Subway May Be Dug With a Difference

County transit officials voted Monday to spend $1.2 million to investigate a novel way of building the Metro Red Line subway in Hollywood without major street disruptions, but postponed until next spring a decision on whether to use the new technology or rely on conventional construction.

The action failed to appease activists who are asking the federal government to reconsider its approval of the Hollywood Boulevard route, where construction is scheduled to start late next year. They dismissed the new design as a “smoke screen” to obscure charges that regular construction methods will kill the district’s renaissance.

Some activists are also questioning the tunneling process itself, in which a squadron of dump trucks will work 18 hours a day, six days a week for at least one year, hauling 588,000 cubic yards of soil out of an access shaft in Barnsdall Park and down Hollywood Boulevard.

The Metro Red Line from downtown Los Angeles to North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley is being built in three segments. Construction on the first, from Union Station to MacArthur Park, is largely finished, and is scheduled to open in June, 1993. Construction on the second segment up Vermont Avenue and west on Hollywood Boulevard is just beginning.

The train tunnels will be dug out completely underground, with the dirt hauled out of shafts dug to the surface. At issue in Hollywood is how to build the stations.

Downtown, the stations were built at the bottom of huge trenches dug in streets, a process that inconvenienced commuters and shoppers while driving some small businesses close to bankruptcy. Hollywood activists are seeking to avoid a repeat of these problems, as well as the potential loss of historic buildings, when the Red Line bores under their neighborhood.

The Hollywood Boulevard Community Council and other groups petitioned the federal Urban Mass Transit Administration to hold public hearings on how construction might affect historic theaters and other buildings. The federal government, through the UMTA, pays about half the construction costs of the Red Line.

The Rail Construction Corp., a subsidiary of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, responded last month by proposing to investigate a new station-construction method that would not require digging 60-foot-wide, 80-foot-deep trenches in Hollywood Boulevard. The stations would, instead, be built completely underground--”mining” the stations simply by widening the tunnels in which the trains will run.

At the RCC meeting Monday, engineers said they cannot meet their December deadline for telling the RCC board whether “mined stations” are feasible at a reasonable cost. Technical considerations, they said, forced them to develop a “hybrid” station that would be partly mined and partly built in a deep hole.

This design, which would require condemning buildings and rerouting underground utilities, raised a new set of permit and engineering questions, said Board Vice Chairman Robert E. Kruse.

A reliable estimate of feasibility and cost cannot be ready before April, Construction Director Ron Drake told the board. In the meantime, he recommended that the board agree to develop parallel designs, using old and new methods. The board agreed, but not without debate.

Board member James Pott criticized staff for only considering mined stations in Hollywood and not in lower-income neighborhoods along Vermont Avenue.

He also challenged preliminary staff assertions that mined stations will prove much more expensive that conventional stations.