Once-Scorned Red Line Poised to Open New Era : Subway: Segment will do little to ease traffic, but officials hail it as a symbol of city’s transit revolution.

When then-President Ronald Reagan scorned Los Angeles’ proposed subway as a project of “dubious merit,” he was being polite in comparison to others.

In the years before--and after--Reagan’s belittling assessment, critics have lambasted the $5.3-billion Red Line subway as an abject boondoggle that will never be utilized fully enough to solve the region’s crippling transit woes. Despite these doubters, the Red Line--the spine of the city’s most expensive public works project--is poised to make its debut.

On Saturday, two stainless-steel trains are scheduled to zip underground between MacArthur Park and Union Station, stopping at five stations and making the 4.4-mile trip beneath some of the city’s most congested streets in seven minutes.

Opening the Red Line’s first segment will do little to solve the region’s problems, transportation experts agree. But it is the latest, controversial link in a 30-year, $183-billion transportation network that promises subways, trolleys, commuter rails, buses and freeways. The resulting tapestry of commuter options will be dominated by 400 miles of light and heavy rail stretching from Ventura to San Diego to the Inland Empire. By 2010, the system is expected to transport 500,000 passengers daily.

For Mayor Tom Bradley and transit officials, the subway’s opening is a historic symbol of the transportation revolution that they say will overtake the city during the next three decades, reducing smog, diminishing gridlock, spurring development and improving the quality of life.

In the minds of many, the Red Line will usher in a new era in a city known across the nation for its clogged freeways and choking smog.

“Los Angeles is the last of the great cities of the world to secure an underground rapid transit system,” said Bradley, who promised voters a transit system when he campaigned in 1973. “It will impact the economy, permit people to move from jobs to homes, reduce the headaches of traffic congestion and it will reduce air pollution.”

When the system is complete, Bradley added with a flourish of hyperbole, “we are going to have paradise in this community.”

Yet the Red Line could scarcely arrive at a less propitious time. Nationally and in Southern California, fewer people have used public transportation to get to work in the last two decades--a trend that officials attribute to relatively inexpensive gasoline prices, decentralization of the workplace and, in recent years, the recession.

In New York City, subway ridership has dropped 8.5%.

As transportation officials in Southern California grapple with finding solutions, they face questions over whether the trend can be reversed. While the region’s suburbs are being transformed into economic mini-hubs, the transportation needs have become increasingly complex, decentralized and more desperate.

The fact remains that people are not giving up on their cars. Although more than half of Southern California’s commuters in a recent survey said their drive to work is worse now than a year ago, only 4% of all workers use public transportation; another 14% car-pool and 77% drive alone to work.

But transit officials across Southern California say the regionwide effort to ease congestion is designed to provide options--not tumble drivers out of their cars.

In some sense the critics are right. It will take much more than the first 4.4-mile segment of the Red Line or the completed 22.7-mile subway to solve all the region’s problems. Even the most upbeat transit officials say the biggest payoff will not come for another 30 years, when the regional system is completed.

The major benefit of the first segment will be as a vital connection for some Metrolink and Blue Line riders, allowing these commuters to travel between the northern suburbs and Long Beach all on rail.

Once completed in 2000, officials say, the subway will eliminate 1.6% of traffic in the South Coast Air Basin, which includes Los Angeles, Riverside, western San Bernardino and Orange counties. This will remove an estimated 6.73 tons of 7,500 tons of pollutants from the air each day.

The practical effect for freeway drivers will be almost nil because of population growth. Even with the entire regional system in place, today’s average freeway rush-hour speed of 29 m.p.h. is projected to fall to 28 m.p.h.

Planners warn that if no steps are taken, the average speed on the freeway will slow to 17 m.p.h. during rush hours in 2010. They also note that the completed regional transportation system will create 45,000 jobs each year. And they argue that rail, which operates two to three times faster than automobiles dodging traffic, can serve 14 times as much as one lane of highway traffic.

