Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Thread Started on Jul 28, 2010, 11:10pm »
The great debate is often whether or not we should invest in bus-only service (no expensive guideways, not even an Orange Line) versus new rail lines (and fixed busways), but is this the right comparison to make?
Where the anti-rail critics get us is on capital subsidies. For the Blue Line this subsidy (operating plus capital) is $13 per new rider and $25 for the Metro Rail system as a whole. The 720's capital subsidy is under a dollar per new rider.
The differences in capital outlay are significant. Rail lines require new infrastructure, rails, stations, electrification, etc. However, when plopping down new bus service, the street is already there. You buy the bus, fill it up with T. Boone Picken's natural gas wonder fuel and tell the bus operator to try and drive it down Wilshire Blvd.
But is this the proper comparison to make when it comes to deciding whether or not to build new rail lines?
If it costs $25 to attract a new rail rider, well, how much does it cost to make room for that same person on the road or freeway? I think the proper comparison is to say, do we widen the Santa Monica freeway or do we resurrect the Santa Monica Air Line (Expo)?
New rail lines create new capacity. More bus service and bus lanes may represent a more efficient use of road capacity, but if a road such as Wilshire is already gridlocked, it doesn't make much sense to throw more buses on it.
The Red Line, however, represents all-new capacity. Instead of cramming more vehicles and buses through the Cahuenga Pass, riders can speed under it instead. The Red Line, in a sense, was an alternative to widening the 101 freeway, which sounds like a very expensive if not impossible proposition in its own right.
Was the alternative to the Red Line ever really buses? How much bus service would it take to duplicate what the Red Line does anyway?
Rail transit does two things at once, offer transit-dependent riders greater mobility and offer drivers a viable alternative to congested roads and freeways. It's only fair that we compare rail capital costs to road and freeway capital costs. This is especially relevant in light of Measure R, where Los Angeles County voters, rich, poor and everyone in between, voted to tax themselves to primarily fund rail projects instead of highway projects.
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Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #1 on Jul 29, 2010, 6:46am »
Also you need to factor in the cost of the road itself, the maintenance and repair, and the damage done to other autos by damage to the roads caused by these buses. Vermont has the Rapids running on it and the road is being shredded and pot-holed at a "rapid" pace. In the end ALL of these costs must be added to the cost of the buses, the drivers, etc. We do need bus only lanes, and I think it is the next step in the evolution of the Rapid lines, but it's time to stop pretending that roads are free.
The great debate is often whether or not we should invest in bus-only service (no expensive guideways, not even an Orange Line) versus new rail lines (and fixed busways), but is this the right comparison to make?
Where the anti-rail critics get us is on capital subsidies. For the Blue Line this subsidy (operating plus capital) is $13 per new rider and $25 for the Metro Rail system as a whole. The 720's capital subsidy is under a dollar per new rider.
The differences in capital outlay are significant. Rail lines require new infrastructure, rails, stations, electrification, etc. However, when plopping down new bus service, the street is already there. You buy the bus, fill it up with T. Boone Picken's natural gas wonder fuel and tell the bus operator to try and drive it down Wilshire Blvd.
But is this the proper comparison to make when it comes to deciding whether or not to build new rail lines?
If it costs $25 to attract a new rail rider, well, how much does it cost to make room for that same person on the road or freeway? I think the proper comparison is to say, do we widen the Santa Monica freeway or do we resurrect the Santa Monica Air Line (Expo)?
New rail lines create new capacity. More bus service and bus lanes may represent a more efficient use of road capacity, but if a road such as Wilshire is already gridlocked, it doesn't make much sense to throw more buses on it.
The Red Line, however, represents all-new capacity. Instead of cramming more vehicles and buses through the Cahuenga Pass, riders can speed under it instead. The Red Line, in a sense, was an alternative to widening the 101 freeway, which sounds like a very expensive if not impossible proposition in its own right.
Was the alternative to the Red Line ever really buses? How much bus service would it take to duplicate what the Red Line does anyway?
Rail transit does two things at once, offer transit-dependent riders greater mobility and offer drivers a viable alternative to congested roads and freeways. It's only fair that we compare rail capital costs to road and freeway capital costs. This is especially relevant in light of Measure R, where Los Angeles County voters, rich, poor and everyone in between, voted to tax themselves to primarily fund rail projects instead of highway projects.
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #2 on Jul 29, 2010, 7:54am »
Taking away lanes from cars and giving them to bikes and buses would certainly increase capacity on city streets, such as Wilshire. If you give the parking lane plus right lane for a wide bike lane and bus lane, you will lose only 1 lane of car capacity each way, or 2000 vehicles per hour, while speeding up buses by 20 to 25% or more.
A bus-only lane can carry over 10,000 people per hour, 5 times as many as the car lane. The trick is keeping bus costs low enough to be able to afford drivers for those buses (health insurance and pensions are the big problems), and keeping the buses moving fast enough to get people out of their cars and onto buses. Taking away lanes from cars will help slow cars down, making the bus relatively faster as well.
Bike lanes can also carry more than 2000 people per hour in theory, but they would be more of an extra addition rather than a capacity improvement (in the short-term).
However, once you take away the lane from cars for buses, it makes sense for the bus operator to maintain and repave that lane, as well as paying for the buses and drivers. If you really have >40,000 people per day on a bus route (like Wilshire or Vermont), it may end up cheaper in the long run to put in rails they next time the pavement wears out, so you can run longer trains (3 car light rail has 3 times the capacity of an articulated bus) and save on fuel costs.
Of course, the ridiculous grade-crossing policy means that trains would have to be grade-separated at intersections where buses currently cross every 2 minutes at rush hour, despite the fact that the bus is just about as dangerous as the train in those places. Unless those rules change, we would have trouble getting at-grade light rail on major bus-route streets. But other countries do it. Perhaps if we call it a "streetcar" with exclusive lanes we could get away with it?
This may all sound far-fetched right now, but with oil production peaking and public demand for a tax on carbon growing, the days of the diesel (or even natural gas) bus are numbered.
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #3 on Jul 29, 2010, 8:01am »
When I talk to anti-rail critics, they say that roads pay for themselves, that is, taxes and fees pay for 160% of expenditures, both capital and maintenance, as well as law enforcement.
I've been having a back and forth with Tom Rubin but I cannot argue with a guy with 35 years of transit experience and to be honest, arguing with one guy through email is kind of lame, so I'm taking it into the public domain.
Here is the conversation thus far.
His responses are in quotes and mine are not.
