Los Angeles’ rail transit system is now 20 years old, but the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Tom Rubin, questions whether it should have been built at all. “The push for rail has forced transit ridership down,” says Rubin, who was the chief financial officer of L.A.’s transit agency when the rail lines were planned in the 1980s. “Had they run a lot of buses at low fares, they could have doubled the number of riders.”
Rubin is referring to the fact that in the early 1980s, when LA’s transit policy was to boost bus service by keeping fares low, transit ridership grew dramatically. In 1985, when the agency starting building rail, it raised bus fares and cut service to cover cost overruns. Transit ridership plummeted, and did not recover to its 1985 levels until after 2000.
