With the first month of the new fiscal year gone, Metro is still operating without an established budget for 2021. When the Board of Directors returns from its July recess, they will immediately be tasked with sorting through the mess that Covid and attendant restrictions on businesses and personal travel have made of Metro’s revenue streams and operations so that they can adopt a budget. While there are no shortage of transportation projects in need of funding in Los Angeles, it remains to be seen what Metro will decide to prioritize during this period of widespread hardship. There have been some early indications as to the discussions going on within Metro, however, and, for bus riders, the signs are not entirely encouraging.
On May 26, an internal memo by Metro CEO Phil Washington was posted for review by the agency’s Board of Directors. The memo, which contained a detailed snapshot of the evolving financial impacts of the Covid pandemic on Metro, divided “all projects and programs” into two buckets. What Washington refers to as Bucket 1 contains capital projects for which work is already being carried out under the terms of an executed contract. By contrast, Bucket 2 contains those projects and programs that have not been contracted and which, consequently, stakeholders can expect to be subject to delays pending an improvement in Metro’s financial standing.
Missing altogether from either bucket is perhaps Metro’s most important initiative: the NextGen bus service reorganization. NextGen is the plan to save Metro from a decade of declining ridership, service quality, and rider satisfaction. NextGen was meticulously assembled over several years, as riders waited with strained patience for Metro to begin implementing the urgently needed system-wide improvements.
When Metro debuted the completed NextGen study in January of this year, the plan’s aims were clearly among the most ambitious that the agency had ever sought to achieve, in a category with the decades-long project to build the city’s subway or the still-elusive goal of tunneling under the Sepulveda Pass. But even Metro’s recent history is filled with false starts and plans that were announced with fanfare only to falter and ultimately result in no lasting changes for riders. This is why Metro’s silence on the priority of establishing dedicated, protected funding streams to keep NextGen moving forward is so concerning.
A full buildout of NextGen is proposed by Metro to take place over 6 years, including nearly $1 billion in capital spending and reallocated bus service hours creating an all-day frequent network the likes of which this city has not enjoyed since the glory days of the old streetcar networks, if ever. By contrast, without NextGen, Metro has no clear hope to establish itself as a high-quality transportation system for Los Angeles. The stakes are that high.
Within the first phase of the NextGen action plan, the number of high-frequency lines running service every 10 minutes or better was set to nearly double while the number of Angelenos living near high-frequency lines would increase by a stunning 238%. But without adequate funding, this plan cannot succeed. Indeed, the capital elements are essential to accomplishing the transition to a high-quality bus network.
A NextGen plan without funding, where stops are consolidated but service remains infrequent and the stop environment remains unfriendly will only further burden the Angelenos who continue to rely on Metro during Covid. And if Metro cuts bus service in response to Covid, the plan’s goals become that much further out of reach.
Budgeting during the time of Covid has been challenging. Uncertainty regarding aid bills at the federal level has trickled down to every other level of government, and Metro, like other agencies, is working to establish a path forward at this critical moment. But we are also in Summer 2020, beyond when work on NextGen was supposed to begin with no clear indication or commitment from Metro to proceed with its reconstruction of a bus network that was failing long before Covid reached our city.
Metro’s faltering relationship with bus riders is sufficient reason to view any unwillingness on their part to be direct about the future of NextGen with suspicion. It is time for Metro to state clearly that they will fund NextGen and how they intend to make sure that it is completed in full.
