The More Things Change

Science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury says that 40 years ago he stepped up in a public meeting on transit reform in Los Angeles to call for a monorail system. He says he was thrown out of the meeting and the city got more buses instead. “There was no rapid transit. There was no improvement,” he says. Now recognized as a visionary, the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles was invited by the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to speak at a symposium at its headquarters on the region’s continuing transit problems. His advice today was as pointed as before: “It’s ridiculous, this building,” he said of the MTA’s new half-billion-dollar headquarters. “You could build a transit system for the cost of putting this place up.” (AP) ...And no doubt the MTA just ordered more buses.