The Public Had Better Hurry to Catch This Train : Transit: Innovations may contribute to an easier commute, but the link to neighborhoods requires vision and civic input.

Los Angeles has embarked on a 30-year, $184-billion campaign to remake its transportation network. Subways are being dug, trolley lines built, commuter trains launched and freeways improved. Even traffic lights are being computerized to respond to traffic jams.

All this promises profound changes in the way people move about the city. Richard Weinstein wonders if all of the money and construction can’t also be used to change the city itself.

Weinstein, who once worked for New York Mayor John V. Lindsay on planning, is dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA. He sees in Los Angeles a city in thrombosis, a city in need of parks and affordable housing and other amenities. He also sees a city without a lot of money or a coherent government framework for addressing these issues.

He believes that the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s 30-year plan could be a way around those obstacles. Just as Georges-Eugene Haussmann made Paris more livable in the 19th Century with one transportation innovation--the broad, straight boulevard, which he lined with intelligently designed buildings--Weinstein believes that the LACTC’s transportation innovations can make Los Angeles more livable in the 21st Century.

Question: Architects and others have said that the subway and other improvements are fundamental “city-making” projects that can shape the way Los Angeles works. Is that possible?

Answer: Paris was transformed by a transportation system, put in by Haussmann. But Haussmann understood that once he put in those boulevards, he created a market for a certain kind of in-city housing, with commercial space on the ground floor, three stories of high middle-class housing and then, for those who could walk up the five flights, much cheaper housing . . . .

That is what I’m talking about as a coordinated vision of housing, social life, economic life and transportation, all integrated. I’m not suggesting that we want to build Paris here. I’m just saying it’s a model of how transportation was linked to housing and development.

Q: Are the government bodies in charge of spending this money approaching the problem in the right fashion?

A: Given the fragmented, Balkanized way we govern ourselves, the agencies are doing the job the only way they are constituted to do it. In order to get anything done in this part of the world, you have to go to quasi-autonomous, single-purpose authority. What you gain is a degree of insulation from the political system, so you can accomplish something. What you lose is an integrated policy that might produce a better result . . . .

I have to think that one of the major opportunities we have going for us in this part of the world over the next 30 years is this (transportation) investment. We have to make certain that the impact of every dollar is conceived of in the broadest possible way . . . . This is discussed by people (at the LACTC). Certainly, (Executive Director Neil) Peterson and some board members recognize this as an issue.

Q: What should the LACTC--and cities and homeowners groups--be looking at?

A: We miss what people in my profession call the public realm--places with a variety of cultural, educational, institutional, shopping and business opportunities, all more or less contiguous. They could make a big difference in everybody’s life in Southern California. We don’t have enough of those places.

The transportation system could be the catalyst that precipitates that kind of activity, but not if you’re only thinking about transportation. You have to think about transportation and land use, affordable housing and related uses.

To some extent that is being done, for example, with joint development around the (subway) stations. But it’s even more important, in my opinion, in areas that are more characteristic of the region, medium-sized and smaller communities--Glendale and Burbank and elsewhere--where the lines will touch down with stations.

Q: How would you go about doing that? Glendale is its own city, Burbank is its own city; there are 80 or 90 cities in the county, and each one wants to control its own destiny.

A: Public and private entities should be required to sit down at a table to take advantage of them, probably by civic groups that care about the futures of their cities.

If you’ve got one of these station stops, you should draw a circle around that station and say this is a tremendous opportunity to give our community what it doesn’t have. It’s a public investment that is creating this station, and therefore some public means needs to be invented to take advantage of the opportunity it presents . . . .

These are the kinds of opportunities we consistently miss in Southern California because they fall through the cracks of competing political jurisdictions. That’s just dumb. We will lose literally the opportunity of a century if we don’t figure out how to do this kind joint planning, across political and bureaucratic jurisdictions.

Q: Does rail transit make sense in dispersed Southern California?

A: In some places; in some places, not. Many of the rail lines that we’ve chosen are on rights of way that we were able to acquire because of the loss of the use of freight lines. But whether the freight lines were located in the optimum places to move people is another question. If you were looking at the regional map and could wave a magic wand and put these lines anywhere you wanted, a certain number would not end up where in fact they are going to be built.

Q: Since we can’t wave a magic wand, does this argue against rail?

A: It doesn’t necessarily, but it means that there needs to be a process of analysis as to whether buses and jitneys and other modes of transportation that cost less can’t play a bigger role in moving people around the region.

Q: Is it too late to think about this? Didn’t people already choose rail when they approved Proposition A in 1980, and when they approved all those rail-bond measures and Proposition C in 1990? Each of those measures was carefully crafted to ask, do you want rail lines generally along the lines drawn on a map--yes or no? People voted yes.

A: I think it’s better that the voters have voted to build these systems than not to have so voted. But I think that all the decisions must be subjected to very tough analysis of what we get for the dollars spent.

Q: The big question is whether people will get out of their cars to ride trains. Will they?

A: It’s a subject of hot debate, and hasn’t been sufficiently debated in public. It depends on what scale you consider. If you look at it in a five-year scale, you get one answer; if you look at it in a 30-year scale, you of course get quite another.

The question is, how long do we want to wait to justify the system, and what can we do to front-load it? One thing you do to front-load is to try to create as much mixed-use development near the stations as you can. What concerns me is that this kind of planning and coordination, which is very unusual in this part of the world, is not going to take place. As a result, ridership will suffer.