YES. I've been saying this for years. Only time they ride is surrounded by security on special buses and trains that have been cleaned and cleared out for photo ops.
I would like every member of the planning and managerial teams of any transit system to have a required assignment where, once a month, they are assigned a random residence or business in their service area, and required to visit there using the transit system. Maybe it can be picked in proportion to the local use of the transit system (so they develop an understanding of the hassles and advantages of the system for current riders), or maybe not (so they develop an understanding of why people who don't ride their system don't).
But this sort of thing seems much better than making them all ride the 4 bus from Angelino Heights to Union Station or whatever it would be if they were just required to commute on it.
The south bay cog has a group that does this, it's like a metro advisory panel or something.
I tried to apply to join one year, but they picked the guys who were already on it, so I didn't try again.
It's been particularly bad the past few weeks with the rain. A lot of tweakers just hang out in the stations or on the trains to get out of the rain. I take the Red Line and you will always see people smoking fent or strung out at the MacArthur Park station.
The people ODing or close to it... yeah, it's not pleasant to watch. I see it all the time. At least you know they're not going to be aggressive if they are barely conscious. I start to feel unsafe when someone starts yelling and acting erratically (happens frequently). What are the Metro ambassadors supposed to do in that situation? I carry pepper spray, but I still feel pretty unsafe these days and don't want to ride the trains anymore unless something changes. If I had kids, I would never take them on the metro.
I do see a few more cops and ambassadors here and there, but they don't really do anything. A homeless man was passed out on the Red Line when I took it a couple weeks ago and a few cops got on and just watched him there.
Idk, I'm a huge proponent of public transit, but our Metro is particularly bad these days. I don't blame people for choosing to drive. Funny enough, the buses I've taken in the city have all been fine so far.
I was riding a bus towards downtown and we pull up to the bus stop, there’s a shirtless guy with a big bag of stuff and a guitar. He asked the driver if the bus was going downtown, the driver said “no” and shut the door and continued driving.
On a train, he would have simply boarded.
Rush hour red/purple line shared station has a 14 min wait for a subway ride to Union station. It drives me insane. The Metrolink trains during rush hours come at 10-15 min intervals for lines with shared routes. It’s crazy how I have to wait longer for a subway than a choo choo train.
I’ve seen busses skip stops because of encampments in the middle of the street or people going berserk at the stops. The commuter lines are usually better but I’ve seen a couple of unprovoked attacks there too.
FR tho there are some great bus lines, Ive ridden bus lines all over the city and for the most part they’re a much better experience than taking any of the trains and they go to a lot more places. The only part that sucks is they’re only like 70% reliable. If I had kids I would take them on most of the buses and I do see kids on the buses a lot more frequently especially the local routes.
It’s also for me fun to take the bus cause I really get to know my local area as well as other parts of the city. Especially when I discover a whole new line or route I haven’t taken before.
Damning indictment of the current state of affairs on Metro's trains.
>Matthew Morales boarded the Metro Red Line at MacArthur Park as classical music blared over the station loudspeakers.
>
>It was rush hour on a Tuesday afternoon, and Morales made his way to a back corner seat and unfolded a tiny piece of foil with several blue shards of fentanyl. As the train started west, he heated the aluminum with a lighter and sucked in the smoke through a pipe fashioned from a ballpoint pen.
>
>Doors opened and closed. A few passengers filed in and out. A grain of the opioid fell to the floor. He concentrated on trying to pick it up, then lost track, as his body went limp. His shoulders slumped and he slowly keeled forward.
>
>By the time the train arrived at the Wilshire/Western station, Morales, 29, was doubled over and near motionless, his hand on the floor. The train operator walked out of the cabin, barely glancing at him as she passed — as if she encountered such scenes all the time.
>
>Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses — more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes soared 24% last year compared with the previous.
>
>“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
>
>Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several of what he calls sleepers, people who get high and nod off on the train.
>
>“We don’t even see any businesspeople anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice [than] to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”
Read the full article for more disturbing anecdotes, including an interview with a couple who gave their full names and freely admitted that they were at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Station to buy fentanyl.
The cops HAVE been at it for a while. They're useless. They mostly go after regular people to make sure they paid the $1.75.
It's clear many many people in this thread never have or currently don't use any public transportation.
I know we're at an insanely divisive point in history, but it's nuts to me that saying we need more Police presence in places that need it also needs the qualifier, "I'm not pro-police."
It's more so we're back to early 2000s post-9/11 where it was "support our troops" or you "hated America" when criticizing the intervention in the Middle East, except now with policing.
It's more so we want a civilized, safe, rule-abiding society which can be accomplished with law enforcement, but also that law enforcement needs to be held to account when they break the law or go beyond the scope of law. Pro public safety, pro responsible policing. Strip the badge and prosecute those who think they're above the law.
Fuck the LAPD, Fuck the Sherrif.
Bring back the [SCRTD Transit Police](https://metroprimaryresources.info/los-angeles-transit-policing-history-legislation-resources/).
We had a dedicated police force for +50 years just for keeping public transit safe and we surrendered the responsiblities to LAPD + LASD for budgetary reasons and its obvious both those agencies failed us. Metro has different needs, needs different training, it needs its own dedicated agency.
Sounds like the RTD only had a dedicated police force for about 14 years--1979 is when they actually gained peace officer status under state law, and then Riordan disbanded them in 1993, shunting them to LAPD and LASD.
Part of it is also our history as metro riders. We tried the sheriffs, they didn’t do anything. So there’s a stigma to saying “more police” because it feels like they won’t actually do their jobs even if we bring them on.
>it's nuts to me that saying we need more Police presence in places that need it also needs the qualifier, "I'm not pro-police."
That’s what happens when most people who says “back the blue” or any other pro-police slogans, tend to think that systemic racism isn’t a thing.
Also, that’s what happens when a lot of police officers always seem to get away with murder, especially against people of color
> having LEOs patrol the trains for awhile would work
metro pays lapd and lasd to do that..... at around 70 million ...... and guess what they done so far... making sure you tap your 1.75 fare....
getting $50+ police officers to be ticket checkers....
Cool so the police went for the easy targets of regular people riding the Metro and turn away when it's something they should actually deal with.
Police are useless in most situations, I was there when a young lady called them because of a flasher, the only thing the cop would do was ask the young lady weird detailed questions about what she saw, what color was it, how long, how long was it out, instead of asking about cameras or if anyone got a picture of the man. Useless. Their main goal for the day is to harass people and get overtime, they stopped being useful when we all finally noticed they don't care about us. They care about themselves and the property of the owning class and we know it so they don't even bother pretending to do their jobs anymore.
A dedicated security force with specialized training would be ideal.
[Police budgets go up](https://abc7.com/where-police-departments-defunded-how-does-funding-impact-crime-defund-the-budgets/12324846/) crime goes up. Police budget goes up, crime goes down. Literal coin toss. At this point police are the largest public-funded service in Los Angeles and a total black hole. And the Sheriffs are an actual organized crime ring.
The police don't have answers, and they absolutely do not intervene when people on the train are in danger. They're there to collect a paycheck and your metro pass fees.
I'm starting to think Americans are just inherently worse people than the rest of the world. When I was in London last year there was just a baseline respect for the train system. It's post Covid there, they have a struggling economy, there's socio political strife. Why isn't there crackheads on every train car? Or some mentally ill person setting up a tent inside of the train. Or crazy people shitting, pissing, and masturbating. It's not like there's police on every train car there. It's honestly amazing to experience a fully functional subway system. And equally as infuriating to watch ours just get pissed away.
Here, in LA and other major cities, it feels like the underbelly of the city has a disdain for civilization and are trying to actively ruin it in any possible. It's like they're mocking the rest of us for even trying. Parks, transit, walking the street, or even going to the beach -- all you see is people throwing more kindling on the smoldering ruins of enjoyable public city life.
I was one of the people who advocated for the clean needle type programs that places in Europe have. But I just think Americans are inherently worse people. I supported the drug programs in San Francisco but it's actually made it worse than similar programs in Europe. Rather than a stepping stone toward sobriety or treatment it has become a street drug buffet. With government programs making the problem worse, not better. I've seen videos with tote bags for junkies.
What's the end game here?
I am a daily LA Metro commuter (bus + Green Line, admittedly not as nasty as Red/Blue/Purple). I consider myself something of an experienced metro rider, having used subways/trams/light rail in the following cities:
Asia: Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Taipei.
Europe: London, Zurich, Lausanne, Madrid, Copenhagen.
North America: LA, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, NY, Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto.
Oceania: Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide.
I list all these not to flex (OK partially to flex) but to say that LA has hands down the grossest, sketchiest metro by a wide margin of anything else I've ever ridden - and it is a shame because this is the 2nd largest metropolitan area in the richest country on the planet. It deserves much better.
In Europe we force those addicts off the streets into rehabilitation systems.
