Los Angeles Times Special Quake Report: One Year Later : Still Shaken / Challenges : The Comeback Trail / Twists and Turns on the Road to Recovery : The Commuter Road Not Taken

If Mother Nature was the Great Leveler last Jan. 17, transportation was the great equalizer in the weeks that followed the earthquake.

With major freeways shattered from Newhall to West Los Angeles, no other issue touched the lives of more Southern Californians immediately after the quake.

The images are enduring: previously empty commuter trains wall-to-wall with passengers, cars lined up in traffic jams for hours. But the temblor’s effect on how commuters move through the city has not proved so lasting.

A year later, all the collapsed freeways have been repaired. And commuters, once pushed to find new ways of getting from one point to another, have reverted to solo driving. What some saw as the silver lining of the Northridge earthquake--increased use of mass transit, more car pools--has virtually disappeared.

“People will do what serves their interests,” said James Moore, associate professor of urban planning and co-director of USC’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology. “When transit’s the only game in town, then you use the train. But if the road network is intact, then the train network doesn’t offer very much competition for most folks.”

Take the case of Metrolink, the 3-year-old commuter rail service that saw its fortunes rise in the quake’s aftermath.

In the first few days after the quake, trains on the Santa Clarita line swelled with refugees from the downed Golden State Freeway, boosting the daily passenger count to nearly 22,000 from fewer than 1,000 before the quake.

As freeway reconstruction progressed, however, commuters got back into their cars--despite extension of the rail line to the Antelope Valley, track improvements that quickened the ride into Downtown Los Angeles and promotional deals that slashed fares by half in some cases.

Officials note that recent passenger levels--about 2,630 a day in November--are triple the amount before the earthquake. But Metrolink chief Richard Stanger acknowledged that ridership has steadily declined, posing a challenge to transit officials not only to attract new riders but also to woo back those who tried the trains--then abandoned them.

“Now it’s incumbent on us through marketing to encourage them to come back,” said Stanger, whose agency provided a $10 subsidy for every passenger who took the trains in 1994.

Another task for transportation planners is to recapture the momentum the quake generated in rethinking how we make our way through a city that sprawls over 469 square miles.

Within a week of the quake, Mayor Richard Riordan unveiled an ambitious traffic-management plan similar to the one developed over three years for the 1984 Olympics. The plan included parking restrictions, improved timing of traffic signals and the potential conversion of Olympic and Pico boulevards to one-way super streets.

The swift repair of the freeways made many of the suggestions unnecessary. It also sapped momentum from the effort to reinvent transportation in Los Angeles, even though some of the ideas remain both good and feasible, experts say.

“An emergency like this opens a window of opportunity for public policy-makers to strike out and do things they otherwise may not do,” said Moore, who favors opening the transit market to private companies, such as jitney services. “That window opened and closed.”