Break Gridlock, Not The Budget
By Walter Moore, Candidate for Mayor of L.A.
I’ve already written here about Plank No. 4, which sets forth steps -- pun intended -- the City can take to enable more people to live within walking distance of their jobs (i.e., my “Walking in L.A.” Initiatives).
For people who can’t or don’t want to live close to work, here is Plank No. 5, to get traffic moving faster:
5. Break Gridlock, Not The Budget: Move More People In Less Time On City Streets
Subways are wonderful -- except they are prohibitively expensive, take years to complete and are probably the last place you’d want to be during an earthquake. Light rail and elevated trains would likewise cost billions and take decades -- time and money we lack.
We need to end gridlock now, not decades from now. And we need to do it using our existing infrastructure, i.e., the thousands of miles of streets we have already built and paid for. The good news is, we can. All we have to do is give people a better alternative than creeping along in their cars at four miles per hour during the ironically named “rush hour.”
The key is to get those people into vehicles that can move more people per hour along a busy street. Cars -- especially those with just one occupant -- are an inefficient way to move large numbers of people through city streets. Cars take up too much space per commuter. We need to motivate people to switch to more efficient forms of transportation: buses, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles and Segways (electric one-passenger “chariots” with a top speed of 12.5 miles per hour and a range of 24 miles). These types of vehicles can let us move more people and less steel through a given intersection when everyone’s in a hurry.
To encourage people to use these types of efficient commuting vehicles, we need to convert the parking lanes on our major surface streets (e.g., Wilshire, Sepulveda) into lanes dedicated to such vehicles. Some of the lanes would become “bus only” lanes. Others would become “two-wheeled vehicles only” lanes. State law authorizes cities to let Segways travel in designated lanes, and we should use that authority. Converting parking spaces into dedicated lanes for buses and two-wheeled vehicles would let us move more commuters per hour through the same streets we already have. (Private parking facilities can be built to make up for the parking spaces we’re removing from the streets.)
Besides creating dedicated lanes, we need to use our massive MTA budget to buy enough buses so they show up every five minutes or so during rush hour. We should also stop charging passengers to use the buses. The fares only cover a tiny fraction of the cost of the buses anyway, and collecting the fares delays the boarding and movement of the buses. Rather than wasting time collecting token fares, let’s get all aboard get rolling ASAP every time the bus stops.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Walter Moore’s Blog
MooreIsBetter.com
