CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Green Line Is No Place for a Novice : Los Angeles would do well to study other cities’ failed efforts to build rail cars before embarking on that path.

Los Angeles is embarking on an adventure in transit cars. Others have traveled this route and it would be wise and instructive for Los Angeles to research their experience. To one who has been there, it sounds like, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, “deja vu all over again.”

In the 1960s, the transit car industry in the United States largely consisted of Budd and Pullman-Standard making the car bodies, and General Electric and Westinghouse making the motors and controls. Basic product designs had been worked out over years of research and operating experience, and innovations were carefully developed between transit authorities and experienced suppliers.

Toward the end of the decade, however, with the establishment of the Department of Transportation and the Urban Mass Transit Authority--and with money newly available from the federal government--the industry was transformed. City after city announced plans for transit systems designed to halt the deterioration of the environment, increase urban mobility, provide jobs and obtain recognition for themselves as progressive, innovative and a good place to live.

Flush with the success of the Apollo program and with “technology” as the buzzword, urban planners envisioned giant leaps forward in mass transit. Systems with small, almost personal, cars would whisk passengers from place to place directed by the passenger, after the manner of a “horizontal elevator.” These would feed trunk-line systems that would be automated and made safer, faster and more comfortable.

Each aspiring city planned its own system with its own car designs. UMTA encouraged pointless innovations by requiring the use of consultants, many of whom made their reputations by proposing the new and the different.

Any words of caution were met with the non sequitur, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we move a person across town with speed and comfort?”

And there were all those aerospace companies out there, hungry for business and loaded with technology that had been proved in a transportation application--putting a man on the moon.

The aerospace companies, stimulated by a perceived opportunity and with active encouragement from UMTA, responded with a will:

Lockheed bid on cars.

Boeing bid and won a contract for articulated, “high-tech” light-rail vehicles for Boston.

Rohr bid and won the contracts for San Francisco’s BART system and Washington’s Metro.

GE expanded its traditional role as a propulsion-equipment supplier into that of a commuter-car builder.

Westinghouse took the ill-conceived “people-mover” contract at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown.

None of these companies is in the business now, and Los Angeles can’t find a domestic supplier. Budd and Pullman-Standard gave up long agon because of unrealistic specifications and prices; GE retreated to the business of supplying propulsion equipment only. Westinghouse never took another contract for cars, and, though the people-mover is working, it would literally have been less expensive to furnish each freshman with a new Volkswagen bug for transportation.

Boeing, perhaps the most experienced company in the aerospace business, put some of its best talent to work on designing and manufacturing the innovative cars for the Boston system. Unforeseen problems arose one after another, were solved at great cost in money and time, and eventually some workable cars were delivered--years late and at an unknown financial loss, but which must have been great; so great, in fact, that Boeing reportedly paid Boston tens of millions of dollars to get out of the remainder of the contract.

Now we are told that Los Angeles is thinking of building its own cars for its new transit system. Again we hear, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we . . . ?” And “Aerospace firms in California need the work . . . “ and “A transit car is much like an airplane fuselage, so why not . . . ?”

It is deja vu all over again. Does Los Angeles really want to do this?

Cities must live with the consequences of previous mistakes, but there is no valid reason why they have to repeat them. Check with Boston, or Atlanta, or Washington, or, if local pride will permit, even San Francisco.