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TAR: The problem was cost. The problem was that the huge cost of rail construction caused diversion of funds from operating bus services and keeping fares down.
This is where I feel the comparison is unfair.
Rail lines no doubt contain huge initial capital outlays. Bus services get to piggyback on city streets and freeways, an expenditure understood to be for drivers. The "guideway," in this case, is already being paid for (well, we could get into whether or not roads and highways are self-sustainable, but that would further complicate matters).
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TAR: Well, first, I HAVE gotten into “are roads and highways self-sustainable” – and the quick answer is, hell, yes. In a paper I’ll be publishing in a few months, it shows that in California, the fees and taxes paid to government by road users amounted to over 160% of the expenditures on roads in 2007.
Road users pay for road use, both the original capital costs, rebuilts, maintenance, and the related costs such as law enforce and safety response, on a pay-as-you-go basis. One of the few exceptions to this is transit, which, by government fiat, is exempt from the Federal $.244/gallon on diesel fuel and all but a penny of the State of California $.18/gallon. A few years ago, I did the calculation of what it would cost AC Transit if it actually paid those fees, plus the sales tax on them, and then threw in the bridge tolls – and it was about 2% of the operating budget.
The annualized cost of rail extensions is much higher – for those MTA guideways I was discussing, it was 383% of t he annual operating cost, or about 200 times that.
However, the main point is this – if you want to build a new rail line, the taxpayers will have to come up with the money to pay for it – and then come up with the very substantial costs of keeping it running, which are FAR more than for roads, or for buses.
But, if you want to put a bus on the street, the cost for the street is minimal, because the road is already there.
Even if you want to want to build a new road exclusively for the use of buses – which is rarely justified – the cost is well under half of building a comparable rail line. If you do what I’ve been recommending for years, which is to build a new HOT lane/busway, the costs for the buses are a small fraction of that.
There is cost, and there is cash flow. Both are important, but in this case, what is vital is the requirement for huge cash flows to build a new rail line, vs. almost nothing for a bus running on the street, and a fraction of the costs per passenger or passenger-mile even if you want to build a new road for the buses.
But what new rail lines do that new buses don't is create new capacity in a similar way that a new freeway lane does. The Red Line allows riders to comfortably travel under the Cahuenga Pass instead of battling their way through it (as a matter of fact, this is what I did when I worked at NBC Universal).
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TAR: Yes, this worked wonderfully for you, and for the people that can use the rail lines easily because both the origins and destinations are close to rail stations, it can be great. I, too, have frequently used rail lines for my commute to work, including the WMATA Red Line in Washington and BART in the Bay Area.
My problem is that the cost for this is huge.
By the way, if you DO have one of those situations where a dedicated busway is justified, they DO create a lot of new capacity. I’ve discussed before the El Monte Busway/HOV lane in Los Angeles, which daily carried more passenger-miles on one lane during peak hours than the four general-purpose lanes on the San Bernardino Freeway combined – and cost less than $100 million when it was put into service in 1972 (sorry, but I don’t have the time to convert this to current year dollars, but, even if it was $500 million, it would still be a lot cheaper than, say, the Blue Line, which is the most heavily utilized light rail line in the U.S. – and carries less than one regular freeway lane during peak hours.
However, flooding the streets with new buses is going to have an effect on congestion.
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TAR: Yes, it will reduce it somewhat.
In LA, buses commonly have approximately 45-50 passengers on board at their peak load points. If five – about 10-12% – of these are people who would have otherwise driven, then the cars taken off the roads more than make up for the space the bus takes up.
Repurposing general lanes into bus lanes is going to have an effect on congestion.
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TAR: I agree, and I have yet to see a general-purpose surface traffic lane into dedicated busway that makes sense.
Buses may represent a more efficient use of capacity, but you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak. And there are only so many buses you can cram down Wilshire before it becomes a joke.
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TAR: I agree that there is a limit, and I do NOT agree with the proposal for dedicated bus lanes on Wilshire – which appears to be going forward.
However, when you consider even the average passenger load of a SCRTD bus for its entire day, including off-peak periods, and the beginnings and ends of routes with few riders – the number is about 15, so the space taken up on roads for buses, per passenger, is a lot less than the space taken up for cars, per passenger.
The Red Line was an entirely new guideway. The Blue Line, aside from the street-running sections, repurposes an old right of way to create new capacity. Expo does the same thing. I think the right comparison is this, freeway widenings or rail? Do we widen the 10 or get the Santa Monica Air Line up and running again? That's the choice.
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TAR: That’s a valid analysis – and, having done it several times, I can tell you that adding a general purpose lane on a freeway will produce far more mobility, measured in annual passenger-miles, than a light rail line.
Do you know that the original budget for the Expo Line was $792 million in 2001, was upped to $2,521 million in 2008 – and has climbed significantly since? Adding urban freeway lanes ain’t cheap, but, compared to that …
Rail, I think, is doing two things at once. Increasing mobility for the transit dependent and providing an alternative to driving. Rail is truly the platform where the drivers and the non-drivers come together, depending on the line.
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From an analysis I did in 2007, the subsidy (operating + capital, FTA “new starts” methodology) per new rider on all of the MTA guideway systems (Blue, Pasadena Gold, Green, Orange, and Red), combined, was $25.82, in constant FY07 dollars. The Blue Line had by far the best statistics of the guideway lines, at $13.96.
Do capital costs matter less as time goes on? The initial capital outlay is huge, but these systems are supposed to last for decades, right? Wouldn't the operating + capital subsidy be different in 2010, 2020 and beyond as more riders use the system?
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TAR: The up-front capital cost simply can’t be ignored. If the money that went for it hadn’t, it would have been available to do other things – like reduce fares, or operate more service – that will generally move a whole lot more people.
Also, rail is the gift that keeps on taking. All capital projects have to be renewed and replaced. Last time I ran the numbers (2006), the capital renewal and replacement costs for bus transit (mainly for new buses, plus maintenance yards, administrative offices, etc.), was about 29% of annual operating costs. Heavy rail (which means, primarily, NYC) was 169%, commuter rail was 106%, and light rail was 69% -- and the light rail numbers will go up significantly as the current rather young light rail systems age and need more work.
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For each added bus rider from the consent decree, the subsidy was $1.40. For the “Rapid Bus” service on Wilshire (Line 720), the subsidy per new passenger was $.95.
Does this only represent new buses + operating costs?
