Thus far, this website has been transportation heavy. This is for two reasons: first, transportation is the key to unlocking any of the other changes we might want to see in our built environment; second, there are some real challenges for Anaheim when it comes to implementing the High Speed Rail. This second point is what’s providing the time pressure for all of these transportation related posts, there is a public meeting next week about HSR in Anaheim and I would like to lay the groundwork for all of the transportation issues before then. I’ll have a post that looks more specifically at the HSR issues prior to next week’s public meeting.
There are many types of public transit, each type serves a different purpose. Rail, subways and monorails, and buses each serve a different role in the transportation landscape. The different types of transit form something of a chain, where each link connects to the others and, to use a a tired cliche, the entire system is only as strong as its weakest link.
Trains connect metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles to San Francisco. Subways and monorails link different parts of a metro area, such as Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Buses are limited to providing transportation within a neighborhood.
Of course, walkable streets are an important part of public transit as well. Buses cannot drop riders off on the doorstep of their destination. Commuters need to be able to safely walk from a bus stop to their final destination.
Orange County has faced a number of challenges when it comes to public transit. By far, the largest challenge is that buses are inadequate for a large area like Orange County. Instead of focusing on transportation within a neighborhood, as buses should, Orange County’s bus lines are stretched across the county. In effect, Orange County’s buses are filling a dual role of connecting the various parts of the County and providing transit within our neighborhoods. This results in poor service in both roles.
The poor service that OCTA provides results in some accurate criticisms about our transit system. The two prime complaints are that buses don’t go everywhere people want to go and that it takes too long to get those places the buses do go. Because OCTA has developed the wrong type of transit system to serve the County’s needs, many Orange County residents don’t see the utility of spending additional money on our system to improve it. This has lead to a self-reinforcing loop where the system is never upgraded so it doesn’t work well, which leads to residents not wanting to upgrade the system.
Thankfully, we here in Orange County, and Anaheim in particular, have an opportunity to greatly improve our transit system. With the coming of HSR and ARTIC, we’re going to need to build up our supporting transit amenities to fully take advantage of this great investment the state and federal government is making in our community. For the HSR terminus to be truly useful in Anaheim, we need to have a better bus system and we need to start working on a rail system, such as the monorail that Anaheim is currently studying, to provide efficient connections between the different parts of the county.
[...] This is especially exciting because it shows the City’s understanding that all of our transportation amenities form an interdependent network for people to move around the [...]