Union Station, Meet Union Station: What the Blue Zones Know But Won't Say About Trump's D.C. Effort

While JD Vance and Pete Hegseth were bringing burgers to the National Guard troops in Union Station, and being jeered as Nazis for doing it, I was also at Union Station. Or not quite: They were at Union Station in D.C., and I was at Union Station in Los Angeles. There are some lessons about the Trump effort in the things I saw here.

In 2023, while D.C. was seeing a crime wave, the Metro system in Los Angeles — countywide public transportation, trains and buses — was several years deep in a similar decline into chaos.

When I searched for stories about violence on Metro light rail today, one of the first results I got was a page from a personal injury law firm, offering to sue the Metro agency on behalf of passengers shot, stabbed, and beaten on public transportation. Metro trains and stations have been so dangerous that they became a business opportunity for litigators. A few years ago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department pitched Metro on increased security funding. Here’s a sample of what they said in their PowerPoint presentation:

“Passenger disemboweled during knife attack.” Anyway, take the train!

Ridership has declined, with modest periods of recovery and renewed periods of dwindling use. And Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles, the great hub that ties together regional, national, and local rail systems, has seen periods of disorder and unpleasantness, with the usual ubiquitous homelessness, so an ugly place at the center of a troubled system has at times driven further declines. Sample news story:

But Union Station is also pretty great, a culturally and historically significant Los Angeles landmark, and yesterday it looked like this:

It was clean, pleasant, and calm. A place with a troubled recent past is…not troubled. Also, see if you can spot a trend in these pictures:

There’s an enormous security presence, including armed security, mixed in with a sizable force of Metro ambassadors who also have a safety role, and a good number of Metro-assigned LAPD officers doing laps around the property. In a system that’s been declining because of disorder and user fear, an attempt at recovery is centered on not just the restoration of order but also the signal that order is being restored. All the security is in yellow and orange, catching your eye, making sure you know they’re there.

Some homeless dudes were still bathing in the bathroom sinks, and I was still asked for spare change once, but the relative peace and calm was striking. At the risk of bringing Mike Davis back from the dead, Union Station has created a degree of order by partially closing off some public spaces to make them controlled-access spaces. A waiting area in the central hall, now with half the seating, used to be a foul-smelling indoor encampment full of sleeping bags and plastic bags. Now you need to show your train ticket to the security guard at the gate to the waiting area. It’s less public, somewhat less open, and much more pleasant to use.

Sadly, the new commitment to a safe and clean Union Station didn’t happen soon enough to save the magnificent Fred Harvey-era restored bars. But still.

So the people who run a public system, seeing it sink into ruin because of persistent public disorder, are working to save it by restoring order and cleaning the place up. They’re making public space usable and sustainable for a diverse public by making it safe, and by showing users that they intend to make it safe. This isn’t fascism; it’s normal human behavior, which looks likes fascism to idiots.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul did the the same thing, recently, after a series of high-profile violent crimes threatened the stability of the subway system in New York City. She did this:

In D.C., poorly mitigated disorder drew a response from federal officials who noticed it in the one city in the country designated as a federal district. Signaling a commitment to a modest preservation of order in important public spaces is unremarkable, worth the effort, and something with a well-limited purpose. I would guess that the hysterical response to Vance and Hegseth in D.C.’s Union Station comes entirely from people who know that.