Case Study: Los Angeles, California
| CO2 Savings From Transit Use Los Angeles 2000 | |
| Metro Passenger Miles | 1,554,723,063 |
| CO2 Emissions From Transit (Tons) | 266,587 |
| Equivalent CO2 Emissions from Personal Vehicles (Tons) | 640,686 |
| CO2 Savings from Transit (Tons) | 374,099 |
No other city in the United States represents the centrality of the automobile to daily life as does Los Angeles. The undeniable vitality of the city (its economy is larger than that of many developing countries, and equal to that of Sweden) is heavily dependent on the ease with which things and people can move into, out of, and within the region. Today, the premise of such mobility is the automobile.
Up until the 1920's and 1930's, however, it was the electric trolley car. Indeed, it was L.A.'s trolley car network, the "Red Cars" run by transportation and real estate magnate Henry Huntington, that cast the geographical mold within which modern Los Angeles would take shape. It was not the arrival of the automobile that made Los Angeles one of the most decentralized urban areas in the United States. In fact, it was Huntington's vision of Los Angeles as a new type of city, one interlacing urban and rural spaces together to avoid the real and perceived ill effects of 19th century urban density, that laid the groundwork for a city that so easily accommodated the arrival of the automobile. Los Angeles and transit are not as antithetical as they might seem at first.
GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTION BENEFITS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TRANSIT PROGRAMS:
High residential density in Santa Monica supports well-used bus system, reducing need to drive to many destinations.
Anchoring Institutions at ends of Santa Monica bus lines make transit a real mobility option for commuters.
Investment in Transit Infrastructure in Los Angeles lays the foundation for future infill and low-emissions mobility options in fast-growing region.
By the mid 1920s, Los Angeles had the most extensive interurban railway system in the world, comprising 1,164 directional miles of track which, at its height, moved over 100 million passengers a year. L.A.'s conversion to automobile transportation, beginning in the 1920's and peaking with the construction of the interstate freeway system in the 1950's and 1960's, channeled automobiles along the old trolley thoroughfares, linking up old regional subcenters such as Pasadena, Hollywood, Long Beach, and Santa Monica.
Beginning in 1990, Los Angeles began a massive, controversial program of infrastructure investment, a thirty-year project to rebuild LA as the transit capital of North America. The project has not been without its critics, and has encountered repeated material and financial obstacles. Even so, ridership increases in the heavy and commuter rail sectors put Los Angeles among the transit systems with the largest growth in ridership for the year 2000.
Currently, subcenters such as Long Beach and North Hollywood are linked by trains to downtown LA, with a link between Pasadena and downtown projected for 2003. Linkages to West and East L.A., however, together with a line into the San Fernando Valley, are in limbo.
Despite difficulties in moving forward with the original 400-mile system, several developers have built, or plan to build, TOD's in close proximity to Metro stations. The Pacific Court development in downtown Long Beach, at the terminus of the Blue Line, was completed in 1992, and quickly leased out. Ten percent of its residents use public transportation to get to work—"nearly a third more than the countywide average for employed residents." The developer of Pacific Court has also put up a TOD in Pasadena, anticipating the arrival of the Blue Line there in 2003; a transit village is also planned for the commuter rail, MetroLink station at Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley.
![[photo]](/images/blue-bus.jpg) Source: http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/busfan/SMBBL.html |
Although the continued extension of the L.A. Metro Rail system faces major obstacles, the L.A. area is already home to one of the most successful transit systems in the United States, the Santa Monica Blue Bus. In operation since 1928, the Blue Bus system provides ready accessibility for Santa Monica residents—"almost everyone in the city of Santa Monica lives within two blocks of a bus stop," according to a TCRP Report on the subject.
| CO2 Savings From Transit Use Santa Monica 2000 |
|
| Santa Monica Bus Passenger Miles | 72,791,532 |
| CO2 Emissions From Transit (Tons) | 12,085 |
| Equivalent CO2 Emissions from Personal Vehicles (Tons) | 29,996 |
| CO2 Savings from Transit (Tons) | 17,911 |
In fiscal year 1998-1999, the Blue Bus moved over 20 million passengers—a considerable number, given that the population of the area served by the Santa Monica Bus is just under 500,000. A recent study at UNC Charlotte puts Santa Monica at the top of a list of 137 U.S. urban transit systems ranked on the basis of ridership, operating costs, and customer service.
Both trade publications and the Santa Monica Municipal Bus management offer the same explanation for the success of the Blue Bus: low fares and friendly service. The Blue Bus undercuts its competition at the fare box, from which it still manages to extract 35 percent of its revenue (standard fares for the Blue Bus are $0.50; for the Culver City bus, $0.75; for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, $1.35).
The Blue Bus also emphasizes service quality, training drivers to be courteous to patrons, and keeping the buses as clean as possible. At any of the many West Los Angeles bus stops serviced by both the L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the Blue Bus, patrons report that the latter's cheaper fare and cleaner bus interiors give the system a competitive edge.
To improve efficiency with one of the key Blue Bus customer segments, the UCLA community, it has recently set up a pass-fare system, which lets UCLA students, faculty, and staff use their identification cards as debit cards at the fare box, thus reducing total boarding time.
The Blue Bus benefits from an administrative emphasis on efficiency to keep costs low, and the centralized nature of the system reduces overhead expenses. Because all the buses come out of one yard, Santa Monica incurs comparatively lower administrative expenses than the L.A. MTA, which operates over a much larger area, and out of multiple bus yards.
It has also paid close attention to rider preferences. After a steady decline in ridership into the early 1990's, the Blue Bus set about a Service Improvement Program in 1997 that, in consultation with community members, helped define the most attractive potential routes and services. Since then, Santa Monica's ridership has increased steadily. The most heavily used lines each operate between major points of origin and destination (such as UCLA), guaranteeing consistent ridership along fairly direct routes. With the beach, and a popular downtown pedestrian mall as year-round destination points, many of the lines benefit from tourist and weekend visitor fares in addition to regular weekday riders.
At the present time, the greatest challenge for the Blue Bus is to maintain cost efficiency in increasingly heavy local traffic. To maintain vehicle headway (the interval between arrival of buses at scheduled stops) with more cars on the road, more buses have been added to each line, effectively increasing overall costs without increasing ridership. The resulting crunch has been noticeable since 1998, and it remains to be seen how the Blue Bus will perform as overall surface congestion continues to increase in West Los Angeles.
With the initial elements of an ambitious subway system, one of the most efficient municipal bus systems in the nation, and a handful of successful TOD developments, it is not inconceivable that the Los Angeles area could moderate its VMT over the long term by building on any of these assets.
Recent research by the Brookings Institute suggests that the five county Los Angeles Consolidated Statistical Metropolitan Area is densifying—consuming land more efficiently than its northeastern peers, thereby raising its density as a function of population over aggregate urbanized land.
This is not to say that L.A. is becoming Manhattan. But the study does suggest that conditions within some parts of Los Angeles and surrounding areas, physical limitations to land consumption, together with an influx of immigrants into already urbanized areas, are making for urban densities more favorable to effective transit operation. In the short term, the Santa Monica Municipal Bus system has already taken advantage of this densifying trend; in the long term, the potential is there for Los Angeles bus and rail systems to do likewise.
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Click here for links to organizations working to enhance transit use and curb auto-dependent urban development.