Metro Rail’s Big Day Arrives, and Downtown Girds for the Upheaval : Formal Ground Breaking Due; Construction Will Create ‘Substantial Impact’ on Traffic

Art Lemos and his construction crew realize, as Lemos puts it, that “history remembers the big shots.”

But Lemos and his men may deserve some small footnote in the history of Los Angeles’ planned multibillion-dollar Metro Rail subway.

Several days ago, before the formal ground breaking scheduled today near the Civic Center, Lemos and his crew became the real ground breakers when they began installing underground utility pipes through a projected Metro Rail tunnel.

“We’re the pioneers,” Lemos said recently over the noise of passing traffic on downtown’s Hill Street. Gesturing toward an open trench where his Department of Water and Power crew was cementing in the new conduit, Lemos said: “That’s for Metro Rail. It says it right on the print.”

The Lemos crew, jackhammering through the pavement near 5th and Hill streets, is the first of nearly 2,000 subway construction workers who, if last-minute legal obstacles are overcome, will tear up downtown Los Angeles in the next few years.

150-Mile Rail Web

Metro Rail, which is to begin as a 4.4-mile subway between Union Station and Alvarado Street, is supposed to carry 35,000 passengers a day when it opens about 1992 and more than 300,000 a day if extended to the San Fernando Valley. Transit officials say Metro Rail will be the backbone of an ambitious 150-mile commuter rail web that will one day span the county.

Still, things never have been simple or certain with Metro Rail. Any number of legal, political or financial booby traps could slow, interrupt or halt its progress.

If things go as planned, heavy construction is expected to hit its stride by late next year, bringing with it a string of construction bottlenecks, detours and periodic street closures in the already congested heart of the Central City. Hundreds of thousands of commuting motorists and bus riders will have to adjust to new, often longer, routes to and from their jobs.

No one knows exactly how severe the disruption and delays will be, but Donald Howery, general manager of the city Department of Transportation, said Metro Rail will “create a substantial impact on downtown traffic, particularly during the peak of activity.”

‘Prevent Gridlock’

“We will be working to prevent gridlock. We intend to keep traffic moving,” said Howery, who has been working with the Southern California Rapid Transit District on plans to manage traffic during construction.

The official Metro Rail ground breaking is scheduled for 9:30 this morning when “the big shots,” including Mayor Tom Bradley and a long line of elected officials, gather at the corner of 1st and Hill streets. An elaborate ceremony, put together at a cost of more than $90,000, is open to the public.

If work moves ahead, more than 120 contracts worth about $600 million will be awarded on the initial segment--most of them in a burst worth $425 million in the next 12 months. They range from a $12,000 job to move some telephone lines at Union Station to cutting the tunnel section between the Union Station maintenance yard and the proposed 5th and Hill streets station near Pershing Square, at a cost of $70 million.

At first, only minor utility relocation work--like that being performed by Lemos’ crew--will be evident along Hill Street.

The first major traffic disruptions could begin in mid-November, when a $3-million contract is due for the moving of underground utility vaults out of the subway’s path beneath Hill Street.

The first major tunneling--$40 million worth--would start next spring by workers boring two train tubes between Alvarado Street and the multilevel station under 7th and Flower streets, where the Metro Rail and the Los Angeles-to-Long Beach light rail would link up.

The peak of construction activity on the first segment is scheduled between 1987 and 1990, when three tunneling operations will proceed under separate areas of downtown, along with the excavation and building of four stations.

On the first 4.4 miles alone, about 1,800 construction workers, day and night, will be excavating 1.5 million cubic yards, setting in place 120 million pounds of reinforcing and structural steel and pouring more than 400,000 cubic yards of concrete.

In addition, by the time the first segment opens for passenger service--no sooner than six years from now--RTD officials hope to be well along with construction on an extension beyond Alvarado Street.

Maintaining a fast-paced schedule of interlocking construction contracts will be a major challenge, RTD officials say. If just one or two key contracts bog down, that could trigger a chain reaction of delays and cost overruns.

“All we have to do is default on a rail car contract, and this project will be years behind schedule,” RTD General Manager John Dyer told his board recently.

RTD officials say they have addressed the problem with an elaborate computer-aided management system to track construction progress.

UMTA Management Team

In addition, the federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which is disbursing almost 55% of the financing, will have its own construction management team continuously looking over the RTD’s shoulder. Runaway cost increases have plagued transit projects in other cities, but a relatively new beefed-up federal oversight program should spot a problem “before it becomes a crisis,” said Ralph Stanley, UMTA administrator.

And the more efficiently all this goes, the more the city’s street traffic will have to stay out of the way.

