway down Wilshire Boulevard makes sense. Henry didn’t think so in 1986, when he caved to racist forces and seized the methane explosion in the Fairfax district as an excuse to pass a law banning the use of federal money on a subway to the Westside. If he was so worried about methane fires, he should have tried to ban all excavation in the region. Some 22 years later, in a plea for redemption from the transit gods and historians, Henry got Congress to lift the ban.
Antonio took a seat on the bus. The obvious question: “You think you’ll ever be able to get Henry Waxman to join you on the bus?”
The mayor wouldn’t take the bait. He called Henry a leading voice in Congress and gave him an out. “Henry Waxman is a very busy man. I wouldn’t expect him to come on the line with me.”
Maybe not, but it would be one well-covered photo op and would probably lead the TV news that night: The man who killed the subway joining forces with the man out to resurrect it. One dude with his hand in the local pot, looking for money to pay for a project estimated to cost up to $7 billion. The other one in a key leadership position in Congress, owing to his three-decade tenure, and in a good position to lobby for $1 billion or more for a healthy federal share of the project. Talk about good connections. These two politicians have them. If only they could find each other in a wonderful public setting conducive to deal-making, like the back of the 720.
Antonio greeted a few passengers and shared an insight into the massive ego of a politician. “Most people are not surprised to see me. They see me just about everywhere.” He makes a point of repeating that line several times, usually after waving to someone in a passing car or on board a bus or train. His predecessor, James Hahn, could go almost anywhere without being recognized. He almost needed a name tag.
Seven minutes later, the bus arrives at the Wilshire/Western station and the mayor holds a brief news conference for several reporters. His goal: to ride public transportation to work once a week.
“I figured the least I could do is lead by example,” he says. “If the mayor can get on public transportation once a week, so can you.”
One of the amazing feats of the morning: Every escalator the mayor encounters is working. Maybe that’s a coincidence, or maybe the Metropolitan Transportation Authority took some precautions.
A Purple Line appears to be waiting, but just as the mayor and his entourage reach the platform, it glides down the tracks. “I can’t stop the train,” says Antonio, enjoying his regular-guy status. “I like that. The train must go on.”
Within four minutes, the next train arrives and the mayor hops on and engages a half-dozen riders in conversation on the way to the Civic Center stop.
He finds two ninth-graders on their way to Los Angeles Leadership Academy, a charter school, whose stories he finds particularly inspiring. He keeps leaning over to tell me what they’re telling him. Yessenia Hernandez and Yosselia Melgar ride the bus and subway and Gold Line for 90 minutes in the morning and in the afternoon from their homes near Western and Imperial Highway. They’re up every day at 5 a.m. to get to school by 8:30. “You gotta hear this. It just shows you the challenges of our young people,” the mayor says. “Are they committed to school, or what?”
Both girls get straight A’s and have their sights on good colleges; Yessenia is considering Princeton or Harvard and Yosselia wants to stay closer to home and attend Occidental College in Highland Park. The mayor tells Yessenia that his son is at Princeton and that she should contact his office once she gets closer to applying. The two girls are impressed by their morning visit with the mayor. “He’s for the people. He listens to what everybody says,” says Yessenia.
At the Civic Center station, a man standing on the platform unloads on the mayor about the state of the local economy and darts away. The mayor takes the escalator and philosophizes about the wide range of human nature that can be found on public transportation. He says gridlock would be significantly reduced if every Angeleno rode public transit once a week.
On the plaza across from City Hall, as the mayor remarks on how much he loves his job, I ask him if there’s time for one more serious question.
Of course, it’s about Waxman. What will it take to get Henry Waxman to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the mayor of Los Angeles and announce plans to aggressively pursue federal money to help pay for the Subway to the Sea and other transit projects?
Silence.
The mayor thinks for what seems like a long enough time to dig a tunnel from Western to Crenshaw.
“Right now, I’m focused on putting a plan together to find local funding – first. You’ve got to start by finding your share first.”
That’s fine, but I’m saving a seat for Henry Waxman on the 720 and hope that he can join us soon.
Shut the fuck up, Sam
We don’t expect the editorial pages of the L.A. Times to be able to muster the courage to tell off Sam Zell, the new owner whose gutter-raker mentality demeans himself, women, his employees, and bodes poorly for the future investment in sound journalism at the city’s largest daily paper. We’ll be happy if we never see or hear anything about Zell or his coarse ways until he announces the sale of the paper and promises never again to step foot in L.A.
Send insults or ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.
2008-02-14
Published: 02/13/2008
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It were no coincidence that "every escalator the mayor encounter[ed] [was] working." The MTA spent six days (01-08 February 2008) hand-in-hand with OSHA (I have empirical proof) seeing to an unprecedented campaign that resulted in some escalators being thoroughly overhauled. (The street-to-mezzanine "down" escalator at Western and Hollywood is a prime example: all but one of the aluminum "teeth" were replaced last week.)
Having put two and two together, the insult is obvious: Roger Snoble, Pam O'Connor, Tony V, Wendy Greuel and the MTA board only cares to impress itself. To hell with the straphangers, but since the Mayor is going to be riding a bus and a train, there are bound to be photographers on hand, so we better make sure everything works. Why else would these people wait so long to do something about a facet of the failing Metro?
Well, there has been a photographer lurking about recording the gross incompetence of the MTA, and one aspect of this journalist's reporting was the Dead Escalator Report, which was carried out for the entire month of January. The results can be seen <a href="http://www.thebusbench.com/6-the-mta-dead-escalator-.html">here</a>.
Cheers to Mr. Middlestaedt for his story. Since the lacklustre L.A. Times possess neither the brains nor backbone to state the time