The Rail Line to Nowhere Gets Another Chance

Just for the fun of it, I rode the Green Line last week. I wanted to watch as we cruised past LAX, ever so close but ever so far.

The Green Line, as you probably know, is famous for not going to LAX. Somehow, we managed to build a rail line that heads straight for the airport and then, at the last minute, turns away and goes to Redondo Beach instead.

Maybe they were thinking of a transit line for surfers. In any case, we spent a billion dollars on the Green Line. Right now, if you want to go to the airport, you climb out at Aviation Boulevard, schlep your bags down to the street, and wait for a bus.

You can only laugh. And like so many other fiascoes in Los Angeles, this one is coming back to haunt us. Mayor Riordan and his business pals now want to expand LAX, adding a runway and squeezing 100 million passengers through the gates each year.

It’s a plan designed to make the Westside freeways look like something out of Bangkok or Mexico City. As it stands, each of those 100 million passengers will come by car or bus. There’s no alternative.

So serious is the congestion issue that it may sink the expansion plan altogether. On Friday, Times reporter Jim Newton described the scene in Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ Washington, D.C., office as Riordan made his pitch for a Super-LAX. Waters cut him off and said she was not convinced.

“That congestion is a real problem,” she said.

Indeed it is. If you’ve had the chance to navigate the freeways and surface streets leading to the airport in, say, the last 10 years or so, you’d probably agree that adding millions of additional cars to the load is an idea approaching the humorous.

At times, the swirl of traffic becomes maniacal. Some try La Cienega, others La Tijera. In the end, nothing really works.

Meanwhile, the Green Line cruises serenely past LAX, oblivious to all. If you stand on the platform at the Aviation Boulevard station, you can see where the train was supposed to enter LAX. It’s so close you could throw a rock onto LAX property.

The story of why it doesn’t go to LAX says much about the way L.A. is governed. No government body actually voted to build the Green Line. It was born of a court decree when L.A. County settled years of disputes over construction of the Century Freeway.

Entering the world as a stepchild, it was treated that way. The Green Line does not start in a particular place nor end in a particular place. It simply floats on a line running across south Los Angeles.

But it had the great virtue of connecting with the Blue Line out of downtown and heading for the airport. That means it could collect all those shuttle fliers from the downtown high-rises--passengers with only a briefcase for baggage--and whisk them to LAX without traffic or SigAlerts.

And that was the plan. For a while.

Then, incredibly, LAX itself began to fight the extension, arguing that it posed threats to airline safety.

Why didn’t the airport people sit down with the transit people and work out a new design? We don’t know. The answer is lost in the mists. Instead, the fight escalated until the airport chief threatened in 1991 to prohibit trains from entering the airport if the line was built as designed.

Even the Federal Aviation Administration got involved. “If we determine the airport no longer can safely be operated, we can shut it down,” one FAA official said.

And so it went. The paralysis continued until the transit system began its famous descent into bankruptcy, and the LAX extension presented itself as a fat target for elimination. It died with a whimper, virtually unnoticed.

Usually in Los Angeles the story ends there. Just another lost cause. Just another billion thrown away.

But wait! It appears that a resurrection may be possible. So serious is the congestion issue with the expanded LAX that the mayor and LAX are plotting ways to bring back the Green Line connection.

Here’s Jack Driscoll, executive director of Los Angeles World Airports: “We think passengers must have an alternative way of getting to LAX rather than getting into their cars. The Green Line offers that alternative and we are planning on it.”

In fact, each of the working concepts for the LAX expansion includes a Green Line extension. In these concepts, trains would be brought into a new terminal at the western end of the airport so passengers could walk off the Green Line to a boarding gate.

Also possible, Driscoll says, is a plan to route special Green Line cars to LAX that would have baggage carriers and make fewer stops.

Robin Kramer, chief of staff for the mayor, says the pathetic failures of the past might even represent a blessing in disguise. If the old extension had been carried out, she says, it might now face demolition under the expansion plan.

That assumes, of course, that the expansion plan will come to pass and the Green Line gets included. Neither is certain by any means. As for the extension, the chief question is who will pay.

Airport planners now estimate the cost of the extension at $350-$400 million. Let’s be realistic and say the real cost would come closer to $500 million.

Clearly the MTA cannot pay that amount. The MTA cannot pay even part of that amount. But, just possibly, the airport can.

Driscoll says that funds could be assembled from several sources, among them passenger fees and grants from the feds.

“You can make a strong argument for the benefits of extending the line,” he says. “Maybe those arguments can be translated into dollars.”

If I was a betting man, I would bet against it. Half a billion is a huge amount of money. And putting a rail line into an airport is just not the way Los Angeles works, right?

But, as Hemingway would say, it’s a pretty thought. How comforting to think that we could actually build a rail line that went somewhere.