Parts of key streets--Hill and 7th--will be blocked off for excavation work, up to 25 large dirt-hauling trucks an hour will be maneuvering through downtown streets and the operation of huge cranes are expected to distract and slow motorists.

The greatest tie-ups will be near the sites of the large stations in the core of the city--at 1st and Hill, 5th and Hill and 7th and Flower.

Those snarls will be compounded by other large projects--the Los Angeles-Long Beach light rail subway under Flower Street, the Central Library expansion and office tower project on 5th Street and the completion of the huge California Plaza office-retail-cultural center near Hill Street.

Traffic Battle Plan

A traffic battle plan developed by the city and the RTD calls for the diversion of as much bus and auto traffic as possible to the east side of the Central City.

By the middle of November, a 13-block stretch of Hill Street will be converted to a one-way street southbound to make room for construction equipment at the proposed stations. Broadway, a block to the east, will be resurfaced, and left-turn lanes will be added to help handle the displaced northbound traffic.

Signs will be posted to encourage motorists to use north-south streets like Main, three blocks east of the Hill Street construction area.

Howery said the city is “going to apply some of our Olympics experience” and mount a major public information campaign to alert commuters to problem areas. “Over the long term, people will find new routes and avoid the trouble spots,” he said.

Along with the street changes, more than 30 bus lines affecting 115,000 boarders a day will be rerouted eastward away from Hill Street and Broadway to Spring and Main streets, meaning that some riders from the office district will have longer walks to their stops. The changes will involve about one-third of the bus lines through downtown.

Coupled with the auto traffic rerouting, RTD planner Ben Urban said, “We will have some fairly good congestion, primarily on Broadway and Main. . . . But you can’t get much more congested on Broadway.”

To help use the undisrupted street space effectively, the city plans to deploy “gridlock busters”--a recently expanded squad of traffic officers. They will direct traffic at key intersections to prevent clogging and rove about during rush hours ordering the towing of illegally parked cars.

The difficulties of managing the project and keeping traffic moving are enormous, officials say. But they are welcomed by the RTD and the city because they mean Metro Rail would be escaping from its long captivity in legislative hearing rooms and engineers’ drawings.

Planned Since 1975

State, local and federal officials began planning Metro Rail in 1975.

Hopes of having the project completed by 1990 and most of it paid for by the federal government faded by mid-1984 when competition for UMTA funds caused RTD to cut back the first segment from 8.8 miles to 4.4 miles.

Later that year, the Reagan Administration announced that it would fight all appropriations for Metro Rail and other new transit systems, causing Metro Rail advocates to step up their lobbying effort to salvage the project in Congress.

Trouble struck again last year when Westside Rep. Henry Waxman, an influential Democrat and past supporter of the project, demanded that the entire tunneling safety program be reevaluated. Waxman succeeded in getting the RTD to abandon tunneling through Westside areas of methane gas, and early this year he became an active opponent of the project.

Nevertheless, earlier this month the RTD finally appeared to have all the federal, state and local financing agreements in place to begin work--until a U.S. district judge in Washington temporarily blocked the release of federal funds because of a legal challenge to the project’s environmental impact statement. A hearing on the suit is scheduled to be heard Wednesday.

Even if that snag can be overcome, the struggle and controversy will continue.

$1 Billion Short

About $1 billion in federal funds not yet appropriated are needed, under present financing arrangements, to extend the line to the Wilshire Corridor, Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Critics, as well as many supporters, agree that the best Metro Rail can hope for is to maintain the recent level of federal financing for the project, about $100 million a year. That is less than RTD officials had hoped for, and the project may have to proceed at a slower pace.

“They’re almost at the top of their wish list now,” said Rep. William Lehman (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on transportation. “I think they have a fighting chance (to complete the entire system). But they are going to have to come up with about half the money locally and to lobby like hell in Washington for the rest of it.”

The RTD also faces political problems in settling on a new Westside route, required under an agreement with Waxman. A two-pronged route that would include elevated sections on Wilshire Boulevard, Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard is the officially favored option, but a large coalition of Westside homeowner groups have vowed to fight any elevated plan, claiming that it would ruin their neighborhoods. That means that construction is to begin on one section of Metro Rail before there is agreement on where the next section should be routed.

Valley Work Required

And there is still no agreement on how the RTD will meet a state requirement that a year after work begins downtown, subway construction must begin in the San Fernando Valley. That would require between $68 million and $100 million in additional local and state funds in the next several years.

RTD President Jan Hall said uncertainties will always be there.

“It’s presumptuous of anyone to try to anticipate” all the answers, she said. “The real critical question is: Are we going to start on these projects and are we going to continue on toward their completion? Do we have that kind of commitment in this county?

“I think we do.”