I’ve only been in Oxford for two weeks now, but I’m in love. Why? The city planning and public transit here seem to make a huge difference, compared to what I regularly see in LA and NYC, in racial integration, accessibility of jobs and healthy foods, and overall health. I can’t tell you how many elderly people have cut me off on the sidewalk because I was walking too slowly for them. I also see old people riding bikes all the time! It’s great! It not only implies that the infrastructure is set up so that it’s easy for people for walk and bike, but it also makes clear that living in a city that emphasizes these environmentally friendly methods of transport contributes to better health and independence.

A huge problem in LA is the disproportionate amount of money spent on freeway and car-related transit, and the transportation racism/classism and residential segregation that results. The first two things I noticed about Oxford were 1) how easily accessible everything is and 2) how visibly racially diverse the city is. I daresay these two observations are inextricably related.

It’s rare to find a city where, with any given glance, you see Whites, Blacks, Asians, Indians, and others, who all seem to be of similar socioeconomic status. While LA is diverse, the odds of regularly seeing wealthy Black or Hispanic people in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills are pretty low. This might well be related to the fact that you absolutely do not need a car here in order to have access to the same job opportunities. So even if Oxford is residentially segregated and I just don’t know about it, it doesn’t seem have the same social, socioeconomic, environmental or health impacts apparent in LA.

Part of the Bodleian

The city is small enough that you could walk the whole place if you had the desire and the whole day to spare. But it’s also big enough that every time I walk the city, I find something new. If walking doesn’t suit, about 90% of the population owns a bike, and there are bike lanes everywhere. The public transportation is excellent and affordable (and clean!). They only have buses because most of the underground is owned by the Bodleian Library, and it’s too small to make lightrail financially or environmentally sensible. I got a monthly key card, equivalent to the TAP, for 42 pounds, and I’ve taken the bus everyday, which I still have never done in LA despite having lived there my whole life.

I’ve only been here for two weeks, so I’m sure some dystopian race-related observations will come my way, but It’s the first European country I’ve been to where, as a Black person, I could easily be a well-off local.

Is LA too big to achieve this sort of accessibility? Possibly, but after being here for a short time, I have even more faith in the BRUs push for more clean air buses and bus lanes. I see a definite correlation between (apparent) increased racial equality and prevalence of affordable, quality (particulate free!) public transportation.

The foreign born residents or the native born resident?

Metro Rapid buses are a greener alternative to cars, but poor service frequently makes them overcrowded

Ali Modarres wrote an article titled, “Immigrants are ‘Greening’ our cities, How about giving them a break?” In the article, Modarres writes about how immigrants are ‘greening’ our cities by using public transportation.  Meanwhile, native born residents have lived in the United States for a longer time so they’re more likely to use a car for transportation. Cars are know for being a big contribution to global warming because of the toxins that car emits to the air. Many cities in the US have public transportation which includes of buses and rails that run on natural compressed gas and clean energy.

Overall, more than a quarter of the immigrants who have arrived since 2000 use an alternative mode of transportation to work. If the rest of America could do the same, we’d be a bit ‘greener’ already.

Immigrants that enter that country are most likely to use public transportation. There are a lot of misconceptions about immigrants in the US, but immigrants are pushing our cities towards a green movement. Immigrants are using public transportation (or the bus) to go to work, school, and running errands. And although public transportation agencies know that more buses would help the environment, they continue to waste money on projects that are specifically made for the rich class.

Last Wednesday, the Transit Riders for Public Transportation campaign took action all over the United States. Big cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Portland, Chicago and Atlanta participated in the rally. The motivation for the day of action was to get Congress Representatives to co-sponsor H.R. 2746 which is a bill introduced by Representative Russ Carnahan that would provide funding from the federal government for public transit operations.  The day of action was to inform congress that public transportation is a huge necessity for cities all around the country and if it is not funded then mass transit will not be able to operate, affecting millions of public transit users and commuters who travel via bus or rail.

