If you haven’t read the first two parts of my adventures in public transportation, check them out first.
After my interview with the good looking urban planner (to be fair, I had no idea what he looked like, nor did it matter, prior to the interview – just bonus points), I decided to high tail it back to the bus stop.
Just look for the silver bus, right?
Wrong.
All the buses have silver on them. My attempt to segregate out the appropriate public transportation based on color scheme (which is how it works in Boston and in many other cities) failed.
Now, thousands of people use public transportation in Los Angeles on a daily basis with no problem. I somehow defied the odds and am incapable of understanding the system out here, which involves memorizing bus numbers. Downtown LA has probably 500 bus stops, and each bus stop has a sign posting 4 to 8 different bus numbers.
After wandering around a bit, getting sweatier and more annoyed (it was hot out), I asked a local pedestrian for assistance. She didn’t seem the type that would rape or mug me, although she had two giant dogs (which, she explained, were to keep her safe from being raped or mugged). I certainly did not feel safe around those dogs. They looked at me and thought ‘lunch’. I looked at them and thought ‘uh oh’.
I finally wander to some sort of bus stop and a bus rolls up. I ask them ‘hey, does this go to the green line?’ The guy thinks for a bit and goes ‘yeah’!
About 40 minutes later, I’m still on the bus (it should have been like, 13 minutes). The bus changes drivers. My mouth asks the new driver ‘does this go to the green line?’; my eyes ask ‘oh god help me where the hell am I?’. He does not know and will try to find out.
In the meantime, I’m on the bus easily for another 35 minutes, posting status updates to my Facebook so that my entire friends list may feel my pain.
Here are some highlights from my 90+ minutes on the bus from hell:
wait... WHAT?
- I saw parts of LA that most people never see. Third world countries. It was truly amazing, from an anthropological point of view
- I watched a woman repeatedly hit her 6 year old child on his head. I thought about saying something, but she would have beat me, too
- There is a TV on the bus displaying trivia, and every other trivia question was extremely morose. Did you know that charqui is llama jerky? Seriously. That was a trivia question.
- Buses make me motion sick
I finally got to the effing Green line. Here is some of the public art that greeted me when I got up to the station (click on the picture to see a larger version):
My heart has been ripped out and I am sobbing
REALLY? REALLY NOW? But wait! Look behind the hideous public art – what do you see? A person! With a BIKE!
I started chatting the guy up – he was on his way to Bicycle Kitchen (one of the social organizations that helps people with bike maintenance). So that was a positive.
I finally make it back to where my car is, and start walking the LONG WALK back to my car, when I notice the last fine example of public art that decorates the metro stations. Look closely at the image below, what do you see? It’s a person covering their face with their arms in a protective stance, while some kind of sharp impact (bullet? train crash? ninja?) explodes on their chest.
Holy sh!t, Los Angeles. And so, I conclude my adventures in public transportation.
DEATH IS IMMINENT - BEWARE ALL WHO PASS
This is the second installment of my adventures in public transportation!
This is what an urban planner may or may not look like
Michael Smart is a doctoral candidate in the department of Urban Planning with a focus on transportation studies at UCLA. He seems like your average nice guy: has a dog, lives downtown, bathes regularly… but under this normalcy lies a person that has never owned a car. Never. And he now lives in Los Angeles, where you are judged by your car, live in your car, breathe car fumes daily.
This probably partially explains his career choice in life, which needless to say, is to improve OUR lives and hopefully help liberate us from the tyranny of cars. I should mention I am a horrible driver and get in at least two accidents a year and have totaled three cars so far. Yes, my insurance is a fortune to pay.
I am pleased to present an interview with Michael concerning his recent study which identifies immigrants as the group most likely to use bicycles to get around in the United States (in particular, NYC and LA).
TC.Com: Why did you choose to study the use of bicycles as a mode of transportation for the immigrant population?
Michael: I was researching how immigrants get around and out of that was born the focus on bicycles. I was always interested in finding out why immigrants travel so differently than those born in the U.S. Nobody bikes very much [in the United States], yet immigrants are biking more than anyone else in the U.S. Even in the tiny phenomenon in the world of public transportation, the fact that one group of people is doing it more than others is worthy of research, because we want people to bike.
We think of biking as good, but other reasons people are biking is because they can’t do other things they would prefer to do. They may want to drive, may want do all the things they want to do in a car better than on a bike. Something is preventing them from doing that. We might think of traffic congestion, environment, but there is something structural blocking what these people want to do so that is worth figuring out what is blocking those barriers.
TC.Com: It sounded like there were several barriers with incomplete or unavailable data on certain immigration groups. What data do you wish was more readily available in order to provide a more concise evaluation?
Michael: The big one is that in all the transportation datasets we have, we don’t know if the person responding is an immigrant or not. There are good reasons why it can’t be asked – fear from the immigrants, even if they are documented, very leery to talk about that. Another thing that is missing from data sets is good detail on where people are from (country of origin). Also, the questions only ask about using public transportation to get to work, not personal needs trips.
TC.Com: Your study touches upon a very hot topic right now in the United States in regards to illegal immigrants and how they are using bicycle transportation in order to stay ‘under the radar’. Are you concerned that your research could be used as a political tool and/or misconstrued due to the political environment surrounding this issue?
Michael: There is probably some danger to that, that some clever law enforcement person will use it for profiling.
The point I am trying to make in the paper is that the public sector isn’t doing any outreach. Building/planning/funding bicycle centers, planners are naively modernist – if we have a public forum and open the door, whoever comes, comes. The planners don’t have the money or resources to do much more than what they can do now.
Because I am an urban planner, I’m interested in how money is used to shape how we live in cities. Right now it’s done without a lot of outreach to immigrant communities (talking about biking specifically).
TC.Com: And finally, do you commute via bicycle?
Michael: Yes, I ride a 3 speed. I have two of them. A Schwinn from 1961 that I love and a new one from Nirve which is nice. I also have a 1970s 10 speed Schwinn.
Thank you SO much, Michael, for taking the time to provide an interview!!
Stay tuned for tomorrow, where I had to take public transportation to GET HOME. Did I get home? Could I be updating this from a metro bus somewhere in Los Angeles!?
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