Finally on the Fast Track

It has finally arrived.

Half a century after the last Red Car trolley ran between Van Nuys and downtown, a sleek, modern subway system will begin whisking passengers to the central city on Saturday, providing a new link between the San Fernando Valley and the rest of Los Angeles.

For $1.35--or a 90-cent discount token--passengers who enter the rainbow-colored portal in North Hollywood will be able to jump on a subway train every 10 minutes during peak hours and ride downtown in 29 minutes.

“I cannot wait for it to open,” said Ralph Dash, who plans to sell the car he drives every day from his Valley Village home to his downtown job as a state administrative law judge.

“In traffic, it can take me up to an hour to get to work,” Dash said. “It’s not fun. I’m looking forward to being able to commute at a quicker and calmer pace and read the paper on the way.”

After years of sitting on the sidelines while other parts of the city gained access to rail transit, San Fernando Valley civic leaders are also excited at the prospect that it is finally their turn.

“This is going to be really great for the Valley--it’s a great opportunity, especially for North Hollywood,” said Councilman Joel Wachs of Studio City. “We will finally get something back for all the taxes we have paid toward rail.”

To mark the opening of the subway stations and give the first weekend’s riders a good impression of North Hollywood, the Chamber of Commerce and others are throwing a big party.

The annual North Hollywood International Theater and Arts Festival, which will give people a taste of the dozens of theaters and restaurants in the area, has been set for the weekend the stations open. The MTA is also waiving fares on opening weekend.

Saturday’s opening of the last planned leg of the Red Line subway is being celebrated as a major engineering and political feat--a civic event important to Los Angeles’ history.

“The North Hollywood subway extension is a remarkable milestone for Los Angeles,” said Mayor Richard Riordan. “It provides a vital connection to and from the San Fernando Valley and finally makes the Valley part of the regional transit system.”

From North Hollywood, trains will travel 60 feet under Lankershim Boulevard, stopping at the new Universal City station before reaching speeds up to 70 mph as they pass through the Santa Monica Mountains in tunnels up to 900 feet below the surface.

At the new station at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, also opening Saturday, passengers will be able to disembark in the heart of Hollywood or stay aboard for the ride downtown, where they can connect to trains heading toward LAX, San Diego, Redondo Beach and Long Beach.

Special new buses equipped with devices capable of extending green lights as they approach intersections will provide express links for West Valley residents to get to the Valley subway stations.

For those who want to park and ride, the North Hollywood station will have 847 parking spaces and the Universal City stop will have 250 at first, rising to 700 by the end of the year.

However, residents near the stations are fearful that parking will be inadequate, leading to an overflow of cars into surrounding neighborhoods, especially in Universal City, where problems in awarding a contract have delayed providing the full complement of promised parking.

“We are absolutely concerned,” said Tony Lucente, president of the Studio City Residents Assn. “We are telling our members that there are going to be problems for at least a year.”

Economic Spark?

In addition to connecting the 1.5 million Valley residents to the rest of the city, the opening of the North Hollywood and Universal City subway stations is expected to provide an important spark to the economies of the surrounding neighborhoods.

“It will be a catalyst for economic development and reinvestment in the city around subway stations,” Riordan predicted.

Especially in North Hollywood, the opening of the subway station is eagerly anticipated by nearby merchants who believe it will boost an area that has been in decline since it was a commercial center for the Valley some 50 years ago.

The 6.3-mile North Hollywood extension from Hollywood cost $1.3 billion. It brings to 17.4 miles the amount of subway lines in the city, built at a total cost of $4.6 billion.

Ridership on the new, larger system is expected to reach 120,000 boardings each weekday, far less than the 290,000 originally predicted.

But not everyone is celebrating the new stations’ opening.

The Bus Riders Union says the subway was built for middle-class commuters at the expense of poor residents who depend on the overcrowded bus system to get around the city.

“Rail is built with stolen bus money,” said Eric Mann, a leader of the union.

Others say the opening this week is a bittersweet reminder of what could have been.

What was built, they note, represents only a portion of the subway system originally envisioned by city fathers in the 1970s. Transit officials have since dropped plans to extend the subway across the Valley floor to Woodland Hills.

Councilwoman Laura Chick said she was deeply disappointed that the MTA did not fulfill its promise to extend the system to Warner Center in her West Valley district.

