MTA Scuttles Rail Projects in Drastic Retrenchment

Los Angeles transit officials, retreating from long-range plans that they now concede are unrealistic, have scuttled proposals for a web of new rail lines and are drastically scaling back their vision of how to relieve local gridlock in the 21st Century.

The numbers behind the retrenchment are staggering: Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials are scrapping a 30-year plan that called for $183 billion in transit projects and, in its place, are reviewing proposals to spend $65 billion over the next two decades.

Once billed as a modern, high-speed version of the sprawling railway that served Los Angeles decades ago, the proposed rail system is expected to shrink from 296 miles to 95 miles.

That would mean tabling at least eight proposed rail lines that had been eagerly awaited by local officials from Burbank and Azusa to Santa Monica and Torrance, who already have spent millions of dollars on planning studies and land purchases.

Other ideas--such as an electric trolley-bus line--also will be scrapped as MTA officials concentrate on a pared-down list of rail, bus and car-pool projects. MTA staff and board members have been reviewing the plans since summer, and the board’s final decision could come as early as March.

The 1992 plan that guided the MTA’s work in recent years “incorporated some far-reaching ideas that just aren’t attainable,” Chief Executive Officer Franklin E. White said in a report last month outlining his “vision” for the agency. He blamed the recession and the “overly ambitious nature” of the plan, which was adopted before he joined the agency.

Critics, however, say transit planners must shoulder more of the blame for their own poor planning, and they accuse the agency of using the promise of massive but ill-conceived public works projects to curry favor with politicians around the region.

Even the more modest new plans appear premised on the idea that “funding will come like manna from heaven,” said Tom Rubin, former controller at the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the MTA’s predecessor.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said the region’s transit planning problems lead him to question whether a different sort of transportation oversight should be put in place. “The time is overdue to question whether the (MTA) should exist at all,” said Hayden, a member of the Senate Transportation Committee.

Although lower sales tax revenues and voter rejection of rail bonds contributed to the transit agency’s troubles, Hayden said, “the MTA was a big part of it because of an insatiable need to project fanciful rail lines in every direction.”

The $65-billion plan is still an enormous investment--amounting to nearly a third of the national deficit. But the drop in proposed spending, representing almost two-thirds of the long-range forecast, has forced officials at the battered MTA to acknowledge that the days of plenty are over.

“When you had a lot of money,” White said in an interview, “it was much easier to say yes to all of those demands.”

The new plans are built around the MTA’s projection that freeway speeds will drop below 10 miles an hour during peak hours by the year 2015 and that Angelenos must drastically alter their travel habits to avoid total gridlock.

“In the decades ahead,” White wrote in his report, “driving alone in rush hours must become as politically incorrect as smoking in a hospital ward.”

Under the scenario recommended by staff members, the MTA would add only 300 buses to the current peak of 2,240 countywide. More buses than that, planners insist, would clog the roads and actually slow traffic.

The plan also would add car-pool lanes on 11 local freeways and concentrate new rail construction on a handful of projects: a Downtown Los Angeles-to-Pasadena rail line and the extension of the Downtown subway to the Westside, the Eastside and in the San Fernando Valley only as far as the San Diego Freeway.

These lines would connect to three rail lines already open or under construction: the Downtown-to-North Hollywood subway, the Long Beach-to-Los Angeles Blue Line and the soon-to-be-opened Green Line running down the middle of the Century Freeway.

Gone from the plan, however, are a host of candidates for new rail corridors that would crisscross the county and give Los Angeles one of the nation’s biggest rail networks.

Among these corridors are the Pomona Freeway, the Crenshaw district, Downtown Los Angeles to Burbank and Glendale, Exposition Boulevard from USC to Santa Monica, Pasadena to Irwindale or Azusa, Los Angeles International Airport to Palmdale, and extensions of the Green Line to Torrance and Downey.

“The agency has been spending beyond its means for several years,” said County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member, “so naturally, there needs to be a mid-course correction. (The new plan) is an attempt to bring the agency’s spending in line with its revenues. Failure to do so will bankrupt the agency and leave a bunch of unfinished lines all over the county.”

