Transit Dream Derailed, Reality Prevails

The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority is not a happy place to work at these days. For years it was the one local government agency flush with tax money--funds to build the new Downtown subway and light rail lines to Long Beach, Pasadena and Los Angeles International Airport. But now the gravy days are over.

The hard news comes in the form of a report from the MTA’s chief executive officer, Franklin E. White, to the agency’s 13-member board. In it White outlines his vision for the agency’s next 20 years, and warns that recent voter rejection of rail bond measures and a prolonged drop in sales tax revenues caused by the California recession have forced MTA planners to rethink the ambitious 30-year plan drawn up in 1992 by one of the MTA’s predecessor agencies.

The contrast between the numbers in the 30-year plan and those that White uses to argue his case to the MTA board starkly summarizes the dilemma facing the transit agency. The 1992 plan envisioned mass transit projects costing $183 billion and covering everything from 296 new miles of subway and light rail lines to 4,200 new buses. White’s revised 20-year plan costs $65 billion, includes only 95 miles of rail lines and would add only 300 buses.

None of this downsizing comes as a surprise to the MTA board, which includes Mayor Richard Riordan and the five Los Angeles County supervisors. As savvy politicians, they knew that the ongoing recession would eventually hit even the MTA. Now White is asking MTA board members to publicly acknowledge what they privately know, and start making hard decisions on what projects need to be shelved for the time being--or killed entirely.

In raising alternatives, White suggests that the region may have to make do with more bus and car-pool lanes on local freeways, at least in the near term. Though the lanes are less glamorous than subways, at least some transit experts think they would fit better with the automobile-centered economy of Southern California.

But that won’t make the MTA board’s job any easier. The members must tell communities across Los Angeles County that they are not likely to see such longed-for mass transit projects as trolleys to the Crenshaw district, Santa Monica and points in the San Gabriel Valley east of Pasadena. Even the Red Line, already being built in the San Fernando Valley, will reach only the Sepulveda Basin rather than Warner Center.

Understandably, local political leaders and community groups will push for exceptions for their pet projects. But the sad fact is that White’s stark projections are more realistic, both financially and politically, than the old 30-year plan. And if the MTA board members act like the regional representatives they are supposed to be, rather than like parochial politicians, they will support White’s effort to scale back Los Angeles’ transit dreams.