THE PROPOSITIONS: Measure R – Alan Mittelstaedt says: YES

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nobody I know is better informed on all things transportation-related than friend and sometimes WLA guest blogger, Alan Mittelstaedt. So I asked him to give his take on Measure R. He kindly agreed, and you’ll find the result below.

Read. And heed.

Measure R: Flawed, but forgivable – Vote Yes

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Let me see if I have this right: Measure R would place Orwellian restrictions on automobile owners. L.A. County residents would be forced to burn or bury their cars and take public transportation to work the three days a week they aren’t biking or walking. A major intrusion into your life, big, bad Measure R tosses to the side of the road any sense of fairness in government’s role in addressing traffic and air pollution.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.

If any of this were true, the opposition coming from county supervisors Gloria Molina and Michael Antonovich, Singleton’s running-on-vapors San Gabriel Valley newspapers and the Bus Riders Union wouldn’t be so petty and shortsighted. Get real, folks. Clogged freeways and streets are a No. 1 threat to our health and sanity, and the measure represents the best chance in a long time to do something about it. In reality, R’s main flaws are lack of ambition and courage and failure to promote a public-transit-only spending plan. Too many road projects http://www.metro.net/measurer/project_index.html are included in a calculated way to make voters everywhere believe their neighborhood somehow will benefit.

But don’t reject Measure R because of these weaknesses. They’re a distraction and prove that R is a product of the political cowards running government at a time when we need visionaries who can plot out a mass transit system and sell it to residents, business owners and state and federal governments – all of whom must pay for it. Our plight demands inspiring leadership reaching across L.A. County’s neighborhoods into the halls of Congress and the state Legislature, but we get Measure R instead.

It’s a worthy start, but R won’t take us to our destination of car-free commuting and healthy lungs for all. All it would do is raise the sales tax by half a penny and collect anywhere from $20 billion to $40 billion over 30 years. The cost to you: about as much as six cupcakes. For $25 a year, you can help the region take small steps to catch up on several decades of lost time when we should have been building a complete network of subways and light-rail systems. Time lost by squabbling among some of the same career politicians who now disagree over whether their communities get a fair share.

Take Molina’s objections as a toxic example of failed leadership. She’s concocted a phony dichotomy of Eastside vs. Westside to justify her opposition to the measure. She’s still fuming that the Gold Line Eastside Extension is a light-rail line and not a subway like the cornerstone project of Measure R, pushing the Purple Line to Westwood and beyond. Molina should hop on Wilshire Boulevard’s standing-room-only 720 bus and meet some of her constituents among the 80,000 daily riders, many headed to domestic jobs and restaurant kitchens on the Westside.

Opponents of Measure R are like the jealous sibling upset that your present under the tree is a little better than hers. They’re like the fat kid who punches a classmate who got an extra anchovy on his piece of pizza at lunch. They’re the stingy one whose fuss makes the entire class miss recess.

Throughout the campaign, I kept waiting for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his nemesis, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to show up at a news conference with congressional leaders to announce a regionwide plan to seek federal money as a way to motivate voters to do their part to build the Subway to the Sea and light rail to Montclair, among other projects. It would have inspired voters to witness such unity and commitment, even if the feds covered only a fraction of the cost. I caught up with Antonio one day on the Red Line subway and shared my advice.

But so what? The lack of unity might not matter in fractured L.A., where residents face dysfunctional government at all levels. In this context, Measure R is more than a transportation measure. It’s a referendum on our broken regional leadership, where no elected leader emerges with the talent or vision to pull us together. Instead, we’re largely left to fend for ourselves.

Let’s hope that Measure R wins by a resounding 70 percent, even more than the required two-thirds. Such a victory will show that L.A. County can survive without bonding political leadership. We don’t need one leader to inspire us and rally our support for strong public policy.

Let the voters overcome the deep-seated, pathological animosity that keeps some of our top leaders like Molina from seeing beyond their slighted psyches to serve the public good. I can’t wait to analyze precinct data from the Eastside to see if voters blew off Molina’s dumb whining and voted for the good of the region. Maybe L.A. Times’ Steve Hymon will examine the numbers for us. He spent a day last week talking to Eastsiders and blew up Molina’s myth with fellow staffer Carla Hall in this story,”Many drivers don’t see east-west divide.” By the way, for the best, up-to-minute coverage of L.A.’s transportation issues, see Hymon’s Bottleneck Blog.

He posts several times a day in pieces unfiltered by editors who often give his stories poor placement in the paper. A daily compilation of all things transportation are posted every morning by Metro’s librarian.

A victory for Measure R would be a wonderful testament to the role that people can take in directing our sluggish, compromised and ineffective government. It was 10 months ago that the movement for R started outside the realm of City Hall and the county Hall of Administration, when former Santa Monica Mayor Denny Zane convened an all-day conference of community leaders and transit advocates to come up with a way to jumpstart the region’s transit system. Some of the politicians now lined up in support took a cautious, wait-and-see stance that day. But not Assemblyman Mike Feuer, whose leadership in Sacramento made it possible for Measure R to make it to the ballot despite 11th-hour threats by myopic legislators, Jenny Oropeza and Gil Cedillo, to kill the ballot measure unless it included their pet projects.

If Measure R wins in this era of conflict and neglect, let’s pull to the side of the road and toast power to the people. If it loses, we must devote more of our time stuck in traffic to finding a regional leader or two.