by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On October 11, I
said goodbye to my father. He had died two months earlier in the San Francisco
Bay Area, and his widow (they had been married 53 years; he and my mom had
broken up when I was 1 ½) had arranged what she called a “gravesite visit” and
invited family members and friends for an informal memorial. That night, as I
took the bus from the airport and then made a connection downtown to return me
to my home in North Park, I said another goodbye — not to a person, but to a
bus line. The #15, which started downtown and ran up the 163 freeway to
Hillcrest, then turned onto El Cajon Boulevard and followed it to San Diego
State University, was running for the last time before, in one of the many
stupid and infuriating decisions made by the people running San Diego’s
Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), it was shut down and replaced by a so-called
“Rapid” #215.
I had been
riding the #15 since I got to San Diego in 1980. At first my then-girlfriend
Cat and I lived in Golden Hill and would walk down to Broadway and ride it
either to the College area or all the way out to El Cajon — it ran longer in
those days — mainly to buy LP records at stores like Off the Record and Blue
Meannie Records. (Blue Meannie closed in 2008 — a victim of what in these pages
I’ve called “the Interblob,” the way the Internet has largely taken over business
after business and abolished the experience of in-person browsing — but Off the
Record still exists, though it moved first to Hillcrest and then to North Park,
where it holds out in a much smaller space and I still occasionally buy CD’s and used LP’s.) More
recently, for the last year and a half I have been doing home care for clients
who lived downtown, and I had used the #15 as my quickest and most reliable way
to get to work.
But, beginning a
little over a year ago, I was warned that the ill-informed idiots who ran MTS
would not be letting me do that much longer. The key clue was when construction
crews started building these elaborate metal objects on the sidewalk along El
Cajon Boulevard and on other parts of the bus lines, including an island smack
in the middle of Park Boulevard just north of University. The constructions got
in the way of the existing bus stops, and frequently I would leave the house
unsure of just where my beloved #15 was
going to stop and how much farther than normal I’d have to walk to get there.
Then the signs went up, announcing that a new “Rapid” bus line was going to be
running along that route and these new, highly decorated bus stops were being
built to accommodate it. It took a while to complete these projects — indeed,
the morning service started on the “Rapid” #215 a crew was still hosing down
the newly built stop where you were supposed to pick it up — but eventually the
dark day came when the #15 would be no more and what I’ve come to call the
“Crapid” would replace it.
I decided to be
fair and give it a try. That lasted two days. On Monday, October 13 — the
morning they were still hosing down the bus stop at El Cajon and Texas Street
that “Crapid” riders were supposed to use to get on it — I wasn’t sure whether
it was going to stop at the elaborate new stop they were hosing down or the old
stop across the street. It stopped at the new stop and the sidewalk was still
wet from the last-minute cleaning job as I boarded the “Crapid.” It took the
“Crapid” just as long to make it down Park Boulevard as it did the old #7 bus,
which (blessedly) still exists and which for years has run from Broadway up
Park Boulevard, turned east on University Avenue and (depending on which one
you get on) goes to 54th and University, College and University, or
all the way to La Mesa. What’s more, while the #7 and the old #15 stopped at
several locations on Broadway — including one just a block and a half away from
my client lives — the “Crapid” only makes three downtown stops: the City
College trolley station, Horton Plaza and the America Plaza trolley station.
That means a longer walk once I get off the bus — and an irritated client who
quite rightly wonders why it’s now so much harder for me to get to work on
time.
The wanton
destruction of the #15 and its replacement with the “Crapid” is just the latest
in a series of bizarre moves by the people running the Metropolitan Transit
System (the “Metropolitan Transit Sewer,” as I used to call it until a fellow
bus rider sitting with me at a stop on Sunday evening said, “You’re being
unfair to sewers — at least they run on
Sundays”). For decades both the #7 and #15 ran all the way down to the end of
Broadway — until the idiots running MTS decided to short-circuit the runs and
end them at First, then shortened them again to end at Third, all of which makes it difficult to
get to the Office Depot store at the end of Broadway where I shop often. What’s
more, they’ve adopted a stupid plan that’s supposed to make the overall system
faster and more efficient, but which anyone who actually rode San Diego’s buses
regularly could have told them would be stupid and counterproductive.
It’s called
“Limited Stops,” and it’s based on the dumb idea that the reason more San
Diegans don’t use public transit is that the buses stop too often. I remember
when the two trunk lines serving University Avenue, the #7 and the #10, both
stopped at every stop along University. Now only the #7 does; the #10 (which
starts at the Old Town Transit Center, snakes up Washington Street to Mission
Hills and Hillcrest, and continues down University Avenue — except on weekends,
when it abruptly stops at the 40th Street station on a bridge over
the freeway) stops at just a few places along the route. The #15 was also
subjected to a “limited stops” routine so that it made only one stop (at 33rd Street) on the long stretch
of El Cajon Boulevard between 30th and 40th. When the
“limited stops” nonsense was introduced at first even the bus drivers were
confused — they no longer knew where they were still supposed to stop and where
they weren’t, and sometimes they stopped where they weren’t supposed to (and
thus made the system much easier on riders) until they learned which stops were
still kosher and which were verboten.
