MTA 20-Year Plan and Bus Service

Your Sept. 2 editorial, “Back to Square One: MTA Needs a New Basic Plan,” accurately describes the much-maligned “20-year blueprint” for the MTA. Your editorial, however, fails to focus on the $300-million-per-mile subway system that is the major factor bankrupting the county’s transit future.

Cost-effective rail solutions lie in the cooperative agreements between the public and private sector. The private consortium that has offered to create a partnership with Caltrans to build and operate a light-rail line in the median of the Ventura Freeway is an example. Projects like this will unleash the power of the private sector, ensuring rail and bus service will be expanded at far less cost to the taxpayer in far less time than the MTA can deliver.

MICHAEL D. ANTONOVICH

Chairman, Board of Supervisors

Los Angeles County

* I wonder what would happen if a Metro Rail train just didn’t show up, as was the case with MTA bus No. 561 due at Victory and Van Nuys at 1:10 p.m. The next bus, due at 1:40, arrived 10 minutes late, overburdened, and having to stop at every stop for the accumulation of travelers who had been waiting.

My segment of the trip, Van Nuys to Westwood, which ordinarily would take about 40 minutes, took an hour, making it a total of two hours for a trip that should have taken 45 minutes.

Lest you think that this is unusual, perish that thought. We are at the disposal of the MTA; why isn’t it the opposite? How long would this be tolerated by the business people who utilize the Metro Rail?

JEAN KRAMER GLASSER

Van Nuys