The Carnahan bill is an important issue. It can either make or break the infrastructure of public transportation, it can be a decision on whether or not transportation can can be operational or whether or not it can only be an exhibit of buses and trains that will not be able to run. This is the biggest gamble, and it would mean that if funding is not provided then public transportation could become obsolete. The hugest cities in the U.S. need this bill to survive these harsh economic times and  it is not an issue of whether or not the federal government has enough money to pass the Carnahan bill, its whether or not the government wants to, but it shouldn’t even be an issue of wanting to or not it needs to be passed. You cannot have a sustainable system of transportation without mass public transportation. If it does not pass, it will soon become an issue of whether or not the working poor will have to decide to buy a car, over buying groceries for their families. It will become an issue of whether or not a 50 mile commuter will have to make a decision to drive their high fuel emission cars to work along a high populated freeway.

H.R. 2746 needs to pass, it can only bring positive and more possible ideas for a better tomorrow, if the government can bail out corporations that have been irresponsible and contributed to the largest global economic crisis,  then they can bail out mass transit.

Cop cars

I waited for my friend at the bus stop on Crenshaw at Stocker (Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall) for about 45 minutes on Sunday. During my wait, I witnessed a living validation of the many theories we have discussed at greenRELAY this summer. Massey and Denton’s discussion of an oppositional Culture of Segregation and the cycle of poverty supported by residential segregation could not have stood out more. People at the bus stop spoke surprisingly loudly; young-looking mothers stood with strollers while saggy-jeaned men sat on the benches,  getting up occasionally to throw their trash away in the bushes behind the benches. These behaviors and styles, except for throwing trash in the bushes, are not inherently bad, but they clearly differ from the normative behaviors of the dominant groups in the US, namely wealthy white people. Massey and Denton would likely refer to loud speech in public, teen mothers, and baggy jeans as ‘oppositional’ because they don’t mesh with the behaviors of socioeconomic and political power, such as traditional families.

While I waited, I counted at least five cop cars that stayed within view for the entire time: one parked itself next to the curb with its lights flashing; another pulled over a car for a reason I could not discern; two others seemed to be circling the mall, and one pulled into the lot in which I parked. I found myself terrified that he would give me a ticket for nothing just because he could. I created stories and explanations in my head in preparation for the potential event, praying that he had no legitimate reason to come over to my car. Fortunately he left without exiting his car, but his very presence instilled fear in me, and I suddenly stopped judging people for making an effort to put trash in bushes. The constant surveillance overwhelmed me. I could leave. I have always been able to escape the gaze, but for people who endure that belittlement everyday, an oppositional culture demonstrates a righteous indignation, a way of asserting dignity in a city that has made legitimate means difficult to come by.

As I sat there, I thought ‘no wonder so many people have no interest in restoring the environment when the environment in which they have to live cannot possibly foster affection for the earth or the societies that attempt to organize its inhabitants’. The cops made me so frustrated that I found it easiest to give up hope, leave, and blame ‘the man’, ‘the system’. I think this is the mindset to which a lot of academics refer when they speak of cultures of poverty and segregation, ones in which people do the best they can with what they have and only fight it in ways that have few positive impacts. Massey and Denton argue that because of segregation, these oppositional values are passed between generations and their high concentration makes them the norm, preventing large-scale socioeconomic success. But we have seen throughout history that despite high concentrations of poverty and the prevalence of a culture that is not necessarily in sync with the powerful one, minorities have always fought for better and more just conditions. The necessary changes do come through structural revisions, but those almost always start with grassroots movements, like that of Environmental Justice. No doubt, minorities as a whole are still overwhelmingly disadvantaged, and segregation contributes greatly to it, but we have had our Sojourner Truth’s and Harriet Tubman’s, our W.E.B Dubois’, our Rosa Parks’, our Martin Luther King’s, Cesar Chavez’s and Jesse Jackson’s, and we will continue to have countless organizations who may not be as famous, but who work tirelessly to help people care about and fight for their environmental rights despite underprivileged situations.

I woke at 6:40 AM to attempt to attend a meeting that started at 9:30 PM. I just have to say that if public transportation was easier to use that I probably could have gotten up at 7:45.  If the MTA trip planner which I attempted to use was better I wouldn’t have wasted so much time taking the round about way to Union Station for this meeting.  During the meeting all one lady had to say was that it took her 65 minutes to get there.  I took about 150 minutes or so to get there.  I don’t mean to complain I just have to say that the public transportation is not always the easiest to use.