A true express
bus — one that bypasses surface streets and spends a lot of its route on the
freeways, like a car — is considerably
faster than one that stays on the surface streets and makes frequent stops. But
a “Limited Stops” bus that runs on city streets isn’t any faster than a bus
that makes all the stops. Why not? In two words: traffic lights. Any time the driver may be saving by not having to
stop at all the indicated stops is going to be lost anyway by all the red
lights he or she (and many of the best MTS drivers, both in terms of efficiency
and friendliness to riders, are women) will have to stop at. This was a problem
when the #10 was shifted to “Limited Stops” status — and it’s also why the #215
“Crapid” isn’t any faster than the #7. It still has to run down Park Boulevard,
and even though part of the way it runs on a newly (and expensively)
constructed dedicated lane, it still has to stop whenever there is a
red light.
I mentioned this
to a fellow rider at the #15 stop at Texas and El Cajon a few days before the
#15 was killed and replaced with the “Crapid,” and he said that that wouldn’t
be a problem because the new buses on the #215 would be equipped with radio
signals that would broadcast to the traffic lights and cue them to turn green
so the bus could pass. This seemed a bit dubious to me, but he swore that he’d
seen this work in Cleveland. From years of bitter experience as a San Diegan, I
replied, “There are plenty of things
that work in other cities that get screwed up when they’re tried in San Diego.”
After I decided to give up on the “Crapid” after two days and start taking the
#7 to work, I mentioned this to a middle-aged woman bus driver who said those
radio devices that are supposed to make the lights on Park Boulevard go green
for the #215 to pass do indeed exist — but they’re not automatic. The bus
drivers have to activate them as they approach each light, she said, and most
of them aren’t bothering.
The “Limited
Stops” nonsense and the wanton destruction of the #15 line to replace it with
yet another slow, crappy bus that runs on city streets and gets delayed by red
lights are just two examples of the thinly veiled contempt the people who run
MTS have for the people who use it. A decade ago I interviewed San Diego
environmental activist Carolyn Chase, and something she said in our interview
has stayed with me ever since: “San Diego will never have a great public
transit system as long as the people running it still think of it as a welfare
program.” Genuinely cosmopolitan cities like London, Paris, New York or San
Francisco see public transit as part of the urban experience; places like San
Diego regard their transit systems as bones they throw to the people too old,
too poor or too ignorant to drive.
Limiting the
number of stops doesn’t make the buses any faster; it just means that transit
users have to walk farther at both ends of their trips. Anyone who actually rode buses regularly would have been able to tell that to
the majordomos at MTS, but no one did. Someone who’s seen the MTS offices at 12th
and Imperial has told me about all the big, fancy cars in their parking lot,
many of them chauffeur-driven, with which MTS’s decision-makers get their sorry carcasses to work so they can make decisions
that make MTS slower, less efficient and harder to use. Replacing the #15 with
the “Crapid” #215 is a doubling-down on the “Limited Stops” strategy that has
actually made San Diego’s bus service worse, not better.
It’s long been a
pet theory of mine — at least until I was told that a lot of MTS’s top staff
people don’t actually drive themselves to work, but make enough money they can
hire other people to do it — that everyone who works for MTS should be required
to surrender their driver’s license for the duration of their employment there
so they would have to use public transit
and therefore experience the results of their decisions in the real world. The
middle-aged woman driver I met on the #7 (who told me she’s retiring soon,
which will be good for her but a loss for the system) had a similar but less
drastic idea: everyone at MTS should spend two years driving a bus on the
system before they get to be decision-makers. Either would ensure that the
people making decisions for San Diego’s bus riders would be conversant with the
people who use public transit, and would help keep them from coming up with
cool-sounding ideas like “Limited Stops” and the “Crapid” that any bus rider
could have told them wouldn’t work on the ground.
There are other
problems with the “Crapid” #215, including the decision to set up a special
stop for its eastbound run on Sixth and Broadway instead of having it use the
same regular stops all other buses that run down Broadway use. This is yet
another dumb MTS idea; by staggering the stops you make it impossible for
passengers to play one bus line against another and get on the one that arrives
soonest and will still get them where they’re going. No, if you want to get
from downtown to North Park you have to
decide in advance whether you’re going to take the #7 or the “Crapid” — and
it’ll take you a long walk out of your way if you change your mind. It also
doesn’t help that some of the stops are on dedicated lanes in the middle of the
street — including the one outside the Grace Towers senior citizens’ building
at Park and University — meaning that seniors and people with disabilities are
going to have to make a potentially dangerous street crossing just to get to
the bus stop instead of conveniently picking the bus up on the sidewalk in
front of their building.
The “Crapid” was
introduced with a major public-relations campaign that included a press
conference at the Park and University stop and a cool logo with their
advertising slogan, “One Sweet Ride.” It’s actually one more bitter pill shoved
down the throats of San Diego’s public transit users by an insensitive and
ignorant bureaucracy which knows little — and cares less — about the problems
faced by people who actually depend on public transit to work and shop.
