Kings Hockey

For the second time ever I went to a Minnesota Wild hockey game. The last time was in St. Paul at the Xcel energy stadium, and this time it was in Los Angeles at the Staples Center, home of the L.A. Kings, the Lakers, the Clippers, and a WNBA team. Although the first two periods were relatively slow-paced, the game ended in the most dramatic fashion possible...an overtime shootout that is essentially a test to see which goalie makes a mistake first (see above photo). The Wild won the night, and even though the crowd was disappointed, they lacked the ferocity that Minnesota hockey fans would have exhibited. Being there was less like being at a hockey game and more like being at a restaurant, with audible cheers happening only when someone scored or got checked really hard. It was clear that, unlike the Wild crowd, less than 95% of the people played hockey. There was another bit of Minnesota in the Staples center that I didn't expect to see: The Minneapolis Lakers championship banners were hanging in the rafters next to the L.A. Lakers'.

One of the most potent aspects of the Kings/Wild game experience was getting there and back. One of the things that makes living here so bifurcated is that once you're "there" (wherever there is), it's almost always an incredible experience. As someone else in the geography department told me, life in L.A. happens behind closed doors. But getting there is not easily shrugged off, and can often wholly dictate whether or not you do something. In this case, my friend Tristan and I took the bus to the Staples center and back. It worked out about as expected...a 20 minute walk, a 20 minute wait for the bus, then a 50 minute bus ride...each way. It was worth the effort, but reaffirmed for me the obvious, that it's an atrocity that there is not better public transportation. I and everyone else have of course realized this for a long time, so in an effort to understand the nuts and bolts of the problem, I joined the Bus Rider's Union (BRU), a leading national civil rights organization whose mission is to improve public transportation for the transit dependent. Being transit dependent in the USA, and especially L.A., is a racialized phenomenon. In a full bus I am almost always the only white person, sometimes one of 2 or 3. On the Santa Monica lines the ratio is a little higher, but any bus that goes south or east, away from the swanky hills of UCLA, Bel Air, and the beautiful mountains, carries not white collar, but the bule collar black, Mexican, and Korean workers that make the clean, landscaped hills so pretty. I feel much more comfortable riding with these people that being surrounded by BMWs, Audis, Navigators, and Jags on the freeway because I feel more like a citizen of the city and part of a society rather than part of a competition to be the most independent and well-off. I had heard about the BRU from friends in Madison, so I decided to go to one of the meetings. They took me and the other first timers into a mini training session wehre we learned about the history and goals of the organization. Right away I liked their mission statement and agenda, which is to increase the number and quality of busses and bus routes in the city. Their vision is to increase the quality of lives for everyone in the city by making movement in the city easy, and by decreasing the number of cars on the road that make the daily layer of smog. Right now the main problem as identified by the BRU is that the Metro Transit Authority of Los Angeles is spending all their money on finishing a rail line that would connect the west side to downtown. As of now there is no such rail, but there are bus lines instead. The BRU says this is a disgrace that the east and south and central parts of town should not be improved in lieu of the money being spent on a uber expensive rail system that would connect "choice" riders (read: white people with cars) to the rail system. The BRU says (and I generally agree) that the billions of dollars should first be spent on improving the existing bus system for people without cars who actually need it. For as much as people say the L.A. bus system is bad, it's ironic that they have the largest fleet of "green" busses (low emissions) of any city in the world, and were named the best public transportation system in the USA for 2006. It's easy to recognize this experientially if you're riding during business hours, but in the evening and weekends it all falls apart, making going out at night, or coming home from work, nearly impossible if you're on bus. Here's a whole bunch of whopping statistics about the Metro system that are amazing.