Check out Nithya Raman interviewed by Nick Andert

I've posted quite a lot on this blog about the state of Los Angeles transit. The upcoming mayoral election has the possibility to really change the momentum behind transit programs in the city... because the LA mayor, despite being very "weak" compared to comparable positions like the NYC mayor, controls nearly 1/3rd of the seats on the Metro board of directors. I never got around to posting about this, but we had a deranged upset in the June mayoral primary - the republican candidate, Spencer Pratt, failed to place in the top two and therefore will not appear in the November election. Instead, he was edged out by Nithya Raman, a progressive city council member whose political career in the city has been kind of a rollercoaster. If you recall the 2022 city council racism scandal, your memory is already longer than most people who comment on LA politics nationally. What you may not recall is that the meeting where those city council members said all that racist stuff was largely…