MOVING THE CENTRAL COAST FORWARD was a meeting about regional transportation needs held on Saturday, January 31 in the cafeteria at Ventura College.

Hosted by ASERT, the Alliance for a Sustainable and Equitable Regional Transportation, and by CAUSE, the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, the meeting featured keynote speaker Senator Alan Lowenthal who chairs the California Senate Committee on Transportation and Housing. There was also a panel of speakers: Rick Cole, Ventura City Manager; Esperanza Martinez of the Los Angeles
Bus Riders’ Union; and Das Williams from the Santa Barbara City Council.

Oh, yawn, right?  (Are you still with me after that first paragraph?)  Well, that’s what I thought when I almost didn’t show up at 8:30 in the morning on a Saturday.  I couldn’t even remember what e-mail or flyer orwhatever had caused the notation on my calendar.  But shortly after getting there and finding the coffee, I realized that I had stumbled upon one of the many battlefields where the final Armageddon is being waged with the beast that is devouring our planet and all life upon it.

Ventura County, incidentally, is not doing as well in the battle as are the counties to our north and south–as the three panel members made clear.

Rick Cole, Ventura’s City Manager, pointed out that we tossed “6,000 years of human culture into the trash can” when we started designing our cities around the automobile instead of around pedestrian traffic. Citing the fairgrounds “with a parking lot the size of Delaware” next to the beach where the runoff goes directly into the ocean, and the county government buildings, which are surrounded by acres of parking lots and can be reached only by car, Cole observed that we have a system in which our citizens who walk, who ride bikes, or take public transport are “separate and unequal.”  He noted that there are no homeless cars because there are laws ensuring that every building constructed has to have enough parking spaces provided.  And if people were treated with as much consideration as cars, there would be seven beds in shelters available for every homeless person.

Rick Cole, Ventura City Manager

Panelist Esperanza Martinez chronicled the success of the Los Angeles’ Bus Riders’ Union.  When the L.A. bus riders learned that buses were getting only 6% of available funding while highways were getting 70% and trains the rest, they got serious.  With action items such as “no seat, no fare” in which they refused to pay if no seats were available, and demonstrations against “transport racism,” they gradually got their share of the federal money to get natural gas fueled buses in L.A., and they saved the monthly bus pass, which is a lifeline for the working poor.

In both Los Angeles County and Santa Barbara County, voters approved a .5% sales tax to be used exclusively to fund transportation.  Ventura County has no such tax base for transportation.  This is a classic case of them that has gets. City Council Member Das Williams from Santa Barbara pointed out that when Los Angeles or Santa Barbara Counties petition the state or federal governments for assistance, they are able to demonstrate that they have money of their own for the projects.  Santa Barbara can go to Lois Capps and say, “We need three dollars; we’ve got two dollars.  Can you give us a dollar?”  Ventura County has to go to Lois Capps and say, “We need three dollars.  Can you give us three dollars?”  It’s not hard to figure out who’s likely to end up with three dollars.

Esperanza Martinez of the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union

Keynote speaker Alan Lowenthal, State Senator from Long Beach and chair of the Senate Committee on Transportation and Housing, made it clear that this wasn’t just a meeting about buses.  This was a meeting about social justice in all of its many aspects.  But once the speakers had made it clear that the issue of woefully inadequate public transportation is only one head of the beast (along with the wars, the economic collapse, the environmental devastation, the human rights atrocities, all the many aspects of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into), some of us did talk about buses.

There were six workshop sessions.  There was one session on getting funding and results, one each on issues affecting bikes, buses, and trains, one on oil and environment, and one on how to use public transportation.  After the workshops there were breakout sessions where people exchanged information about transportation needs.

There’s something Orwellian about that phrase: “exchanged information about transportation needs.”  We’re talking about when you can’t get there from here—and you have to get there.  We’re talking about there being no buses that come within a mile of the adult education facility on Valentine Road in Ventura where many of the students are handicapped. We’re talking about mothers carrying a small child and pushing another in a stroller in heavy traffic along the shoulder of Victoria north of Gonzales to reach the Prototypes Program.  We’re talking about elderly people trying to reach Oxnard Airport from Ventura Avenue.  We’re talking about a man recently released from prison and on parole who doesn’t have a driver’s license but finally gets a job outside of Santa Paula but can’t get to work because the Vista buses don’t get there early enough so he’s fired.

California State Assembly Member, Pedro Nava, Santa Barbara City Counselmember, Das Williams, Program Host, Carmen Ramirez

State Senator Lowenthal commended the efforts that turned Ventura County blue in 2008.   But he also pointed out that transportation is a key to social justice and that counties with a population of over 500,000 are legally required by the Transportation Development Act to use a percentage of revenues for transportation.  Ventura County now has a population of 800,000 but continues to act like a rural county.  It certainly seems that our newly blue county’s Democrats need to be deployed to this battlefield.