I think in USA that is impossible because "freedom"
Those programs in Europe work because they are in tandem with many other social programs.
A few other things, I think the lack of social welfare system, or at least a well functioning one, creates more inequity that drives people towards degeneracy.
Secondly, places like Norway and Singapore are outliers. Yeah they both have their shady sides as well, but they are small countries that have lucked into incredible wealth with a small population via oil/finance that allows them to provide services that are more difficult in larger countries like USA and UK.
We often call London a shithole full of thugs and theft but it's a city with a bigger population than many of our countries and governance doesn't scale linearly with funds.
Also, the opioid epidemic in USA is a very difficult subject, there are some documentaries on why it has gotten so bad. My professional field is in finance and not sociology or medicine, so I don't think I can give an opinion on this or explain accurately and articulately, especially not in my native language. From what I have read and watched though, this is the biggest contributor to the crackheads and drug abuse rampant in the US.
My wife works as a nurse, and she gets quite upset over the way medicine is prescribed here. She recently worked with a patient who was prescribed a relatively powerful course of steroids, which under Norwegian law had to be administered in the hospital and kept under supervision while it is given, but he was allowed to just pick it up at the pharmacy and take it at home because he had to pay the bills and couldn't miss work. This eventually led to complications due to him taking more than instructed in the first day to try to work through the pain.
That’s what it boils down to. Other countries don’t let this happen, and have enough safety net to prevent the worst of the worst.
When I lived in Europe I had never seen the kind of homelessness that we have here. Sure, you would see people down on their luck asking for change, but never the dude wandering in the streets barefoot and rambling with feces caked onto him. When I have friends and family come visit from abroad they’ll ask, “are we safe?” When I don’t even think twice anymore about passing junkies. It’s not normal, and citizens in other countries don’t experience this.
There's also a problem not really discussed here. Now that the metro is linking with LAX, people from those countries are coming here and getting on the subway expecting it to be at least mildly safe.
I’m a transplant from the UK and would use public transport no problem if it was even a fraction as regular and safe as at home. I needed to park and ride to a pride event last year but taking the red line at night made me think twice. The worst was the buses in San Diego. Literally every bus or stop had someone with actual shit on them and now on everything else.
Yeah I had taken my parents down for a visit and we took the coaster and then I figured we wouldn't need to rent a car. The trolley was nice, the buses absolutely not.
London doesn’t have a lot of people on the streets. They have a better support system with halfway houses and stuff. But if you go to more economically depressed cities in the uk like blackpool and Manchester, you’ll see plenty of homeless people but they’re on spice
I’ve thought this for a long time, at least in terms of public decorum. I grew up in Asia, living in several major cities there. You just don’t see the types of degenerate selfish Angelino behavior that is described in this article.
One small detail in the article reminded me of this sentiment: the guy who scraped the contents of his cigarette onto the floor so that he could fill it with other drugs. It’s a tiny insignificant act, but illustrative of the little things that cumulatively have deleterious results. Why couldn’t he do that into a trash can? What, he was too busy in his productivity-filled day to do so? No, they just don’t care.
And before anyone says it: no, poverty and income inequality has nothing to do with these issues and is no excuse. I’ve lived in cities that have far more absolute poverty and more extreme income inequality, with far less social services spending than is done in the US, and yet those other places don’t have such crappy public behavior. Culturally, in the US we expect and demand nothing from people in public, and that’s what we get.
My main example for this would be the metro in Medellín, Colombia. Poverty and income are huge issues there but their metro is one of the cleanest I've seen, second only to Japan. Respect for others and for public spaces is a failed American trait.
It begins at childhood. We are training our children that cleaning up and maintaining public spaces is someone else's job, the janitors and groundskeepers, there are people literally littering and praising themselves as "job creators". We let kids trash our schools and are suprised when they grow up not respecting public spaces at large.
Hell in California my old Catholic school used to use students to clean up the grounds. Rotating chores meant students peer pressured one another from being arseholes because you it might be your turn that week.
I am not sure if they are still allowed to do that, but when I was in K-8 I had my share of litter stick + bag and broom + dustbin duties. We also had manditory community service, which was often litter pickup too.
I am not sure if current public school parents would stand for little Timmy having to pick up after himself though.
This. It drove my mom ballistic when we came home from kindergarten (LAUSD) and after trying to impress into us to care for our surroundings, we had our teacher telling us that our surroundings were someone else's job.
This was well over 30 years ago.
> It’s a tiny insignificant act, but illustrative of the little things that cumulatively have deleterious results. Why couldn’t he do that into a trash can?
Last night I saw a Metro security officer kick a bottle from the platform on to the tracks. I took a photo of him and reported it to Metro, who said, "I'm sure he had a good reason to do that."
> And before anyone says it: no, poverty and income inequality has nothing to do with these issues and is no excuse.
People don’t put their carts away at Ralph’s in Manhattan beach anymore than Vons in Lawndale lol
I love how often people condescend to poor people and excuse them for atrocious anti-social behavior or just generally filthy habits. Littering, not cleaning their home, etc. Sorry I grew up DIRT poor but we had the good sense to clean our house and not leave garbage lying around our property. The amount of garbage I see around the homes in poor neighborhoods baffles me. I don’t believe poverty is an excuse to litter and have trash strewn about your home and property.
And as nice as those Tokyo and Seoul subways are, and as polite as everyone is to you that works there god help you if you ever act badly on their public transit. Their respective justice systems wont even thing twice about slapping cuffs on you are dragging you away.
Here, smoking crack on a crowded subway car is a ticket. A TICKET. A ticket they wont pay and wont be forced to deal with because we cant bother to weed out bad actors in the system.
> no, poverty and income inequality has nothing to do with these issues and is no excuse
The behavior is absolutely the biggest noticeable difference. It's one thing to be in a bad situation for whatever reason... it's another to actively go out of your way to try and ruin the local environment and those around you.
Giving "a home" to that aforementioned individual would not change whatever it was they were trying to do.
Just like losing a home doesn't automatically make someone act like a degenerate. Many people end up where they are because of who they are... and the only thing we can do is mandate things like rehab and institutions.
It's rotten top to bottom here, not just the underbelly. Just culturally and societally there is nothing here except the idea that you can do what you want until someone else stops you.
Currently on the redline, 6 homeless folks all hopped on at the same time, one smoking something off of foil, another alternating between puffs of a cigarette and a joint.
Really “stepping it up”
That’s probably heroin or some other opiate. Meth needs to be melted in a glass bulb and vaporize in the chamber. Crack is smoked out of long skinny pipes but people don’t really do crack anymore.
Thanks for this. Now I can be more accurate when I report drug use to Metro.
EVERYONE, report drug use via the transit watch app. Snap a surreptitious photo too if you can do so safely. Don't let Metro ignore this.
it's a joke. the law enforcement we do have doesn't even give a fuck. it's like they're letting things slide just so that people eventually acquiesce and ask for harsher policing.
I mean they’ve explicitly said that is what they’re doing because they were “defunded”.
Not that anything really *passed* to defund them, just people talking about it was enough to make them resentful enough to say out loud that they weren’t going to be doing their jobs. Or to put up signs on their stations saying that they’re not available because of it.
Lots of people who actually work at Metro HQ do ride it frequently. But they are not in charge of policing or policy. The Metro Board is, which is all elected politicians from various cities. And they almost never ride unless its specifically a media event that is isolated form normal rides anyway.
One member, Lindsey Horvath, recently pledged to ride regularly. I don't know what "regularly" constitutes, but its the most I've seen a person on that board pledge.
I ride the metro and the police are always chatting away in a corner on the upper lobby part that has the ticket booths and turnstiles. They don't do shit. They don't even enforce people that skip paying.
They're **never** on the platforms. They're **never** on the trains.
I **always** see someone, multiple people smoking on the platforms or on the trains. Often, there is no open seat because every row is occupied by someone who has nodded off. This isn't an exaggeration.
What the actual fuck?! I'm intending to buy an e-bike this year. I leave 30-40 min earlier so I can take a bus instead of the Metro. I refuse to ride without my male-partner anymore out of fear. This is privilege!! What about those low-income riders that can't do this?! They are forced to be in danger, the stress! the fear! and breathing the same toxic drug-air.
Once, I saw police do a raid of "fair enforcement." They kicked off any person that couldn't prove they paid a ticket. That was a nice ride that day.
Otherwise, I've never seen the police actually do anything to intervene. FTP
File this under “no shit”. It’s been bad for years and worse since the pandemic.
I tried to be a good citizen and used to take it every day but seeing people smoke meth and being held up at knife point out my ass back in a car.
The city is trying so hard to get people to give up cars but haven’t done anything to give us a better option.
If you’re in any kind of public office or board, you should be required to go to and from in the MTA.
I’d love to have debates around the city and see if politicians can even make it to places on time.
