Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (33 page)

In California, another rising star in the movement to reinvent traffic is Seleta Reynolds, whose job as general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation is to do for LA what
Sadik-Khan did for New York—times ten. When LA Mayor Eric Garcetti hired her away from San Francisco in 2014, he branded Reynolds “the ideal field marshal in the war against traffic.”

Hers is arguably the greatest transportation challenge of the era—at least people walk in Manhattan. Reynolds is charged with reengineering traffic to make walking as reasonable (and safe) a choice in LA, where some major streets have been denuded of pedestrians for decades, along with bicyclists, sidewalk diners, and casual transit riders. Her charge is to open up the streets to all of them, while also making it possible to drive LA without crippling traffic getting in the way. Oh, and one more little mission: While she's at it, Reynolds is charged with ending all traffic deaths in the city by 2025.

Still, Reynolds prefers to define her job less as field marshal and more as game changer, offering mobility alternatives after five decades of having only one practical option: the car. That's as much about perception as infrastructure, she says. Why is it, she wonders, that Angelenos can name their favorite restaurant, favorite museum, or favorite park in a heartbeat, but if you ask them their favorite street, they look at you like you're nuts? To its own people, LA streets are places of dread.

“It shouldn't be that way,” she says, explaining what she believes is at the heart of her job. “Streets are spaces that belong to the people. They are public spaces, and we should be able to think about them like any of our other favorite places.”

Her ideas—and other similar initiatives across the country—offer promise but no panacea. Even though bike lanes and pedestrian malls can improve safety, traffic, and mobility choices, they also lead to conflict that reveals just how intractable the fundamental problems of goods and people movement can be. In LA and New York City, the new bike-car-walking rules have unexpectedly pitted pedestrians against cyclists, who berate one
another for failing to follow the rules of the road. New York's Central Park has become a particularly angry battleground after numerous high-profile collisions between bikes and walkers, including two crashes that left two pedestrians dead in 2014. The police have cracked down on cyclists by issuing hundreds of citations for rolling through red lights and failing to yield to pedestrians, but the bad feelings have yet to ebb (with the
New York Post
tabloid egging on the conflict with such headlines as: “New York's Cycles of Death: Our Arrogant-Biker Nightmare”). Other cities—San Francisco, for one—have grappled with aggressive cyclists who deliberately block cars and, in one videotaped confrontation in August 2015, surrounded and smashed a car after it bumped one of the blockade bikes.

The Times Square pedestrian mall, meanwhile, after drawing years of praise at home and emulation by other cities, has come under fire for attracting aggressive and costumed (and occasionally half-naked) panhandlers—an annoyance, perhaps, but tame in comparison to its past history of seediness and street crime. The new mayor and his police chief suggested in 2015 that the area be restored to its old car-centric design, setting off a political firestorm. The president of the Times Square Alliance business group fumed to the
New York Times
, “We can't govern, manage or police our public spaces so we should just tear them up. That's not a solution. It's a surrender.”

The lesson here is that building a better door-to-door system is not just about the infrastructure. There are obstacles of habit and behavior to overcome as well: of tradition, belief, and the sense of entitlement that drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians all bring to the mix. The failure to acknowledge door-to-door behavior has led political and civic leaders to cling to costly “solutions” to traffic and transport that just aren't working, at least in their current forms.

Large investments in mass transit, such as the light rail and subway system Los Angeles has been constructing since the 1980s (primarily through voter-approved local taxes, not federal handouts), have had some success, but ultimately have failed to attract the hoped-for ridership (a common pattern nationwide). As of 2015, LA's Metro Rail system had exactly eighty-seven miles of track laid, with more under construction, at a cost of $12 billion over twenty-five years. About 7.2 percent of Los Angeles–area commuters use public transit, which is above the national average, but two-thirds of that is by bus, which means that $12 billion bought 2.4 percent of commuters for the new rail lines.

These sorts of investments have achieved nothing close to the pre–World War II levels of rail transit use, much less the mass devotion to streetcars and light rail of America early in the twentieth century, when cars were still in their infancy. A bit over 5 percent of Americans commute by mass transit of all types, which certainly has a measurable effect on traffic,
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but a significant portion of that ridership comes from the 55 percent of commuters in the New York area who rely on transit. Recent mass transit investments nationwide have barely moved the needle on the 76 percent of workers who commute to work alone in their cars—suggesting the need to try something different, a rethinking of ways to make those investments pay off.

The same goes for the hundreds of billions spent to add lanes to highways without achieving the congestion reductions predicted and desired. This includes carpool lanes, such as the $1.3 billion for the Carmageddon addition in LA. Investment in carpool lanes continues despite the fact that proportionately fewer people than ever use them. In 1980, 19.7 percent of workers carpooled on their commutes. In 2013, the percentage of workers who carpooled was down to 9 percent.
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This suggests we ought
to be doing something different and more useful with the 3,000 miles of carpool lanes across America.
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Beyond the old strategies that aren't working, some trends tend to get ignored but bear examination. Consider the somewhat bizarre fact that Americans hate to walk more than any other people on earth. We quite literally walk less than everyone else, and far less than previous generations of Americans. This is not a minor thing but a trend that has profound implications for traffic planning and traffic jams (not to mention health and obesity). In 1980, 5.6 percent of Americans commuted to work on foot. By 2012, that number had dropped by half, down to 2.8 percent. Bicycling to work hadn't budged significantly in that same time frame: 0.5 percent in 1980 versus 0.6 percent in 2012.
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According to a 2010 study of American walking habits, in which 1,136 adults around the country wore pedometers for two days, the average American took 5,117 steps a day—about 2.5 miles. That's about half what a healthy person should cover every day, and about half the steps the average Australian or Swiss takes daily.
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A separate study showed Amish men, who live as Americans did 150 years ago, take about 18,000 steps a day—nine miles. (Amish women cover about seven miles a day.)
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Unsurprisingly, countries with higher average daily steps have lower adult obesity rates—anywhere between 3 and 16 percent of the population, compared to a 34 percent obesity rate in the U.S.

