Los Angeles’s Union Station is trying something new to keep the homeless at bay: restricting waiting room seating to ticketed passengers.
But the pilot program might not just affect L.A.’s homeless population, Damien Newton writes. Because the new policy restricts seats to Metrolink and Amtrak riders, Metro travelers and locals waiting for family or friends might also be given the boot.
Depending upon how it’s enforced, then, the program could create a two-tiered system of rail transit, with Metrolink and Amtrak riders in the first class, and subway riders in the second. “For many people, Union Station is their first taste of Los Angeles,” Newton writes. “It’s going to send a strange message when one of the first thing[s] a visitor experiences is being shooed out of what appears to be a public seating area.”
Read the full story: Union Station's Pilot Program Aimed at Moving the Homeless, But Does It Create Two Classes of Transit Rider?
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