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TAR: That’s all capital costs, the original cost of the buses, plus the maintenance and operating yards, plus admin facilities, computers, bus stops, etc., plus the operating subsidies, annualized by the FTA “new starts” procedure.
Don't they have to basically repave Wilshire?
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TAR: By, “they,” if you mean, LA MTA, no, they don’t – the general purpose local governments pay for most of that. MTA does kick in some funds that some cities choose to use for related purposes, such as bus pads.
How much of that cost should be attributed to bus riders? Buses pound the pavement hard.
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TAR: Yes, very hard – but there aren’t all that many of them, compared to the auto and truck flow. Also, street maintenance is not really all that expensive – well, when you compare it to maintaining a rail line.
I agree with the point you are making, which is one reason why I favor a shift to VMT-based road use charges, with EVERY vehicle on the road paying, including police cars, fire trucks (which are among the worse on beating up streets), and even road maintenance vehicles, and the cost being related to the wear-and-tear on streets costs. This, however, is extremely complex, the calculations will never be perfect, and since the rates will have to be passed by various political bodies, …
But, when you do do the calculations, the wear-and-tear costs for buses on streets are a small fraction of the rail line capital renewal and replacement costs – and the initial capital costs are generally smaller still on a per unit of capacity basis (there are exceptions, of course, such as the new East end of the Bay Bridge – which was, to a large extent, even more of an ego trip than many silly rail lines – but it makes more sense to look at the whole, rather than the single most ridiculously over-priced silly waste of public funds.
The Wilshire Rapid conveys huge benefits to riders, but the fact that you sometimes have to wait for the next bus because the current one is full should matter when it comes time to calculate benefits. You have to pack into those buses like a sardine even with the massive service levels. How much can you really beef up service on Wilshire before there is a need to go underground?
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TAR: MTA can increase Rapid service substantially, if it wanted to, but it has decided not to. Just like the Orange Line is very overcrowded at many times because MTA has decided that that is all the service it is going to operate, it is a matter of, MTA does not want to spend more money on carrying bus passengers in some minimum level of comfort – and attracting new ones.
MTA could do some relief of the Wilshire Rapid by operating Rapid Bus on some of the nearby parallel streets. This would work well for, say, up to five miles from the CBD, where this could work for, say Third/Fourth Street, Sixth, Eighth/Ninth, Pico, etc. However, the farther West you get, the fewer arterials you have. By the time you get to UCLA, your nearest choices are Sunset in the North, well over a mile away and not exactly prime for this type of bus service, and Santa Monica and Pico to the South.
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During the period, 1986-1996, when MTA was losing 12+ million riders per year, MTA was devoting 60-70% of its total available subsidies to rail, most of it to rail construction and then the every-growing debt service. During the Consent Decree period, 1997-2008, when ridership was going up 12 million, per year, the subsidies were split roughly equally, bus vs. rail. The resulting fare reductions, plus the added service for relief of the extreme overcrowding, plus a small number of new bus lines, were extremely important to the riders. While both bus and rail ridership were up significantly during the latter period, over half of the added riders were bus, although a solid majority of the passenger-mile increase was rail (sorry, don’t have the stats handy).
I think this is mostly a coincidence and has little to do with anything that the MTA actually did. The consent decree just happened to go into effect as gas prices started creeping up.
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TAR: Very few MTA riders have the option of driving; when your household income is $10,000/year, the price of gas is not generally anything that is of much interest to you.
Gas prices do not really have all that much impact on driving – even when there are huge rapid jumps in the per-gallon charge, VMT doesn’t change more than a few percent – and a lot of this change is more attributed to things like people losing work and not having a home-to-work trip to make.
Please don’t get too wound up in things like this APTA press release:
This shows that, from 2007 to 2008 (gas prices were going up hugely in the latter part of 2008), transit ridership was up 4.0% and road VMT was down 3.6%. The numbers are correct, but many people jumped to the conclusion that huge numbers of people were using transit rather than driving. Well, when you do the passenger-miles, the change in transit passenger-miles was about 2% of the change in auto passenger-miles. Yes, there were some people who went from driving to transit, but what was happening a lot more was that people no longer had a job to go to and that trip to Grandma’s for Christmas got cancelled when Daddy lost his job.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the LA data over the years and what I can tell you is that there wasn’t a lot of change in road VMT/capita that could be used to explain MTA bus ridership – but that the change in fares is a good fit. What is even more interesting is MTA-NYCT, which is about a third of all U.S. transit, where their huge fare decreases during from about the mid-1990’s – down 38% in constant dollar terms from 1996 to 2007 – were a major part of the annual trips going up 63% over the same period (ahhhh, and the huge improvements in the subway and bus systems over this period also having something to do with that).
It gets difficult to do get too far into which went up more because, after all, this is a transit SYSTEM. I am very confident that the consent decree did a great deal to increase rail ridership, both through the reduced fare and from all the added bus service which made rail access possible.
One thing that has to be kept in mind is, although the unlinked passenger trips were almost the same at the end of the CD in 2008, the number of people using transit was way down. In 1991, the ratio of unlinked to linked trips for SCRTD (which became MTA in 1993) was 1.65:1; in 2002, it was between 2.25:1 and 2.40:1. A major part of this increase was due to the introduction of rail, because there are currently only 83 guideway transit stations in LA (NOT including Metrolink commuter rail), while there are 18,000 MTA bus stops, so there was a big shift from single-vehicle bus trips to bus-rail trips, and from two-bus linked trips to bus-rail-bus and bus-rail-rail trips, etc.
Also, keep in mind that, from 1991 to 2002, the LA County population increased 11%, and the non-White population, which is a better approximation of the potential transit market, went up 27%.
In 1991, the median MTA bus rider household income was $10,000; in 2002, it was $12,000 – which is about $9,300 in 1991 dollars. MTA rail ridership that year had a median income of $22,000. Both are WAY below the poverty level. In the 1991, the average household was 3.3 people; question not asked in 2002, but I’m going to guess it didn’t change much.
Median means "in the middle," which means that half of all bus riders are earning above the median income and half are earning below. It's likely that some of the ridership decrease between 1985 and 1996 represents those bus riders who could afford to purchase a vehicle as driving became less costly (both vehicles and operating costs). There were also "choice" riders who already own a vehicle but were riding a bus because of the high 1985 gas prices (and memories of the oil and energy crises), who went back to their own cars as driving became more and more affordable up until 1996.
