2 Commuter Rail Systems Given the Green Light : Transportation: Rights of way to existing tracks are being negotiated to provide rail service between Los Angeles and Pasadena and other parts of the valley out to San Bernardino.

A century ago, the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe railroads first crisscrossed the Western mountains and deserts. Forever changing the Southern California landscape, the railroads lured Eastern and Midwestern settlers to a land of orange blossoms and avocados.

Those same rail lines, which in the 1880s brought the founders of San Gabriel Valley foothill towns such as Claremont, Azusa, Monrovia and Glendora, may again alter a region now choked with traffic, smog and people.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission last week took two actions significant to an overall long-term plan to revive mass rail transit in the Valley.

Urged by officials from Pasadena and South Pasadena, long at odds over the extension of the Long Beach Freeway, the commission agreed on a light-rail route from Los Angeles to Pasadena.

Electrified trains would go from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles through Chinatown and Highland Park, South Pasadena and Pasadena, traveling along tracks now used by the Santa Fe freights and Amtrak trains.

Transportation planners estimate that the 13.6-mile light-rail line could carry as many as 65,200 daily riders, one of the highest projected riderships in the county.

At the earliest, they say, the $925-million line could be operational in six to seven years.

The commission also approved negotiations to buy commuter rail trains that planners say could be running within two years. A commuter rail system, unlike light rail, uses heavier, diesel-powered trains.

The timing of the equipment purchase is keyed to the outcome of the current negotiations with Santa Fe and Southern Pacific, which have offered to sell 200 miles of rail rights of way throughout the county.

“This rail effort is really back to the future,” said Claremont Councilwoman Judy Wright, who also heads the transportation committee of the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “We were started by the railroads. That’s part of the excitement, that we’re seeing a cycle return: the importance of rails to the local communities.”

Part of the commuter rail proposal involves a 60-mile route with five rush-hour trains from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, traversing existing routes in the San Gabriel Valley and making a few stops along the way.

Ironically, commuters had a similar option aboard trains run by the Pacific Electric Railway Co. from 1914 to 1961. The Big Red Cars out of Los Angeles connected South Pasadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre, Glendora, Covina, Pomona and on out to San Bernardino and Redlands. Other routes went to the San Fernando Valley, Venice, Long Beach and elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin.

A proposed northerly route could go along the Santa Fe line roughly following the Foothill Freeway. For that part of the ride, trainloads of commuters would cruise along the center of the Foothill Freeway, where rush hour traffic can slow to a halt beside the often-unoccupied Santa Fe rail line.

A southerly route could run along the San Bernardino Freeway on the Southern Pacific lines.

Later, if the more efficient light rail is phased into Pasadena to replace commuter rail, what is known as a fish-hook commuter line could be established from Azusa to Sierra Madre. Then a commuter line would circle back to Azusa, making a southerly turn to follow the Southern Pacific line into Los Angeles along the San Bernardino Freeway.

The commuter rail trains are expected to transport riders who would fill the equivalent of one to two lanes of rush hour traffic each day.

Unlike in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, there has been no vocal opposition to the idea of mass transit in the San Gabriel Valley.

Both the Sierra Club and County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, whose district includes part of the San Gabriel Valley, advocate rail transit as the solution to escalating housing costs, traffic congestion and smog, caused in large part by emissions from trucks and cars.

“I don’t think it is a passing fad,” said Pasadena Director Rick Cole. “It’s the beginning of a new era in Los Angeles transportation.”

Alhambra Councilman Michael Blanco, president of the San Gabriel Valley Assn. of Cities, said his group supports both light rail and commuter rail. “Traffic is projected to get worse and worse and worse,” Blanco said. “By reducing traffic, in any way that we can, we have another benefit, and that’s clean air.”

Despite the local support for the rail projects, funding is uncertain. In late March, the county Transportation Commission is scheduled to decide whether to fund a Pasadena light-rail line.

Several transportation measures will be voted on statewide in June. Without additional money, the commission has only about $800 million to spend; the Pasadena line alone is estimated to cost $925 million.

There are two other projects in the county competing for the money: a San Fernando Metro Rail subway, for which a route was approved Wednesday, and a northward extension of the Century Freeway light-rail line from El Segundo to Marina del Rey.

Pasadena Mayor William E. Thomson pointed out that the commission should note the agreement of Alhambra, South Pasadena and Pasadena on the light-rail issue. He said it was a unique coalition, since Pasadena and Alhambra support the extension of the Long Beach Freeway, and South Pasadena opposes it.

Commission chairman and county Supervisor Ed Edelman said that it makes “no sense for everyone to say they want light rail and expect for someone else to pay for it.”

Thomson said Pasadena would help support light rail.

The best and quickest way to get money, Edelman said, would be through a package of $18.5 billion in transportation proposals, including one for a gasoline-tax increase, which will go before voters in June.

San Gabriel Valley officials are concerned that their light-rail system could be long delayed in favor of the San Fernando Valley Metro Rail line.

Wright of Claremont reacted with displeasure to an article in Thursday’s Times that said several transportation commissioners had indicated privately that the San Fernando Valley had the political clout to be first in line for the three rail projects under consideration.

“I don’t want to pit one valley against another,” Wright said. “But I think the commission has to look at both valleys and other areas as well. We all should have a piece of the pie.”

Steve Lantz, the county Transportation Commission’s manager for community affairs, said it had not been decided that the San Fernando Valley line would get all of the money.

Doug C. Reilly, administrator of Pasadena’s transit and commuter services, said anything short of construction of the entire Pasadena to Los Angeles line wouldn’t make sense. “It’s all one big line that needs to be constructed at once,” he said.

Under the route approved Wednesday, the line would go from Los Angeles to East Pasadena near the Sierra Madre Villa Boulevard intersection of the Foothill Freeway. It could be built in phases, beginning with the section from Los Angeles to South Pasadena or to the Amtrak station on Raymond Avenue in Pasadena.

Cole said the shorter line would worsen Pasadena’s traffic situation and would not fulfill the need for light rail in the entire San Gabriel Valley.

“There’s a long way to go,” Wright said. “I’m not a Pollyanna about it. And there are people who very stubbornly say: ‘I want my car.’ That’s fine, but they will have to pay for the pollution they cause.”

But Wright, whose office in Claremont looks out on the train depot the city just bought as a mass transit center, added: “Rail is coming, and it’s an investment in the future.”