Today, I attended the MTA Board meeting. Upon arrival I did not expect such a large amount of people to attend this meeting. I knew that the MTA was important but I did not expect so many people to show an interest and come to the meeting. Before last month I had only taken public transportation a handful of times and now that I have used it more frequently I know the importance of the MTA and public transportation. Towards the beginning of the meeting there hardly and of the directors were present as it was time to begin the meeting. There was time for people to speak but I felt that it was sort of pointless because hardly anyone was there to listen to them. Anyone who has ever been to one of these meetings knows of John Walsh who is nearly unforgettable and speaks often. On my way to the meeting I entered a subway station at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Normandie and there were turnstiles.  I thought they were nice but I thought whats the point of having them if you can just walk right around them.  I know that the trains get checked to see if you have a ticket but if you used a tap card is there anyway to know whether or not you paid?  I’m not sure the answer to this question but would like to know the answer.  The Board of Directors voted to approve prices for use of HOV or carpool lanes by cars that do not meet the minimum occupancy requirement, mainly alternate fuel or hybrid vehicles. There was much discussion of the LRTP or Long Range Transportation Plan and a contract with a company that would build rail cars. In the end the vote for the LRTP was postponed until further study could be done and a company was chosen which left many workers there happy. What I found difficult about this meeting was how so much time was wasted during it. The directors have a big long discussion and then in one they decide to return to the original idea wasting a lot of time. Also, I am all for people having a voice but there a lot of what some people had to say got quite a bit repetitive for me. I must admit that not all of this was interesting to me but I have to say that parts of the meeting kept my attention. One of the directors had an article about how contrary to what the representative from this company stated that they were working in Iran. The funny thing is that they criticized another company for working there.  It was an event filled day with my first MTA board meeting as well as AJ Najarian’s first meeting as Chairman.

Wilshire Blvd. and Western St. Bus Riders Union's press conference for Clean Air and Economic Justice Plan.

The BRU had a press conference on June 29, 2009 for the  release of the Clean Air and Economical Justice Plan (CAEJP) policy paper.  The policy paper explains what the CAEJP is and goes into detail about the amount of money nedeed to adopt the CAEJP and how it would cut travel time, increase ridership, reduce global warming, create new green jobs, etc.

This NBC-LA article entitled “Move Over, Prius: Meet the Raptor” discusses a determined NorCal man who built his own fully electric car when he no longer wanted to pay for gasoline: “I can do what GM couldn’t” (or wouldn’t) – mass produce the electric car. I admire this man’s can-do attitude and his decision to drastically reduce his dependence on oil by converting his car, but his goal concerns me as a resident of a city so dependent on cars.

Were Angelenos to replace conventional gas-guzzlers with gasless cars, many relative benefits would emerge: air quality would improve, mobile and area source pollution by cars and gas stations would decline, drivers would depend significantly less on fossil fuels, and it might even help create sustainable jobs. Despite the magnificence of these prospective situations, I am skeptical because of the thought that popularizing less harmful cars might detract attention from the very serious problems of  structuring cities around these machines, regardless of their pollution potential.

Out of Business Gas Station - Crenshaw Blvd

Those problems include, but are in no way limited to, the continuation of urban sprawl, the ease of maintaining racial-residential segregation, and the preference of freeway construction over clean public transit, all of which have especially bad implications for the working-class, the poor, and urban minorities. While the mass-produced electric car would work wonders for the physical environment of Angelenos who can afford cars, the idea seems a merely novel one in the context of Los Angeles because it still supports an environmentally racist and unjust infrastructure.

I don’t mean to put down Mr. Atkinson’s accomplishment. If anything, I would encourage more people to take his lead by making changes on an individual level that would be accessible and reproducible, especially because I am reprehensibly dependent on my own gas-guzzler. His apparent enthusiasm for larger-scale production simply made me realize how dependent Los Angeles is on a machine that has been successfully used to support environmentally unjust decisions. We budget  more money for crime than for public transit and more for freeways than public education, which says nothing good about the problems and priorities of a car city.