Our kids need a ticket to ride

MY SON NEIL is going to start high school in the fall, and I’m ready for my school-schlepping days to end. His older brother Jarrod, 17, has been able to get to and from school on his own since his first day of high school, and I hold out the same hope for Neil.

Jarrod has mastered the city’s convoluted mass transit system. A musician, Jarrod attends Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, a conservatory-style public school on the campus of Cal State L.A. east of downtown.

To get there, he hops the Beeline bus three blocks from our house in Glendale, which takes him to the local Metrolink station. A 10-minute train ride whisks him into Union Station, where he catches either a bus or a train eastward to Cal State L.A. Easy as pie.

He buys a discounted monthly student pass at the university for $72 -- about $3.60 a day, certainly less than I’d spend on gas if I drove him or organized a carpool. Fellow students join him on this commute, a fact for which I was incredibly grateful the afternoon he left his trumpet on the train. By the time he got home, a friend who commuted with him called to say she had Jarrod’s forgotten instrument.

Putting together his commute took some doing. The websites for Metrolink, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Glendale Beeline don’t hook up to each other. Unless you persevere and know the options available, you’re stuck with few choices. But if you figure it out, goodbye carpool.

Plus, Jarrod’s happier this way. He wants to be independent, and this system allows him that self-sufficiency, as well as the flexibility to stay after school for rehearsals. And -- this is no small miracle -- he’s in no hurry to get his driver’s license.

Neil, meanwhile, has just been accepted at Loyola High School, a few miles west of downtown. Great, I thought, Neil can ride the Metrolink train with Jarrod as far as Union Station and then catch a bus in the other direction, out to Loyola.

Except, as it turns out, Metrolink doesn’t sell student passes to high schoolers. Because Jarrod’s school shares its campus with Cal State L.A., he is considered a college student and eligible for the discount. Neil’s monthly pass would run about $100 -- still less than the cost of gas, but hey, aren’t we trying to solve our traffic problems?

Neil could always go with the MTA bus route -- a K-12 student pass is only $20. But the convenience and safety of Metrolink, paired with the frequency of and location for the connecting buses, I’d decided, was worth paying more -- but why the full adult fare?

It will be great if we succeed in building a subway system that serves all our communities. But until then, there are simple fixes that could be implemented now. Realizing that commuters are best served by a combination of rail, light rail and bus services, and that they need maps and timetables that complement each other, would be a good start. Luring haggard carpooling parents, who will rejoice to realize there are other choices, is another.

Imagine what the roads might look like with all those carpools disbanded. Imagine a mass student conversion to mass transit. Imagine, if you will, all those kids who won’t be screaming for a driver’s license on their 16th birthday.