Experts Question Proposal to Link Growth and Transit

An ambitious plan to transform neighborhoods around rail and bus stops seeks to capitalize on the region’s enormous investment in mass transit but would be expensive and may do little to rein in sprawl or reduce traffic congestion, planning experts said Thursday.

The idea of developing bustling districts of apartments and shops around transit stops is a key component of the city’s new General Plan, which serves as a long-term blueprint for growth in Los Angeles. It seeks to direct 75% of all new development into so-called “targeted growth areas” served by bus and rail.

City planners hope that focusing growth in centers--and linking them with transit--will lessen people’s reliance on cars. The proposal also seeks to protect single-family neighborhoods from large-scale development and provide affordable housing for another 800,000 people over the next two decades.

UCLA professor Martin Wachs and others invited to speak at a presentation before the Los Angeles Planning Commission agreed the goals of targeting growth are noble. But they cautioned against counting on such proposals as a panacea to the city’s ills.

“It won’t do any harm,” Wachs said, “but I don’t think it will change Los Angeles in any particularly dramatic way.”

Wachs said targeting growth could be useful in reviving flagging commercial districts and desolate residential neighborhoods, as well as in creating “urbane” pedestrian districts, where shops and apartments are built close together or even share the same building.

“A wonderful city like Los Angeles should foster diversity in its urban form,” Wachs said, alluding to the blanket of generic single-family neighborhoods covering the community. “This provides more choices.”

Building transit-based districts is difficult, however. Although the General Plan suggests incentives to build in targeted growth areas, Wachs doubts they would be enough to lure developers away from building single-family homes in outlying areas.

“All of the forces pushing development to outlying areas over the past 40 years are still with us,” he said.

Wachs also took issue with assumptions that increasing density in neighborhoods near transit stops would reduce traffic, as city planners contend. He argued that traffic would actually increase as visitors from other neighborhoods are lured in by activity in the centers, similar to the weekend crowds at Old Pasadena or Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

USC professor Peter Gordon questioned whether Southern California’s multibillion-dollar rail network will ever pay off. He said ridership rates in other cities actually dropped between 1980 and 1990--from 11% to 7.9% in Pittsburgh and from 7.3% to 4.7% in Atlanta.

“New rail lines have not paid off for these places,” Gordon said.

Michael Bernick, chairman of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors, said transit is a money loser in many cities because they did not plan ahead. Instead, the plan to build dense communities around planned stops would build a ridership base into the transit system by making it easier to use, he said.

“You have this enormous fixed investment,” Bernick said. “The question is how are you going to get people to ride it.”

In the Bay Area, transit officials and planners have embarked on a program to turn parking lots around transit stations into shops, offices and apartments in an effort to boost ridership.

So far, the project has met with mixed results. In suburban Pleasant Hill, about 35 miles east of downtown San Francisco, 30% to 40% of people within a quarter-mile of the local transit stop commute by rail.

“It’s unfortunate that we waited 20 years,” Bernick said, urging Los Angeles officials to begin similar plans even before rail projects are completed. “This is a viable policy.”

Thursday’s discussion was part of a series of public hearings over proposed changes to the General Plan. The Planning Commission will consider the plan this spring before sending it to the City Council for final approval.