L.A. Has Lots of Weapons on Transit : Billions From Sales Tax Could Save or Complement Metro Rail

At first glance the Reagan Administration’s plan to once again try to scuttle the Los Angeles Metro Rail project is unmitigated bad news.

Planning for the 18.6-mile transit line from Downtown to North Hollywood has been going on for 10 years and has cost taxpayers $234 million--a hefty investment of both dollars and human effort that will have a zero, or close to zero, payoff if the project falls by the wayside.

Furthermore, there aren’t any plans on a shelf someplace for a substitute project that could be dusted off and plopped down in the Wilshire area to do what Metro Rail has been designed to do: Rescue about 360,000 harried people a day from some of the worst traffic congestion in the county--if not the country.

And if Metro Rail goes bust, travelers who have been looking forward to traffic relief in other corridors may feel some effect, too. For example, the Long Beach trolley currently is planned to end at 7th and Flower streets, with transfers to Metro Rail for other Downtown stops. Unless new arrangements are made, trolley passengers will not have easy access to Bunker Hill, Union Station and points nearby.

But even if you buy all the arguments for Metro Rail, it’s hard to avoid the sense that there’s been something shaky, even unreal, about the project from the start. What’s surprising is not that Metro Rail may be derailed at this late stage, but that the project has come along as far as it has.

Metro Rail didn’t earn its place on the map in the conventional manner. The orthodox approach to developing urban-transportation projects calls for planners and engineers, working in some officially sanctioned forum, to study the pattern of travel in an area and then to suggest a network of interconnected lines--roads, bus routes or railroads--to handle expected trips between various origins and destinations. After decision-makers have agreed on an overall network, the next step is for them to decide in what order to build its segments. When planning is done in this sequence, individual projects tend to derive a good measure of their strength and credibility from being part of the explicitly defined, larger system laid out earlier.

With Metro Rail, this planning process--from system to segment--was reversed. Although many transit systems had been proposed over the years, Metro Rail was treated basically as a free-standing endeavor when the project began to be seriously discussed in the mid-1970s--a single line designed to solve congestion problems in the Wilshire corridor alone.

As the issue was framed at the time, any broader rapid-transit system for the region was to grow out of the project, and not vice versa. Tellingly, Metro Rail was called a “starter line,” which would spawn other transit lines as demand increased. It wasn’t until 1980, when the voters passed Proposition A, that Metro Rail finally found a system to call home. A map accompanying the text of the measure included the Wilshire line in a 150-mile areawide network of rail routes. (Interestingly, Metro Rail hasn’t grown. It has shrunk. The starter line now has its own starter line: a 4.4-mile Downtown segment.)

Metro Rail also stands out from more commonplace transportation works in the high degree to which its development has been embedded in politics, dating back to the struggle between Mayor Tom Bradley and Baxter Ward, then a county supervisor, over the project’s alignment. To many, the real issue of the struggle was who would control Los Angeles’ transit future. (Bradley won.)

Starting in those early days, too, much of the push for the project seemed to have less to do with the project’s intrinsic merits than with the desire of local bigwigs, after years of disarray and frustration, to agree on something that would enable Los Angeles to join other cities tapping into the big pot of federal dollars then available for rapid-transit construction.

It’s in the realm of dollars that Metro Rail goes from being simply extraordinary and approaches the extra-terrestrial. At an estimated cost of $3.3 billion, or $170 million per mile, the 18.6-mile Metro Rail would be the single most expensive public-transit project in the United States.

It invites comparison with the Century Freeway--a transportation project of about the same length, also the most costly facility of its kind in the country, also heavily dependent on federal funding and also targeted by the Reagan Administration a few years ago for cutback. Given the similarities between the two projects, Metro Rail supporters may be inclined to take hope from the fact that the Administration ultimately dropped its assault on the Century Freeway’s funding. In reality, though, the freeway’s survival could work against Metro Rail.

The Century Freeway project is still not out of the woods financially. Although it does so less severely than on transit projects, the new Administration budget also calls for scaling back overall funding for highways. In deficit-strapped Washington it may be hard to sell two transportation mega-projects in the same geographic area. And arguments that the two projects should be treated separately because each is funded from a separate cookie jar are weak: Under federal law, local officials could have used Century Freeway money to pay for the subway in a transfer and substitution scheme that has been used to fund transit in many cities, including Sacramento.

Whatever the absolute or relative merits of Metro Rail, it’s not the only project in the Los Angeles region’s transit pipeline, or even the farthest along. Construction is already under way on the light-rail line between Los Angeles and Long Beach (at a cost about one-sixth the per-mile price tag for Metro Rail), and work has also started on the line that will run down the median of the Century Freeway. Extension of the El Monte Busway to Union Station is imminent, and funds are earmarked for another busway along the Harbor Freeway.

As for transit financing, there is hope even if Washington fades from the picture. The half-cent sales tax imposed by Proposition A gives Los Angeles County a fat and secure source of money to pay for major new rail facilities as well as bus operations. Staff members of the county Transportation Commission, which administers the funds, have conservatively estimated that the tax will raise $6.9 billion over the next 15 years. Of this, $2.4 billion must be used on the 150-mile rail system, and $2.8 billion more is available at the commission’s discretion for rail or bus projects.

So far the commission has committed only $1.2 billion in Proposition A funds to rail. This would pay for 59 miles of projects, including $412 million to Metro Rail. So there’s a lot of money, and leeway, left. If federal funds do dry up, most or all of the remaining Proposition A money could be sunk into Metro Rail. On the other hand, dropping Metro Rail itself would free up not only its current share of Proposition A revenues but also $397 million in ear-marked state funds. If the state agrees, all this money could be added to the pot for other projects in the system.

At the bottom line, it is politics--not any detached calculation of benefits, costs or alternatives--that will probably determine the fate of Metro Rail, both in Washington and in Los Angeles. However those politics turn out, the Los Angeles region fortunately has a lot of weapons other than Metro Rail to stave off terminal traffic gridlock.