Focus Needed for Valley Transit Plans : After years of debates and delays, a consensus now must be reached on what’s best for region

One year ago today, we referred to the following as 1994’s Most Anticlimactic Decision by a Local Body.

That was the vote that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board finally took in favoring a subway route for the long-awaited San Fernando Valley Rail Project. “They waited so long,” we said then, “that it will take decades to complete the thing, if there is ever enough money to build it.”

The idea of a rail system that would stretch from Canoga Park to downtown Los Angeles had been launched in 1980. But it took 14 long, combative, indecisive and bitterly argued years for the MTA board (with the backing of Mayor Richard Riordan) to finally agree.

Yet by February 1995, it had become clear that the MTA’s citywide 30-year, $183-billion, 296-mile and 4,200-bus plan was only a pipe dream.

Sure, the new and supposedly improved 20-year, $65-billion, 95-mile, and 300-bus plan included a San Fernando Valley project. But it was one that, in all likelihood, would be half as long as planned, running only to the San Diego Freeway.

But would it even go that far? The question, by the summer of 1995, was easily stated. Were the unimaginably awful problems of sinkholes, subsidence problems, construction mishaps and delays along the Hollywood section of the connecting subway line the result of lousy engineering and construction? Or was the geology of L.A. underground simply unsuitable for tunneling?

Prominent engineers reached a comforting conclusion a few months later: that it ought to be possible to build safe subway tunnels here in Los Angeles. But, of course, even that welcome bit of reassurance was short-lived.

The new realities are these: the MTA has dropped the shortened Valley rail project from a list of state funding priorities; about $51 million in local transportation monies have been set aside for engineering studies to keep the project afloat; and, if Mayor Riordan has his say, there will be a subway to North Hollywood, and the rest of the Valley project may well run above ground. How far? Who knows.

What’s needed now, of course, is consensus, a rallying point focused on a Valley mass transit project that will lure residents out of their cars in the most efficient way possible. Right now, that seems about as likely as an immediate peace accord between Israel and Syria.

We can say this. This is not the time for discouragement. It’s not the time to become even more firmly entrenched in the same old arguments over routes and technology. This is the time to reconsider all options and reach an agreement based solely on what’s best for Valley residents. This could be the last chance to get it right.