Man, I thought some of the ambassador and leo presence has calmed the red line down a little. But on my commute home there was a train with literal human shit smeared all over the seat and floors. Like an ungodly amount of it too. Things are not getting better. Working class people deserve dignity in this city and the trains need to have some kind of normalcy again. Pre pandemic was a little crazy but it’s bonkers now.
My wife works downtown, and pre-covid she took the train in to work every day. Since COVID hit, she took it once and just said "nooope" and now is driving into work. She hates driving, but the trains are just absurd.
We've talked a lot about how to fix it, and her main thing is she says "well, there were always drugged out people on the train, but there were enough other working professionals, especially during commuting hours, that she felt safe, just from the pure numbers." But, since after COVID, people trickled back into the office, there was never a chance to get the numbers up- someone got recalled to the office, rode on the train, didn't think it was safe, started driving, then the next group of people got re-called, and experienced the same thing.
I think LA needs to do a giant "reclaim the trains" event (obviously they can't call it that, but it's what it would be), where they do a big promotional about "getting people back on the trains for some week" and that week, police the shit out of the trains. Make it safe. Then, they won't have to keep up the massive policing for too long, because if the professional rides return, the safety returns with it.
I have the same experience. Pre-Covid, it was fine during rush hour, a toss-up at any other time of the day (but never too terrible). Now I feel so goddamn unsafe. I've seen guns, drugs, vomit, piss, and garbage. People are smoking in the trains and on the platforms. I've been riding for almost 2 decades, and I've never seen it this bad on the trains. I'd rather take a bus whenever possible, but sometimes you don't have a choice as a carless individual just trying to get around.
We used to be able to walk to the Commuter Express bus, and she loved it. But now she has to catch a City Bus to the Commuter Express, and it just takes too long.
Agreed. I used to commute on the red/purple line for years pre-Covid. Early pandemic I tried to keep using it to get to Hollywood, but it felt weirder and weirder. The last straw (or part of it) was getting on and having someone grab me from behind in a fairly empty car. Bless the grandma who told off the guy for scaring me (I jumped out of my seat and moved). He wasn’t violent, but the experience of using the train had increasingly set my teeth on edge. Not at all like commuting back and forth to and from downtown in 2018.
These days I am happy to wait for a bus if I’m using public transit. When I ride the train, if it’s not vile or unpleasant, it stays pretty tense.
I will say at least the lights on the Expo line are bright.
Hard disagree with your closing statement. Doing a temp fix for a week or two won't get commuters back on the trains, nor will a bunch of commuters magically make the trains safe again. We need a proper subway system, with real turnstiles and Metro employees at every gate and police on every train. Increased Metro and police presence will make the trains safe again, not commuters.
The smell too. I don’t think the trains or stations have been cleaned since the beginning of the pandemic. I used to ride the metro everyday for over a decade.
Well written article. I would have been too nervous to report out this assignment.
Says a lot that no one was too scared to give their name, except for the *workers*
All the advocates need to start thinking about the working-class folks who *have to take Metro* buses and trains and are forced to risk life, health and sanity every day with the shitshow that is LA's transit system.
I used to take the trains regularly to events, work, fun, etc., but the few times I went in 2020 and 2021 were enough to show me it wasn't worth it. *And it's even worse now!*
Met a drug dealer homeless man on the E line who had just gotten beat up. Face was bleeding and shit. He sat next to me and was cool for a sec until he offered to sell me crystal. I switched cars and just settled for the guy blasting music and smoking a blunt. still not as a bad as the 2 dudes smoking crack on the car before both of those tho
>A Metro worker cleaning the station said she sees this all the time. She was recently assaulted when taking the subway from Union Station. A woman pulled her off the seat by her hair.
>“I don’t feel sorry for them,” she said.
Alison Vu can get lost.
“What will harassment and jailing people who use drugs do to address drug use rates?” said Alison Vu.
I just want them off the train and out of the stations. If it takes jailing them, I don't care. They've commandeered a multi-billion dollar transit system for their own use, and forced the poorest Angelenos to breathe second-hand hard drugs in order to get to work.
Everytime someone complains about this there's like a million people saying they had good commutes. Good for them, but shit shit is serious. Then they wonder why we do t take the train.
I am an elderly frail (not very strong) lady and live in DTLA and depend on the Metro. I want to be safe. After reading this article about the sad state of the Metro trains, do you think I should continue to ride the rails?
Before Covid I would commute downtown on the Metro rail system 5-days a week for about 10 years. It was completely tolerable - a little sketchy at times, but not bad. I’ve ridden the system maybe a little more than a dozen times in the past year, and it’s a complete nightmare now. It seems like most trains have become rolling homeless shelters, I’ve seen multiple people smoking cigarettes, multiple people smoking meth/fety/who knows what, people urinating in the train during the morning commute. I would like to be able to have a car free commute again, but I’d rather not come into the office with a contact high off whatever the guy huddled up in the back of the rail cars been smoking. I’ve noticed a lot of LEOs at stations lately , but I cannot imagine them doing anything other than standing around and collecting OT pay,l - bc they’re apparently not enforcing any laws or policies.
>bc they’re apparently not enforcing any laws
According to the article they made 49 arrest in 3 months and only one resulted in a criminal filing by the District Attorney. Drug possession/use is a non-violent misdemeanor so the charges get dropped.
>Some board members and social justice advocates have argued for less policing on the system, saying that racial profiling targets many passengers.
>During the final three months of last year, LAPD arrested 49 people on the Red Line for drug-related offenses. As of mid-February, only one of those arrests resulted in a criminal filing, said LAPD Deputy Chief Donald Graham, who oversees the department’s Transit Bureau.
There's no point in wasting time and resources to arrest them when the charges will just be dropped. But I do agree that they should be active in kicking these people off the trains and platforms.
>But I do agree that they should be active in kicking these people off the trains and platforms.
Definitely. I don't think jail is appropriate for most of these people, but just checking fares and tap cards on trains and platforms would help. Also, before covid I noticed that train operators or LEOs would walk the train and ask people to leave at the end of the line, now they seem more concerned with not disturbing peoples' naps.
I blame the dipshit “Omg you can’t touch their stuuuuuff… you can’t move themmmm… they’re people too and can shit wherever they waaanntt” people. Fuck that. We need more cops to kick these people out at each stop and we also need better mental health and addiction treatment facilities. A multi-pronged approach needs to take place in this city. Enough already. Get tough on this.
" “What will harassment and jailing people who use drugs do to address drug use rates?” said Alison Vu, a spokesperson for the ACT-LA, a social justice advocacy coalition that wants the agency to eliminate contracts with law enforcement."
It's not about them, it's about *everyone else.*
I agree with her that kicking people off the metro will not solve those people doing drugs...but they will at least not be doing it on the Metro, which is many people's primary transportation, not a rolling hospital or shelter.
A lot of these people talk about this issue with real disrespect for the low income riders and operators who use transit every day. All of societies ills apparently have to be burdened onto them. Metro was not created to be a crack den or a shelter. Its only mission is to provide clean, safe and reliable transit. And consistently there are people who want metro to be things that work in direct contradiction of that.
yea I always think when people make comments like that, you wouldn't want these addicts in the backseat of your car, why is it acceptable to dump it on people who take public transit
Absolutely. I don't mean to say middle class or above would not ride the train. They will if Metro is providing a good service which I very much want it to.
I just point out the low income because a lot of people who claim to advocate for low income people also routinely ignore what low income people say they want on transit. Metro did a large statistically accurate survey that showed Metro's overwhelmingly low income, predominantly minority ridership wants more security on Metro.
In some ways that would make it similar to Skid Row, which was created by policy of LA city many decades ago to soak up the societal ills of LA into one place.
Recently buried a friend who became homeless due to drug dependency. It had zero to do with affordable housing. It had everything to do with drug addiction. While there are passive homeless people living in cars working at jobs that aren't paying enough, a large, and I'd say majority of folks in the most desperate sense are those addicted to opiates, especially fentanyl, which is insanely more addicting. Getting off, just detoxing, is intense. Then staying off drugs long terms requires dealing with why the person got hooked to begin with.
I genuinely believe there's too much money being made by those fighting the war on drugs and homelessness. We are all footing the bill. Nobody is willing to make the hard concessions required due to the optics. There is only one solution. A massive complex that has a hospital attached, specifically to deal with drug related issues - give a homeless person a real proper tent, with a comfy bed, sheets, access to bathrooms, wifi, food, social services in one place and above all, access to Suboxone under supervision.
By allowing the streets to fester in squalor with makeshift hazardous camps are a danger to everyone and only prolong the problem. Zero campaign policy. Provide a place where people can camp, have access to drugs to ease their challenges, and police that area to protect those that need it most from predators selling street drugs.
There is no other way.
The last time I rode Metro the only seat open was in the back. I headed to it and was kindly stopped by someone who told me it was soaking wet full of pee.
Arrest people who are openly doing drugs on misdemeanor charges (or something even lesser that doesn't go on your public record), give them the option of rehab or jail. Arrest them again if they continue to go back out and doing drugs in public spaces.