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TAR: True, but these impacts were minimal – and, even if your household income was $20k in 1991, double the median, owning and operating a car would be tough. The median income, in real dollar terms, DECREASED during this period; it is very difficult to see a lot of people shifting to auto’s when the price of driving goes from far more than I can afford from hugely more than I can afford.
Also, the low cost of driving could have also encouraged more carpooling and vanpooling.
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TAR: Perhaps, but it decreased over this period, in LA as in most of the U.S. – and the vast majority of carpooling is now “fampooling,” with members of the same household sharing a vehicle for the home-to-work and other such trips. I’ve seen published figures as high as 91% of carpools being “fampools.”
You stated earlier that a Honda Accord costs 8 grand over at Robertson Honda. That's irrelevant. A poor person wouldn't purchase an $8,000 used car at the dealership, but a very old car at some local used car lot. They'll purchase a car from a friend or from the Penny Saver or off the street.
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TAR: I agree.
I choose that because BART has published a rebuttal of what I had said in the Times and he used the specific example of transit riders leasing a Honda Accord, so I took advantage of his “unfortunate” point to have some fun. I’ve attached the full thing if you are interested.
I don’t recall using a figure of “8 grand;” I was using $270/month lease, which I got directly from their web site. If you can find a new Accord for $8,000, please let me know where.
I'm not surprised that real incomes of bus riders went down. After all, as the higher earning bus riders leave the bus, their incomes are not counted anymore, forcing the median income of bus riders down.
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TAR: Ah, the number of bus trips rose significantly over this period; this doesn’t compute – and over half of the new rail riders were former bus riders.
As drivers park at the park and ride and switch to rail (because rail is so attractive) that forces the median income of rail riders up. Hell, some bus riders may purchase vehicles and then park and ride.
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TAR: The former, I most definitely agree with; the latter, I think you are going to have a very hard time finding a whole lot of those people.
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Given that most MTA rail riders are also bus riders, but only a small portion of MTA bus riders are rail riders, I’d love to get demographic data for bus-ONLY and rail-ONLY riders, but, again, wasn’t asked.
What I get from this is that rail DID attract new riders, and, particularly compared to bus riders, these were higher income, more likely to have an auto available, more likely to be male, and more likely to be White.
And more likely to represent the diversity of the region as a whole. A similar stink was made about the DC Metro. Rail riders made 100K a year and were whiter and the bus riders made 70K (high for both modes) and were darker. In any case, rail was pegged as a mode of transportation for the elite (ignore all the poor people using the line too). Interestingly enough, the same pundit who pegged DC Metro as "elite" also said it was dirty, dangerous and slow. Gee, I wonder why all these rich people are foregoing their cars for a mode of transportation that is so dirty, dangerous and slow.
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TAR: Speaking as a rich (well, by transit standards, at least) white person who kept my Caddy in the garage and took Metro to work in DC, yeah, I think I can agree with you on that.
It's not as extreme in Los Angeles, but I wonder why a more diverse ridership is a bad thing.
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TAR: Diversity in transit ridership is a good thing.
The taxpayers paying $25 to get a rich white person to park his/her car and take a train ride while thousands and thousands of poor people of poor people without cars are no longer able to take a bus trip that would cost the taxpayers $2 is not.
There was a black man at the Expo Line public hearings that testified that he felt the rail lines would integrate communities. Lovely thought if I do say so myself. Rail, bringing all races together in harmony! Haha.
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TAR: I’m not against this; but I – very strongly – believe that the first priority for transit expenditures MUST be providing transportation for those who do not have other transportation options.
Here’s a reality you won’t hear much – it takes a lot more money to carry a rich person on transit than a poor one.
(These are from the demo studies; if anyone is really interested, here the cite:
Go to page VII-36, pdf page 193, for the bus and rail line data; the auto availability data is from the source document, not the survey in this budget document.)
So, I do not disagree that rail has resulted in the attraction of new passengers; however, my problem is, it is costing $25 for each of these new riders (actually, the number is higher, but I made some key assumptions that favored rail) – and there are tens to hundreds of thousands of people who would be thrilled to take a bus ride that would cost the taxpayers well under $5; in some case, under $2 – and that’s a proven fact.
So, my objection is spending five, ten, fifteen times as much to attract a new rider via rail as via bus.
What is the alternative? If it is costing $25 for each new rider, what would it cost to make room for each of them on the freeway? They want to widen the I-5 down South. $4 billion for 27 miles.
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TAR: I’m not familiar with this proposal, but that’s $148 million per mile. That’s a lot less than the Expo LIGHT RAIL LINE, to say nothing of the proposed Subway to the Sea, which will be three times that.
The Expo Line will carry a lot fewer people, a lot fewer passenger miles, than an expansion of I-5 – and, I’d have to see the numbers and crunch them, but the I-5 expansion might beat the subway to the sea, too.
Also, people forget, roads are very important for movement of freight – other than an odd messenger with an envelope or small package, transit is not really known for freight movement.
Nor does transit do ANYTHING to reduce traffic congestion on an urban area basis, and rarely does anything on even a specific corridor basis.
We're talking 14 lanes in some places. How much is it going to cost to widen the 405? How much is the 710 tunnel? Perhaps the voters are tired of driving on these freeways and wish to invest in rail instead. This was made clear when Measure R passed with 66% of the vote. Poor areas and rich areas alike voted yes on this thing, from West LA to South LA. It's hard for me to believe this democratic process is "exploitation."
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TAR: There ARE alternatives – and, by the way, when you run the numbers, you find out that, per trip and per passenger-mile, the costs of adding capacity through freeway expansion is a fraction of what it costs to do so by rail AND, unlike rail, the cost of the expansion is paid by the people who use the road.
By the way, while I most definitely do favor road expansion where warranted, there are a whole lot of other things that can be utilized, and should be.
I’ve been in the transit industry for over 35 years, and have done work for well over 100 agencies of all types and sizes in all kinds of urbanized areas. What I can tell you is that people are so sick of freeway congestion – caused in large part by very poor government policy decisions based on “wishing will make it so” analysis – that they will often vote for about anything that might be an improvement.
Particularly when they are kept uninformed by the responsible public bodies.
And where are the tens to hundreds of thousands of people who are thrilled to take a bus?
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TAR: Well, I’d probably start with the people who are made up the increase in MTA bus ridership of 76 million per year from 1996, before the Consent Decree went into effect, to 2007, the last year it was in effect.
The buses are there. They go everywhere. We have 12-minute maps that highlight frequent service service that is just as frequent as the rail lines. Where is everybody?
