Electrifying Experiment in Westchester : Transportation: Two buses and a van will draw power from an electric cable under the street in an experiment that could change the way Los Angeles moves.

Clean electric cars, buses and vans cruise quietly along a roadway below the Westchester Bluffs powered by an electric cable buried in the street.

A vision of the future, yes. But a $2-million research project financed by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison aims to make it a reality sooner rather than later.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter told a press conference on the bluffs at Loyola Marymount University Wednesday that one of the world’s first electrified roadways will be built this year in Westchester on land provided by Maguire Thomas Partners, developers of the huge Playa Vista project.

Galanter said dependence on gasoline-powered vehicles has created “a terrible mess in the air we breathe.” She expressed hope that the experimental electrified roadway will give rise to an entirely new technology that will change the way Los Angeles moves and breathes.

“This is really the first step in what I hope will be a very important journey,” Galanter said.

Transportation engineer Howard R. Ross said that in coming months an electric cable will be installed beneath the pavement on a 1,000-foot segment of lightly traveled Teale Street, below the Westchester Bluffs. Two electric vans and a passenger bus will be equipped to draw power from the street by tapping a magnetic field created by the electrified roadway.

Ross described the initial $2-million experiment as “simply the down payment on a larger research and development program expected to be carried out over the next four or five years.”

The project’s goal, Ross said, is to develop commercially viable electric vehicles that can operate over an extended distance by using an electrified roadway to power a motor and simultaneously recharge batteries for travel on ordinary streets.

For the past 100 years, he noted, automobiles have been powered by fossil fuels that pollute the air and deplete natural resources. “We have to get a clean, quiet vehicle that doesn’t use petroleum fuels,” Ross said.

Operating out of a former aircraft hangar on the Playa Vista property, which until recently was owned by the estate of industrialist Howard Hughes, Ross hopes to prove that electrified roadways hold promise as a transportation system of the future. “We are civilizing the automobile,” he said.

The project has drawn the financial backing of Los Angeles’ largest utilities, which are seeking ways to offset air pollution from electric power-generating plants.

“We are at the forefront of an emerging technology,” said Eldon A. Cotton, assistant general manager of the Department of Water and Power.

Cotton said the Los Angeles area’s “poor air quality is a byproduct of an inefficient transportation system.” If electrified roadway technology proves successful, he said that it may be more economical to reduce air pollution through use of electric vehicles than to further tighten emission standards on power plants.

Robert Dietch, Southern California Edison vice president, noted that Los Angeles once had one of the world’s largest interurban streetcar systems. But the Red Cars were replaced by freeways, and Los Angeles became dependent on gasoline-powered vehicles. He observed that the area now has the distinction of the dirtiest air in America.

Dietch said the time has come to return to electric transportation. Through its $1-million research grant, he said Edison is “trying to be a part of the solution.”

However, the cost of actually building an electrified roadway system in the vast Los Angeles metropolitan area is staggering.

Ross estimated that electrified roadways cost $1.5 million per lane per mile to build. To electrify 3% to 5% of Los Angeles’ roadways would cost a whopping $18 billion.

If the technology works, who would pay? The general consensus: business, government and motorists.

“The numbers have to prove out,” said Ed Rowe, general manager of the city of Los Angeles Transportation Department. “It has to be profitable to the private sector.”

In addition to state and federal financing of non-polluting forms of transportation, Galanter said developers could be asked to electrify streets, just as they now are required to pay for road improvements and traffic signals.

Asked if she would require an electrified roadway as a condition of approval for the massive Playa Vista residential, office, retail, marina and hotel project, Galanter replied: “We’re not going to ask them to pay for it until we know if it’s going to work.”

Playa Vista project manager Doug Gardner said Maguire Thomas Partners believes the electrified roadway represents “very interesting technology,” which could be incorporated into the multibillion-dollar development if the transportation concept works.