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Most Metro staff doesn’t use Metro, they drive. Even the staff who plan things like first/last mile around Metro stations, bus lanes, and rail, rarely use the system they are planning for.
If you live in Los Angeles, it is painfully obvious that the people who run the city’s predominant public transit service never use it if there isn’t a ribbon being cut or a press camera along for the ride.
Take Metro’s Regional Connector: in some ways, an amazing feat to connect multiple, previously disparate lines and provide a new backbone through downtown. On the other hand, the project has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with its lengthy A-Line driver changes at Union Station and the fact that the E-Line still has no signal pre-emption as it crawls through the west portion of downtown, stopping entire trains, full of people, at the behest of a few private vehicles on the cross roads.
I had occasion to take both lines today—and ignoring wait times for the trains themselves—I lost about 15 minutes between surface street stop lights and driver changes. There are better ways to operate these lines and better ways to lobby LADOT for necessary surface-street changes, but we are not a serious city and we have absolutely decided to put our heads in the sand when it comes to alleviating climate change or improving quality of life.
Also, it’s helpful to remember that a good chunk of Metro’s budget is dedicated to highways, sigh.
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Apologies for the pay-walled link. The whole post is excellent, but I thought these two bits were useful even without the full context.
We have an understandable tendency, in this world where information is blasted at us from a fire hose at roughly a 50/50 mix of fact and disinformation, to focus on a single horror at a time. One gradually replaces another and over time we lose track of some of the previous horrors. This is both by design and simply a consequence of the limits of our own capacity; we do have lives to live and things to do other than to sit before a screen collecting information about what woe has befallen whom every moment.
The crisis of the moment obscures the compounding effect of all of the crises.
Buckle down, do what you’re able to do to help given your unique personal circumstances, and then remember not to quit when you (rapidly) reach a point of despair and exhaustion. Their goal is to tire you out and to cow you into submission. They have those goals because they know if they cannot achieve one or both of those things, they will eventually lose. It is only a matter of time, but likely of more time than any of us would prefer.
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As the cultural and political ratchet continues to move in one direction, I’ll let these extraordinary passages stand for themselves.
I met a couple in their 70s who told me they had never considered joining a political protest until ICE came to town, and they realized that their granddaughter was at risk of witnessing a violent immigration raid just by going to school. Dan and Jane (like many others, they asked that I shield their full names) live in a large house in a comfortable suburb, where they welcomed me with tea and cookies.
“When a child witnesses violence or crime, it’s profoundly different from adults,” Dan said. “It leaves scars.”
Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis. This past Friday, Dan joined thousands of others at a protest in Minneapolis, where his fingers were frostbitten in the –9 degrees Fahrenheit weather.
And also:
One of those latecomers was a 46-year-old documentary filmmaker named Chad Knutson. On the morning after Good was killed, he was at home with his two hound dogs, watching a live feed from the Whipple Building, where ICE is based, a five-minute drive from his house. A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.
Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.
“I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”