There's always more to the story

Headline says, "OMG the driver was denied a permit!"  And, admittedly, that is a problem. But it's a very large and convoluted citywide problem involving the charter school system, the legal environment under which bus companies operate in Louisiana, and several other things. The top of this Lens article covers some of it if you are looking for a quick mode of entry.

Anyway back to this un-permitted driver today.  Why was he denied a permit?

City spokesman Beau Tidwell confirmed the Hammond’s Transportation bus was driven by Chad Rodney, who had applied for a city school bus permit on Sept. 24 and was denied because he had a 2016 conviction for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. By state law, school bus drivers can’t operate within five years of such a conviction, Tidwell said.

Is that a valid reason, though? Weren't we trying to end this kind of employment discrimination against ex-offenders? I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the bus didn't crash because the driver was busy selling coke at that particular moment today. 

Some would say New Orleans East is a rural area

I mean they've got wild hogs, and alligators, and Grunch monsters, and all sorts of things out there. 
 
So this hardly seems like a disqualification.

On Monday, Transdev - the Paris-based company that manages RTA's day-to-day operations - confirmed through spokeswoman Taslin Alfonzo that DOT had not awarded a TIGER grant for the transit center. In an email, Transdev noted that only one grant was awarded to a Louisiana project -- $13 million for the St. Bernard Port, Harbor & Terminal District to patch up two wharves on the Chalmette Slip.

It's unclear why RTA lost out on the transit center grant, through DOT stressed in a news release that special consideration was given this year for projects in rural areas. Transdev says it intends to "request a debrief from the federal government."

Oh well. At least we got all those streetcars to nowhere and pedestrian-only boat rides for tourists while the money was still coming in. Ideally it would be nice if East New Orleans residents could get downtown to see all that stuff once in a while but that's never been a priority. 

We failed

New Orleans was always going to be rebuilt after the Katrina flood. The 70 billion dollars plus worth of federal funds and insurance payouts guaranteed that.  The challenge to local policy makers was to ensure that the city was rebuilt equitably. The task was to make sure that everyone who was affected by the disaster was relieved and to see that the future benefits of a rebuilt New Orleans accrued to everyone and not just to the wealthy and opportunistic.

We failed miserably to meet this challenge. The new city is more exclusive, more expensive, and a more difficult place to be if you are poor.  The bulk of the discretionary investment in rebuilding has focused on creating nice new things for rich people and tourists to enjoy.  One of many facets of life in New Orleans through which we can observe our failure is public transit.  Just take a look at this new report from the advocacy group Ride New Orleans.

The report largely focuses on the expansion of streetcar service — including the Loyola Avenue line and the line under construction on North Rampart Street and St. Claude Avenue, which some have argued serve mainly tourist areas — and the decline of bus service, which the report argues could be more flexibly used to serve the needs of residents.

Streetcars now offer about 3 percent more trips each week on the five completed lines than they did before Katrina, while buses are making only about 35 percent of the trips they made in 2005.

As a result, streetcars offer more frequent service, with one coming on an average of about every 17 minutes during peak hours, compared with buses, which require an average wait of about 38 minutes, according to the report.

While buses on two routes run every 15 minutes, the other lines have longer waits, and some routes have as much as a 60-minute wait time.

This surprises pretty much no one who has been paying attention over the past decade as RTA has repeatedly emphasized its role in "economic development" (i.e. propping up real estate values).

Justin Augustine, the agency’s general manager, said the project will take about two years to complete once the work gets started. As with the Loyola Avenue spur, which opened in January 2013, city officials hope the investment will pay off by generating economic development in a part of the city where revitalization efforts have proceeded in fits and starts.

“When we first introduced the concept, we wanted to revitalize and renew parts of the city, and we knew that along that corridor, you’d be touching five historic neighborhoods,” Augustine said, referring to the French Quarter, Iberville, the Treme, the Marigny and the Upper 9th Ward. “We’re hoping with all of our projects that we spur economic development.”

And this means, by necessity and by design, the transit agency has worked, in cooperation with developers, to deemphasize.. you know.. transit.

Pres Kabacoff, a real estate developer from the Bywater neighborhood, said he thinks the streetcar will help spur business. Kabacoff even argued that slowing down vehicle traffic might be a good thing, since having cars whip by "is not conducive for good retail development."

He added, "To the extent that people have a difficult time in traffic getting down the street it may cause them to want to live in the area and use an effective streetcar."

An "effective streetcar" slows down traffic and helps sell downtown luxury condos.  It does this at the expense of reliable bus service that helps people get where they're going on time but those people aren't who we rebuilt this city for anyway.


For more on the sorry state of New Orleans transit after the flood and on into the forseeable future, please check the schedule at this year's fast-approaching Rising Tide X.

