Vandalism, Graffiti Plague Rail Line Before It Opens

The concrete structures are hardly dry at the new stations along the $752-million Long Beach Light Rail Line and the trains won’t start running until next summer. But already graffiti, vandalism and theft are major headaches.

Stations all along the 22-mile line from the Long Beach Harbor through South-Central Los Angeles into downtown are being defaced by gang graffiti and a newer, more individualized kind of spray-paint vandalism called “tagging.”

In addition, Los Angeles County Transportation Commission officials say, thieves are stealing whatever they can from the construction zones.

“They’re so aggressive they’ve even run off armed security guards at construction sites,” said John Stacy, commission security coordinator. “They’ll steal anything--lumber, signal boxes . . . especially anything with copper or aluminum on it.”

“This is an enormous problem,” said Norman Jester, a commission spokesman. Because the new line runs through low-income neighborhoods dominated by gangs, some thievery and vandalism was expected. “But,” he said, “no one envisioned the problem would be this real or of this magnitude.”

The new transit line, expected to be completed in July or August, will be the first operating in a planned 150-mile, countywide rail network. Authorities fear that unless they take immediate counter-measures, the problems here could spread to the other lines as they are built, including the $3.4-billion Metro Rail subway, already under construction.

To combat the problem, the commission has hired the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to patrol the construction sites and provide helicopter surveillance on a temporary basis.

But the long-term solution, they believe, may be to adopt practices undertaken in urban areas such as New York and Washington, where officials spend millions each year to control graffiti and vandalism in their transit systems.

Although the New York subways have long been regarded as among the nation’s dirtiest and most heavily vandalized, officials there are reporting surprising success in a $6-billion, five-year fight to clean up and rebuild the badly deteriorated, graffiti-smeared system.

In the nation’s capital, a clean transit system is taken for granted because the situation was never allowed to get out of hand, most experts agree.

“The key to our success is that no piece of graffiti or slashed seat is seen by the public the next day,” Washington transit spokesman Robert Sloan said. “All of it has to be cleaned up within 24 hours . . . or the problem feeds on itself.”

Los Angeles officials hope to adopt the same policy, but admit they have a long way to go.

So far, theft, destruction of property and removal of graffiti on the new Long Beach line have cost the commission $350,000, Stacy reported. The commission has hired three Community Youth Grant Services Project cleanup crews to sandblast graffiti from the new station structures. New kinds of anti-graffiti paints and sealer coats are being tried, and the commission staff is asking for at least $120,000 more to finance this work.

The Long Beach route--called the Blue Line--is designed to carry 50,000 riders a day and will eventually link up with the $3.4-billion Metro Rail Red Line subway at 7th and Flower streets in Los Angeles.

What Jester and other transit officials fear most is that the graffiti will become an instant symbol of decay and lack of control by transit authorities that can frighten off riders, as it did in New York.

“We must keep the graffiti off of the line because we don’t want riders to perceive there is any danger,” Jester said. “Unless you get rid of the graffiti and keep it off, riders will not have a sense of security.”

Nearly all of the Long Beach transit line is above ground and still easily accessible. When construction is complete, the right-of-way will be entirely fenced. However, the unmanned stations as planned will be open and protected only by video cameras and occasional patrols. Already, as the Blue Line nears completion, entire approach ramps, walls and supporting columns in the new train stations have been defaced by tangled patterns of red, black and white stylistic scribbles. Some of the graffiti marks turf claimed by gangs such as the “Watts Vario Grape St.” or a clique of the “South Side Watts XIII” called the “Winos.”

Elementary school-age youngsters are spraying much of the graffiti on the new structures, neighbors say. “There are a lot of little kids . . . they come out after dark, like vampires,” said Annabel Medrano, who lives by the tracks near Slauson Avenue. She said the police never respond to her complaints. Recently, a different kind of graffiti has begun showing up along the transit line--a kind previously seen primarily in the East, experts said. Called “tagging,” this form of spray-can vandalism is the work of individuals who develop their own unique “tag” or moniker and try to leave it in as many places as they can in one night, commission security coordinator Stacy said.

“They are also attacking the RTD,” Stacy said, referring to the Southern California Rapid Transit District and its fleet of 2,465 buses. One tagger may spray his or her moniker 80 to 100 times a night, he said. Taggers even circulate underground newsletters to keep their growing numbers informed on ways to beat anti-graffiti campaigns, according to Stacy.

RTD officials report that they now spend $9 million a year fighting graffiti and vandalism, a statistic that gives some measure of the dimensions of the problem. RTD officials say they are trying their best to clean the buses and replace up to 700 seats that are slashed each day, but the battle is overwhelming.

“We send a bus out clean in the morning and it will come back in the evening looking like it has never been cleaned,” RTD Associate General Manager John Richeson said. “The cost is getting astronomical and the (seat) damage is getting worse.”

The Rapid Transit District, the Los Angeles City Council and other public agencies have been trying to fight back against the vandals, but with little obvious success.

“We are in a crisis,” Councilman Marvin Braude said during a recent anti-graffiti debate before the council. “Our society is deteriorating. And graffiti is the symbol of that crisis.”

Still, transit officials here say New York’s example provides the best evidence that the battle against graffiti can be won.

The New York City Transit Authority operates an 85-year-old system that had deteriorated badly during the city’s fiscal crisis in the early 1970s. Ridership on the 26 subway lines had plummeted as trains derailed and fires broke out underground. The stations were overrun by hooligans and vandals who sprayed paint everywhere they could reach, said Bob Slovak, spokesman for the New York authority.

“Graffiti was an international symbol for everything that was wrong with transit authority,” Slovak said. “The system was a mess. . . . By the early 1980s riders were leaving in droves.”

Without riders, no system can afford to operate.

To stop the economic hemorrhage, the transit authority launched a $6-billion campaign in 1984 to rebuild, refurbish and modernize 466 stations, 704 miles of track and 6,200 rail cars. A top priority was to get rid of the graffiti, every trace of it.

“When we announced that one of our first goals was to get rid of the graffiti everyone laughed at us,” Sloan said. “They told us it couldn’t be done.”

Car-cleaning facilities were set up in the terminals, teams of graffiti-cleaners attacked each station and orders went out that no train or bus with graffiti on it would be allowed out of the yards. Everything had to be cleaned before it could go into service, Sloan said.

When vandals were caught, their sentences included long days cleaning graffiti from transit facilities and equipment. Even parents were hauled into court. Special anti-graffiti teams went into the schools to spread the word: no more tagging.

On May 12, the last graffiti-marked subway car was cleaned and rolled out into the system, Slovak said. “Now,” he added, “we have a system that is 100% clean and graffiti-free. It took a lot of dedicated work . . . but once the vandals couldn’t see their tags roaming the city anymore, they began to lose interest.”

Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, said the results are a hopeful sign for local transit projects.

“When you see what New York and Washington have accomplished, it tells you it can be done,” he said “We intend to instill that kind of standard.”