A New Mind Trip : Lifestyle: Give up their cars? Ride trains? For L.A. commuters, as transit system debuts, attitude adjustments may be in order.

So you’ve turned your car into a sort of movable cocoon, with a sound system that’s the next best thing to having the Tokyo String Quartet in the back seat and an air conditioner that can transport you, with the turn of a dial, from the late afternoon murk of the Long Beach Freeway to an autumn morning in Lausanne. And here come these people talking about the Blue Line.

It’s this new light-rail system, they say. You can garage the car, hop on a train and, even if you live in Long Beach, be downtown in less than an hour. Ride in an airy new commuter rail car, they say, with 76 molded steel seats and enough space for about 150 standees. After weekend opening celebrations, the commuter line begins business today, with service between Long Beach and Flower Street.

But wait a minute. This sounds familiar. Electric-powered trains slicing through urban neighborhoods? Are they talking about a subway here? Is this Los Angeles’ version of the A train?

Absolutely not, say officials of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

These polyurethane-paneled electric-powered babies, manufactured by the Sumitomo Corp. of America at a cost of $1.2 million a car, are a far cry from the trains that crawl through the gritty New York underground, commission officials insist.

Still, for some Angelenos, there’s this eerie feeling about the Blue Line. A mode of transportation that involves the storing away of cars so that commuters can ride belly-to-belly with total strangers? That sounds suspiciously like what jaundiced ex-New Yorkers remember as the “iron horse.”

“Yeah, it’ll be great,” deadpans television producer Richard Dubin, an ex-New Yorker who drives to work these days in a Mercedes. “Especially at Christmas, if they come up with a giant tree to run it around.”

There may be some marketing problems here, Transportation Commission officials concede. If it’s going do its bit towards reducing automobile traffic, the Blue Line--along with its future brethren, the Red Line and the Green Line, as well as 100 miles or so of other planned or proposed light-rail projects--is going to have to change a lot of attitudes and behavior patterns among the city’s pampered freeway travelers.

Can the freeway culture make room within its vast sweep for a light-rail system? Will large numbers of Southern California motorists ever choose to leave their cars in their garages? Can Los Angeles commuters learn the glazed-over “subway stare”?

Transportation advocates from other cities greet the news of the Blue Line’s arrival with sunny approbation and with a lot of fatherly advice. “Keep in mind that it’s not just the personal aspect (of getting to work),” says Stephan Chait, president of the Assn. for Public Transportation in Boston, which has the nation’s oldest subway system (founded in 1897). “There are the social benefits to being crowded in a train.”

He ticks them off: traffic reductions, improved air quality, preservation of natural resources, getting to know people. That’s right, getting to know people. “People meet each other on trains,” Chait insists. “It can be very interesting and pleasant sometimes.”

Or maybe interesting and un pleasant, some Angelenos reply. Despite a lot of Transportation Commission assurances about sophisticated electronic surveillance and a fast-moving rail security force, some people who live near the Blue Line are already worrying openly about gangs turning it into a hermetically sealed target range, with the passengers as moving ducks.

There’s something about an urban commuter train, with 250 strangers sealed together in a moving rail car, that sets off people’s anxieties.

Researchers at the Washington-based Anxiety Disorders Assn. of America say that urban mass transit can evoke a whole complex of phobias in people. “There are simple phobias, like the fear of the train itself,” says psychotherapist Jerilyn Ross. “Or there can be a more generalized agoraphobia, the idea of being in a place where you don’t have any control.”

“It’s the old ‘Taking of Pelham One Two Three’ syndrome,” says one New York City official, referring to a 1974 movie about terrorists hijacking a New York subway train.

The often-chaotic New York subway system, with its 730 miles of track and 3.7 million passengers a day, is, of course, the Big Daddy of urban mass transit systems in the United States. Here’s where urban commuter rail travel started getting a bad name, New York City Transit Authority officials acknowledge.

“In the early 1980s, it was an adventure getting from one stop to the next,” Transit Authority spokesman Bob Slovak says. “There was a derailment on the average of once every 17 days and a major fire almost every day. The entire fleet was covered with graffiti.”

But the system has seized control of itself, Slovak says. Graffiti have virtually been eliminated, equipment failures have been dramatically reduced and crime . . . well, that’s edging upwards again. Last year, there were almost 17,000 felonies reported in the subways, up from about 14,300 the year before.

Transit Authority officials like to point out that crimes committed in the subways represent barely 3% of all the crimes committed in New York. “It’s kind of ironic that people are so relieved when they get to the street,” says Albert O’Leary, a spokesman for New York’s Transit Police. “They’re more likely to become victims on the street than in the subway.”

Nevertheless, New York subway riders--”straphangers,” they call themselves, though the last of the subway cars with leather balancing straps has long since disappeared--find themselves making some phenomenal psychic adjustments before they go beneath the sidewalks.

A lot of it involves getting used to the proximity of total strangers, straphangers say. After a while, having a fellow passenger or two wrapped around you like pretzels during rush hour gets to seem perfectly normal, says New York transportation advocate Joseph Rappaport. “If you’re above ground, and someone you don’t know moves too close to you, it’s usually a sign that he’s from another culture,” says Rappaport, coordinator of the Straphangers Campaign, a subway riders’ advocacy group. “But in the subway, your space is violated all the time. You’re a little closer to people than you’re used to, but it’s OK. You accept it.”

There’s even a kind of etiquette to being pressed into a crowd, like a cigarette in a pack. You can look at people, but not too closely. “And you can eavesdrop,” Rappaport says. “That’s one of the fun things about the subway.”

“You have to learn how to go limp,” adds Manhattanite William S. Whyte, author of “The Organization Man,” and more recently “City: Rediscovering the Center.” “It’s a protective measure.”

New York Newsday columnist Jim Dwyre, who is writing a book about subway travel, says experienced straphangers sometimes put themselves into a Zen-like trance. “Late at night, you go into the subway glaze,” he says, “a state of near-sleep in which you’re asleep enough to get some rest and awake enough to run for your life if necessary.”

Other cities like to distance themselves from New York and its quaint practices. “New York is legendary,” says Peter Dimond, public information director for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which runs the Boston subways, where the biggest worry is pickpockets.

“They go after college students--kids who maybe haven’t yet learned the rules of urban life and keep their wallets zippered in their backpacks,” says Dimond.

By comparison to the Big Apple, San Francisco and Washington offer joy rides, with little subway crowding or crime. “For us, a big crime in the subway is Fawn Hall getting busted for eating a banana,” says Washington Post columnist Bob Levey.

In fairness, the Los Angeles Blue Line’s two-car trains with the antenna-like links to overhead power lines are not subway cars. And until a one-mile tunnel along Flower Street, between Pico Boulevard and 7th Street, opens next year, the Blue Line will be strictly surface transit.

Think of it as Los Angeles’ version of San Francisco’s Muni-Metro or maybe of the San Diego Trolley, says Edward McSpedon, acting president of the Rail Construction Corp., which engineered and constructed the Blue Line.

“We have a difficulty in this city, brought about by the lack of a model,” McSpedon says. “There’s little for people to compare with so that they can understand what it is we’ve been building here.” Old-time Angelenos might think of the Blue Line as a modern version of the Red Cars, while people who have moved here from Eastern cities think in terms of the subways of their hometowns--neither of which please McSpedon.

But no matter how civilized the Blue Line is likely to be, it will mean sacrifices for those who give up their cars. You can catch up on your reading on the way to work, avoid freeway hassles, maybe even develop a new sense of community by rubbing actual shoulders with the commuting masses.

But there won’t be any sudden left turns for cappuccino and cinnamon rolls, no spontaneous side trips to the beach. About 1.3 million daily RTD passengers can tell you all about it.

Babette Wieland, a member of Disgruntled Ex-New Yorkers (DENY), a group that likes to needle elitist Angelenos, suggests that commuters from the palmier sections of the city pack carry-all bags for their trips on the Blue Line. “You’ll absolutely have to have a mobile phone and a fax machine,” she says puckishly. “You’ll need a few magazines, an espresso maker and maybe something cold to eat.”

Wieland, a hospital administrator, rides an RTD bus to work. “People thought I was making a social statement,” she says. “I just happen to live four miles in a straight line from where I work.”

It’s true, though. When you use urban mass transit, you make a kind of social statement, say straphangers and others. “The subway is a great equalizing force,” says Rappaport. “There are a lot of $100,000-a-year men and women in those trains, but everybody’s equal down there.”

For all of its faults, says Rappaport, urban mass transit has the capacity to be “democracy in action.”