Bus stories. What a difference the 10 makes....

When I lived in Los Feliz I rarely saw people get on the bus in wheelchairs. The elderly Jewish people who would get on the 180 were in relatively good shape. They were going to do fun things like go to a creative writing class or play parlor type games with friends.

I even met my friend Danny Weizmann’s infamous Aunt Ethel on the 180. I only knew her from his stories he used to tell about her. When she got on the bus and started her lively chatter I went up to her and asked, “Are you Danny Weizmann’s Aunt Ethel?” and she said, “Yes, you know my Danny?”

WeizmannPROMO
by shametrainla

A video of Danny reading at my old art space in Boyle Heights.

I got lots of advice from the women on the 180 bus and Los Feliz Dash. Mostly it had to do with their opinion if I should or should not get married. Some seemed to think I should get married, before I got too old and some thought I should get a doctorate and not worry so much about being married. I did not start these conversations they just liked talking and I like talking, so lots of talking on the 180 and Los Feliz Dash for me.

When I moved to downtown LA and started to take the 51 and the 40 the experience was very different. I still see lots of elderly people get on the bus, but they are black and they aren’t happy. They are not going to do anything fun. They are going to the doctor or to get dialysis or something else horrible. They don’t have any advice for me, well they do, “shut up.” Not saying that elderly black people don’t give advice just the ones who take the bus aren’t giving any.

Older black women with cars have lots of things to tell me, “You need to get a car, this bus riding business is silly and bikes will get you killed,” and “You need to get a nice man, I got a nephew come to church and you can meet him. You believe in Jesus Christ don’t you?”

On the 180 rarely did a wheelchair get on. On the 51 two wheelchairs and people with canes and walkers get on every time I get on AND a wheelchair usually gets left every time I am riding the bus.

The people in the wheelchair aren’t even mad when they get left behind; they just stare at the bus as it goes by.

On the 51 by the 113th Street Park there are some hospitals, but they seem to be a bit far away, because I can’t see them from the bus, but everyone around that stop hobbles the four feet distance from the bus stop to the bus and  they all have medication, canes, wheelchairs, bags to carry their waste or are visually impaired or they have a combination of plate of issues.

I see young mothers on the bus. They seem very poor and their kids are eating junk food and the moms are overweight. Everyone on the bus who is adult seems overweight, which is weird, because I would think that riding the bus would make you thinner.

But I think many of the passengers on the busses in South LA are disabled. Some of their disabilities are more obvious, but many people seem to have some kind of ailment, so I think they do that wait for the bus to take them two blocks and transfer thing, so that they don’t have to walk far, because I don’t think they are able to.

The lack of being able to move around and food that poor people eat is really killing them. There is no greater visual demonstration of this than on a LA bus out of South LA. I see on average about three people a day get on the bus missing a foot or missing a leg and we all know what causes that: diabetes.

And diabetes is caused by a poor diet of processed food and a lack of exercise.

And processed fast food is cheap. Vegetables and fruit aren’t cheap and have you tried to get vegetable and fruit at a store in South LA? It’s usually rotten. I’m not exaggerating; it’s rotten or just about to go bad. At least in that part that doesn’t have name recognition, you know up Central, Avalon, around Watts…lots of fast food places (not lots, but only) cheap fast food places and no grocery stores and the grocery stores that are there have rotten produce.

I realized that if I didn’t start to prepare my lunch prior to leaving the house that I was going to end up being those people who ate fast food and had a missing foot.

I know some people think this is depressing, but you know it’s true. This is what I see when I ride the bus. I don’t see a party. I don’t see people just so stoked to be saving the planet. I don’t see cute girls hiding behind notebook talking about how they love the bus. I see poor people in wheelchairs going to the doctor. And this isn’t so much a bus problem but a socio-economic problem.

There are some lines that are party lines, but most lines are not.

Chances are if you ride the bus regularly you’re poor, not even working class, but poor. And I know in LA that’s not what people want to hear. Everyone wants to believe that they are a little middle class, that everyone is, but no, there are poor people in LA. If you ride the bus you’re probably one of them, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t matter.

I think half of the problem with the bus is that poor people don’t want to admit they are poor so they don’t want to talk about poor people problems:

• Having to get to DPSS in a specified amount of time to fill out your food stamp info, because you don’t have an official address or don’t live by a post office or have access to stamps is a real pain via public transit.

• Since you don’t have a bank account you have to go to a check cashing place to cash your welfare check. The only check cashing place you won’t get jacked at, the bus stops running one hour after you get off your under the table babysitting gig.

• Healthful groceries are heavy as shit and a pain to take on a crowded bus with two transfers.

• The way the Blue Line set up really sucks, because you have to walk all the way around to get to the one grocery store in the neighborhood that you used to be just across the street from.

Or maybe just poor people think life is about suffering and don’t realize that these are problems that could be fixed if they said something.

I noticed that when I do talk about issues of unfairness to people on the bus they seem to think I’m crazy. They are very this is how it is. I talked to a man who had been held for  a day on accident by the LAPD and he told me how it was fine, because he had a record and that’s what happens when you have a record. I told him that was bullshit, it wasn’t fine and then I gave him the number to the ACLU, but I could tell he was just like, “Whatever.”

