L.A. Officials See a Smoother Road Ahead for Transit : Transportation: A pending bill would increase spending and let smoggy cities switch U.S. highway funds to mass carriers.

After a decade of slashed budgets, proposals to increase federal transportation spending--and to spend that money in “revolutionary” ways--are good news for Los Angeles, mass transit planners said at the annual meeting of the American Public Transit Assn.

The changes in federal programs, included in a bill that is expected out of Congress by the end of October, would let smoggy cities such as Los Angeles spend highway funds on mass transit lines--speeding extension of the Metro Rail Red Line to the San Fernando Valley and spurring plans for another subway between the Westside and East Los Angeles.

The transportation bill, along with the Clean Air Act passed in 1990, also gives regional planning agencies power to shape growth patterns to discourage auto traffic and promote mass transit.

“It’s tremendously important. . . . This bill, with the provisions we have in there, pulls us way, way ahead of where we’d be otherwise,” said Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

Peterson, as head of the transit group’s political strategy subcommittee, mapped out how the nation’s train and bus operators lobbied Congress to set a new course for federal transportation policy after completion of the 44,000-mile Interstate Highway System.

That system, virtually finished, has dominated transportation strategy for three decades. In the 1980s, Peterson said, the highway program was fed by starving mass transit districts.

“We’ve had a transit program that built a great interstate system, but doesn’t work for the future,” said Bob Kochanowski, executive director of the Southwest Pennsylvania Regional Planing Commission in Pittsburgh. “We can move relatively easily across the country, but we can’t get to work on time.”

The problem was conceded by U.S. Urban Mass Transit Administration chief Brian W. Clymer when he praised the substantial rail rapid transit network of Toronto, which is hosting the American Public Transit Assn.’s convention.

“While we . . . in the United States . . . were casting our lot exclusively with the automobile and freeway (in the 1950s and ‘60s), up here in Toronto you methodically built the Yonge Street subway, and then you went on to expand it, methodically, into a magnificent regionwide rail transit network.”

By 1990, mass transit grants by the U.S. government had fallen in real terms to half what they had been 10 years earlier. President Bush has proposed a modest increase, which Congress intends to make even higher.

Equally important to many of the public transit operators meeting here was the promise of flexibility in how those newly increased funds can be spent. Unlike the past, when Congress decided whether grants would be spent for highways or transit, a Senate bill would let cities and states shift up to 45% of the money from one fund to the other, depending on local needs.

Funding flexibility grew out of the realization, conceded even in analyses by the Federal Highway Administration, that American cities seeking to avoid smog-shrouded gridlock will have to double mass transit ridership, car-pooling and other alternatives to solo drivers in the next 20 years.

“They’ll double because that’s the only plausible way we can accommodate the mobility needs of people without paving over half the planet,” Clymer said.

Kochanowski called the flexibility feature--and the “substantial new authority” given regional planning agencies like the Southern California Assn. of Governments to make sure all new projects produce long-term easing of congestion and smog--”innovative and rather revolutionary.”

Limits imposed by the Clean Air Act would have made it impossible for some areas, such as Los Angeles, to use all of their highway grants to build more smog-generating freeways. The Senate plan would let Los Angeles spend some of the money for highways, including car-pool lanes, and shift the rest to build up its budding rail network or add more buses to its fleet.

Nonetheless, Richard F. Davis, general manager of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority and chairman of the American public transit group’s legislative committee, said the flexible funding system would be a license for transit agencies “to go out hunting for new funds by demonstrating transit’s benefits over highways.”

“I don’t think any of us expects transit to make great gains in the short term,” he said, “but . . . the new emphasis on clean air and congestion relief will inevitably push more of that (highway) money to transit.”

At the same time, transit officials such as Leslie R. White of the Clark County, Wash., Public Transportation Benefit Area Authority said beefed-up transit cannot solve the problems of congestion and smog by themselves.

“We’re not going to do that with just buses,” he said. “It means changes in land-use plans, it means changes in housing patterns--it may even mean the return of some cottage industries.”

Speakers said those changes can be imposed on cities by regional planning agencies that would disperse federal transit funds or by the Environmental Protection Agency, which can withhold other federal aid to cities failing to deal with the related smog problem.

“It wouldn’t explicitly take land-use planning away from localities, because that would cause an uproar,” said Sharon Neely, chairwoman of the transit association’s Policy and Planning Committee and policy director for the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. “But it does force local coordination and compliance with regional efforts to reduce congestion, air pollution and other problems.”