Riding the poor
By Kevin Uhrich 04/30/2008
Making wealthy and politically influential people who live on the West Side of Los Angeles — where highway traffic in most places comes to a dead stop much of the day — pay a toll to drive in the high occupancy vehicle, or HOV, lanes of the Santa Monica (10) and San Diego (405) freeways would be a tough decision.
Another tough decision would be charging a toll on the Ventura (101) Freeway, out Woodland Hills and Calabasas way — a virtual parking lot at rush hour.
Of course, neither of those suggestions is likely to get much traction. Why? Because rich folks who live in those areas already have all the financial and political clout they need to not be used as guinea pigs by their government.
In reality, it is much easier for public agencies to sock the working poor, which transit officials appear poised to do with the implementation in 2010 of tolls for people who drive in HOV lanes of the Foothill (210) Freeway between Pasadena and Azusa, where the freeway joins with the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway, and on the 10 from the 605 to downtown LA.
According to a report in the LA Times, the US Department of Transportation planned to provide more than $200 million to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority if the MTA board agreed to implement a toll on one or more freeways, which it did last week. That money will now go to buying 60 high-capacity buses. Part of that money will also be used to upgrade Metrolink train service in the San Gabriel Valley.
If the MTA has any money left over, officials plan to set up another toll station — another MTA cash repository — on the Pasadena (110) Freeway, the state’s oldest freeway, which, like portions of the 10, traverses some of the poorest neighborhoods in the county.
Of course, the MTA board of directors is supposed to represent the whole county, and reps from this Valley sit on that board. But the board is actually dominated by Los Angeles city and county officials, including LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. And it certainly appears as though the mayor and his cohorts are having no problems heaping yet more misery on those outside their immediate constituencies who are already struggling financially. Nor do they seem to care about the fact that these people’s gas taxes already subsidize freeways that they will now have to pay to drive on.
OK, so you’re sick of hearing about poor people. Then think of the person who just bought a hybrid car and makes sure he or she takes passengers with them to work or to school. Wouldn’t imposing a toll on these good citizens be tantamount to penalizing them for doing the right thing?
But there’s an even bigger issue here — they don’t call them FREEways for nothing. Back when the country was first starting to travel extensively by car, officials on the East Coast took full advantage of the craze and established tolls on nearly every major highway.
Not in California, where you could still drive free of obstruction and unencumbered by some state bureaucrat sticking his or her hand in your pocket every six miles.
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the MTA is planning to use poor people for federally financed traffic-control experiments. After all, this is the same agency that a federal judge found had discriminated against poor people of color and ordered to start buying better and cleaner buses, which it did only after even more court rulings ordering it to do so. It seems ideas like charging a toll to HOV users in economically hard-hit areas are pretty much right on track with the MTA’s elitist record of indifference to the average Joe and Jane’s needs.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT