70 Years Later, Los Angeles Is Still Stalled in a Rail Fantasy : Transportation

In April, 1925, a group of distinguished transportation consultants unveiled Los Angeles’ first plan for “comprehensive rapid transit.” The sweeping proposal by the Chicago consulting firm of Kelker, De Leuw & Co. called for a reorganization of the city’s transportation system, including the construction of several high-speed rail lines across the region and elevated rail lines Downtown to separate rail and auto traffic. Estimated cost: $133 million.

The Kelker, De Leuw plan fell victim, in large part, to the ensuing war over whether the city’s three intercontinental railroads should be forced to build a union terminal Downtown. But even as it was debated, the transit plan was becoming obsolete. The popularity of the automobile was creating a historic and unprecedented change in the nature of cities.

Jobs and stores abandoned congested Downtown and headed for auto-friendly sites along Wilshire Boulevard, thus setting into motion the seemingly endless cycle of jobs and stores chasing houses across the Southern California landscape. Within a decade, the Kelker, De Leuw report had been pushed aside by the Auto Club’s proposal to build an extensive system of freeways.

Last month, nearly 70 years after the Kelker, De Leuw report, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved a 20-year plan that includes rail construction and some expansion of its bus system. Even though it’s a dramatically scaled down version of an ambitious 30-year plan prepared in the 1980s, the proposal’s backbone remains a rail system, radiating out of Downtown, that’s not unlike the one put forth by Kelker, De Leuw. The scaled-down price tag: $65 billion.

Ever since the car invaded Los Angeles, transportation planners have insisted that if only the city could build a big-time urban rail system, it would become a “real city.” There is a good measure of truth in this argument, because population densities, job clusters and transit ridership in central Los Angeles are quite high. The Wilshire and Vermont corridors, even with buses, are among the most heavily used transit corridors in the country.

Yet, this rail-oriented vision of Los Angeles’ future has always had to carry a much heavier load than it could possibly bear. In the first place, public support for rail is often wrapped in a nostalgic mist about the Pacific Electric’s Red Cars. The Red Car system was the nation’s biggest, but its operation was hardly flawless. Traffic jams choked the city in the ‘20s just as they do today.

Equally bad, however, is that the rail vision has always had to operate inside the complicated maze created by the MTA’s sprawling and unruly political constituencies. MTA board members cannot afford to consider possible rail-construction cutbacks with a view of their impact on the actual transportation system. Instead, they must analyze changes for their potential fund-raising effects, MTA contractors being among the most generous and motivated campaign contributors in the region. Then, they must examine how such changes would affect the public perception that they are bringing pork back to their district.

Even when MTA board members sound as if they truly want to change the way they look at rail construction, the temptation to play conventional politics is just too great. In a speech at the L.A. Chamber of Commerce a few weeks ago, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky came tantalizingly close to asserting that the MTA should get out of the rail-construction business altogether. His remarks were so startling that they seemed designed to stake out new political territory.

But at the MTA board meeting last month, Yaroslavsky, like almost every other board member, made a pro-forma motion to have his district’s pet rail project put back into the 20-year plan. “It keeps hope alive,” he said. Forget whether such a rail line is needed; even forget whether your constituents want it. The important thing is to look as if you are fighting for something for your district.

Maybe it’s time to exorcise the ghost of the Kelker, De Leuw report and start from scratch in thinking about what the role of transit should be in Los Angeles.

The decentralization of Los Angeles is not going to stop, but that doesn’t mean transit has no role to play. It will just differ from what everybody’s been thinking since 1925. Here are a few guideposts:

* Residential neighborhoods may continue to spread out across the landscape, but jobs remain clustered mostly in dense centers. Paradoxically, telecommuting may reinforce dense employment districts, because proximity to workers’ homes on a daily basis won’t be so important. And telecommuters who travel to work one to three days a week may be more amenable to vans or rails, especially if their commutes are long.

* It’s foolish to continue thinking that transit must revolve around commuting trips, especially for the middle class. Most middle-class people will drive to work even if you pay them not to. But they will ride rails, vans or even buses to avoid traffic at crowded attractions, such as universities, airports and entertainments venues. That is why it’s dumb not to have a subway stop at the Hollywood Bowl. It’s also why the MTA will do whatever it takes to move the Universal City station from the bottom of Universal’s hill up into the heart of CityWalk.

* Los Angeles must figure out how to serve the transit-dependant working poor who currently make up the bulk of the MTA’s ridership. This is, by far, the agency’s toughest job--not because serving this constituency is expensive, which it is, but because they are just as far-flung as everybody else in Los Angeles. Southside residents may be more transit-dependent than people in the other parts of town. But there are few big, centralized job centers on the Southside. Getting the working poor to their jobs may require new approaches, such as smaller, van-like buses and special shuttles rather than regularly scheduled routes.

But helping the poor is just as politically difficult as anything else about transit in Los Angeles. Poverty advocates constantly clamor for more buses and better bus service; in the debate over the MTA’s revised plan, they called for reallocation of rail funds to buy buses. But they rarely support radical alternatives because of their ties to labor unions representing transit workers.

It’s unrealistic to expect transportation decisions in Los Angeles to be made outside the realm of politics. But the political decisions that are made will serve the 21st Century better if we stop pretending the city is the same today as it was in 1925.