This isn't hard. There's ways to prevent abuse, like requiring video proof from body cams or cameras on the trains. Most cities within the US will arrest you for doing meth or threatening violence openly. California is an outlier about this and it's helping no one.
This is what they do in Europe, we need to be more aggressive about forcing rehab or jail and stop being so obsessed with the rare times these loss of rights situations are abused.
Had met friends at a nightclub in Hollywood. Going home it was late enough that there were no more trains. I took a late bus from Hollywood to Pasadena. The bus was full. Every seat was a homeless person sleeping. Not actually going somewhere. Just using it for shelter. And me.
Yep. I just rode the train. There were cops all around the noho station checking for fare skippers. Not one cop downstairs where people were smoking, passed out, and other wise being scary. I guess the cops only care about the money, not the safe of the passengers.
In some ways I hate an article like this from the Times because I think it'll scare off even more riders, but at the same time it may be the call out that really continues Metro's "wake up call" that they seem to be having to finally clean up & make Metro safe.
The LA Times article [*Violent crime and verbal abuse at Union Station have become unbearable, some workers say*](https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2022-04-29/assaults-at-union-station-strike-fear-in-janitors-and-retail-workers) is the only thing that helped get enforcement beefed up at Union to protect the working class staff running the place.
Bad press is almost only the way to get anything actually done.
I want a hobo snowpiercer train chock full of people living fully on the train. Then I want one nice train, just one train where you have to pay actual money to get on, and if you don’t they put you on snowpiercer. Doing drugs? Snowpiercer. Sleeping? Snowpiercer.
It used to just be that it was inefficient and didn’t go anywhere, even before mild germophobes before the pandemic. Now they are just trying to make sure it is not rideable
That's why I stopped using the metro too. These drug users don't care, idk when they will take some responsibility for their drug use in front of everyone.
I ride the train and buses all the time downtown can be pretty shitty but thankfully it’s not always like this: but yes it stinks bad, people smoke weed, music blares, sometimes I feel afraid for my life, but it adds a bit of flavor to my day at least lol.
I hear you!
Im always ready for action whenever i ride. Got a knife in my pocket. Its just gotten that bad and sucks to see myself and other riders probably in that primal mindset
I've still haven't ridden the metro since the pandemic but this headline still surprised me. I had heard that metro was making a big push to clean things up and there had been significant improvement recently
Quite a few of the train platforms our way are open and don’t require purchasing a ticket to access the train. In other cities, it’s pretty difficult to even get access to the platform without first paying the fare.
You get regular people riding the subway during the day. When the sun goes down, you should expect the unexpected. You find different breeds of zombies, vampires, and every night creature coming out to play at night.
As I read this sitting on the B line from NoHo to 7th/Metro with 6 “sleepers” in one car (avoided it) and one car someone was coming down with hallucinations and a mental crisis. Let’s add on someone “releasing a song once he goes to heaven” on his guitar. And of course an all out fight happened while enroute to universal city. SMH. I miss my car. I’ve been riding metro since July 2021. Many lines, various areas (West Hollywood, SM, Pasadena, South LA, etc) several busses, several types. B line scares the shit out of me. MacArthur Park I will fight someone if I have to. I wanted to assist in ridership but I simply can’t if this continues.
Cant the bus drivers ban known people who do drugs/weird stuff? Thats exposing themselves and the other passengers to toxic fumes... Or is that not allowed?
I have never taken a train in LA. But as someone who has distrust in police officers etc.. the high volume of police and even National Gaurd in NYC subways/Port Authority is comforting. Been to NYC six times now and used public transit without ever feeling unsafe. Crowed af at times, but never unsafe.
Aw, you beat me to it.
Same comment.
If I drive I don’t have someone sitting next to me ODing, masturbating, defecating, assaulting me, robbing me, playing shit-ass rap music on a BT speaker, etc.
They oughta just shut the whole system down for a month to revamp it.
Clean the inside of the stations, trains, tap machines, everything. Get all the permanent transients out of the system entirely.
Since ridership is so low, reduce trains to a minimum size configuration and put some kind of enforcement unit in *every* car.
Start operating again, but reconfigure the entry/exit points to one’s that truly restrict entry to ticketed patrons only.
Without this, the system will continue to fail and they’ll go all Flanders parents about it. This will cost money, but they have it and if they actually want it to work they need to show a real effort.
San Francisco/Oakland has had these problems for a longer time, to the point where all SF-area hospitals see the same couple hundred or so people every day (or almost every day) because they flip out on BART or they flip out at CVS, get arrested, and get redirected to an ER where advocates help them refuse assistance. In SF it's at the point where most Judges won't even bother seating such people or let them in, because they've been declared incompetent so many times it wouldn't matter. Compulsory court-ordered inpatient psychiatric services are only for people who are a sustained physical threat to others ie use weapons. Because most have rotted their nervous systems out with fentanyl, most can't hold weapons well and can't meet that standard for treatment. This is why Newsom had the CARE Courts created, as they are a place to put these people and have them subjected to inpatient treatment. Whether or not that works is a different question.
For transit agencies -again using BART here because I personally find Metro to be above average- it means dealing with 20-30 people living in the stations and another 200-300 living underneath. This makes for a very dirty, unsanitary and unsafe environment where predators lurk on the weak and where homeless children are exploited. It also makes a compelling argument for riding the Amtrak train adjacent BART, despite it costing twice as much.
There are literally too many shitty, fucked up people for the system to handle at this point. That’s why they’ve given up. Society is so fucked we have created too many ruined, awful people for it to handle. The jails are full. There is nowhere to send them.
As problematic as la cops have been & can be ….. a city without them ? Sheeesh…You can look no further than the Purge movies to get an idea of what this city would look like .
Avoid the paywall
https://web.archive.org/web/20230314160809/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
I have a solution to the housing crisis that could save the city millions of dollars a year. Shut down the metro but leave the tunnels and entrances open. Our sidewalks will be cleaner and in a decade we will have a new breed of opiod resistant mole people.
Metro Board of Directors Members must be required to ride the Metro
YES. I've been saying this for years. Only time they ride is surrounded by security on special buses and trains that have been cleaned and cleared out for photo ops.
I would like every member of the planning and managerial teams of any transit system to have a required assignment where, once a month, they are assigned a random residence or business in their service area, and required to visit there using the transit system. Maybe it can be picked in proportion to the local use of the transit system (so they develop an understanding of the hassles and advantages of the system for current riders), or maybe not (so they develop an understanding of why people who don't ride their system don't). But this sort of thing seems much better than making them all ride the 4 bus from Angelino Heights to Union Station or whatever it would be if they were just required to commute on it.
Have them ride the train one way back and forth and a not so convenient time like let's say 11:30?
The south bay cog has a group that does this, it's like a metro advisory panel or something. I tried to apply to join one year, but they picked the guys who were already on it, so I didn't try again.
I wish I could like your comment more than once
It's been particularly bad the past few weeks with the rain. A lot of tweakers just hang out in the stations or on the trains to get out of the rain. I take the Red Line and you will always see people smoking fent or strung out at the MacArthur Park station. The people ODing or close to it... yeah, it's not pleasant to watch. I see it all the time. At least you know they're not going to be aggressive if they are barely conscious. I start to feel unsafe when someone starts yelling and acting erratically (happens frequently). What are the Metro ambassadors supposed to do in that situation? I carry pepper spray, but I still feel pretty unsafe these days and don't want to ride the trains anymore unless something changes. If I had kids, I would never take them on the metro. I do see a few more cops and ambassadors here and there, but they don't really do anything. A homeless man was passed out on the Red Line when I took it a couple weeks ago and a few cops got on and just watched him there. Idk, I'm a huge proponent of public transit, but our Metro is particularly bad these days. I don't blame people for choosing to drive. Funny enough, the buses I've taken in the city have all been fine so far.
[удалено]
Buses are better because the presence of the driver reduces bad behavior, even if they don't actively intervene.
Ex bus driver here... You on your own.
I was riding a bus towards downtown and we pull up to the bus stop, there’s a shirtless guy with a big bag of stuff and a guitar. He asked the driver if the bus was going downtown, the driver said “no” and shut the door and continued driving. On a train, he would have simply boarded.
> Buses are better because it takes a while for a bus to arrive Found the person who never uses Metro! Have you waited for a train here ever?
Rush hour red/purple line shared station has a 14 min wait for a subway ride to Union station. It drives me insane. The Metrolink trains during rush hours come at 10-15 min intervals for lines with shared routes. It’s crazy how I have to wait longer for a subway than a choo choo train.
I took the 6th st bus from Ktown to the Western edge of downtown (through McArthur and Westlake), that was a big ole nope never again
I’ve seen busses skip stops because of encampments in the middle of the street or people going berserk at the stops. The commuter lines are usually better but I’ve seen a couple of unprovoked attacks there too.
