Earlier this summer, on a rare day off, I rode the Metro D Line — the “purple” line, to me, no matter what they call it now — to Los Angeles’ newest rail station at Wilshire and Fairfax. I wanted to see the La Brea Tar Pits before the museum shuts down for a $240 million renovation ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
It struck me, walking through that gleaming new station, that kids growing up in Compton and Watts — kids like I once was — are now just a train ride away from Museum Row. That’s something worth celebrating. But as I toured the Tar Pits that afternoon, I couldn’t shake a harder question: Who is all of this really being built for?
I’ve spent my adult life doing the kind of work that keeps this city running behind the scenes. I’ve cleaned airplane cabins overnight at LAX. I currently work in public safety, fielding calls from strangers in the middle of their worst moments. And every single day, before I can even start that work, I have to answer a more basic question: How am I going to get there safely?
My commute runs from Watts to the San Fernando Valley, across five shifts a week that rarely follow a normal schedule. More often than not, I’m traveling during hours when safe, reliable transit simply doesn’t exist. That means walking through pitch darkness, waiting at empty transit platforms, or driving alone on freeways that feel abandoned.
If I try to rely on Metro, my day starts with a 1.3-mile walk to the nearest bus stop. Large stretches of South L.A. — Main Street, Figueroa Street, Avalon Boulevard — have gone dark in recent years because of rampant copper wire theft that’s knocked out streetlights block after block. Walking those corridors at night means moving through neighborhoods stripped of even the most basic safety infrastructure.
Even once I’m on a bus or train, I can’t relax. Metro Rail doesn’t run 24 hours, and when service is available, it’s often unpredictable — delays that threaten my job, overcrowded platforms, and moments that have felt genuinely dangerous. I’ve had people make violent, explicit threats toward me while riding. I’ve sat on stalled trains watching the minutes tick by, knowing I was about to be late, or miss my shift altogether.
That’s not just bad for my career. Given the nature of my work, it’s a public safety issue in its own right.
A few years back, I bought a car, thinking it would solve the problem. It didn’t — it just traded one set of risks for another. I was paying more than $200 a month just to park near my job, on top of the steady bleed of gas money. Worse than the cost was what I saw driving L.A.’s freeways at odd hours: a kind of quiet chaos most people never witness. I’ve swerved to avoid unhoused people wandering into traffic. Someone once threw a brick off an overpass and it hit my car. Another time, a driver behind me panicked over a bee and rear-ended me hard enough to total my Camry.
Owning a car didn’t make me safer. It just changed what I had to be afraid of.
Not long ago, a man carrying a pole approached me at a bus stop and threatened me. I wasn’t hurt, but I was rattled enough that I couldn’t bring myself to go back to work for several days. That encounter — and my visit to the Tar Pits — changed how I think about transportation in this city.
I can enjoy a smooth train ride during normal business hours as much as anyone. But if an emergency called me, or any other essential worker, into a shift at 3 a.m., I honestly don’t know that L.A.’s transit system could get us there safely.
I think of Los Angeles sometimes as a living body. The Department of Water and Power is its heart, pushing water and electricity to every home and business. Public safety workers are its immune system, responding when something goes wrong. City Hall is the brain. And our streets, buses, trains and freeways make up the circulatory system — the thing that actually moves people from one part of the body to another.
Every part depends on the others. And none of it works without the people doing the labor.
I want to keep celebrating new train stations and expanding rail lines as the city gears up for the 2028 Olympics. But I hope this wave of investment isn’t only about making it easier for visitors to reach Los Angeles. I hope it also means the workers this city depends on most finally get something we’ve long deserved: a transportation system that is reliable, and safe, enough to get us where we’re needed, whenever we’re needed there.
Original source: CalMatters