No one has come up with the ultimate solution to get cars off the roads. But many counties are convinced that trying a mosaic of various transportation options and technologies makes sense. Their vision includes route lines for bus, trolley, subway, automated light rail, monorail and commuter rail.In the vernacular of the industry, the hodgepodge is called the “multimodal” approach. In the Southland, the projects include:

* Car-pool lanes: High occupancy vehicle lanes, or HOV, are planned for most of the region’s freeways. One car-pool lane carries about the same number of riders as two lanes of regular traffic.

* Private toll roads: Orange County will introduce the state’s first privately operated toll roads, paid for by a contractor who will receive toll revenues for 30 years until Caltrans assumes ownership. Tolls will be about $2, but car pools of three or more will travel free.

* Superstreets: Some of Orange County’s busiest roads will be equipped with extra lanes, bus turnouts, left- and right-turn pockets. Under a 20-year traffic improvement plan, 21 “superstreets” will be established countywide.

* Buses: Regionwide, the bus system is slated for expansion. In Orange County, 20 bus routes will be added over 20 years. In Los Angeles, officials plan a 55% expansion in bus service over 30 years, which includes adding at least 600 buses to the fleet. A similar expansion is being weighed for Ventura County.

* Rail: By 2001, officials expect to open additional segments of the subway, completing 22.7 miles that will branch out to North Hollywood, Pico/San Vicente and East Los Angeles. Other rail lines are planned to run between Norwalk and El Segundo, downtown and Pasadena, John Wayne Airport and Los Angeles International Airport, and across the San Fernando Valley.

Indeed, more rail lines than ever in recent years have sprung up, casting a web across the region where the Red Cars, which were electric trolleys, reigned from 1902 to 1961, using almost 1,000 miles of tracks at their peak.

In the view of transit officials, the decision to invest in rail has begun to pay off.

Last October, Metrolink trains were put into operation to carry commuters from Moorpark, Santa Clarita and Claremont into downtown Los Angeles during rush hours. The 114 miles of Metrolink routes are the initial tentacles of what will be a 400-mile system.

Each day, about 3,600 riders use Metrolink, which will expand its hours and also stop for the first time in San Bernardino County next month. Officials estimate that by 1995, 20,000 passengers will ride what will then be seven Metrolink commuter lines daily.

Officials predict Metrolink will be as successful as the Blue Line trolley, which runs between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach. It carried 11 million passengers in 1992, its second year.

Once the Red Line opens Saturday, Metrolink and Blue Line passengers will be able to transfer and ride at speeds up to 70 m.p.h. to stops at Union Station, the Civic Center, Pershing Square, 7th Street/Metro Center and MacArthur Park. Initially, it is projected to carry 7,800 riders a day--a number that is expected to soar to 335,000 daily in 2010.

“It’s only 4.4 miles out of a 400-mile system that we are building but it is probably the most significant segment, way beyond its length because it provides the first link between the other rail systems that we put into place,” said Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

Others say the subway will change the face of the city, causing development to spring up around stations--a revitalizing trend that has occurred in other cities.

“It is the scaffolding for the re-urbanization of Los Angeles,” said Kevin Starr, professor of urban and regional planning at USC. “It’s the equivalent of opening the Pasadena Freeway in 1941, opening the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937--it’s that kind of major link.”

Still others say a subway will affect the way residents deal with one another, forcing some people out of the isolation provided by automobiles.

“People will actually have to meet each other. It’s a very different social pattern than driving in a car on the freeway when you are never closer than 20 feet from other people,” architect William Fain said.

Even with the advent of rail, buses will continue to play a key role in the transportation network. Generally considered the workhorse of the region’s transportation system, the Southland’s buses carry more riders than any other single mode of public transit.

Southern California Rapid Transit District buses serve 1.3 million passengers a day, or 85% of the county’s public transportation users.