But some opposition is already developing to elements of the plan. “We’re not going to rubber-stamp what we’ve been given,” said Tom Silver, chief deputy to county Supervisor Mike Antonovich, MTA board chairman. Silver said the board needs to look at creative alternatives to save some of the rail lines in his district by cutting back on subway construction.

Although MTA board members are seeking to restore some of the rail projects, there may not be money in future budgets to cover any, said MTA planning director Judith A. Wilson.

That’s good news for some homeowners who opposed the rail lines in their neighborhoods, but the proposals also promised an economic boost for the region. Officials from several of the cities affected by the cutbacks said they still hope to revive the lines, but that could prove difficult given the MTA’s money woes.

“They’re sucking back all the money they can suck back,” said Burbank City Manager Bud Ovrom, concerned about the prospect of losing the Glendale-Burbank rail line.

Glendale has already spent more than $20 million to prepare for the rail line, purchasing rights of way and a train station now being used by Metrolink, said Councilman Larry Zarian, vice chairman of the MTA board.

“The funding is not there,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean (the line) is not going to be done.”

Staff members for west San Fernando Valley Councilwoman Laura Chick have already begun lobbying the MTA to stick with the old plan to extend the proposed Valley subway from North Hollywood to Warner Center.

“Not just the Valley but just about every part of L.A. County is tremendously disappointed by the realities that are contained in the 20-year plan because everybody is losing their favorite lines,” said Chick’s deputy, Ken Bernstein.

The attitude is much the same in Santa Monica, where city transportation planner Paul Casey said: “It became clear the 30-year plan was pretty unrealistic given the economic downturn.”

Some transportation experts say the 1992 transit plan was unrealistic from the start. It included 250 miles of freeway car-pool lanes, 4,200 new buses, 296 miles of new rail lines. The plan also called for 200 miles of Metrolink rail service that now is operating in Los Angeles County, with connections to neighboring counties.

Rubin, the former controller, warned White in an internal memo that by mid-1993, projections about rail ridership were pure “Fantasyland” and recommended that the MTA “disown” the 30-year plan because it was “badly flawed and worthless.” Nonetheless, the agency has since spent millions of dollars in planning work and rights-of-way purchases for projects that may never be built, officials estimate.

The debate about the MTA’s direction comes as the nation’s second-largest transit agency faces assaults on a number of fronts.

In Washington, President Clinton will come out with a new budget next week that officials say will slash federal transit subsidies--which account for about 30% of MTA’s budget--and the new Republican-dominated Congress is expected to cut further. Federal officials have already made clear their concerns about the MTA operation, temporarily freezing $1.6 billion in funds last fall because of construction problems on the Downtown subway project.

The MTA’s funding priorities also could be affected by the outcome of a lawsuit filed by a bus riders coalition, accusing the agency of pushing rail expansion at the expense of poor and minority bus riders.

Peter Gordon, a USC planning professor who specializes in transportation issues, criticized the MTA for raising bus fares and making public transportation too expensive for many who are most dependent on it, even as it pumps billions into rail projects.

“You’re going in reverse,” Gordon said. “You’ve spent more money and you’re serving less people.”

Other critics, meanwhile, question whether the scaled-down rail construction program is too ambitious.

MTA board member James Cragin points to the planned Pasadena rail line, designed to provide a link to Downtown by the year 2002. The MTA has already spent about $143 million on development costs for the $1-billion project, but state and local funding for the rail construction is still not considered certain.

“Our taxpayers . . . wouldn’t go to the bank to get a couple of thousand dollars to build a foundation for a home when you don’t have the money to build the rest of the house,” Cragin said. “I’ve never heard such a ridiculous thing in my life.”

Said Marvin Holen, who left the MTA board last month after serving for two decades in local transportation posts: “Planning (at the agency) seems to have become a purpose in itself without any relationship to reality.”

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LA’s Shrinking Rail Network

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is drastically scaling back its plans for further transit projects in Los Angeles, tabling plans for eight possible rail lines that were to have reached into every corner of the county. Here’s a look at the projects are facing elimination and those that have survived.