Blogging Social Difference in LA: Week 4

For a city that loves their cars so much they will sit in hours of traffic, it’s not surprising to read about the stigma of riding buses in Los Angeles. This city owes much of its current layout to the rise in popularity of the automobile and although its sprawling nature almost encourages and intensifies the need for a car, Jarrett Walker thinks otherwise. Walker, a public transit planning consultant and author of the blog Human Transit claims that the “regular grid of arterials” that link the many city centers is “the ideal infrastructure for that most efficient of transit structures: a grid network.” And it turns out that LA has one of the most accessible transit systems in the country. The Huffington Post reports that “99.1 percent of no-car households in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana area have access to public transit.”

So why is the idea of social stigma surrounding the use of public transportation so prevalent in Los Angeles? The LA Times discusses Jacquelyn Carr, an LA resident who started using the bus because she could no longer afford to lease her car. Carr saw this lifestyle shift as so monumental that she launched a blog, Snob On a Bus, which catalogs her travel experiences on public transportation. She told the LA Times that she felt as though she were “too good for the bus.” She claims, “there’s a social understanding and a construction around that if you take the bus, you take it because you don’t have money. There’s a social standard. Obviously I had bought into that.”

This is especially curious to me, coming from San Francisco and being an avid MUNI rider. In San Francisco riding public transportation (much like biking, walking, and composting) adds to your stripes as an intelligent urban inhabitant. Here in Los Angeles it seems that riding public transportation goes along with this “social standard” that Carr mentions and brands you as someone who cannot afford any other mode of transportation. Another point of interest is that this stigma only seems to be associated with bus travel and not with train travel. This is probably because, as the Atlantic Cities bluntly puts it, "train riders are richer and whiter." 

So, I decided this week I should experience LA’s public transportation system for myself. I wanted to ride both a train and a city bus because these modes of transportation offer different experiences, attract different riders, and have different social implications.

Union Station

I began downtown at Union Station which is the bustling crossroads of Metrolink, Amtrak, and many municipal bus and rail lines. Union Station, built in 1939 is full of marbled surfaces and terra cotta tiling. The building’s well preserved elegance offers a clean and comfortable place to sit and wait. I made my way to the platform where I waited for the purple line that was scheduled to arrive at 11:41am. As a transit rider who thinks of MUNI time much like the concept of dog years (where a minute in MUNI time is about two minutes in real time) I assumed the worst. However, I was pleasantly surprised when the purple line train pulled up at 11:41 like promised. Almost too civilized to be true.

I rode the purple line from Union Station to the last stop of Wilshire and Western. There were about twenty people on the car I was on and it was a smooth and quiet ride. After the 7th Street/Metro Center stop, which is a transfer point to a couple of other metro lines, there were just three others left on the train. There were clear announcements at each stop with a reminder in English and in Spanish that this was the purple line headed to Wilshire and Western. I got off at the last stop and headed upstairs where I hopped on the 720 towards Santa Monica to get back to my apartment in Westwood.

On the 720 Bus

The bus was definitely more crowded than the train had been but I was able to get a seat and it still was generally pretty clean (although I think BART has taught us that cloth seats are definitely not the most hygienic...). Just as I was wondering if this prompt service was an everyday occurrence in Los Angeles, or if I just had good transit juju today the bus got a flat tire. We all emptied out to wait for the next 720 which came in about 10 minutes.

Overall my experience on LA’s public transit system was pretty smooth and although comparisons have been made about the average race and income of bus riders compared to that of train riders, I didn’t notice a very big distinction. An article on the Atlantic Cities, “Race, Class and The Stigma of Riding the Bus in America” claims that 92% of bus riders in Los Angeles are “people of color” with an annual median household income of $12,000. Compared to the aforementioned "richer and whiter" demographic who rides the train it's easy to see where this bus stigma comes from. However, discussing it in terms of racial and income disparities will only continue the negative line of thought and ultimately justify the stigma.  

There are many ways in which our society views inequalities as a natural phenomenon - whether they are gender, class, or racial inequalities. This tendency to naturalize inequality stems from early theories of sociology like structural functionalism. This is a theoretical framework for society that is often described with the analogy of an organic being where a society would represent a body, social groups would represent organs, and individuals would represent cells. Every part has its own function and exists because it serves a specific purpose. This line of thinking cannot accurately represent a society because it justifies difference and repression. Jarrett Walker wrote a response piece to “Race, Class and The Stigma of Riding the Bus in America.” He points out that discussing the social stigma around bus travel really just, “tells everyone that an incurious aversion toward buses is a normal part of being a successful person.” Essentially, discussing unwarranted cultural stigmas just works to perpetuate those feelings and naturalize the racial and economic differences we see on public transportation. The idea that the bus system functions to serve low income citizens is flawed and will be a roadblock to a greater acceptance of public transportation as a distinguished and sustainable way to get around. 

Proof!