Transformation of the Defense Industry Could Work a Transit Miracle : Transportation: Invest the peace dividend, save jobs and solve our traffic crisis. Government and aerospace companies just need the grit.
In Disneyland there is a prescient, people-moving example of how Southern California can protect laid-off defense workers from becoming victims of peace--and free commuters from gridlock.
Gazing into the future in 1959, Walt Disney inaugurated the Western Hemisphere’s first modern monorail system.
“Rolls like an automobile,” Disney said, after piloting the pioneering monorail at Disneyland. “Yes, sir, this is what Los Angeles needs. The monorails could be built over the freeways.”
Californians rejected Disney’s vision as “Mickey Mouse” and built more freeways. Two years after Disney’s futuristic gamble, East Germany, trying to hold back the future, erected the Berlin Wall. Responding to the call for defense, Southern California built America’s premier military-industrial complex. Dependent on defense jobs and automobiles, the region built a transportation network hundreds of miles long and many lanes wide--a freeway wall encircling a metropolis of smog. Californians blindly let their air and their peaceful way of life be threatened by an enemy within: the internal combustion engine.
Even East Germany could not hold back change forever. In November, thousands of Germans revolted, tearing down the hated Berlin Wall. But Southern California’s freeway wall remains. And the specter of peacetime layoffs frightens workers trapped in traffic jams on the way to defense jobs that may not exist tomorrow.
“I want there to be no casualties of peace in our community--neither firms nor individuals,” said Irvine Mayor Larry Agran at a recent conference on economic conversion. Agran, a visionary pragmatist in the Disney mold, recently brought together defense contractors, labor unions, conversion experts and civic leaders to discuss how the region can cope with defense cuts--and profit from peace.
“Just imagine what we could do with $70 billion--the price tag for the B-2 bomber (program),” Agran said. “If resources were available for a Transportation Trust Fund, we could revolutionize transportation by the year 2000. We could build a commuter rail system and monorail and happily employ tens of thousands of workers and make billions (in) profits.”
If Proposition 116, authorizing state rail transit bonds, passes in June, there will be $125 million available for mass transit in Orange County alone, Agran says. Statewide, the rail bonds would, if approved, provide at least $3 billion over the next 10 years for inner-city, commuter and urban rail transit.
A subsidiary of McDonnell Douglas, seeing the business potential, is privately building a half-mile, $5-million monorail at John Wayne airport. An expanded monorail network, to be built through private and public funding, could eventually radiate from Orange County to the Los Angeles Metrorail and the San Diego Trolley. An integrated Southern California rail, light-rail and monorail network could link commercial and residential centers from Los Angeles to the border.
When Mayor Agran recently asked to meet with McDonnell’s engineers about the project, he was told that the firm had no monorail engineers. It had hired the subsidiary of a Canadian transportation company, Bombardier, to design and build the monorail.
Japan, Germany and Canada are hungering for mass-transit contracts ignored by U.S. aerospace companies. This month Germany and France wooed a 29-member Orange County contingent with European technology for a proposed Anaheim-to-Las Vegas supertrain. San Diego already buys its trolley cars from Europe.
Tom Stone, director of the Bombardier transit subsidiary, pledges that the company will build the monorail system entirely in America. “We have a tremendous positive spinoff for peace,” he says. “The so-called ‘peace dividend’ is real.”
But while military contracts are available, U.S. corporations may remain slow to make a switch.
“We were approached in 1982 by Local 148 of the United Auto Workers Long Beach at Douglas Aircraft,” recalls Michael Closson, director of the Center for Economic Conversion. “We cooked up an idea for McDonnell to do final assembly of rail vehicles to go into the new L.A. transit projects. Plant management was cautiously interested. We got a bunch of people involved from the state office of economic development and the UCLA business school. Then one day out of the blue they called up. ‘The whole deal’s off.’ Why? ‘Well, we got notified we’re in line for a C-17 contract.’ ” To get it, the plant had to demonstrate “idle plant capacity.”
McDonnell is now building the C-17s, which are rapidly becoming militarily useless. The C-17 is a massive transport plane designed to shuttle troops to European war fronts--a purpose that is evaporating as Germany reunifies and the Soviet Union transforms.
Conversion is daunting for defense contractors, for several good reasons. They’ve gotten burned before by transit projects that lost millions; the engineering stresses are radically different in aerospace and ground transportation; and the commercial climate is far less predictable than during the Reagan Administration’s blue-skies era of military contracting. Defense companies accustomed to sole-source procurement face competition from abroad. And, significantly, the dollars aren’t guaranteed up front for projects taking years to develop.
Yet these considerable problems pale before the necessity of converting from predominantly military to peacetime economic competition. “The handwriting is on the wall,” conversion expert Lloyd Dumas told defense contractors at the Irvine conference. “Can you meet the economic challenge of the 1990s as well as the military challenge of the past?”
If American leaders hold back from positive change, as the rulers of East Germany did, Southern Californians will liberate themselves from the freeway wall. Commuters will demand environmentally clean mass transit. High-tech engineers will seize the opportunity to design vehicles for mass transportation--not mass annihilation. Workers will challenge their bosses to build competitive products for consumption, not destruction. If companies can heed these calls, they can transform Southern California’s military-industrial base to a transportation and environmental-defense base. They will put America back on track.
