The Art of Getting to the Getty Will Have Visitors Floating on Air : CITY SMART: How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California.

They’re building another transit line in Los Angeles, but this one hasn’t had problems.

It’s only three-quarters of a mile long.

And it isn’t being built by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

While curious commuters on the San Diego Freeway whiz by, the privately owned tram is being built to shuttle visitors and staff to the imposing Getty Center rising atop the Santa Monica Mountains in Brentwood.

It is the first system of its kind to be built in the region and is similar to the people mover planned to one day ferry passengers around Los Angeles International Airport.

The Getty system, which will open to the public in 1997, will operate like a horizontal elevator. In fact, it is being built by Otis Elevators.

A steel cable carries two trams of three cars each along a guideway as much as 60 feet off the ground.

The ride may feel lighter than air. Instead of wheels, the trams glide on a cushion of air. A Getty spokesman (clearly not an engineer) likened the technology to that of air hockey.

The president of the elevator company’s subsidiary, Otis Transit Systems Inc., said the concept is similar to that used by hovercraft.

Air is blown through circular rubber pads, lifting the fully loaded, 25,000-pound vehicle about 1/64th of an inch above the guideway.

“You travel on a thin film of air, about the thickness of a sheet of paper,” said Otis Transit President David I. Perl.

The air suspension provides not only a quieter, smoother ride but results in less wear and tear on the guideway, or as Perl prefers to call it, the flyway.

Stephen Rountree, director of operations and planning for the Getty Trust, said the tram “kind of whooshes into the station.”

“It doesn’t touch the guideway so there is no surface wear, and that reduces maintenance costs,” said Lawrence Schulman, associate administrator for research, demonstration and innovation for the Federal Transit Administration. The principle is similar to the futurist magnetic levitation trains that have been proposed for Los Angeles but were never put in use. Mag-lev trains have no wheels and are propelled by electromagnetic force on a cushion of air, creating little noise or pollution. Otis has installed similar systems at a ski resort in Austria, a casino in South Africa, the Duke University medical center in North Carolina, the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and a hotel/office/shopping complex in Florida.

The Getty tram grew out of neighborhood concerns about traffic from the cultural complex, which is expected to draw 1.5 million visitors a year.

The center explored using shuttle buses and trams like those used at the San Diego Zoo, but felt the vehicles were not reliable and still resulted in too much traffic.

Since the complex will be unlike anything Los Angeles has ever seen, officials decided that the shuttle system should be, too.

They settled on the Otis system because it has no exposed parts. “We needed a system where, if there was an emergency, people could stop and walk down the tramway,” Rountree said.

“The tricky part of it was not the tram but the guideway,” he said, noting that the system had to be built on a curving slope. “The flying surface is perfectly flat, which is an engineering feat in itself,” said Otis Transit’s Jim Esposito. Anyone who has ever poured concrete for a new sidewalk can appreciate that, he said.

Visitors and staff will park in a six-level underground garage beside Sepulveda Boulevard.

When one tram travels uphill, the other travels downhill. The trams will be nothing like the city’s famous Angel’s Flight, where the weight of one car pulled the other up Bunker Hill.

The Getty trams are synchronized but operate independent of each other by computer. There is no driver.

The system, which runs at 12 m.p.h., can carry 1,200 passengers per hour in one direction.

The trip, offering sweeping views of the city, will take about four minutes each way.

The system costs about $12 million.