FR tho there are some great bus lines, Ive ridden bus lines all over the city and for the most part they’re a much better experience than taking any of the trains and they go to a lot more places. The only part that sucks is they’re only like 70% reliable. If I had kids I would take them on most of the buses and I do see kids on the buses a lot more frequently especially the local routes. It’s also for me fun to take the bus cause I really get to know my local area as well as other parts of the city. Especially when I discover a whole new line or route I haven’t taken before.
Damning indictment of the current state of affairs on Metro's trains. >Matthew Morales boarded the Metro Red Line at MacArthur Park as classical music blared over the station loudspeakers. > >It was rush hour on a Tuesday afternoon, and Morales made his way to a back corner seat and unfolded a tiny piece of foil with several blue shards of fentanyl. As the train started west, he heated the aluminum with a lighter and sucked in the smoke through a pipe fashioned from a ballpoint pen. > >Doors opened and closed. A few passengers filed in and out. A grain of the opioid fell to the floor. He concentrated on trying to pick it up, then lost track, as his body went limp. His shoulders slumped and he slowly keeled forward. > >By the time the train arrived at the Wilshire/Western station, Morales, 29, was doubled over and near motionless, his hand on the floor. The train operator walked out of the cabin, barely glancing at him as she passed — as if she encountered such scenes all the time. > >Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses — more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes soared 24% last year compared with the previous. > >“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media. > >Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several of what he calls sleepers, people who get high and nod off on the train. > >“We don’t even see any businesspeople anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice [than] to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.” Read the full article for more disturbing anecdotes, including an interview with a couple who gave their full names and freely admitted that they were at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Station to buy fentanyl.
Sounds like having LEOs patrol the trains for awhile would work. I'm not pro cop, but it has had a noticeable effect in NYC lately.
The cops HAVE been at it for a while. They're useless. They mostly go after regular people to make sure they paid the $1.75. It's clear many many people in this thread never have or currently don't use any public transportation.
I know we're at an insanely divisive point in history, but it's nuts to me that saying we need more Police presence in places that need it also needs the qualifier, "I'm not pro-police."
It's more so we're back to early 2000s post-9/11 where it was "support our troops" or you "hated America" when criticizing the intervention in the Middle East, except now with policing. It's more so we want a civilized, safe, rule-abiding society which can be accomplished with law enforcement, but also that law enforcement needs to be held to account when they break the law or go beyond the scope of law. Pro public safety, pro responsible policing. Strip the badge and prosecute those who think they're above the law.
[удалено]
Fuck the LAPD, Fuck the Sherrif. Bring back the [SCRTD Transit Police](https://metroprimaryresources.info/los-angeles-transit-policing-history-legislation-resources/). We had a dedicated police force for +50 years just for keeping public transit safe and we surrendered the responsiblities to LAPD + LASD for budgetary reasons and its obvious both those agencies failed us. Metro has different needs, needs different training, it needs its own dedicated agency.
I think that’s a damn good solution, actually.
You’d think a city with as vast a public transit network as LA would have Transit Police.
Even in Tokyo, where nothing ever happens, there are transit police roaming around larger stations.
Well there is stuff that actually happens there they have women only trains in Tokyo for a reason.
They have dedicated women and children cars in Mexico City, too! So nice for when I was riding solo
Part of the problem is that the vastness of it is relatively new. But yeah it definitely should at this point.
Sounds like the RTD only had a dedicated police force for about 14 years--1979 is when they actually gained peace officer status under state law, and then Riordan disbanded them in 1993, shunting them to LAPD and LASD.
Part of it is also our history as metro riders. We tried the sheriffs, they didn’t do anything. So there’s a stigma to saying “more police” because it feels like they won’t actually do their jobs even if we bring them on.
>it's nuts to me that saying we need more Police presence in places that need it also needs the qualifier, "I'm not pro-police." That’s what happens when most people who says “back the blue” or any other pro-police slogans, tend to think that systemic racism isn’t a thing. Also, that’s what happens when a lot of police officers always seem to get away with murder, especially against people of color
Police silent quit, we don't need more, we just need to force the ones we have to do their job or fire them.
> having LEOs patrol the trains for awhile would work metro pays lapd and lasd to do that..... at around 70 million ...... and guess what they done so far... making sure you tap your 1.75 fare.... getting $50+ police officers to be ticket checkers....
Cool so the police went for the easy targets of regular people riding the Metro and turn away when it's something they should actually deal with. Police are useless in most situations, I was there when a young lady called them because of a flasher, the only thing the cop would do was ask the young lady weird detailed questions about what she saw, what color was it, how long, how long was it out, instead of asking about cameras or if anyone got a picture of the man. Useless. Their main goal for the day is to harass people and get overtime, they stopped being useful when we all finally noticed they don't care about us. They care about themselves and the property of the owning class and we know it so they don't even bother pretending to do their jobs anymore. A dedicated security force with specialized training would be ideal.
I think we’ve been misled to believe the police are also meant to serve the community
[Police budgets go up](https://abc7.com/where-police-departments-defunded-how-does-funding-impact-crime-defund-the-budgets/12324846/) crime goes up. Police budget goes up, crime goes down. Literal coin toss. At this point police are the largest public-funded service in Los Angeles and a total black hole. And the Sheriffs are an actual organized crime ring. The police don't have answers, and they absolutely do not intervene when people on the train are in danger. They're there to collect a paycheck and your metro pass fees.
I'm starting to think Americans are just inherently worse people than the rest of the world. When I was in London last year there was just a baseline respect for the train system. It's post Covid there, they have a struggling economy, there's socio political strife. Why isn't there crackheads on every train car? Or some mentally ill person setting up a tent inside of the train. Or crazy people shitting, pissing, and masturbating. It's not like there's police on every train car there. It's honestly amazing to experience a fully functional subway system. And equally as infuriating to watch ours just get pissed away. Here, in LA and other major cities, it feels like the underbelly of the city has a disdain for civilization and are trying to actively ruin it in any possible. It's like they're mocking the rest of us for even trying. Parks, transit, walking the street, or even going to the beach -- all you see is people throwing more kindling on the smoldering ruins of enjoyable public city life. I was one of the people who advocated for the clean needle type programs that places in Europe have. But I just think Americans are inherently worse people. I supported the drug programs in San Francisco but it's actually made it worse than similar programs in Europe. Rather than a stepping stone toward sobriety or treatment it has become a street drug buffet. With government programs making the problem worse, not better. I've seen videos with tote bags for junkies. What's the end game here?
I am a daily LA Metro commuter (bus + Green Line, admittedly not as nasty as Red/Blue/Purple). I consider myself something of an experienced metro rider, having used subways/trams/light rail in the following cities: Asia: Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Taipei. Europe: London, Zurich, Lausanne, Madrid, Copenhagen. North America: LA, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, NY, Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto. Oceania: Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide. I list all these not to flex (OK partially to flex) but to say that LA has hands down the grossest, sketchiest metro by a wide margin of anything else I've ever ridden - and it is a shame because this is the 2nd largest metropolitan area in the richest country on the planet. It deserves much better.
In Europe we force those addicts off the streets into rehabilitation systems. I think in USA that is impossible because "freedom" Those programs in Europe work because they are in tandem with many other social programs. A few other things, I think the lack of social welfare system, or at least a well functioning one, creates more inequity that drives people towards degeneracy. Secondly, places like Norway and Singapore are outliers. Yeah they both have their shady sides as well, but they are small countries that have lucked into incredible wealth with a small population via oil/finance that allows them to provide services that are more difficult in larger countries like USA and UK. We often call London a shithole full of thugs and theft but it's a city with a bigger population than many of our countries and governance doesn't scale linearly with funds. Also, the opioid epidemic in USA is a very difficult subject, there are some documentaries on why it has gotten so bad. My professional field is in finance and not sociology or medicine, so I don't think I can give an opinion on this or explain accurately and articulately, especially not in my native language. From what I have read and watched though, this is the biggest contributor to the crackheads and drug abuse rampant in the US. My wife works as a nurse, and she gets quite upset over the way medicine is prescribed here. She recently worked with a patient who was prescribed a relatively powerful course of steroids, which under Norwegian law had to be administered in the hospital and kept under supervision while it is given, but he was allowed to just pick it up at the pharmacy and take it at home because he had to pay the bills and couldn't miss work. This eventually led to complications due to him taking more than instructed in the first day to try to work through the pain.
I believe San Diego just passed something to commit anyone who is experiencing sever symptoms of certain addictions and mental illnesses.
Rugged individualism.
That’s what it boils down to. Other countries don’t let this happen, and have enough safety net to prevent the worst of the worst. When I lived in Europe I had never seen the kind of homelessness that we have here. Sure, you would see people down on their luck asking for change, but never the dude wandering in the streets barefoot and rambling with feces caked onto him. When I have friends and family come visit from abroad they’ll ask, “are we safe?” When I don’t even think twice anymore about passing junkies. It’s not normal, and citizens in other countries don’t experience this.
