Sacramento's light rail is mainly used by the extremely poor and as a rolling second home for bums and a party zone for impoverished teens. Teens will play their music loud and scream at each other and get into fights. The bums will do what bums do-panhandle and drink. They smell too.
The trains are actually quite dangerous, teens have been known to "claim" areas or stations and then defend their "turf". This is related to rampant street gang activity, especially on the South Line. Sometimes white people will get beaten up or shot if some black kids think they're on a specific turf and are disrespecting it. The buses are similar, except the driver has more control, he can grab kids and toss them off, the train driver sits behind a reinforced door and pretends nothing's happening.
There's transit cops, but they are few and getting fewer thanks to budget cuts. Sacramento's transit system is so dangerous that they're no longer urging people to use it instead of cars, instead they're urging downtown workers to put more people in each car, known as "carpooling". Carpools are largely informal and organized on a worker level and thus cheaper for the govt.
At least Sacramento has buses, Reno has all but shut down their transit service, known as RTC Ride. It used to be the catchier "Citifare", but a few years ago they were rolling in dough from property taxes so they changed the name. I bet they wish they had that money back. At least transit systems in California keep the same name, Sacramento has used the name Regional Transit since 1973.
California actually has the world's oldest government owned transit system, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, which opened for business in 1912 to replace private streetcars that went broke after the 1906 quake. The name has since been shortened to "Muni", but they still use the 1912 logo on letterhead, and technically it's still the long name. Muni is just cheaper to paint on buses. SF has been doing a back to the future thing lately and been putting the 1912 logo on passes, transfer slips, and the sides of some streetcars.
18 Feb 2009, 8:34 pm