Panel Discussion: Transportation: How'd ya Get Where Yat?

Megan Braden-Perry (Public Transit Tuesdays) moderates this conversation about how New Orleans makes infrastructure an obstacle course.

With:

Dan Favre of Bike Easy,

Rachel Heiligman of Ride NOLA,

Jeff Januszek of Fix My Streets

Amanda Soprano from #NOLATwitter.

Rising Tide X is August 29, 2015 at Xavier University. Check out the rest of the website for details about the extensive program. You can go for free this year but please register here. If you'd like to help defray the cost of production or order swag, there's a separate GoFundMe page here.   

Keep your damn paparazzi out of my thrift store!

From this week's (final.. like ever) Gambit Public Transit Tuesday.

While walking away, I heard someone yelling, "Excuse me? Turn around!" I didn't think the person was talking to me, but I turned around anyway. The lady was black with dreadlocks and the lady I saw inside of M-V Thrift Shop was a middle-aged woman with greasy blonde hair.

"Why were yuh takin' pictures of the store? Yuh cannot do that!" she yelled with a Jamaican accent.

"I'm a journalist and I'm outside — I'm allowed to. I didn't even take any pictures inside!"

"But why were yuh takin' pictures?"

"So people can know the store exists."

"What is exists? What do that mean?"

Now it turns out that the thrift store owner in this episode might have some legal issues making her nervous but it's not the first time Megan has been scolded by shop owners for snapping pictures. Can someone explain what this particular paranoia is about? People in public take pictures of stuff. Google takes pictures of everything in the world and maps those pictures. 

I understand the concerns individuals have over creeping Big Brotherism when city's police forces have cameras on every corner or randomly harass hundreds of thousands of citizens as a matter of policy.  But that's not what I'm asking about here. What is it about shop owners in particular that makes them so jumpy about customers with cameras?

Ride the red bus

Like many New Orleanians who occasionally find themselves having to traverse the "Hospitality Zone" even though the Mayor has made clear that area belongs more to the tourists than the residents, I'm very much looking forward to being stuck in traffic behind one of these giant obnoxious double-decker tour buses.

Yes, I'm looking forward to it for a couple of reasons.  First, I'm reasonably certain the none of the buses will keel over and die in the middle of the street no matter how hard they are worked. 

Second, now that I've seen the route,



I'm reminded that only a few years ago, our city fathers tried to waste a federal public transit grant building a streetcar that would have served the same purpose.



So at least this way the tourists will be funding their own amusement ride (to the tune of $40 per adult).

I'm a little confused, though, about this.

Meg Lousteau, executive director of the Vieux Carre Property Owners, Residents and Associates group, said there's potential for the buses to draw tourists across the city. "But we hope this won't continue to overload the French Quarter with visitors," she added.

Peter Boese, the National World War II Museum's director of sales, said he hopes the new bus routes will bring tourists who might otherwise remain in the French Quarter to other parts of the city.

"If they have the means to venture out and explore the rest of the city, it's going to be a great opportunity for them to see other attractions," Boese said.

Lousteau and Boese are both hoping the buses "draw tourists across the city" but, according to the map published in today's T-P, the route stays well within the "Hospitality Zone" so I'm not sure how this is accomplished.  But then, adding to the confusion is this bit from WWLTV.

Riders can buy a day pass and hop on and off a bus at one of several different tourist attractions. The continuous loop includes stops at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, New Orleans Museum of Art, World War II Museum, as well as the Superdome, Audubon Zoo and Magazine Street shopping area.

If the big red buses are going to the Zoo and to Magazine street, I'd like to see which route they're taking.  Magazine is crowded and hazardous enough as it is.  One would hope we'd be doing our best not to cram it with even more oversized vehicles at this point.

More importantly, shouldn't visitors trying to get across town just figure out how to use the available public transit anyway?   After all seeing how a city actually works is part of the point of traveling, isn't' it? See the real people, hear the real accent, that sort of thing. Gambit's Megan Braden-Perry has spent much of this year demystifying the RTA for first-time riders.  It isn't very hard to figure out. So why sequester yourself in a big red rolling tower with the rest of the adult kindergarten?

Well, according to the bus operator's website, there is always this incentive.

City Sightseeing New Orleans will give you a set of their own Free souvenir earbuds, so you can hear this exhilarating tour in any of 7 Languages: Spanish / French / Portuguese / German / Italian / Japanese / Chinese. Plus look forward to our Kid’s Club Channel and even, hear the tour in that local Cajun accent!

 Well alright then, by all means don't pass up a chance to hear "that local Cajun accent!" It's all part of that "authentic" experience we're selling these days.

(*)