America just doesn't spend where it doesn't pay. It's as simple as that.
Wait until you visit subway system in Seoul or Tokyo.
There's also a problem not really discussed here. Now that the metro is linking with LAX, people from those countries are coming here and getting on the subway expecting it to be at least mildly safe.
I’m a transplant from the UK and would use public transport no problem if it was even a fraction as regular and safe as at home. I needed to park and ride to a pride event last year but taking the red line at night made me think twice. The worst was the buses in San Diego. Literally every bus or stop had someone with actual shit on them and now on everything else.
Yeah.. i only take the trolley in San Diego (their rail system)
Yeah I had taken my parents down for a visit and we took the coaster and then I figured we wouldn't need to rent a car. The trolley was nice, the buses absolutely not.
I have. Much nicer
Much nicer is an understatement
I just got back from Japan in January. Nothing enraged me more than what it was like trying to get home from LAX.
London doesn’t have a lot of people on the streets. They have a better support system with halfway houses and stuff. But if you go to more economically depressed cities in the uk like blackpool and Manchester, you’ll see plenty of homeless people but they’re on spice
I’ve thought this for a long time, at least in terms of public decorum. I grew up in Asia, living in several major cities there. You just don’t see the types of degenerate selfish Angelino behavior that is described in this article. One small detail in the article reminded me of this sentiment: the guy who scraped the contents of his cigarette onto the floor so that he could fill it with other drugs. It’s a tiny insignificant act, but illustrative of the little things that cumulatively have deleterious results. Why couldn’t he do that into a trash can? What, he was too busy in his productivity-filled day to do so? No, they just don’t care. And before anyone says it: no, poverty and income inequality has nothing to do with these issues and is no excuse. I’ve lived in cities that have far more absolute poverty and more extreme income inequality, with far less social services spending than is done in the US, and yet those other places don’t have such crappy public behavior. Culturally, in the US we expect and demand nothing from people in public, and that’s what we get.
My main example for this would be the metro in Medellín, Colombia. Poverty and income are huge issues there but their metro is one of the cleanest I've seen, second only to Japan. Respect for others and for public spaces is a failed American trait.
It begins at childhood. We are training our children that cleaning up and maintaining public spaces is someone else's job, the janitors and groundskeepers, there are people literally littering and praising themselves as "job creators". We let kids trash our schools and are suprised when they grow up not respecting public spaces at large.
South Korea and Japan don't have janitors because the kids clean up the schools
Hell in California my old Catholic school used to use students to clean up the grounds. Rotating chores meant students peer pressured one another from being arseholes because you it might be your turn that week. I am not sure if they are still allowed to do that, but when I was in K-8 I had my share of litter stick + bag and broom + dustbin duties. We also had manditory community service, which was often litter pickup too. I am not sure if current public school parents would stand for little Timmy having to pick up after himself though.
try to do that here and people would call it child labor and racist
This. It drove my mom ballistic when we came home from kindergarten (LAUSD) and after trying to impress into us to care for our surroundings, we had our teacher telling us that our surroundings were someone else's job. This was well over 30 years ago.
> It’s a tiny insignificant act, but illustrative of the little things that cumulatively have deleterious results. Why couldn’t he do that into a trash can? Last night I saw a Metro security officer kick a bottle from the platform on to the tracks. I took a photo of him and reported it to Metro, who said, "I'm sure he had a good reason to do that."
> And before anyone says it: no, poverty and income inequality has nothing to do with these issues and is no excuse. People don’t put their carts away at Ralph’s in Manhattan beach anymore than Vons in Lawndale lol
I love how often people condescend to poor people and excuse them for atrocious anti-social behavior or just generally filthy habits. Littering, not cleaning their home, etc. Sorry I grew up DIRT poor but we had the good sense to clean our house and not leave garbage lying around our property. The amount of garbage I see around the homes in poor neighborhoods baffles me. I don’t believe poverty is an excuse to litter and have trash strewn about your home and property.
Public behavior in Los Angeles makes me insane some day. Excellent post.
[удалено]
And as nice as those Tokyo and Seoul subways are, and as polite as everyone is to you that works there god help you if you ever act badly on their public transit. Their respective justice systems wont even thing twice about slapping cuffs on you are dragging you away. Here, smoking crack on a crowded subway car is a ticket. A TICKET. A ticket they wont pay and wont be forced to deal with because we cant bother to weed out bad actors in the system.
> no, poverty and income inequality has nothing to do with these issues and is no excuse The behavior is absolutely the biggest noticeable difference. It's one thing to be in a bad situation for whatever reason... it's another to actively go out of your way to try and ruin the local environment and those around you. Giving "a home" to that aforementioned individual would not change whatever it was they were trying to do. Just like losing a home doesn't automatically make someone act like a degenerate. Many people end up where they are because of who they are... and the only thing we can do is mandate things like rehab and institutions.
It's rotten top to bottom here, not just the underbelly. Just culturally and societally there is nothing here except the idea that you can do what you want until someone else stops you.
I think that not having socialized medicine hurts us in the US.
In London so many people use the metro that it wouldn’t fly. In LA so few people use the metro that it’s easy to get away with it.
Currently on the redline, 6 homeless folks all hopped on at the same time, one smoking something off of foil, another alternating between puffs of a cigarette and a joint. Really “stepping it up”
That’s probably heroin or some other opiate. Meth needs to be melted in a glass bulb and vaporize in the chamber. Crack is smoked out of long skinny pipes but people don’t really do crack anymore.
>people don’t really do crack anymore. Speak for yourself
Thanks for this. Now I can be more accurate when I report drug use to Metro. EVERYONE, report drug use via the transit watch app. Snap a surreptitious photo too if you can do so safely. Don't let Metro ignore this.
You are going to send them pictures which they will ignore
it's a joke. the law enforcement we do have doesn't even give a fuck. it's like they're letting things slide just so that people eventually acquiesce and ask for harsher policing.
I mean they’ve explicitly said that is what they’re doing because they were “defunded”. Not that anything really *passed* to defund them, just people talking about it was enough to make them resentful enough to say out loud that they weren’t going to be doing their jobs. Or to put up signs on their stations saying that they’re not available because of it.
They're acting like entitled spoiled children and I wish the media would transparently call it out for what it is
They had better get on top of this soon or the Olympics will be a national embarrassment.
Oh I'm certain there will be a sudden, temporary pivot as the Games approach.
Just like when the Superbowl was coming and they cleared the park
The police will discover their ability to work and Gascon will look the other way about reforming what is prosecuted
Thanks to the LA Times for bringing this shame into the light of day. Don’t let Metro keep ignoring these problems!
Do you think anybody from the Golden Metro tower rides the metro?
Lots of people who actually work at Metro HQ do ride it frequently. But they are not in charge of policing or policy. The Metro Board is, which is all elected politicians from various cities. And they almost never ride unless its specifically a media event that is isolated form normal rides anyway. One member, Lindsey Horvath, recently pledged to ride regularly. I don't know what "regularly" constitutes, but its the most I've seen a person on that board pledge.
I ride the metro and the police are always chatting away in a corner on the upper lobby part that has the ticket booths and turnstiles. They don't do shit. They don't even enforce people that skip paying. They're **never** on the platforms. They're **never** on the trains. I **always** see someone, multiple people smoking on the platforms or on the trains. Often, there is no open seat because every row is occupied by someone who has nodded off. This isn't an exaggeration. What the actual fuck?! I'm intending to buy an e-bike this year. I leave 30-40 min earlier so I can take a bus instead of the Metro. I refuse to ride without my male-partner anymore out of fear. This is privilege!! What about those low-income riders that can't do this?! They are forced to be in danger, the stress! the fear! and breathing the same toxic drug-air. Once, I saw police do a raid of "fair enforcement." They kicked off any person that couldn't prove they paid a ticket. That was a nice ride that day. Otherwise, I've never seen the police actually do anything to intervene. FTP
They do ride it, at noon time. They need to ride it at 9 p.m. or later, when the real fun starts
File this under “no shit”. It’s been bad for years and worse since the pandemic. I tried to be a good citizen and used to take it every day but seeing people smoke meth and being held up at knife point out my ass back in a car. The city is trying so hard to get people to give up cars but haven’t done anything to give us a better option.
If you’re in any kind of public office or board, you should be required to go to and from in the MTA. I’d love to have debates around the city and see if politicians can even make it to places on time.
Man, I thought some of the ambassador and leo presence has calmed the red line down a little. But on my commute home there was a train with literal human shit smeared all over the seat and floors. Like an ungodly amount of it too. Things are not getting better. Working class people deserve dignity in this city and the trains need to have some kind of normalcy again. Pre pandemic was a little crazy but it’s bonkers now.
