The Blue Line is Receiving an Overhaul—But Will a New Reality Make for New Perceptions?

6 minute read

The council Tuesday night received a two-part report on various improvements—some already made, others still on the way—to the Metro Blue Line, which runs between the downtowns of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

The first part of the report detailed how police response times and crime rates have decreased since Metro authorities began teaming with the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) last year. Officers have been riding the Blue Line to maintain a presence, and as a result emergency response times are below 3.5 minutes for calls in the city, and serious crimes are down 30 percent over the last 12 months. Next year, the LBPD is also adding to its Metro unit two new Quality of Life Officers, who deal exclusively with helping those experiencing homelessness access services.

Photo by Madison D'Ornellas.

The second part focused on the $350 million “New Blue” project designed to make structural and aesthetic improvements to the Metro, including upgrades that will decrease the travel-time from Long Beach to Los Angeles by an estimated 10 minutes. This last batch of financing comes at the tail-end of a 10-year overhaul that has seen about $1 billion placed into the Blue Line. Measure M, which Los Angeles County voters passed by a wide margin in November of 2016, will itself create two dozen new transit lines across the county.

But the above investments cannot fully address the large and lingering problems at the root of Metro’s declining ridership.

The first issue is gentrification. Though some affordable housing developments—such as the Spark and the Beacon—have been planned in Long Beach along the Metro route, they are few compared to the mass of market-rate and luxury development happening downtown; and when communities that have relied on public transportation are displaced by wealthier residents, ridership suffers. This has already been happening across Los Angeles.

A 2017 report from Policy Link and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at the University of Southern California found that 73 percent of residents in L.A. County drive to work alone. This percentage increases dramatically with income: “Only 58 percent of very low-income workers (earning under $15,000 per year) drive alone to work,” the report states (pg. 71), “compared with 82 percent of workers who make over $75,000 a year.”

As of 2016, the Blue Line had 20 of its 22 stops traversing through communities with median incomes well below the L.A. County average. Accounting for Downtown Long Beach’s ongoing developments, median incomes near the southernmost stations of the Blue Line are sure to rise, begging two questions: will these new folks ride the improved Metro? Or will they only continue displacing the people who need the Metro most?

Tomisin Oluwole
Ode to Pink II, 2020
Acrylic and marker on paper
14 x 22 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

Then there are concerns over how effective altering the reality of transit will be at affecting the perceptions and lifestyles of Southern Californians. The Blue Line has struggled for years with its public image, and mass transit across L.A. is seen as less effective and accessible than it actually is. From 2013 to 2017, Metro ridership declined almost 20 percent. The growth of ride-sharing companies, falling gas prices from 2012 to 2015, and gentrification may have all played a part.

Further working against any optimism is the foundation of Los Angeles transportation: historically unique, largely suburban, and car-centered, it creates issues, not just for the existing transit infrastructure, but with an existing culture that prevents many residents from stepping foot on a bus to begin with. Will improvements in transit safety, or even a full aesthetic reboot, get people out of their cars and onto the bus?

During public testimony at this past week’s city council meeting, Mayor Robert Garcia, who was elected to the Metro Board last year, stated that, after an eight-month period of intermittent closures to finish the changes, there will be “a major push… to hit refresh.”

“The collective push to have that fresh start” should help increase ridership, Garcia urged. “We want people on the Blue Line.”

From the 2017 Equity Profile of the Los Angeles Region.

Progress on that front may be limited, however, by the same home-owning interests in our city who utterly had their way with the mayor and city staff all of last year and into January, effectively shrinking the city by claiming more space for suburbs—and the lonely cars that come with them—at the direct expense of shifting Long Beach into a truly urban, green, and sustainable future.

As record wildfires rage across our state, the Metro should be viewed less as a public alternative and more as an ecological necessity—but are Long Beach residents prepared to turn in their car keys for a TAP card?

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

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