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TAR: You are evidently unaware that, until the CD, SCRTD/MTA had the interesting distinction of having the highest average passenger load per bus of any major bus system in the U.S. for every year that the FTA kept records – and, after the CD with its massive overcrowding relief, MTA fell all the way down the rankings to number two.
THEY ARE ON THE BUSES.
The 760 and the 753 parallel the Blue Line. Why are people choosing the Blue Line?
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TAR: it’s faster, etc.
However, again, the cost per rider is huge, which takes away from the ability to carry more people on transit.
The choice is simple: You can use taxpayer dollars to carry a small number of people in a deluxe manner or ten times or more people in a good manner.
… and what really steams me is when the high costs and overruns of carrying that small number in a deluxe manner on rail means that the people who have no option but the bus lose service and see their fares increase, so their good ride becomes an overcrowded, unreliable poor ride – that have a lot of trouble paying for.
You've got perfectly good bus service every 10-12 minutes on Central and Santa Fe. The Blue Line should have remained a defunct Pacific Electric right of way.
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Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. For example, the rail trip is likely to be at a higher mph, although not everyone will actually have a time savings due to the access requirements, the rail times are likely to be more consistent, the rail ride is likely to be smoother. Going the other way, more bus riders get a seat (due to the CD requirements to lower the load ratio) and it generally takes about one to year to get a new bus line started, vs. a decade, more or less, for a new rail line, minimum.
For these reasons, I like to see money going into bus first.
Metro's Blue Ribbon committee wants the rail system to be the backbone of the transit system. I don't see this trend letting up anytime soon.
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TAR: Neither do I, as long as Metro keeps selecting people for the Blue Ribbon Committee who will heed the party line and makes sure that anyone with a differing opinion is not included.
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Keep in mind that MTA is probably the easiest and clearest choice in this matter of any place in the nation; there is no other location where the vast majority of the transit riders live in such poverty; while I think that the overall conclusions are similar in many other places around the nation; LA is clearly the “champion” in this regard.
I think it's irrelevant that Los Angeles transit riders are in such poverty as it relates to rail construction. I have a feeling that those who advocate for buses expect transit riders to be poor forever. It's a form of class segregation and very much divisive.
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TAR: I am not one of those people; I very frequently advocate high-quality, premium-priced bus service, particularly for long-haul freeway express service as a substitute for commuter rail – in large part because the taxpayer subsidies are reduced by 80% and more.
I advocate good bus service, for all, specifically because I believe that it will attract more riders from a broader slice of the American public.
However, as any marketing prof will tell you, when you are trying for brand extension and penetrating new demographics, if you are selling Yugo’s, trying to compete with Mercedes is probably NOT a good tactic. What you need to do is, first, improve your Yugo so it is regarded as a good deal in its existing market – and then start thinking about going after entry-level Chevy and Toyota buyers.
As transit is a public service, once again, THE KEY IMPERATIVE IS, FIRST, TAKE CARE OF THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES.
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #4 on Jul 29, 2010, 1:02pm »
Time to throw in an anecdote from nearly 60 years ago (credit to Dr. William A. Myers at Cal State Fullerton). Back in Sept. 1951, the Pacific Electric abandoned its last two rail lines to the San Gabriel Valley. One of the regular passengers was a San Marino business man who took the Red Car to his office in downtown LA nearly every morning. Some days he would drive his car to work, usually if he had a meeting at another location during the day, but normally he would walk down to Huntington Drive and board an inbound Monrovia-Glendora Line car. On Oct. 1, 1951, his wife noticed that he was heading for the garage rather than out the front door. "I see your taking the car today" she commented. "Yes, the Red Cars quit running yesterday. I'll have to drive." The wife said, "I saw something about it in the newspaper. PE will be running buses along Huntington Drive. Doesn't the bus go to the same place?" "Buses?" replied the businessman disdainfully, "Buses are for poor people!" Indeed, I lived next to the PE line in Monrovia, and even saw the "preview bus" in front of Library Park in downtown Monrovia, complete with a table set up with pro-bus leaflets. Shortly thereafter, the cars stopped running, the signal maintainer placed gunny sacks over the 5th Ave. crossing flashers and new GM buses started running a block and a half north. And eleven-year-old me thought, "buses are just overgrown autos, but the PE cars were RAILROADING and thus something special." Not transit related, but about five years ago my wife and I went back to Boston to visit her relatives in New England. We took Amtrak, and when booking tickets I mentioned that on some days during this period, passengers bound for Boston would be carried on buses from Albany to their final destination. And she said something like, "Be sure we go on a day with trains running. No buses for me!"
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #5 on Jul 30, 2010, 12:02am »
So, Tom Rubin thinks Metro should just run more buses in general travel lanes on city streets, or HOV lanes on freeways, without ANY capital improvements?
My bus (LB Transit 90's) comes every 10 to 20 minutes most of the time, every 30 minutes in the evening and early morning. I would certainly love it if the bus came every 10 to 15 minutes, but that would only save me an average of about 5 minutes. Right now, I just check the NextBus website before walking out to the stop, and usually only wait a couple minutes for the bus. If it will be another 20 minutes, I can do the dishes, or play with my kids, or do some work on the computer (yay EMR).
But the 96, a limited-stop bus, is just as big an improvement, because it often takes 10 minutes less to go the 4 miles to CSULB, saving just as much time as increasing frequencies to every 4 minutes (in our case). Exclusive bus lanes on 7th street could save another 5 minutes, while REDUCING operating costs by 25%. Doubling or tripling service frequencies, to get the same time savings, on the other hand, would raise operating costs by 100%.
So higher frequency bus service would be great, I don't doubt, but reliability, good info on the next bus, and speed are also important. Speed and reliability are important to the total cost of the service, as well.
And what about when I want to go to Los Angeles? Even a freeway bus on the 110 HOV lanes is no faster than the Blue Line, and much less reliable once it gets to street traffic in Downtown LA. The Blue Line reliably takes 50 minutes. Now, the blue line is a great deal at $1.50 (or $6 day pass), but I would gladly pay $10 per ticket each way for a train straight to Union Station, Metrolink style, if it got me there in 30 minutes.
