Phillip Washington, the transit executive who thinks Los Angeles isn’t congested enough, has been named the leader of Biden’s transition team in charge of the Department of Transportation and Amtrak. Washington is the CEO of Los Angeles Metro, the main transit agency in Los Angeles County.
A year ago, as Los Angeles bus ridership was collapsing due to LA Metro’s insistence on building expensive light rail, Washington blamed the loss of bus riders instead on Los Angeles’ famously uncongested freeways. “It’s too easy to drive in this city,” he told the Wall Street Journal. To restore bus ridership, the city has to “make driving harder.”
“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington also told the Journal. He will clearly fit right in to Biden’s top-down view of how the world should work. Washington’s support for obsolete light-rail transit will go hand-in-hand with Biden’s support for obsolete intercity passenger trains.
In The Best-Laid Plans, I pointed out that American cities are increasingly run by a Congestion Coalition, a collection of special interest groups that benefit from increased traffic congestion. The coalition includes urban planners, transit agencies, environmentalists, builders of high-density housing projects, transportation contractors (especially those who build urban monuments that don’t really relieve congestion), and downtown property owners.
Few have been as explicit in stating their goals as Washington, but Biden’s transportation transition team includes several other members of the coalition. Among them are:
- Polly Trottenburg, a long-time smart-growth advocate who was on Maryland Governor Parris Glendening‘s staff when he (or someone on his staff) coined the the term “smart growth.”
- Therese McMillan, CEO of the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the metropolitan planning organization that pushed through the density-oriented Plan Bay Area;
- Gabe Klein, who considers himself an urban visionary who believes that buses aren’t “real” transit and so every city needs rail lines.
- Robert Molofsky, general counsel to the Amalgamated Transit Union, the nation’s biggest transit union.
- Brendan Danaher, chief lobbyist for the Transport Workers Union, the nation’s other big transit union (and active Biden supporter).
- Austin Brown, an advocate for “sustainable” transportation at the University of California, Davis.
- Vinn White, an enthusiast of high-density, transit-oriented developments in New Jersey.
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I forgot about Gabe Klein. How could I? I love that sort of mental buffoonery that produces things like “public entrepreneurship”.
As with every new presidency, folks project every little pet wish onto them, convincing themselves it will happen. They public rail zealots are already yammering about more LRT, a new high speed rail program including connecting LA to SFO.
Think about that, 12 years after Biden first entered the White House, people are still ___DREAMING___ of some way that they’ll come up with the funds to connect SFO + LA w/ HSR.
They still refuse to recognize that BO’s so-called high speed rail ( HSR ) program just funneled money to rail projects, none but one of which were HSR.
Turns out Trump was right. The sort of people Biden is appointing (ahem, his handlers are appointing) are downright scary, makes Obama people look moderate by comparison (not that there aren’t a lot of Obama retreads popping up, because there are).
Klein – “You have buses, but buses are not always as intuitive as rail transit. I think there’s also probably a stigma around here around who rides the bus and who drives. And the car has become a status symbol.”
The only thing that [light] rail has that buses don’t have is the rail track and the overhead wire. These both say that a rail route goes this way. A bus version would put a washing line along the route, with pennants hanging off of it.
As for ‘stigma’ about riding buses, there isn’t any. Sometimes I use cars, sometimes I walk, sometimes I use the bus. Buses are OK, but can be expensive, with time consuming walks to the bus stop, a slow service, and then a walk at the other end. There are real reasons for not using buses.
As for cars being a status symbol – well, they were once. Once most people have something, by definition, it’s not a status symbol.