Freeway Trolley Idea Way Off Track

San Fernando Valley residents are being taken for a ride by the promoters of the so-called Ventura Freeway trolley--but unfortunately, not where they think. This idea, like the line itself, is a train to nowhere.

Boosters of this latest Valley transit scheme would have us revisit an issue settled years ago by our former regional transit agency, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, and reaffirmed by its successor, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In a series of public votes, the governing boards of those agencies have repeatedly declared that a rail line along Burbank and Chandler boulevards is the “preferred alternative” for East-West Valley rail.

That binding decision, upon which hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal construction funding now depends, and which has been codified into state law, was reached after thoughtful deliberation and painstaking consensus-building by elected officials, businesses and residents’ organizations representing the affected communities.

Yet now we are asked, on little more than a whim, to slow down and possibly even reverse course in Valley rail transit policy.

To do so, however, would be sheer folly. We’ve heard this siren song before, and it’s a lure to disaster. Here’s why I believe we must keep the existing plans on track and maintain full speed ahead:

* “Privately funded” rail projects have been proposed and fallen through before. Remember the grandiose plans for a profit-making Los Angeles-Las Vegas “gamblers’ special?” Or the LAX-Palmdale line, which breezed into the transit debate as a flashy, high-tech “mag-lev” entrepreneurial venture, and wound up slouching out the back door as technologically unworkable and economically unsustainable? Without hefty public subsidies, it never could have survived after its ridership projections were found to be wildly overstated.

Similarly, this freeway trolley couldn’t be totally “private” either because some untold amount of operating subsidies would be required to ensure that fares remained at affordable and competitive levels, even in the unlikely event that it could be constructed privately. When such projects sound too good to be true, they invariably are.

* If the idea of privately funded transit has genuine merit, why was it never proposed for other freeway corridors? Where were the venture capitalists eager to underwrite the Blue Line north from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena, the Blue line from downtown Los Angeles south to Long Beach, or the Green Line light-rail line from Norwalk to El Segundo, which actually runs down the median of the Century Freeway? They’re nowhere to be found, for one reason: Such ventures don’t pencil out.

* Even assuming such a line were financially feasible and politically acceptable, substantial and costly legal hurdles would remain. Where is the Environmental Impact Report for such an undertaking? It would entail widening the freeway by at least 15 feet on each side, causing substantial inconvenience to commuters, assaulting the surrounding community with the attendant noise, traffic and joys of freeway parking in their backyards, and triggering condemnation proceedings for adjacent properties that could tie up construction and rack up costs for years to come.

* Who really benefits from such a proposal? Certainly not the Valley. Rather, it’s other corridors covetous of funds earmarked for the Valley that stand to gain. Valley taxpayers already had their pockets picked when the San Fernando Valley line was dropped from the State Transportation Improvement Program list earlier this year, and its funding effectively diverted to projects such as Pasadena and East Los Angeles rail lines.

* Who’s fronting the money for a feasibility study of the Ventura Freeway Trolley? The engineering consortium floating this idea won’t really say, raising questions about possible conflict of interest on the part of those with a stake in siphoning off precious transit dollars.

* If private companies really want to study this, it’s a free country and they’re certainly free to do so. Meantime, the MTA and taxpayers who support it cannot afford to issue stop-work orders on a multibillion-dollar project every time somebody pops up with the latest “brilliant” idea. Delays, many of them eminently avoidable, have already cost the Valley a decade or more of precious time for the development of rail transit. In sum, this private trolley proposal is purely a chimera, a seductive dream that dissolves into smoke the more closely you look at it. Its pursuit is a diversionary tactic. We simply can’t change plans and charge off in a different direction at tremendous expense, chasing every flaky “new” plan.

Otherwise, if we aren’t forced to forfeit them altogether, we will end up watching dedicated funds siphoned off elsewhere, squandering the opportunity for any rail line in the Valley.

Buying into this trolley line instead of the subway is a classic bait-and-switch proposition. But saddest of all, we’d only be conning ourselves.