Guest editorial: It s time to rethink the Arts and Culture District parkrecord.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from parkrecord.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The board of LA Metro, which runs the buses and subways in Los Angeles County, met on Thursday to consider a radical idea: making transit free. The agency has approved a pilot program that will waive fares for K-12 and community college students this summer and for low-income riders next winter. In 2023, Metro will decide if the remaining riders get to ride free, too. That would give Los Angeles the largest free transit system in the world.
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More than two hours of public comment preceded the meeting, and most of the speakers were not fans of Metro’s incremental approach. They were against the agency asking for “a public attestation of poverty.” “Any effort to impose a means test is in fact a form of racial discrimination,” one said. Another said: “It’s an apartheid system on its face.” In short: Free transit now!
Beverly Scott
Jarrett Walker
PART 1: HOW THE PANDEMIC WALLOPED TRANSIT SYSTEMS
When Americans were told to avoid crowded spaces, that meant buses and trains, subways and streetcars. Our policy hackers outlined what happened in the months that followed, and some of the lessons policymakers learned along the way.
Widespread service cuts
Nationally, transit ridership fell by 80 percent, so it’s no wonder that many agencies dialed service way back. Some switched to a weekend schedule or stopped late-night service.
But hackathon participants said those cutbacks soon created new problems. Essential workers working low-paying service jobs whose value Americans finally recognized but didn’t remunerate still had to go to work at grocery stores, nursing homes, hospitals and, yes, transit agencies.