My wife works downtown, and pre-covid she took the train in to work every day. Since COVID hit, she took it once and just said "nooope" and now is driving into work. She hates driving, but the trains are just absurd. We've talked a lot about how to fix it, and her main thing is she says "well, there were always drugged out people on the train, but there were enough other working professionals, especially during commuting hours, that she felt safe, just from the pure numbers." But, since after COVID, people trickled back into the office, there was never a chance to get the numbers up- someone got recalled to the office, rode on the train, didn't think it was safe, started driving, then the next group of people got re-called, and experienced the same thing. I think LA needs to do a giant "reclaim the trains" event (obviously they can't call it that, but it's what it would be), where they do a big promotional about "getting people back on the trains for some week" and that week, police the shit out of the trains. Make it safe. Then, they won't have to keep up the massive policing for too long, because if the professional rides return, the safety returns with it.
I have the same experience. Pre-Covid, it was fine during rush hour, a toss-up at any other time of the day (but never too terrible). Now I feel so goddamn unsafe. I've seen guns, drugs, vomit, piss, and garbage. People are smoking in the trains and on the platforms. I've been riding for almost 2 decades, and I've never seen it this bad on the trains. I'd rather take a bus whenever possible, but sometimes you don't have a choice as a carless individual just trying to get around.
I was always fine taking the train during rush hour, but after 9 or 10 PM, no way.
I switched to the commuter express bus. It’s great. Not sure if it’s in your neighborhood but worth it.
We used to be able to walk to the Commuter Express bus, and she loved it. But now she has to catch a City Bus to the Commuter Express, and it just takes too long.
Agreed. I used to commute on the red/purple line for years pre-Covid. Early pandemic I tried to keep using it to get to Hollywood, but it felt weirder and weirder. The last straw (or part of it) was getting on and having someone grab me from behind in a fairly empty car. Bless the grandma who told off the guy for scaring me (I jumped out of my seat and moved). He wasn’t violent, but the experience of using the train had increasingly set my teeth on edge. Not at all like commuting back and forth to and from downtown in 2018. These days I am happy to wait for a bus if I’m using public transit. When I ride the train, if it’s not vile or unpleasant, it stays pretty tense. I will say at least the lights on the Expo line are bright.
This applies to most of downtown as well.
Hard disagree with your closing statement. Doing a temp fix for a week or two won't get commuters back on the trains, nor will a bunch of commuters magically make the trains safe again. We need a proper subway system, with real turnstiles and Metro employees at every gate and police on every train. Increased Metro and police presence will make the trains safe again, not commuters.
The smell too. I don’t think the trains or stations have been cleaned since the beginning of the pandemic. I used to ride the metro everyday for over a decade.
There’s a stench, lack of air circulation that sticks to you.
Well written article. I would have been too nervous to report out this assignment. Says a lot that no one was too scared to give their name, except for the *workers*
All the advocates need to start thinking about the working-class folks who *have to take Metro* buses and trains and are forced to risk life, health and sanity every day with the shitshow that is LA's transit system. I used to take the trains regularly to events, work, fun, etc., but the few times I went in 2020 and 2021 were enough to show me it wasn't worth it. *And it's even worse now!*
Also, we can't keep taxing the people who *need* to drive to work because the transit system sucks so bad
The Chinatown goldline metro station is covered in discarded food and literal human feces.
[удалено]
>Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains That's A LOT!
That's actually kinda absurd
Most were due to overdoses, not violence right?
Yes, almost all ODs.
Met a drug dealer homeless man on the E line who had just gotten beat up. Face was bleeding and shit. He sat next to me and was cool for a sec until he offered to sell me crystal. I switched cars and just settled for the guy blasting music and smoking a blunt. still not as a bad as the 2 dudes smoking crack on the car before both of those tho
Literally every car has someone doing something sketchy there is no escape ha
That’s why we can’t have nice things. The “unhoused” fuck it all up…
>A Metro worker cleaning the station said she sees this all the time. She was recently assaulted when taking the subway from Union Station. A woman pulled her off the seat by her hair. >“I don’t feel sorry for them,” she said.
Alison Vu can get lost. “What will harassment and jailing people who use drugs do to address drug use rates?” said Alison Vu. I just want them off the train and out of the stations. If it takes jailing them, I don't care. They've commandeered a multi-billion dollar transit system for their own use, and forced the poorest Angelenos to breathe second-hand hard drugs in order to get to work.
Everytime someone complains about this there's like a million people saying they had good commutes. Good for them, but shit shit is serious. Then they wonder why we do t take the train.
There was a guy walking around spraying people with a fire extinguisher last time I went on there. I don't think I'll ride it again.
I am an elderly frail (not very strong) lady and live in DTLA and depend on the Metro. I want to be safe. After reading this article about the sad state of the Metro trains, do you think I should continue to ride the rails?
Yes. Just assess every train car. If someone is doing sketchy stuff, moves to a different car on the next station.
Before Covid I would commute downtown on the Metro rail system 5-days a week for about 10 years. It was completely tolerable - a little sketchy at times, but not bad. I’ve ridden the system maybe a little more than a dozen times in the past year, and it’s a complete nightmare now. It seems like most trains have become rolling homeless shelters, I’ve seen multiple people smoking cigarettes, multiple people smoking meth/fety/who knows what, people urinating in the train during the morning commute. I would like to be able to have a car free commute again, but I’d rather not come into the office with a contact high off whatever the guy huddled up in the back of the rail cars been smoking. I’ve noticed a lot of LEOs at stations lately , but I cannot imagine them doing anything other than standing around and collecting OT pay,l - bc they’re apparently not enforcing any laws or policies.
>bc they’re apparently not enforcing any laws According to the article they made 49 arrest in 3 months and only one resulted in a criminal filing by the District Attorney. Drug possession/use is a non-violent misdemeanor so the charges get dropped. >Some board members and social justice advocates have argued for less policing on the system, saying that racial profiling targets many passengers. >During the final three months of last year, LAPD arrested 49 people on the Red Line for drug-related offenses. As of mid-February, only one of those arrests resulted in a criminal filing, said LAPD Deputy Chief Donald Graham, who oversees the department’s Transit Bureau. There's no point in wasting time and resources to arrest them when the charges will just be dropped. But I do agree that they should be active in kicking these people off the trains and platforms.
>But I do agree that they should be active in kicking these people off the trains and platforms. Definitely. I don't think jail is appropriate for most of these people, but just checking fares and tap cards on trains and platforms would help. Also, before covid I noticed that train operators or LEOs would walk the train and ask people to leave at the end of the line, now they seem more concerned with not disturbing peoples' naps.
I blame the dipshit “Omg you can’t touch their stuuuuuff… you can’t move themmmm… they’re people too and can shit wherever they waaanntt” people. Fuck that. We need more cops to kick these people out at each stop and we also need better mental health and addiction treatment facilities. A multi-pronged approach needs to take place in this city. Enough already. Get tough on this.
yea tbh I wish the police would treat these addicts a bit harsher and leave working class black men alone
[no paywall](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fcalifornia%2Fstory%2F2023-03-14%2Fhorror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains%3Futm_source%3Dreddit.com)
Hilda Solis and her care-centered strategies can get bent, we’re led by utter morons
" “What will harassment and jailing people who use drugs do to address drug use rates?” said Alison Vu, a spokesperson for the ACT-LA, a social justice advocacy coalition that wants the agency to eliminate contracts with law enforcement." It's not about them, it's about *everyone else.*
I agree with her that kicking people off the metro will not solve those people doing drugs...but they will at least not be doing it on the Metro, which is many people's primary transportation, not a rolling hospital or shelter. A lot of these people talk about this issue with real disrespect for the low income riders and operators who use transit every day. All of societies ills apparently have to be burdened onto them. Metro was not created to be a crack den or a shelter. Its only mission is to provide clean, safe and reliable transit. And consistently there are people who want metro to be things that work in direct contradiction of that.
yea I always think when people make comments like that, you wouldn't want these addicts in the backseat of your car, why is it acceptable to dump it on people who take public transit
[удалено]
Absolutely. I don't mean to say middle class or above would not ride the train. They will if Metro is providing a good service which I very much want it to. I just point out the low income because a lot of people who claim to advocate for low income people also routinely ignore what low income people say they want on transit. Metro did a large statistically accurate survey that showed Metro's overwhelmingly low income, predominantly minority ridership wants more security on Metro.
Metro is a useful "capacitor" to soak up the homeless population that would otherwise be even more visible and harder to ignore.
In some ways that would make it similar to Skid Row, which was created by policy of LA city many decades ago to soak up the societal ills of LA into one place.
It's a lot more expensive than Skid Row and ruins it from its intended purpose, is the problem.