Transit is only getting a 10% market share, not because buses are too infrequent, or too few limited-stop buses are available, but because buses sharing streets with cars can only average 15 to 20 mph at best, and often only go 10 mph average. Light or Metro rail, with 25 to 35 mph average speeds, is competitive with cars during rush hour. Good electric regional rail could average 50 or even 60 mph with widely spaced stations, and beat car travel during half of the day. That's how you get transit market share up to 25%
Now, if you want 50% transit market share, you need to take away freeway lanes from cars for HOV and bus lanes or new rail lines, take away street capacity for bike lanes, bus lanes and wider sidewalks, and slow down car speeds and turns on streets, to make walking or biking to transit safe, easy and fun, while driving becomes comparatively frustrating and slow. Fair, high prices for parking, and congestion tolls or VMT fees would also help people to change modes.
Uh oh, look out: once we are at even 20% transit mode share, where are all those buses going to fit? Metro would have to almost double the operations budget. If Tom wants to keep fares low, how can we do that, unless we ask for more money.
I know, lets get a new tax for transit! To pass it, we need to show concrete improvements. Oh, people don't think buses are exciting. Maybe we can make plans to build a new subway and Downtown and to the Westside, and new light rail lines in other parts of the county. The Valley likes the orange line; they can get some bus lanes. And we will throw in a couple freeway projects, so the pro-roads groups don't block our plan. Now, we can build some new capacity and speed into the system, as well as getting lots of new operating funds! And we can get the federal government to pay for most of those new rail lines, anyway.
If only someone had thought of this a few years ago! Perhaps we could have called in Measure R, for "Rail."
Okay, no more sarcasm.
I'm all for better, efficient, faster, and frequent bus service, and fair prices are nice. But those changes will only increase ridership by 50% at most. We need to build a system that can handle 25% of trips in the county, and 50% of trips to the central business districts (like downtown, Westwood, Century City), if Los Angeles is going to prosper in an age of limited oil, energy, water, minerals and land.
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #6 on Jul 30, 2010, 12:31am »
I want to respond to this directly: "As transit is a public service, once again, THE KEY IMPERATIVE IS, FIRST, TAKE CARE OF THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES."
Okay, so transit is often treated this way in the United States.
But many rich cities in the world, similar in size to Los Angeles, treat transit as an normal method of transportation that is valuable because it can be superior to travel by car, bike, foot or other means.
Consider that transit it Tokyo, London, Hong Kong and countless mid-level Asian cities and developing cities is run on a for-profit (or break-even) basis. There may be some subsidy of capital costs in places like London, but no more than than given to roads. And all over Europe, systems may have a 50l% subsidy, but manage to attract all segments of the population, and are considered public amenities and something to be proud of about the city.
Tom Rubin seems to think that buses are meant to provide a cheap form of transportation to the very poor. They are first and foremost a form of welfare, or social security, for those so unfortunate that they cannot own a car.
But why not give them all cars, then? A transit pass costs $1000 a year, now, and the costs per rider per year for Metro are significantly more than that. Couldn't we subsidize old, cheap cars for the poor, instead of offering transit? Paratransit could continue to help the disabled. Young people could get a free bike, or walking shoes; a bike is often as fast as a city bus, and better exercise. Walking usually takes about 3 times longer than a city bus.
Or we can just shut everything down; let MediCare pay for electric scooters and wheelchairs, and the private market can provide bus services if it wants; we can uses the savings to widen freeways and give the rest to the poor as a cash payment.
Well, I don't think transit is just a form of social security or social welfare.
Transit improves cities by allowing dense, walkable development, improving mobility for the young, old and disabled, reduces our dependence on imported oil (which now costs the US economy almost 400 billion per year), and makes us all healthier by encouraging walking (and bicycling). It also encourages people of different cultures, ages and income levels to mix and learn to get along. And it can be cheaper overall, if done right, which means we can spend money on other things, rather than just transportation and housing.
Transit certainly benefits the poor, who have trouble getting access to our multi-billion dollar freeway system due to credit and income limitations. But it can benefit moderate and high income people just as much, by saving time, stress, money, and health.
In a democracy, people need to get a benefit from a public service, it the service is going to survive. This is tlhe reason that Medi-caid (Medi-Cal in this state) is always starved for funds, while Medi-Care has an ever-increasing budget; this is why the mortgage tax exemption and social security and road funding are considered sacrosanct, while public housing, welfare, and transit funding get cut again and again. Voters will not support services for the poor, unless they also benefit everyone.
If transit is going to succeed, it needs to escape the failed vision and policies of 1960's progressives, and get away from being a service of last resort for the destitute. Done right, transit will "pay for itself" at least as much as road do (that is, the subsidizes or lack thereof are closely linked), while helping us build better cities and towns for everyone. Done wrong, crappy transit just perpetuates the cycle of poverty and segregation in our cities.
You can't propose a bus-only system for a central city of >3 million in a metro area of 12 to 20 million people (and growing), especially without instituting full BRT treatment on every major route (including exclusive bus lanes). For a city like Los Angeles, even BRT will not be enough on the corridors currently considered for subways. Rallying against capital funding for transit is short-sighted.
Joined: Jun 2005 Gender: Male Posts: 413 Location: Silverlake
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #7 on Jul 30, 2010, 7:24am »
It's nice to hear transportation theories, and ideas are important, but then so is actually running and managing a transit agency. Somehow we need to plan for the future of Los Angeles and I believe in the benefit of a vast fixed guide way system outweighs the upfront expense.
There are ways to make the bus better and many of them have been implemented in Los Angeles, and they, for the most part, work well.
But please, it's an apples to oranges comparison. Rail may cost more, but it delivers higher benefits that accrue to society and are, admittedly, difficult to measure. The anti-rail critics make damn sure we know how much it costs though
Once you design a bus route to compete with the freeway or rail, you might as well lay down the rails. Sticking the bus on the freeway can be great for express runs, but is a non-starter for local transit because you either have to get off the freeway to make stops or build stations on the freeway, which we all know is a bad idea (Harbor Transitway?).
Even the rail stations on the freeway do better than the Harbor Transitway.
but I would gladly pay $10 per ticket each way for a train straight to Union Station, Metrolink style, if it got me there in 30 minutes.
This is the next step, in my opinion, introducing express rail service to Metro Rail. What the Blue Line proved was that there was a latent demand for longer trips. Average trip distances went up considerably after the Blue Line opened. I think there's a demand for express service. I wonder what it would take to make it possible.
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #10 on Jul 30, 2010, 3:49pm »
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I wonder what it would take to make it possible.
There are freight tracks (which may be in poor condition) from the Harbor Transitway south to Watts, and there is sufficient right-of-way for another pair of tracks along the Blue Line all the way to Willow station.
