Some green for the Red Line

REP. HENRY A. WAXMAN’S RECENT DECISION to lift his ban on federal funds for subway tunneling in the Fairfax district was great news for anybody who has ever been stuck in gridlock on the Westside. But Wilshire Boulevard commuters might want to leave the corks in their champagne bottles for now; it’s still going to be a long fight to get a subway extension down L.A.’s densest corridor.

Citing safety issues, Waxman (D-Los Angeles) bulldozed the ban through Congress 20 years ago following a methane explosion in a store near Fairfax Avenue. After a team of experts in October concluded the threat was a figment of Waxman’s imagination (likely fueled by the wealthy Westside constituents who in the 1980s deeply opposed a Wilshire subway line, but who are now paying the price as traffic in the district slows to a crawl), he introduced legislation to end the ban.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the only hurdle to extending the Red Line, which now reaches only as far west as Western Avenue. The federal government only supplies half the funds for local transit projects; local and state governments have to kick in the rest, and that cupboard is bare.

One complicating factor is Proposition A, a 1998 ballot measure that forbids transit planners from spending county sales-tax money on subway tunneling. But most of the sales-tax money is already tied up in maintaining an expanded bus fleet and other projects, leaving little for a subway even if Proposition A had never passed. That leaves just two other possibilities if L.A. is to get a Wilshire subway within a decade.

The first stems from a law signed by former Gov. Gray Davis two years ago, allowing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to put a measure on the L.A. County ballot for a half-cent sales tax increase that would pay for a variety of transit projects, including a Red Line extension. It’s not a bad idea, but no one on the MTA has proposed such a measure. It would take a two-thirds vote for approval, and polling has shown nowhere near that much support among county voters.

The second possibility is the giant state infrastructure bond, worth perhaps as much as $50 billion, proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa should use every bit of his considerable clout in Sacramento to ensure that some of the cost of a Red Line extension is a part of that bond. Arguably no project is more vital when it comes to shoring up the city’s public-transit infrastructure.

L.A. transit planners have long dreamed of a Wilshire subway from downtown to the ocean. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. Villaraigosa will be lucky if he can get a line from Western to Fairfax Avenue approved during his tenure as mayor -- that three-mile project alone would cost more than $1 billion. His successor can worry about getting the line from Fairfax to Westwood.