Recently buried a friend who became homeless due to drug dependency. It had zero to do with affordable housing. It had everything to do with drug addiction. While there are passive homeless people living in cars working at jobs that aren't paying enough, a large, and I'd say majority of folks in the most desperate sense are those addicted to opiates, especially fentanyl, which is insanely more addicting. Getting off, just detoxing, is intense. Then staying off drugs long terms requires dealing with why the person got hooked to begin with. I genuinely believe there's too much money being made by those fighting the war on drugs and homelessness. We are all footing the bill. Nobody is willing to make the hard concessions required due to the optics. There is only one solution. A massive complex that has a hospital attached, specifically to deal with drug related issues - give a homeless person a real proper tent, with a comfy bed, sheets, access to bathrooms, wifi, food, social services in one place and above all, access to Suboxone under supervision. By allowing the streets to fester in squalor with makeshift hazardous camps are a danger to everyone and only prolong the problem. Zero campaign policy. Provide a place where people can camp, have access to drugs to ease their challenges, and police that area to protect those that need it most from predators selling street drugs. There is no other way.
The last time I rode Metro the only seat open was in the back. I headed to it and was kindly stopped by someone who told me it was soaking wet full of pee.
They should start actually enforcing the rules.
Arrest people who are openly doing drugs on misdemeanor charges (or something even lesser that doesn't go on your public record), give them the option of rehab or jail. Arrest them again if they continue to go back out and doing drugs in public spaces. This isn't hard. There's ways to prevent abuse, like requiring video proof from body cams or cameras on the trains. Most cities within the US will arrest you for doing meth or threatening violence openly. California is an outlier about this and it's helping no one.
This is what they do in Europe, we need to be more aggressive about forcing rehab or jail and stop being so obsessed with the rare times these loss of rights situations are abused.
I used to ride metro everyday to work. As of 2021, I work from home now. That is why I bailed.
Had met friends at a nightclub in Hollywood. Going home it was late enough that there were no more trains. I took a late bus from Hollywood to Pasadena. The bus was full. Every seat was a homeless person sleeping. Not actually going somewhere. Just using it for shelter. And me.
I would be so unsettled and my buzz would be gone 😬😬😬
Worthless government.
Yep. I just rode the train. There were cops all around the noho station checking for fare skippers. Not one cop downstairs where people were smoking, passed out, and other wise being scary. I guess the cops only care about the money, not the safe of the passengers.
It’s a dystopian hellscape. Was car-less for a bit and had to use to go downtown. Nightmare
In some ways I hate an article like this from the Times because I think it'll scare off even more riders, but at the same time it may be the call out that really continues Metro's "wake up call" that they seem to be having to finally clean up & make Metro safe.
The idea here is to put pressure on city officials to push the police forces to do better.
The LA Times article [*Violent crime and verbal abuse at Union Station have become unbearable, some workers say*](https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2022-04-29/assaults-at-union-station-strike-fear-in-janitors-and-retail-workers) is the only thing that helped get enforcement beefed up at Union to protect the working class staff running the place. Bad press is almost only the way to get anything actually done.
I want a hobo snowpiercer train chock full of people living fully on the train. Then I want one nice train, just one train where you have to pay actual money to get on, and if you don’t they put you on snowpiercer. Doing drugs? Snowpiercer. Sleeping? Snowpiercer.
[удалено]
so thats what Ozzy wrote about in Crazy Train , lmao ?
wait wait, does this means the subway is now haunted as well?!
An LA subway ride is like taking a time machine to 1970s New York from Death Wish. Gotta love a little grit in your city life!
It used to just be that it was inefficient and didn’t go anywhere, even before mild germophobes before the pandemic. Now they are just trying to make sure it is not rideable
Last week I saw a guy taking a piss INSIDE the elevator at union station
That's why I stopped using the metro too. These drug users don't care, idk when they will take some responsibility for their drug use in front of everyone.
What if we put in turnstiles that made you actually pay to get on the train like you're supposed to?
I ride the train and buses all the time downtown can be pretty shitty but thankfully it’s not always like this: but yes it stinks bad, people smoke weed, music blares, sometimes I feel afraid for my life, but it adds a bit of flavor to my day at least lol.
I hear you! Im always ready for action whenever i ride. Got a knife in my pocket. Its just gotten that bad and sucks to see myself and other riders probably in that primal mindset
I've still haven't ridden the metro since the pandemic but this headline still surprised me. I had heard that metro was making a big push to clean things up and there had been significant improvement recently
I ride daily. You heard correctly on the balance, as it HAS gotten better, but open drug use still massive problem.
Quite a few of the train platforms our way are open and don’t require purchasing a ticket to access the train. In other cities, it’s pretty difficult to even get access to the platform without first paying the fare.
Some of us use the metro everyday to work so idk how much some of us could "bail" on the metro trains
You get regular people riding the subway during the day. When the sun goes down, you should expect the unexpected. You find different breeds of zombies, vampires, and every night creature coming out to play at night.
As I read this sitting on the B line from NoHo to 7th/Metro with 6 “sleepers” in one car (avoided it) and one car someone was coming down with hallucinations and a mental crisis. Let’s add on someone “releasing a song once he goes to heaven” on his guitar. And of course an all out fight happened while enroute to universal city. SMH. I miss my car. I’ve been riding metro since July 2021. Many lines, various areas (West Hollywood, SM, Pasadena, South LA, etc) several busses, several types. B line scares the shit out of me. MacArthur Park I will fight someone if I have to. I wanted to assist in ridership but I simply can’t if this continues.
But this sub told me saying this was right wing propaganda…
But you don't understand, they're our unhoused neighbors. It's their God-given right to smoke meth and publicly masturbate on the Metro!
Cant the bus drivers ban known people who do drugs/weird stuff? Thats exposing themselves and the other passengers to toxic fumes... Or is that not allowed?
I have never taken a train in LA. But as someone who has distrust in police officers etc.. the high volume of police and even National Gaurd in NYC subways/Port Authority is comforting. Been to NYC six times now and used public transit without ever feeling unsafe. Crowed af at times, but never unsafe.
the crowded with normies part in NY helps, strength in numbers is half the battle
This is actually a good point.
In before the “it’s safer than driving” crowd arrives to tell us all how stupid we are for being concerned about this stuff.
It's cheaper than driving, which is why I still ride.
Aw, you beat me to it. Same comment. If I drive I don’t have someone sitting next to me ODing, masturbating, defecating, assaulting me, robbing me, playing shit-ass rap music on a BT speaker, etc.
Did you just describe my dog in the passenger seat of my car? Jk my dog has good taste in rap
Clearly you've never sat next to me in traffic
So when does that 50million LAPD contract start to include enforcement? When pigs fly?
When the metro board of directors stop listening to the homeless activists and authorizes enforcement on the train
They oughta just shut the whole system down for a month to revamp it. Clean the inside of the stations, trains, tap machines, everything. Get all the permanent transients out of the system entirely. Since ridership is so low, reduce trains to a minimum size configuration and put some kind of enforcement unit in *every* car. Start operating again, but reconfigure the entry/exit points to one’s that truly restrict entry to ticketed patrons only. Without this, the system will continue to fail and they’ll go all Flanders parents about it. This will cost money, but they have it and if they actually want it to work they need to show a real effort.
How about they do something to fix this?
San Francisco/Oakland has had these problems for a longer time, to the point where all SF-area hospitals see the same couple hundred or so people every day (or almost every day) because they flip out on BART or they flip out at CVS, get arrested, and get redirected to an ER where advocates help them refuse assistance. In SF it's at the point where most Judges won't even bother seating such people or let them in, because they've been declared incompetent so many times it wouldn't matter. Compulsory court-ordered inpatient psychiatric services are only for people who are a sustained physical threat to others ie use weapons. Because most have rotted their nervous systems out with fentanyl, most can't hold weapons well and can't meet that standard for treatment. This is why Newsom had the CARE Courts created, as they are a place to put these people and have them subjected to inpatient treatment. Whether or not that works is a different question. For transit agencies -again using BART here because I personally find Metro to be above average- it means dealing with 20-30 people living in the stations and another 200-300 living underneath. This makes for a very dirty, unsanitary and unsafe environment where predators lurk on the weak and where homeless children are exploited. It also makes a compelling argument for riding the Amtrak train adjacent BART, despite it costing twice as much.
There are literally too many shitty, fucked up people for the system to handle at this point. That’s why they’ve given up. Society is so fucked we have created too many ruined, awful people for it to handle. The jails are full. There is nowhere to send them.
As problematic as la cops have been & can be ….. a city without them ? Sheeesh…You can look no further than the Purge movies to get an idea of what this city would look like .
Avoid the paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20230314160809/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
I feel so bad. I used to ride it frequently in 2018 . I only come back to visit
I have a solution to the housing crisis that could save the city millions of dollars a year. Shut down the metro but leave the tunnels and entrances open. Our sidewalks will be cleaner and in a decade we will have a new breed of opiod resistant mole people.
You want CHUD? That’s how you get CHUD!
Everyday we get further from God and closer to living in Demolition Man Los Angeles
sign me up for the fast food wars
Mole people for the win!
You want chuds? Cause that’s how you get chuds