Let’s Get Pasadena on Track

There was a time when Los Angeles County’s two major public transit agencies were the only sectors of local government that actually had plenty of money to spend. That’s because since 1980 county voters have approved two modest sales tax increases to help pay for construction of a modern mass transit system for this region, starting with the Red Line subway and the Blue Line trolleys.

Unfortunately California’s ongoing recession has meant consumers are trying to hold on to their dollars, and when that happens the sales tax coffers dry up. The resulting shortfall in transit funding could reach $2.9 billion over the next 10 years. So in the next few weeks some painful decisions will have to be made by the board of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the agency that came into being earlier this year as a successor to the Southern California Rapid Transit District and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

MTA officials will have to decide what projects to scale back in their ambitious 30-year plan to build a 400-mile system of trains, subways, trolleys and buses for the Greater Los Angeles area. There are sure to be controversies, some local and some regionwide. How much of the MTA’s now-limited funds should be spent on inner-city buses as opposed to suburban commuter trains? Should long-range projects like extending the Red Line to the western San Fernando Valley be delayed?

However, one project--the extension of the Blue Line from downtown Los Angeles into Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley--deserves to be completed as close as possible to its announced 1997 opening date.

There are several good reasons that the Blue Line should be an exception to the cost-cutting that other transit projects in the MTA empire face.

First, it would have a lot of riders: The 16 RTD bus lines that run through Pasadena already log more than 20,000 boardings per day, many of those riders commuting to jobs in or near downtown Los Angeles.

The Pasadena Blue Line’s $841-million cost is modest compared to the subway project, whose long-range cost (to be covered with lots of help from the federal and state governments) is more than $5 billion. To their credit, officials in Pasadena, aware of the MTA’s money crunch, are not asking for all of their transit money immediately. They want only a commitment to long-term funding of the Blue Line extension so that private development projects now being built along that line will not be abandoned. Finally, the Pasadena Blue Line is refreshingly free of the local controversy that could slow the discussion of other transit extensions--to wit, the ongoing subway-versus-monorail debate in the San Fernando Valley, or the Wilshire-Boulevard-versus-Pico-Boulevard debate on the Westside.

MTA officials should remember that long before the Red Line successfully opened, it was the first leg of the Blue Line, from downtown to Long Beach, that got Los Angeles’ modern transit era off to a smashing start. Its ridership exceeded even the most optimistic projections. It’s not hard to envision similar success for the Pasadena extension. It would be shortsighted to scale back such a promising project so close to completion.