COVER STORY : Hope Rides...

By Emily Adams

Feb. 19, 1995 12 AM PT

AT THE EXHAUST-CHOKED CORNER OF Figueroa Street and Imperial Highway in South Los Angeles, a 16-year-old dreams of expanding her flower stand from one table to two.

A few blocks away, a barber hopes for enough business to hire full-time help. The manager of a liquor store looks at a forgotten jar of pickled pigs’ feet on her delicatessen shelves and yearns for the day the deli will again be filled with fresh food and eager customers. And Los Angeles city planners, after securing a site near Watts to develop an industrial park, see a lure for new business.

All these people have at least one common bond: Their hopes are riding on a train.

The Green Line commuter railway, scheduled to open in late June or early July, is a source of anticipation for some in South Los Angeles, principally among owners of small businesses clustered around the four stations in the area: Vermont Avenue; Figueroa Street next to the Harbor (110) Freeway; Avalon Boulevard, and Wilmington Avenue, where it intersects with the Blue Line running from Long Beach to Downtown Los Angeles.

Merchants imagine throngs of Green Line riders streaming through their doors.

“When that Green Line opens up, people will come walking by and see my sign,” says barber Wiley Frink. “I really think we’ll get a lot more traffic then.”

Maybe not.

Optimism for Green Line ridership runs higher in South Los Angeles than even at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is building the line running 20 miles along the median of the Century Freeway from Norwalk to the faltering aerospace centers around El Segundo and Redondo Beach.

Nobody can say for certain how many riders the Green Line will attract or if businesses will benefit (no study has been done on whether shopkeepers benefited from the MTA’s other rail projects, the Red Line and the Blue Line). MTA officials acknowledge their estimates for Green Line usage have plummeted from 25,000 projected passengers per day in 1992 to the currently hoped-for 10,000.

Before the Cold War ended and tens of thousands of defense industry jobs were lost, the Green Line had been intended to ferry commuters from the suburbs to industrial centers in the South Bay.

The route has drawn criticism in South Los Angeles from some, who resent the $718-million project’s intent to help suburban commuters, even as it passes through an economically depressed urban area in need of better public transportation.

“It’s obvious (the Green Line) is not designed to help the people in South-Central get around,” says Janet Clark, a Watts community activist. “It’s designed for people who live outside South-Central, who want to pass through.”

The big money, glamorous public transportation projects, activists say, are reserved for suburban commuters.

“That’s completely untrue,” responds MTA spokeswoman Andrea Greene. “South-Central has the benefit of two rail lines--the Blue Line and the Green. South-Central, the inner-cities, have always been our bread and butter. These are the people that are truly transit-dependent.”

To improve access to the train--a key to its success--MTA planners are redesigning 46 of the agency’s 198 bus lines, as well as working with other municipal transit agencies that hope to reroute buses to meet the train. Of the 57 MTA bus lines that crisscross South Central, 30 may be altered for the Green Line, provided the MTA can find the funds to extend some routes and move or create new bus stops. If so, thousands of commuters could find schedules changed or their old, familiar bus stops moved blocks away.

Whether or not the trains are full when they start up, the MTA will still be paying for the overhead of salary, cars and tracks.

If ridership does top out at 10,000, the transit system will be paying a subsidy of as much as $16 for every person who boards the train and buys a $1.35 ticket, MTA officials estimate. But the subsidy will drop as rail and car costs are paid off.

The MTA Blue Line, which runs between Long Beach and Downtown Los Angeles, had fewer than 22,000 daily boardings in June, 1991, and costs the MTA $11 per passenger. Since then, daily ridership has climbed to 37,800 passengers a day, reducing the subsidy to $3.21 each.

The lower-tech buses rumbling along the streets of central Los Angeles carry nearly 500,000 passengers a day--that’s half of the MTA’s total daily ridership--and cost about $1.15 in taxpayer subsidies.

In hopes of coaxing more commuters out of their cars and onto the Green Line trains, the MTA is planning a $527,000 marketing promotion March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. The campaign’s slogan, written by a bus driver who won an MTA contest: “The world just got a little greener.”

All of this will be happening in an atmosphere of pessimism for rail systems in Southern California. This month, the MTA announced it may drastically scale back its 30-year plan for the region. About 200 miles of proposed track would be eliminated from the MTA’s long-range goals--including extensions of the Green Line to Los Angeles International Airport and Torrance. The Green Line, it appears, may be one of the last train routes to open in Los Angeles County for years to come.

It may seem like a questionable idea now, laying permanent tracks from the suburbs to a faltering industrial center, but in the economic boom years of the 1980s, it seemed like just the ticket.

In June, 1984, the old Los Angeles County Transportation Commission approved construction of a Green Line route down the center of the Century Freeway, then under construction. A federal judge had required that the freeway, officially known as the Glenn M. Anderson Freeway, include some type of public transportation--bus or train--and transit officials chose more glamorous, and more expensive, trains.