In Los Angeles, as rail takes hold, officials will use buses to take passengers to and from those lines. RTD officials plan to trim routes several months after the Red Line opens so buses do not duplicate the subway.

“The rail system envisioned to be in place 30 years from now will only place a station in walking distance of 11% of the population,” said Dana Woodbury, director of planning at RTD. “That means the population will rely on the bus, that the bus is still going to be the mainstay.”

Woodbury and others say planned new buses will scarcely enable the overloaded system to keep up with the demand. And they worry about the emergence of a two-tiered transportation system in Los Angeles, where affluent suburban commuters ride in relative comfort and inner-city residents are relegated to standing in crowded, crime-prone buses.

They cite the fact that spending on security is $1.25 per Blue Line passenger and 3 cents per bus rider.

“The 30-year plan is designed to make RTD a Third World bus operation for Third World people,” said Marv Holen, RTD board president.

Some question whether politicians have bought off on a splashy, big ticket rail system while overlooking more modest but less palatable solutions.

“There are a lot of places that could use the busway approach that we’ve done; it would cost less money and give a higher rate of service,” said John Bonsall, general manager of the Ottawa-Carleon Regional Transit Commission, which opted for express busways rather than light rail. “The problem is that rail is always considered a bit more sexy than buses.”

Under the Los Angeles County 30-year plan, $5.5 billion is allocated for devising and implementing ride-share programs meant to decrease the number of single-occupant vehicles by 46%. Critics say that planners expect ride-sharing to remove the lion’s share of single-occupant vehicles from roads, but have set aside relatively little funds for those programs.

“We are spending $5.5 billion on ride-sharing programs (that) are expected to reduce 46% of all home-to-work trips by the year 2010,” said Robert Watson, an environmentalist with the National Resource Defense Council. “And yet we are spending $150 billion over the next 30 years on transit. What’s wrong with this picture?”

Some transportation experts remain skeptical that rail systems like the Red Line will ever truly succeed unless more drastic measures are taken to push motorists out of their cars, such as a steep gasoline tax or toll roads. But public disapproval of these measures has made politicians loathe to push them.

“For a decision-maker who’s an elected official, what’s going to be better: To stand at a subway station and say: ‘Here’s a brand-new system,’ or to stand by the Santa Monica Freeway and say: ‘We are going to charge you $2,’ ?” asked Genevieve Guiliano, an associate professor at the USC school of urban and regional planning. “Who’s going to vote for him next year?”

The entire subway will have cost taxpayers more than $230 million per mile to install and, like most subways, it is not expected to ever pay for itself or cover operating costs.

Subways are about four times more expensive to build than light rail trolleys, such as the Blue Line. They are also about 10 to 15 times more expensive than constructing a busway. But they can carry far more passengers, which is why they are utilized in densely populated urban areas. Critics say that a more effective system, using light rail and buses, could have been installed for much less money than the Red Line.

With urban sprawl scattering jobs to far-flung suburbs, fewer than 5% of workers have jobs in downtown Los Angeles. Some critics say that Los Angeles lacks a sufficiently dense population to host a subway.

“Heavy rail makes sense in high-density locations; it makes sense where there are many residences, and many work and shopping opportunities. It makes less sense in L.A., where people and jobs are dispersed throughout the region,” said Martin Wachs, professor of urban planning at UCLA. “I don’t think the high cost of a subway is warranted in a low-density environment.”

Others reject this line of reasoning, maintaining that rail is just one element of a larger solution that is desperately needed to ease Southern California’s severe congestion.

Bradley notes that some of the same criticisms were directed at the Blue Line before it opened.

“If we added buses to take care of the increased passenger loads, Wilshire Boulevard would come to a grinding halt,” Bradley said. The Red Line “is so fast, so convenient, and comfortable, I think people will get out of their cars and ride it.”

Times staff writers Jeff Perlman, Hugo Martin and Phil Sneiderman contributed to this story.

A GRAPHIC LOOK AT AREA TRANSIT SYSTEMS. A14-15