CSUN Abandons Plan for Bus Hub

A month after neighbors of Cal State Northridge met to decry plans to develop a $2.1-million bus transit center on the campus, university officials said Friday they have dropped the project.

The center, one of six proposed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in an effort to revamp the San Fernando Valley’s sluggish bus system, was to be built on 1 1/2 acres on the east side of the campus.

Neighbors, who voiced concerns about noise and safety at the Aug. 1 gathering, were notified of the decision in a letter from CSUN President Blenda J. Wilson.

“I’m pleased that Blenda Wilson recognized the lack of benefit to the university and the uproar that the community showed,” neighbor Allen Sheldon said Friday. “The noise concern was dramatic.”

Campus officials met Thursday with representatives of the MTA to discuss possibly moving the center to another campus location, but none was deemed workable.

“An in-depth discussion of other factors, including the benefit of a campus transit center for faculty and students weighed against the long-term maintenance costs, led to a consensus that the university was not a viable site for locating the transit center,” Wilson said in a letter distributed on the campus and to neighboring homes.

MTA officials could not be reached for comment. After the outcry from neighbors began, however, officials said that while they hoped to place the transit center somewhere at CSUN, they would look elsewhere if the plans fell through.

The center, which would have been built on part of Parking Lot C along Zelzah Avenue north of Prairie Street, was to be the hub in a new hub-and-spoke pattern of bus routes. Transportation planners have already begun instituting such routes, which will eventually replace the north-south, east-west grid system on which the Valley’s bus routing has been based for 20 years. That pattern sometimes compels riders to take three different buses to travel a few miles.