Life Stories: August 2003 Archives

I'm going to Missouri for a few days for Frank Williams' funeral -- my grandfather. He passed away this week at the age of 81, peacefully.

Frank Williams was a pilot, and he said that he never expected to die in bed at a ripe old age. He survived two plane crashes, and he thought that's how he'd go. His wife, my dad's mother and my grandmother, was a pilot herself and died in a plane crash when my dad was 12 years old. (My grandfather remarried to a wonderful woman, who I have always thought of as my grandmother, and who I love very much.)

My grandfather was a pretty amazing man. He was a construction contractor and invented a revolutionary kind of quick-drying cement. He was also a farmer, a rancher, and a businessman. He worked hard, with his hands and with his mind; he raised a good family.

I was never as close to him as I would have liked to have been because he lived so far away, but a couple of years ago my brother and I spent a week with him and grandma at their house outside Springfield, Missouri, and I got the chance as an adult to get to know how incredible he was. There's a difference between knowing your grandparents when you're a child and they're just a vague mental concept -- people you visit every year or so who like to show you pictures of your parents when they were young. But as an adult I could really appreciate my grandfather's years of experience, his intelligence, and the solid determination he brought to every aspect of his life.

I'll miss him, but he's encouraged me to be an awesome grandfather, if and when I have the opportunity.

Light Rail in Los Angeles is a joke. I took a whole Saturday a few months ago to ride the length and breadth of our rail system, so I can speak from experience.

First, the train doesn't go where anyone wants to go. I can take it to Downtown LA, but if you're familiar with LA you'll know that there's no reason to go there. Where people want to go is West LA, the Valley, the South Bay, and to the various hellish (but affordable!) eastern suburbs.

Somehow, I live within four block of a train station. I thought it would be fun to ride around and see the city, so I bought a ticket, waited 30 minutes for a train to arrive, and was on my way. Oh, what fun.

If you're not familiar with Los Angeles traffic patterns, let me tell you that Saturday is not a light traffic day; there are no such things. Saturday merely redistributes the traffic to different hours. Late morning and early afternoon on Saturday are the pits, so I was hopeful that by riding the train I could get around more quickly than I could in my car. Not so. Even if you discount the 20 minute walk to the station and the 30 minute wait for the train, it took me more time to get to the Valley (via downtown) than it would have taken to drive. The trains are slow, and infrequent.

So did I save money? Not likely. Even discounting the fact that my taxes subsidize the ticket prices, it would have been cheaper to drive. Plus, the system works on an "honor policy"; there are ticket machines that spit out tickets in exchange for money, but there aren't any gates or guards that actually check tickets. I rode the train for some five hours without seeing anyone other than myself actually purchase a ticket. I think it's strange that many riders could apparently afford gold chains and expensive electronics, but not a few bucks for a train ticket.

Not only does the train go nowhere useful -- slowly and expensively -- but the ride was thoroughly unpleasant. My fellow travelers were loud and obnoxious; the train was loud and vibrated a lot; the windows didn't open and there was no air-conditioning; &c.

Altogether, our light rail system is a horrendous waste of money. Here's an article from 1996 that briefly discusses the corruption and ineptitude involved in its construction.

Even better, here's an op-ed by Wendell Cox, who was a member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission in 1980 and who authored Proposition A, which funded LA's light rail projects.

My belief in the value of rail was strengthened by Commission staff and consultants who generally suggested that a rail system was the antidote to traffic congestion and air pollution in the Los Angeles area. Since that time I have migrated to the opposite view, based upon the now considerable experience with new urban rail systems in the United States.

Don Pickrell's seminal US Department of Transportation study in 1989 was the first to systematically evaluate urban rail relative to its objectives and showed generally that ridership fell far short of expectations and that costs were routinely much higher than planned. Since that time, transit agencies have become much better at projecting ridership, largely by producing much more modest predictions --- evidence that expectations can be achieved if only you aim low enough.

