THE ROAD TO MASS TRANSIT : Heavy Equipment Reshapes the Terrain for Metro Rail--Fashions New Era for County

Travelers along Hill Street near Pershing Square may not know it, but nearly eight stories below them Doss Bray’s construction crew is digging into a whole new dimension in the way people and things will move around the Los Angeles of the future.

In a dimly lit tunnel off the bottom of a deep, fenced-off pit beside the busy downtown street, grit-covered workers are mucking out a large work area with hand tools and a tractor. Bray, a leathery-skinned, 31-year veteran of big construction who is the job superintendent, matter-of-factly describes his daunting task.

“We’re trying to get a subway going,” he said.

Eight miles away, in the heart of Watts, Principal Hal Kimball watches another mass transit project with a mixture of hope and fear. Across the street from his campus, Markham Junior High School, are two unfenced mountains of sand and gravel several stories high where concrete is being mixed for the Los Angeles-to-Long Beach commuter train project.

Tons of rails, in sections stretching two city blocks, are stacked nearby. Nearly every day, Kimball and his staff chase adventurous children away from the neighborhood’s unusual new attractions. “There’s a lot of excitement about (the project),” Kimball said. But his immediate worry, now that the rail line “is for real,” is safety, he added.

Some have a better view of it than others, but from Long Beach and Compton to the downtown Civic Center and MacArthur Park, heavy equipment is reshaping the terrain for a new era of public transit for Los Angeles County.

After decades of debate--and 26 years after the last of the old streetcars was run off its tracks--the only major U.S. urban area without a mass transit system is racing to catch up.

The totality is sometimes obscured by controversies over individual projects, but $5 billion has been pledged by local, state and federal agencies to build 80 miles of interlocking commuter rail lines and busways. Also planned, but less assured, is another 70 miles of rail lines.

Of the total, actual construction is now taking place on 48 miles of subways, new-generation trolley lines and elevated busways at a cost of $2.4 billion.

All of the new system would come to only a fraction of the 1,164-mile electrified rail network that spanned Southern California in the 1920s. But taken together, the Los Angeles transit system now being built is one of the most expensive public works programs in state history--dwarfing the record-setting $3.3-billion State Water Project that runs 685 miles from Northern to Southern California.

If the official 10-year construction schedule is to be believed, it also will be one of the most rapidly developed of the country’s modern-day urban transit systems. By comparison, the first 80 miles of the subway and surface train system serving Washington took 20 years to build.

The pace of construction here, which lagged after a series of ground-breaking ceremonies in 1985 and 1986, has picked up dramatically in recent months and is expected to mushroom in the next several months.

Near Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street, at the western end of the first leg of the Metro Rail subway, a massive square shaft several stories deep has been excavated. In the bottom, what appear to be mice-size workers are piecing together a large circular tunneling machine that will soon begin boring its way toward Flower Street in the downtown financial district.

In the downtown area, city officials said, rush-hour traffic is still moving reasonably well, but the squeeze is on for street space. Heavy construction equipment is working day and night along Hill and 7th streets, where pavement is torn up for utility relocations, subway station excavations and tunneling preparations.

On the north edge of downtown, huge pillars are being erected by Caltrans to support a new section of elevated busway--filling in a troublesome gap between the western end of the existing El Monte busway and the Central Business District.

In northern Long Beach, a freshly graded, gravel-covered track bed stretches north and south of the San Diego Freeway, symmetrically edged by the concrete stumps that will support overhead power lines for the trolley, or light rail line, to Los Angeles.

And in downtown Compton, workers on the Long Beach line are pouring the winding ramps and raised foundation for a commuter train station that will stretch the length of a football field.

“You are starting to talk miles and miles of transit facilities (and) we’re well into (developing) a number of the pieces,” said Dave Roper, Los Angeles deputy director of Caltrans and one of a circle of officials who focus on the region’s big transportation picture.

The overall program falls into three categories--projects under construction, those being planned and (with most of the financing pledged) those future possibilities with financing not identified.

Under construction and to be completed within about five years are: the $1.25-billion first four miles of the Metro Rail subway from Union Station to MacArthur Park; the $695-million, 22-mile Los Angeles-to-Long Beach light rail line; the $390-million, 21-mile Norwalk-to-El Segundo light rail line on the new Century Freeway, and the $23-million, two-mile elevated extension of the El Monte busway.

Being planned for completion within 10 years and with funds pledged are: a 7- to 11-mile, $1.3-billion partially elevated extension of Metro Rail out Wilshire Boulevard and north toward Hollywood; an additional 10- to 15-mile light rail line or combination of lines costing $500 million to $800 million, either across the San Fernando Valley, northeast from downtown into Lincoln Heights or north of Los Angeles International Airport, and a $400-million, 12-mile partially elevated busway and car pool lane on the Harbor Freeway.