Two years later, when about 100,000 people were commuting into El Segundo every day and expansion and growth were the only buzzwords, an extension of the line into El Segundo was authorized. Another extension into Redondo Beach, where the destinations were industrial giants like TRW and Hughes Aircraft Co., was approved in September, 1989.

Ten months later, a devastating recession hit Southern California and lingers still.

By the time the Green Line began construction in June, 1992, the Cold War was over and legions of defense industry workers had been laid off. El Segundo officials estimate the city lost at least 30,000 workers. Thousands more were gone from offices and businesses in Redondo Beach.

During this time, the Transportation Commission suffered its own upheavals. In 1992, it was merged with the RTD bus system to become the MTA. Since the organizations combined, officials have faced reduced ridership, a labor strike, enormous budget deficits and a lawsuit over a 25-cent fare increase. In January, a federal judge ruled that the MTA could increase fares to $1.35 for both trains and buses and raise the price of monthly passes from $42 to $49. MTA officials estimate they lost $110,000 a day while the proposed fare increases were stalled in federal court for five months.

Still, momentum propels the Green Line forward.

The trains are undergoing testing. Using Blue Line cars, engineers and operators ride into empty, nearly finished stations and open train doors to the vibrating thunder of freeway traffic that will one day greet passengers.

Each of the stations, designed cooperatively by artists and architects, bears a different theme, from Native American myths to images of children at play. The new cars will look exactly like Blue Line cars, including the external blue stripes, allowing the cars to be used on either line.

Because motorists never cross the path of a Green Line train, these electric cars can be operated without a driver. MTA officials hope, at some point, to have them operated by centrally located engineers. Blue Line cars, which cross traffic, must always be operated by a driver.

Green Line ridership projections would certainly be higher if the line went all the way to LAX. The MTA says riders will probably be able to transfer to a shuttle bus from Aviation Station, at Imperial Highway and Aviation Boulevard in El Segundo, to cover the last mile and a half to airport terminals.

This trip to LAX from Downtown Los Angeles would take at least 50 minutes. A rider would board the Blue Line at the 7th Street/Metro Center terminal, travel south to the Imperial/Wilmington Station, transfer to the Green Line, take that west to Aviation Station and transfer to a shuttle.

The line may not go to the airport or thriving employment centers, but MTA officials like to say the Green Line is really a train for the future. In 50 years, Greene said, the MTA expects the new line will be living up to its full potential.

In other words, the train was planned to follow a route lined with jobs, but MTA officials now hope that employment will follow the train.

At least one new jobs-oriented development is being planned near the Green Line, along the southern edge of Watts, said Roy Willis, a director of operations with the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

Within the last year, the agency purchased 10 acres near Central and Lanzit avenues from the state. With federal funds they hope to ready the site for an industrial park and then persuade businesses to move in and build. The Lanzit Area, as it’s known, is a couple of blocks from the Green Line’s Avalon Station, Willis said.

“When you’ve got an area like Watts that tends to get overlooked, projects like the Green Line and Century Freeway can end its isolation,” Willis says. “And it can mean jobs.”

With free park-and-ride lots available to commuters all along the route, and buses meeting the Green Line from more isolated areas of South-Central, the train will mean new job opportunities in areas like the airport or Downtown Los Angeles, Willis said.

Of the 14 Green Line stations, 11 offer park-and-ride lots, with between 160 and 1,550 spaces.

But will free parking be enough to pry Southern Californians from their beloved vehicles? Besides the “green” marketing campaign, the MTA is working on a few other strategies.

While officials have no set plans, they are running scenarios through computer programs to see what might increase ridership. What they are considering, officials admit, are strong-arm tactics--such as working with companies and local governments to penalize employees who continue to drive to work alone.

“We’re asking questions like, ‘What if parking costs were increased (in employee and public lots)?’ Or ‘How about if the price of gas shot up? How many more riders could we expect then?’ ” Greene said.

Maybe some of those new riders would use the Green Line’s Vermont Station, near Imperial Highway, driving every day past the barbershop where Wiley Frink works, or the Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken where James Chung is manager.

Seeing these businesses every day, commuters might stop in, Chung hopes. The owner of his restaurant plans to put a new banner on the building, facing the Vermont Station, advertising their fried chicken to commuters.

“Everybody around here was looking forward to the (Century) freeway opening, but maybe we were expecting too much,” Chung said. “The freeway is just cars going past, but at the train station, they have to stop. So maybe they will see us here and come in.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

METRO GREEN LINE STATIONS

1. Interstate 605 / Interstate 105

2. Lakewood Blvd. / Interstate 105

3. Long Beach Blvd./ Interstate 105

4. Imperial Hwy. / Wilmington Ave.

5. Avalon Blvd. / Interstate 105

6. Interstate 110 / Interstate 105

7. Vermont Ave. / Interstate 105

8. Crenshaw B;vd./ Interstate 105

9. Hawthorne Blvd. / Interstate 105

10. Aviation blvd. / Interstate 105