If Metro can make an agreement with the owner of the freight tracks or service, they would need to build a connection with the Los Angeles river tracks to get to Union Station on the north side, improve the existing tracks, add stations (I recommend Washington, the Green Line and Willow, with perhaps two more in between), and then figure out how to get trains into Long Beach.
You could either build a new right-of-way along the 710 (there is room between the freeway and river), but this would require an expensive bridge and tunnel (?) into downtown. You could stop the express service at Willow station and require transfers. Or, you could electrify the "express" (freight) tracks, and use trains compatible with light rails street running, and have them go down the existing Blue Line tracks to downtown Long Beach. Since half the trains at rush hour currently stop at Willow there is plenty of room on the tracks further south.
but I would gladly pay $10 per ticket each way for a train straight to Union Station, Metrolink style, if it got me there in 30 minutes.
This is the next step, in my opinion, introducing express rail service to Metro Rail. What the Blue Line proved was that there was a latent demand for longer trips. Average trip distances went up considerably after the Blue Line opened. I think there's a demand for express service. I wonder what it would take to make it possible.
I'm not sure that I like the idea of express rail service in areas without grade separation because it places an additional burden on the community that it travels through without any benefit for that community. It seems unfair. Plus it's only 40 minutes from Willow to 7th/Metro. The slow part of the line is in Long Beach. Skipping a few stops between Wardlow and Washington couldn't save all that much time.
I guess that I'd have to hear some numbers first, but my initial reaction would be to oppose spending tax money for a relatively minor benefit for a portion of riders that choose to live far from work.
I'm not sure that I like the idea of express rail service in areas without grade separation because it places an additional burden on the community that it travels through without any benefit for that community. It seems unfair.
Metrolink and freight lines are both largely at-grade (though more grade seperations are planned in the future), and Metrolink usually spaces stations about 3 to 6 miles apart, about the same as I recommended above. Is Metrolink unfair to the communities it goes thru?
Consider that freeways only have onramps every mile, sometimes less, and are usually "grade-separated" by closing all cross streets except for major arterials! This is more of a barrier than regional rail lines with 15 minute service at best. Also, many freight rail lines (such as the one that parallels the Blue Line) are at grade, and block intersections for 5 minutes at a time with slow, mile-long trains
I'm not saying that I think building more freeways or more at-grade freight lines is a good idea, but those are the facts on the ground in South LA and many other parts of our state. Even many nice neighborhoods have at-grade freight main lines, which contribute ZERO transportation benefit to the local city.
I would love to have the Blue Line grade-separated in the downtown areas of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which would speed up service and improve reliability, and a grade-separated high speed rail line between LA and LB would also be great, in my book. But that would cost more like 2 to 3 billion, rather than a few hundred million for the Metrolink-style service.
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Plus it's only 40 minutes from Willow to 7th/Metro. The slow part of the line is in Long Beach. Skipping a few stops between Wardlow and Washington couldn't save all that much time.
Skipping the stops would only save about 1 minute per stop. However, greater distance between stops would also make a higher top speed more useful. Diesel trains (80 mph, and average 45 mph, with stations every 5 miles or so. (DMUs or EMUs could do the same speed with stations closer together, or reach a 55 mph average speed with 5 mile station spacing) A trip from Willow to LA Union Station could take only 25 minutes, at 45 mph average.
If the DMUs went to Downtown Long beach along the current tracks, with signal priority, the LB to LA trip could be only 35 minutes, instead of 55 minutes to Metro Center today. This would be an especially big improvement for people traveling further north or east, who right now need to tranfer to the subway to get to Union Station; that trip takes 1 hour and 10 minutes right now.
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I guess that I'd have to hear some numbers first, but my initial reaction would be to oppose spending tax money for a relatively minor benefit for a portion of riders that choose to live far from work.
I agree that we should focus on improving transit in the core and denser neighborhoods, but regional rail is also necessary. The High Speed Rail project will run thru the middle of mountains and rice fields, because you need to get people between cities, too. Long Beach residents or visitors currently have an hour-long trip by rail to get to Los Angeles (or you can take a handful of Amtrak California buses, which are not that much faster, considering traffic), if continuing on Metrolink or Amtrak to other areas. A faster route would make longer trips possible without owning (or renting) a car.
Some subsidy would probably be required, but when the high speed rail system is up and running, access to Union Station might be valuable enough to make the service sustainable (or even slightly profitable) without operations funding, as long as we ignore the capital costs. With an electrified right of way and tracks good enough for 110 mph operations (like planned between LA and Santa Ana), the LA to LB trip would take only 20 minutes (with 3 or 4 stations in between), with average speeds of 70 mph including stops. It would ALWAYS be faster than driving.
I would not put this first on the lists of needed projects, but expanding and improving Metrolink will help the region, in the long term, and should not be forgotten in the push for subways and light rail.
Joined: Mar 2007 Gender: Male Posts: 1,597 Location: Carson
Re: Rail vs. Bus or Rail vs. Freeway/Roads? « Reply #14 on Aug 1, 2010, 4:56pm »
Blue line express service and Metrolink style service are two different things. I tend to be opposed to blue line express service for the reason that I stated. I'm not opposed to Metrolink style service although if it's not grade separated I could see that it might end up being slower than the blue line.
When I talk to anti-rail critics, they say that roads pay for themselves, that is, taxes and fees pay for 160% of expenditures, both capital and maintenance, as well as law enforcement.
I don't quite follow the anti-rail response. Obviously it's cheaper to build an ordinary surface road than any grade separated rail line--especially if the rail line is going to be a subway. We could say the same thing about the cost of an airport runway as opposed to the cost of air traffic control, airport operations, and especially the cost of the airplanes that roll over it in a 24-hour period. But like the runway, the road by itself doesn't transport you anywhere. It just sits there.
I think the title of the thread is a good one. Too often people view this as a rail vs. bus and road argument, but the truth is that all those things need to be part of any rational plan. A bus system needs to dovetail effectively with major transfer points in the rail system, and a rail system ideally should be sufficiently extensive and dense to avoid long bus trips, or at least offer the rail alternative along the densest traffic corridors.
If it costs $25 to attract a new rail rider, well, how much does it cost to make room for that same person on the road or freeway? I think the proper comparison is to say, do we widen the Santa Monica freeway or do we resurrect the Santa Monica Air Line (Expo)?
When it comes to road-widening in developed areas, doesn't the cost of condemnations and demolitions offset a considerable part of initial capital investment savings of road building? That is, perhaps the original capital cost of the Santa Monica Freeway was $1 per "rider", but to accommodate more riders now by widening it would have to cost a lot more than that, in constant dollar terms.