The problem of cost escalation, however, remains as intractable. Rising costs made it impossible to deliver the rail routes promised by Proposition A, so in 1990 the voters approved Proposition C to finish the job. During the period, the cost of the Los Angeles to Long Beach light rail line ("Blue Line") escalated from $140 million to nearly $900 --- admittedly part of the increased costs were attributable to system enhancements. But it is unlikely that the Commission would have approved building the Blue Line if it had known the eventual cost. Now, with rail system costs far higher than expected, there is simply no money left to complete most of the promised system, as the Commission's successor, the MTA, has placed a moratorium on further rail construction. The bottom line is that after spending more than $5 billion building rail in Los Angeles, things are worse than before construction started --- MTA bus and rail ridership is 25 percent below the patronage recorded on the bus only system in 1985. The rail system, which carries barely 15 percent of MTA riders is rising toward $400 million annually and will be equal to one-half the annual operating cost of the entire bus system. It is no wonder that the Bus Riders Union has sought legal recourse to limit this distortion.

But the failure of new urban rail in the United States has far more fundamental roots. Despite tax referendum claims that rail can carry the same number of people as up to 12 freeway lanes, no new urban rail system in the US has materially impacted traffic congestion. Indeed, traffic congestion is increasing faster in the rail cities than in the non-rail cities. New light rail lines carry, on average, only 20 percent the passenger volume of a single freeway lane, and subway systems (like the Red Line) average only 40 percent. Even so, less than one-half of rail riders are attracted from cars, with most riders having been forced to transfer from bus routes that previously provided more direct trips.

The Los Angeles light rail system is costing taxpayers around $500 million annually by now (that was written in 1999); for the price of light rail for one year we could add new lanes to freeways that people actually use. I know, it's a revolutionary thought.

I'm off to Las Vegas to spend the weekend with... my family. Yes, the dreaded family vacation. Oh well, it should be fun, considering that I haven't been to Vegas in years. I'm not a big gambler, but I like looking around and eating at all the buffets. Mmmm.

Anyway, while I'm gone go check out the *Best Of* archives and leave some comments. I'll be back sometime Sunday, I reckon.

Update:
I'm back! At no point, in the net or in the gross, for any individual game or overall, was I ahead by a single penny all weekend. Except blackjack, I suppose. Fortunately, I don't like gambling that much and I stuck with the low-stakes games and tables.

There's a really nifty new machine that they didn't have when I was in Vegas four years ago that lets you play 100 hands of draw poker at once. You get dealt a single hand, and then select which cards to hold. The other 99 hands start with your held cards, and then each gets filled in from its own deck. It's a fascinating game, and it illustrates perfectly just how much the odds are stacked against you. If the rate of return for the game is set at 99% per hand, you can lose money very quickly playing 100 hands at a time.

Meanwhile, there are new hotels. The old-new hotels (like Excalibur) are really starting to show their age, and the new ones seem much more uniform inside than I remember hotels being. Most of the casinos have the same exact games, and the decor isn't as interesting to me as it used to be.

We stayed for two nights, and by this morning I was really ready to head home. We hit a touch of traffic on the 15 by Barstow, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared.

Home again, home again, jiggety gig.

I know I can't help getting older, every second of every day, but sometimes I feel like I'm getting crotchety as well. I prefer to think of myself as "grounded in reality", but still....

I'm friends with a lot of high school kids at church, and nearly every week someone is falling in love with someone else, and they've always got to tell me all about it. If not at church, then later online. I listen, and smile, and nod. Oh he's so great, we're perfect for each other, we're going to get married. You know how it goes. Isn't he so awesome?

For some reason (see title) I feel compelled to point out that no, in fact you will not get married and live happily ever after. How do I know this? Because you're 15 years old, that's how. You'd fall in love with a tree stump if it could listen to your stories without wandering off.

Oh no, you don't understand, we're in love! What can I do but sigh? Look, most marriages fail. I imagine that the failure rate for high school relationships is something like 95%. In my mind, I'm concerned for these kids, I don't want to see them all broken-hearted and hurt... but maybe it's futile. who knows.

In a month or so we'll talk again. Oh Michael, you were so right. He's such a jerk! Yes, I know, he's 15 too. Welcome to real life. Still, I feel complicit in stealing a little bit of innocence that I wish they never had to lose.

Well, I'm not a geek, but I finally broke down and bought myself a digital camera: the Nikon coolpix 2100. I bought a used one for a decent price, and then I spent all afternoon taking pictures of everything in sight. It came with a puny 16MB compact flash card (which holds 42 1600x1200 images), but I have a 256MB card that I bought for my PDA (which I never use) that can hold nearly 700 pictures.

What's that? You want to see 'em?

Obligatory self-portrait
Too cute for mere words
Here comes trouble

It's pretty cool, and maybe I'll have an opportunity to use it to do some real reporting sometime. I'll carry it around, just in case; Pulitzer, here I come.