Alternative Transportation and Considerations of Inequality

Attempting to change the car dependent culture on Occidental’s campus must parallel the challenges with urban developers face in planning a city that is socially, economically, and resourcefully egalitarian. In terms of transportation, urban planners face the challenges of economically developing transportation infrastructure that can be maintained, without sacrificing convenience of use, accessibility, and placement. For a city as vast and sprawling as Los Angeles, these decisions are especially delicate in that transportation is the life-blood of the city, giving people access to jobs and resources and linking communities together. Car culture is so deeply engrained by this reality; Los Angeles grew to the extent to that cars have become a necessity, and cars eventually began to define how this growth would continue.

In understanding this development, we can’t really blame Occidental students with cars to be car dependent (in a survey conducted by Professor Ashenmiller, it was found that most student driving is done within three miles of campus). Even non-Angeleno students perceive this city as infamous for its highways, traffic, and smog, but perhaps choose Occidental because of its proud status as an inner-city institution. And accessing the city and building a relationship with its different faces is certainly one of the strongest pedagogical resources Occidental has going for it, giving many students that come from a privileged or sheltered lifestyle a perspective of the world through less of a rosy-colored lens. Although I have discovered this way too late, recent excursions Downtown, the Westside, and Hollywood have exposed me to the ways in which LA is a living, breathing city, each neighborhood extremely unique and distinct, yet every bit of vital to the city as the organs of a body. But it is important to note that this realization was not done through the removed, celestial freeways, but rather on the bus and the rail, infrastructure that is very much grounded…

Learning to substitute this car culture for more sustainable, alternative ways of transportation absolutely depends on people challenging their phobia of interacting and sharing spaces with different communities. While Los Angeles is following suit as a global city in planning and implementing alternative forms of transportation infrastructure, like Bagota, Curitiba, and Copenhagen, this work must be done with the social factors kept in mind. While the average rail rider in Los Angeles is a white, upper- middle-class professional that possesses a car, but receives a subsidize rail pass, 94 percent of public transportation is utilized by people of color and working class backgrounds riding the bus. Meanwhile, bus infrastructure receives a great degree less support than rail, which is partly already supported and feasible because of limited access in only the areas that have the tax base to support such infrastructure. Despite the obvious inequality, there is also a distinct social problem with this situation, reinforcing the racial and class segregation white flight has already perpetuated in the city. Public transportation not only can be space for people of color and white people to interact, but to educate one another about the different struggles they face within their community. Political engagement becomes an outcome of mere exposure to how “the other half live,” working to remedy not just neglect common in an urban environment, but to enlighten the ignorant or unknowing.

I guess the take away would be this: car culture is an inevitability considering the historical development of a city like Los Angeles. But in seeking to change this reality, we are given a unique opportunity to reconcile several more pervasive social ills in our society. Even in choosing to rely on alternative, more sustainable forms of transportation, I implore Occidental students to embrace their liberal education to even be critical of the reasons how and why not only sustainable transportation, but sustainable culture in general is impacting or neglecting social disparities. Ask why bike lanes are just only recently being embraced when poor folks have relied on bikes for so long… Consider what the economic consequences of public transportation ridership changing or expanding, and what this means for the poor… More than anything, make the effort and take the initiative to move past yourself on public transit, and be open to drink in the different worlds around you—the beauty, the injustices, and the tenacity of life within their own spheres.

Implementing a Parking Fee

When Kelsey, Dmitri and I began brainstorming our project for implementing a parking fee and using part of the revenue generated to further subsidize metro passes for Oxy students I thought it was a relatively straight forward project. I was told that the President backed the idea and I thought to myself that this project would be easy and we would have it up and running in no time, especially considering most colleges have such a system already in place. Much to my surprise, we found out that implementing a parking fee required a new full-time campus safety officer as well as thousands of dollars for signage. We managed to circumvent the large expense of an additional officer by proposing a new student employment position. Then we tried to set up a meeting with President Veitch, which was unsuccessful. Recently, we have been trying to coordinate a meeting with all of the various department heads that have an interest or say in the project, which is a surprisingly large group. This project, although I am confident we will accomplish our goals, has demonstrated to me the increased time and difficulty that having a bureaucratic system implies. There are many levels that have to give their input and have a say as to how someting will be completed. This is both an advantage and disadvantage to our system, hopefully everyone's interests are accounted for to minimize the possibility of a negative outcome for a certain group. Yet I now understand the difficulty of pursuing change because what we are all experiencing with our individual projects are a mere microcosm of what happens in Washington and all over the world every day.

Making Move-Outs Better for the Environment and Society

While trying to develop our own Sustainable Move-out program for Occidental, my team and I looked at other schools for inspiration on how to successfully implement the program. While we were unable to find many concrete logistical information about these programs, the other university programs did show us that such programs can have extremely beneficial results on campus and within the community. Suffolk University developed its, Dump and Run Program, and 2.5 tons of goods avoided landfills and ended up in the hands of 64 needy individuals. Many other universities have similar programs and have teamed up with a variety of non-profits to make sure that clothes, furniture, and food are donated properly at the end of the semester. We are quite excited that the logistical details of our project our beginning to take form. First, we met with Juls, the head of res-life to determine if we could involve Res-Life in the project. With her approval of our current plan, we are well on our way to creating Oxy’s first program of this kind. We are still coordinating details with campus safety, and determining our donation partners, but these matters should be fairly easy to figure out. The biggest obstacle for our group is finding enough volunteers to man all of the dorms at the end of the semester when many students have already left, or are working on moving themselves out of the dorms. We plan on heavily promoting this opportunity through flyers, oxy digest posts, contacting the UEP list serve, and recruiting students at Earth day. Hopefully, we will be able to get enough volunteers to successfully implement Sustainable Move-out at the end of this semester.