Will more walkable, welcoming, and safer streets change that? Or will getting people back on their feet require a greater cultural shift than just building it and hoping they'll come? It's a daunting question in Los Angeles, which should be a walker's and cyclist's paradise, with streets that are almost all flat and three hundred days a year with sunny skies and moderate temperatures. There is a small but hearty cadre in Los Angeles who choose to do what most Angelinos consider impossible, if not insane: They
have no cars—by choice, not necessity. The demographic driving this trend is young professionals—Millennials, mostly—settling in the older sections of LA, the areas in and ringing downtown where streets and commerce are in the process or revitalization. With access to transit and more walkable streets than most parts of the city, these areas offer a rare opportunity to at least consider shedding the costs of car payments, parking, gas, and car insurance. That's what drew Monique Maravilla, a former stagehand for Cirque du Soleil and the LA Opera, who left stage work to open a coffee shop, Kindness & Mischief, on North Figueroa Street in the Highland Park section of LA. Now she bikes to work and most other places—a family lifestyle choice, as her fiancée has been car-free for a decade (though most of that time was in Oregon, she says, where such cities as Portland and Eugene have been more welcoming of car-free lifestyles).

What's it like getting around Los Angeles without a car? For Maravilla, it's a constant but mostly satisfying battle, like swimming against the tide. But she's been frustrated by her local city councilman's adamant opposition to installing bike lanes on busy Figueroa where her store is located, something he had promised to support in his election campaign. “It's too scary to bike on it now—the traffic is fast and drivers feel entitled,” she complains. She had been counting on the added business that cyclists could bring to her fledgling shop. “Bikers stop and spend their money. The cars just zip by.”

The health and economic benefits of car-free life keep her invested in the extra effort and planning it requires. Her friend Kacy Morgan, an LA sustainable transportation consultant and avid biker, has been car-light for two years for the same reasons, relying on mass transit and her bike most of the time, but renting a Zipcar or buying a Lyft ride when the only way to get somewhere is by car. “I save so much money compared to when
I owned my car,” she says. “Hundreds a month. I don't ever see myself going back.”

Still, this is not a common choice in Los Angeles, which is probably why Maravilla's councilman felt secure (or compelled) to flip-flop on promised bike lanes. Car owners are a much larger constituency, and many of them see bike lanes as traffic obstacles and competition. The long-term trends have been going in the drivers' direction for many years.

Half of all trips in the metropolitan area are under three miles—easy walking or biking distance—yet 84 percent of those short trips are made in cars.
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A paltry 16,000 Los Angeles commuters get to work by bike. These trends are multigenerational, and we're passing them on to children. In 1969, just under half of American schoolchildren walked or biked to school. By 2009, the walkers and bikers had dropped to 13 percent.
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In all the many transportation plans made over the last fifty years, none saw this profound change coming, much less figured out what to do about it. Yet it is clear that the decline in walking and biking is a major contributor to traffic jams. All those kids who used to walk to school are now in cars—during rush hour.

P
redicting transportation in the future is not, it turns out, one of the things America has been good at. When the interstate system was planned in the fifties and sixties, there were far fewer women in the workforce in America. So we're driving and moving goods today on a system that was not designed to accommodate one of the most disruptive changes to our transportation system of systems: today's workforce is split evenly between men and women. Instead of one household member driving off to work, it's now two—most often in separate cars. No one expected it when the backbones of today's transportation systems were built. No one
imagined it. Planners simply assumed existing trends would continue.

The same holds true of the advent of e-commerce, of containerization, of burgeoning truck traffic pounding road surfaces much faster than anticipated, of a declining willingness to carpool or use transit or to even do such mundane daily trips as walking to school instead of driving. The nation simply didn't plan for any of it. We couldn't plan for it because our transportation crystal balls don't work very well, and so we just use current data and technology, add in population growth, and assume nothing else will change. Transportation planning, in short, is based on a fiction, an imagined steady-state universe. The result is the system we have today, part miracle, part madness, always teetering on the brink of overload.

“It's the ‘Shut your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears and pretend nothing different will ever happen' method of planning,” says David Levinson, the transportation scholar and a former planner himself. “It's kind of absurd, but we're still doing it that way.”

In the summer of 2015, Los Angeles proved Levinson right when it published its official vision for the future of transportation in the second largest city in the country, an aspirational document called
Mobility Plan 2035
. It's an ambitious document that some city leaders have described as LA's new “constitution” of transportation, and others have vowed to oppose vigorously enough to keep the city's lawyers busy for a generation. But that's not the problem with the plan. The problem is that, for all its forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting aspirations, it was, like so many of our long-range transportation plans, obsolete the day it was released. This supposed blueprint of LA's door-to-door future twenty years down the line fails to consider, or even mention, the most disruptive and profound transportation scenario now on the horizon: driverless vehicles.

Los Angeles is not alone in planning tomorrow's transportation based on yesterday's technology. When the National League of Cities analyzed transportation plans for the nation's fifty most populous cities as well as the largest city in each state—a total of sixty-eight cities in all—only 6 percent had plans that considered the potential effect of driverless cars. Just 3 percent took into account the impact of such ride-sharing services as Uber and Lyft. Yet those services are up and running in sixty of the sixty-eight cities studied.
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This is no simple bureaucratic omission. This is a disaster. These plans seek to determine how our cities will look, work, move, and grow in the future. Yet they ignore the most powerful and transformative trends in transportation in a century.