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The Red Line, however, represents all-new capacity. Instead of cramming more vehicles and buses through the Cahuenga Pass, riders can speed under it instead. The Red Line, in a sense, was an alternative to widening the 101 freeway, which sounds like a very expensive if not impossible proposition in its own right.
In a way, though, any new rail line represents new capacity because it makes public transit a more attractive option than would otherwise be possible. Besides new daily commuters, they have the potential to attract leisure riders who, likewise, hitherto have avoided public transit for that particular trip. I'm a good example of that--I frequently use the local muni bus system for short trips in the general area, but I'm not about to take the bus from where I live to downtown L.A. And I'm not about to drive; I feel like a galley slave if I spend an hour or more in bumper to bumper traffic, and the cost of parking can be exorbitant, often exceeding $40 for a weekday afternoon. (I just checked.) I run a local-interest blog and want to cover a number of things in downtown L.A., but right now it's just too slow, difficult, and/or expensive to spend time strolling around downtown taking pictures. Chalk up a few car trips not taken to downtown to the Expo Line. Since I'm expecting it to go online in a couple of months, I'm holding off on going downtown for any reason.
Of course, they do already have the Coaster providing north/south rail service along the same general corridor. One of these days, for the blog, I want to travel between L.A. and S.D. strictly using commuter trains only. Coaster and Metrolink meet at Oceanside, and last I checked, it is possible per the weekday schedules. That's another item on my to-do list which will remain undone until the Expo Line opens.
In a way, though, any new rail line represents new capacity because it makes public transit a more attractive option than would otherwise be possible. Besides new daily commuters, they have the potential to attract leisure riders who, likewise, hitherto have avoided public transit for that particular trip. I'm a good example of that--I frequently use the local muni bus system for short trips in the general area, but I'm not about to take the bus from where I live to downtown L.A. And I'm not about to drive; I feel like a galley slave if I spend an hour or more in bumper to bumper traffic, and the cost of parking can be exorbitant, often exceeding $40 for a weekday afternoon. (I just checked.)
The 1% pays $40/parking and the 99% pay between $8 - $15 parking in downtown LA. I know, because I worked there. No employee less than director/partner would pay greater than $15. Downtown LA has SO MUCH abundant and cheap parking that only if you are desperate would you pay the market rate garage.
Now, in New York, SF, Chicago, etc... that's where you have no choice but to pay a minimum $30 in some areas. They don't have those convenient empty lots with Joe's all over. So its a misconception to say people do pay $40 for parking. I only had to do that twice in my whole life, when I chose to park inside the Watercourt plaza and not the Joe's parking across the street.
The 1% pays $40/parking and the 99% pay between $8 - $15 parking in downtown LA. I know, because I worked there. No employee less than director/partner would pay greater than $15. Downtown LA has SO MUCH abundant and cheap parking that only if you are desperate would you pay the market rate garage.
Now, in New York, SF, Chicago, etc... that's where you have no choice but to pay a minimum $30 in some areas. They don't have those convenient empty lots with Joe's all over. So its a misconception to say people do pay $40 for parking. I only had to do that twice in my whole life, when I chose to park inside the Watercourt plaza and not the Joe's parking across the street.
It is very easy and possible for "the 99%" to pay $30 for parking in downtown. The casual, first-time, tourist, hotel/conference and security-minded visitor will find themselves turning into a garage that accrues at $2.00/15-minutes or more. It isn't a matter of desperation - innocent ignorance, perhaps, but not desperation. If you have a medical appointment, as many seniors do, with or without benefit of a handicapped parking pass, you may find yourself at the mercy of a premium-rate garage.
Seasoned and routine visitors, obviously, will fare better with experience, but you are amiss if you think $30 parking is all that uncommon.
For myself, its a split decision - I've convinced her that $7 parking lots by the convention center are safe for Staples events, but for other parts of town, "secure" parking rules the day, at any price; I can live with the compromise.
If indeed, car-haters and their government allies achieve critical mass and take it out on the 99% who drive, via parking rates, and downtown rates start to mirror San Francisco, I will pay them, but less frequently, to the demise of downtown business.
The 1% pays $40/parking and the 99% pay between $8 - $15 parking in downtown LA. I know, because I worked there. No employee less than director/partner would pay greater than $15. Downtown LA has SO MUCH abundant and cheap parking that only if you are desperate would you pay the market rate garage.
Now, in New York, SF, Chicago, etc... that's where you have no choice but to pay a minimum $30 in some areas. They don't have those convenient empty lots with Joe's all over. So its a misconception to say people do pay $40 for parking. I only had to do that twice in my whole life, when I chose to park inside the Watercourt plaza and not the Joe's parking across the street.
It is very easy and possible for "the 99%" to pay $30 for parking in downtown. The casual, first-time, tourist, hotel/conference and security-minded visitor will find themselves turning into a garage that accrues at $2.00/15-minutes or more. It isn't a matter of desperation - innocent ignorance, perhaps, but not desperation. If you have a medical appointment, as many seniors do, with or without benefit of a handicapped parking pass, you may find yourself at the mercy of a premium-rate garage.
Seasoned and routine visitors, obviously, will fare better with experience, but you are amiss if you think $30 parking is all that uncommon.
For myself, its a split decision - I've convinced her that $7 parking lots by the convention center are safe for Staples events, but for other parts of town, "secure" parking rules the day, at any price; I can live with the compromise.
If indeed, car-haters and their government allies achieve critical mass and take it out on the 99% who drive, via parking rates, and downtown rates start to mirror San Francisco, I will pay them, but less frequently, to the demise of downtown business.
Only a fool would pay $30 for parking in Downtown LA unless you had some other issue like being in a major hurry or have trouble walking two blocks. There are tons of guys waving you in off the streets for $7-$15 lots.
Also, no way do 99% of people drive to Downtown LA. Even when I worked there in the 90's this wasn't the case. Lots of people arrived via Metrolink, Blue Line, or bus (including me). With the Gold Line and Red Line expansions since then, I am sure that has only gone up.
Ultimately, the gubmint or their car hating allies have little to no control over market rates for parking lots as you state. Downtown LA is attracting development much more than other parts of the city. As this takes place, surface lots turn into buildings and more activity with less parking lots means higher rates similar to other cities.
Downtown LA has more parking lots than just about any other city in the world. It has hardly made for the greatest downtown in the world though. Perhaps your wife feels so threatened in Downtown, because there are so many souless parking lots block after block?
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