Maybe in South LA Metro should think about putting a few more areas for wheelchairs on their busses or maybe they should run a few more busses up the street between the hours of 8am-8pm (I know on certain portions Metro has three busses, but I’ve waited for longer than 15 at times and that’s just unacceptable,) since lots of disabled people use that line to go to and from the doctor (according to Yahoo maps there are at least five medical centers around the 113th Street Park.)

Metro can pretend that the wheelchairs have people in them and possibly that will help them come up with a real solution. And maybe the people in wheelchairs will understand that they are people and that they have the same amount of rights as everyone else, it's not causing trouble to state the obvious.

by Browne Molyneux

The reference to the ten for non LA people is the ten freeway. In LA there are two dividing lines the LA River and the Ten Freeway.

The Eastside was where Chicanos lived, South of the Ten was where black people lived, that has changed obviously, but that was the rules of the city of LA how it was drawn up in the past and it wasn't drawn by the Chicano or African-American communities.

Comments

[Shawn]

There are a lot of people in South LA, both with and without health problems, that are dependent on others (ie the government) to take care of them. I don't think that the answer is providing more services, but in providing a better education so that people can care for themselves.

As far as the wheelchair issue...I don't know. That's an issue in lots of places, especially poor areas, and no bus agency does well with it. Do we spend a lot of money to provide extra service for a very few or use that money for more people? It's a tough question. I don't know the answer, but I'd be against making service cuts on more popular lines just to reroute buses to Watts/Willowbrook.

[browne]

Everyone is dependent on the gov't taking care of them. AIG, the automakers, the banks, the rich people who are getting irs breaks because someone who was obviously a crook stole their money.

I would agree education is important in regards to health, but there are virtually no options out there. I have never eaten fastfood more in my life as the time I have worked in South LA and you know why I ate junk food, because I was hungry and nothing else was there and I was hungry and the salads were rotten. Education only goes so far as the amount of true choices you actually have.

If I didn't live some where else I'd be forced to eat junk food if I didn't want to spend the time to go to the grocery store and pick through a bunch of rotten produce.

The 51 is standing room only for most of the journey, so I'm thinking a few extra busses would be a good thing. The 51 and I think it's the 53 are very popular routes.

I think more money for public transit in the places that have hospitals nearby would be a good policy especially in low income areas.

Browne

[Shawn]

No, everyone is not dependent upon the government to take care of them. Most people have jobs that allow them to take care of themselves. But some people have no job, no health insurance, no car, etc. No way to feed or house themselves without government assistance.

Mexican/Hispanic vendors and stores in South LA have fruit and vegetables. They even push them around on carts. I've never eaten it, but I see that it's there. But I agree that healthy food is few and far between, but why is that? Could it be that given the choice that many/most residents of South LA choose fast food? That would be my guess.

I agree with your last statement. You should bring it up with Metro or the BRU.

[browne]

Why do people always assume people will choose the shitty choice if given a choice. Back before fast food existed in a major way people ate at home. And they were fine.

I don't know what part of South LA you're talking about, but I don't see any Latino vendors when I am waiting for the bus. I saw them in Los Feliz, don't see them in South LA, not saying they don't exist. I'm in a particular part of South LA that is pretty much a wasteland. Lots of boarded up buildings, lots of real estate for rent and for sell.

Are we really going to compare two economically oppressed groups, like there is so much of a difference, because that's a little ridiculous. That you are going to act like everything is peaches in cream in the other communities who also have large portions economically oppressed people. If I took income as a sole factor I would bet Latino, African-American, Asian-American and white people all look pretty similar. They probably all have high rates of heart disease, disabetes, at an unhealthful weight, lack health insurance or have insufficent health insurance, and they probably lack mobility.

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/7815
http://iccnetwork.org/cancerfacts/ICC-CFS6.pdf

If you look at those numbers poor ends up looking exactly the same regardless of color.

Black and brown people are pretty much equally unhealthy. I bring up African-American here, because that's who I notice on the bus, because in my general life I've never seen black people be so big and now when I hear these studies (and the jokes) I know who they are talking about. It was like my first experience with Indian-Americans (from India) was going to school with them and playing with them, I never did get the 7-11 jokes, but then when I finally went to 7-11 in LA, I was like in my head, "ohhhh..."

I realize people are ignorant and people of color pretty much get stereotyped by people's first impression of them, so since most people are in this very segregated environment they meet this particular type of person of a certain ethnicty and they assume everyone of that ethnicity is like that.
Not that I haven't seen a big black person, but it was like, "oh that person is a bigger person." On the bus everyone is big and I'm small at least among the adults.

The fact is many people who are economically disadvantaged their food choices are based on economics. This isn't because they aren't educated or don't care, choices come with money and opportunity.

Browne

[Randall BusTard]

Shawn,
Were it not for government subsidy there would be no Freeway system, little air travel and quite a bit more missing. Were those people with jobs that you argue are not dependent on the government forced to pay full price for the "amenities" such as roads, fuel and relatively cheap air travel, the uproar would be horrendous. They are no less dependent than the extreme ends of the benefactors, from AIG and Chrysler to the poor who get less than pennies in respect to the billions doled out under the table and in public to those who used gov't subsidies to shore up their wealth.