Monorail Proposal : Transit Panel Won’t Do Study

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission refused Wednesday a request for an immediate environmental study of Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s proposal for a monorail or magnetic-levitation train through the San Fernando Valley.

The commission instead handed the proposal to a 32-member committee recently formed by the Los Angeles City Council to study Valley transit needs.

Antonovich, who represents most of the Valley and is facing a vigorous reelection challenge June 7, is proposing that a monorail or other technologically advanced line be built along the Hollywood and Ventura freeways from Union Station downtown to the Ventura County line.

Several members of the commission, which is building a countywide network of light-rail lines using conventional technology, have taken offense at the supervisor’s suggestion that they are employing outdated technology.

Selection Difficult

Commissioners also contend that selection of an east-west rail route for the Valley has proved politically difficult and is best left to the council’s committee, which meets for the first time next Thursday.

Antonovich was out of town and unavailable for comment, but Rosa Kortizija, his deputy for transportation issues, said the supervisor “has indicated he will continue pressing the commission on this.”

She said Antonovich “has no quarrel with the council committee’s looking at this matter, but he feels that the commission should also study these advanced technologies itself, rather than rely solely on an advisory body.”

Although the commission staff has not prepared a cost estimate for Antonovich’s proposed study, Richard Stanger, director of program development, predicted that it would be in the same range as the $1.6-million Valley light-rail study the commission launched a year ago.

In November, commissioners abruptly halted that study at midpoint in the face of mushrooming opposition from residents to all five proposed light-rail routes.

At the time, commissioners challenged Valley elected officials to form a committee to determine what route, if any, a Valley rail line should follow.

In a report delivered to the commission Wednesday, staff engineers noted that previous studies have indicated that the Ventura Freeway would be the most expensive of the five east-west routes under consideration for light rail and that monorail or magnetic train costs would be similar.

Also, there is little vacant land available along the freeway for parking lots, and most of the logical station sites are in heavily congested areas, the report said.

Stanger added that the few existing monorail systems are at tourist attractions or in experimental use in Japan and “offer no significant advantages over light rail in terms of size, cost or other key factors.”

On a monorail, rubber-tired trains ride along a single concrete rail. Magnetic trains, which are not yet in regular use anywhere, float above a rail-like guideway, propelled by a magnetic force.

In conventional light-rail systems, steel-wheeled trains ride on twin steel tracks.