Possibilities for Future

Future possibilities with funds not yet available are: an extension of the Metro Rail line, as either a subway or light rail line, from Hollywood or Universal City to North Hollywood; extension of Metro Rail west toward Santa Monica; an easterly extension of Metro Rail on the Santa Ana Freeway toward Orange County; extension of the coastal route from El Segundo toward Torrance; extension of the coastal route north along the San Diego Freeway to the San Fernando Valley.

Just how far and fast Los Angeles can go in developing its new transit system will depend partially on how well officials manage costs and schedules on the early projects. Southern California Rapid Transit District officials, who are building Metro Rail, and Los Angeles County Transportation Commission officials, who are building the light rail lines, said they are currently within the budgets for the lines under construction. In fact, the RTD’s Metro Rail construction contracts are $43 million under budget so far.

As the flow of construction spending speeds up, however, some hoped-for assurances about the RTD’s Metro Rail cost-control procedures have yet to be made. Earlier this year, The Times reported that its own investigation and reports by federal transit officials revealed that internal turf wars, sloppy paper work and poorly defined lines of authority were creating potentially costly confusion over which managers were primarily responsible for management of cost control. Since then, RTD managers insist that they have resolved the problems. But a long-promised follow-up evaluation by federal officials has not even been scheduled.

There also are signs of possible construction delays, which many transit experts agree are a major cause of cost overruns on such projects. For Metro Rail, a rerouting to avoid toxic wastes near Union Station and a drawn-out dispute with a losing bidder over the station construction job at 7th and Flower streets have eaten up much of the cushion in the construction schedule, which calls for the system to open in the spring of 1992.

‘A Very Tight Schedule’

“We (now) have a very tight schedule. . . . It’s very ambitious,” said William Rhine, RTD acting assistant general manager of transit construction. “But as of today, I am still aiming to make April 30, 1992.”

On the Long Beach line, the targeted opening date for the first phase has already slipped several months, to mid-1990.

“On the Long Beach project, the potential for difficulty has more to do with meeting schedule than cost,” said Paul Taylor, the transportation commission’s director of transit development.

The line will use an existing railroad right of way, and Taylor said the complexity of relocating and keeping freight trains running during transit construction is greater than expected. “We’re basically at (the railroads’) mercy,” he said.

In addition, the cost of the Long Beach line is expected to jump $55 million--about 8%--in the coming weeks if the commission agrees to settle a long, bitter legal dispute with Compton. Under the agreement, the commission would have to pay for the relocation of existing freight train traffic out of the city’s downtown.

Even where enough funds are available, progress on the new transit system may be inhibited by a variety of environmental and political conflicts.

Seemingly stymied by a congressional ban on tunneling and resident opposition to building above ground, the RTD has made no progress over the last two years on deciding where to place a western extension of Metro Rail along the Wilshire corridor. One of the most heavily traveled streets in the nation, Wilshire Boulevard originally was the No. 1 priority in Los Angeles County for a mass transit line. But gas pockets were encountered in the Fairfax area and, as of now, agreement has been reached to run the line out Wilshire only as far as Western Avenue.

In Hollywood, recording and broadcast studios along Sunset Boulevard, where an elevated section of Metro Rail trains would run, are protesting possible noise and vibration that would disrupt their operations.

At the same time, the county Transportation Commission has been struggling with community and business groups in the San Fernando Valley over the route of a street-level light rail line there. To a lesser extent, community concerns about the streetcars has slowed the commission’s planning for a rail line through the Lincoln Heights business district near East Los Angeles.

“Our experience in the last six to eight months on the next generation of projects has not given me great confidence,” said Rick Richmond, the transportation commission’s executive director. Still, Richmond and other transit officials predicted that the process of approving routes will speed up substantially once the first commuter rail lines are in operation. When people “can ride them . . . see how they work and that they do not do all these terrible things,” Richmond said, they will be more receptive.

Some transit experts think Los Angeles’ transit plan is simply too inflexible, too ambitious and does not allow time to carefully assess the operating costs and potential ridership of the new rail lines. Jonathon Richmond, a Boston-based transportation consultant who has studied Los Angeles transit plans, has argued that the system is weighted too heavily to trains, which he said will prove inefficient in such a dispersed urban area and do little to relieve traffic congestion.

“The pitfall of doing so much at once is that if you are going to start building several different ventures, you do not get one up and running and see how its doing,” Richmond said. “What they are doing is very much tunnel vision. . . . They are saying, ‘Let’s go ahead and create this great symbol (of better transportation).’ ”

But local transit officials said that projections of sharp increases in population and traffic congestion over the next 20 years make their transit development plan--as well as government regulations to force greater car-pooling and use of public transportation--an urgent necessity.

“We are so far behind, we’ve got to attempt to come up with an accelerated program,” said Gary Spivak, the RTD’s director of planning.