“What they built is certainly a step in the right direction, but when I think about the original plan of having the northwestern terminus for the system being in Warner Center, it’s hard to be terribly excited,” Chick said. “If the contracts, the money and the decision-making had been handled in a more thoughtful, accountable and responsible way, we would have a system for the same price that ends in Warner Center as it should have.”

While acknowledging that some mistakes were made, elected officials who run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority say the reason the subway system will terminate in North Hollywood is simple: Lack of money.

At more than $200 million a mile, the county could not afford to continue building an underground system, according to County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who sits on the MTA board.

“We had to change our course because we couldn’t keep going,” he said.

With the MTA now looking toward bus and light rail projects, Yaroslavsky said Valley residents should appreciate that they got something before the bank went broke.

The project is especially important coming at a time when some Valley civic leaders are pushing for secession, claiming the Valley has not gotten its fair share of government services.

“The political impact of not having this connection would have been devastating,” Yaroslavsky said. “It is very significant that the Valley and the rest of the city be connected to the system for symbolic reasons and real reasons.”

The project to bring the subway to the Valley faced a bumpy road from the start.

Giant, mole-like drilling machines got stuck under the Santa Monica Mountains. There were sinkholes, political feuds, financial problems and disputes over the line’s route.

Homeowners objected to drilling under their neighborhood, and North Hollywood businesses filed legal claims, alleging the MTA scared off customers by tearing up Lankershim Boulevard.

The MTA finished the other segments with no fatalities, but three workers were killed in separate accidents building the North Hollywood extension, bringing the scrutiny of state safety inspectors to the project.

MTA officials said the safety and work record of the project is still superior to other massive public works projects.

The North Hollywood extension was completed within budget and six months before a federal deadline.

“There were times we thought we would never get here,” said Mel Wilson, a Valley Realtor and former MTA board member. “The federal government threatened more than once to pull funding for the project, and there were times when people in the Valley were not sure they wanted a subway.”

History Repeated

The subway is not the first major transit system to link the San Fernando Valley with the rest of the city.

In 1911, Pacific Electric’s Red Car trolleys began offering daily trips from the Valley to downtown Los Angeles for less than 20 cents. The trip took about 83 minutes.

The trolley line was widely credited with opening the Valley to settlers. The Valley mushroomed into one of the nation’s largest suburbs after World War II.

On Dec. 28, 1952, the last Red Car rumbled over Cahuenga Pass to Van Nuys, the victim of freeways and the increasing reliance of Los Angeles residents on the automobile. Before the Red Line stopped, City Councilman Edward Davenport warned of Valley “isolation.”

In following decades, the Valley became a center of the car culture, something the subway will have to overcome if it is to succeed.

Several proposals were made in the following years to build an extensive rail system, including a 1968 transit tax measure that was rejected by voters.

Tom Bradley won the mayoral election in 1973 after a campaign that promised the construction of a world-class transit system that he envisioned turning Los Angeles into a “paradise.”

The proposal to build a subway to North Hollywood was first approved by county transit planners in 1975.

Half-cent sales tax increases approved by county voters in 1980 and 1990 provided the local match for federal and state dollars to pay for it.

But although the plan called for a system linking metropolitan Los Angeles with the Valley, many leaders north of the Santa Monica Mountains feared they would never see their share of the project.

The turning point came in 1984, when then-state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) won approval of legislation requiring the county rail agency to spend 15% of all local and state money for the subway annually on the Valley portion of the project and to begin work on the Valley line within a year of starting work downtown.

“I felt at the time if there wasn’t protection for the Valley, the Valley portion would not have been built,” Robbins said in a recent interview.

In fact, financial problems cast doubt at various times on extending the subway to the Valley.

At one point, the county Transportation Commission in the 1980s also briefly considered substituting a trolley line for Metro Rail between Universal City and North Hollywood.

“There is no question it [the Valley subway] would not have happened if not for the Robbins bill,” said Richard Katz, a Sylmar resident and former chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee.

“What Robbins did was force the MTA to spend money in the Valley, which made sure the system reached North Hollywood,” Katz added. “It forced the MTA to start building at both ends. Otherwise they would have spent all of the money downtown.”

Katz, a member of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. board, also played a major role. His legislative committee held audits and hearings whenever problems developed on the subway project.

He also wrote legislation that created the MTA by combining the Southern California Rapid Transit District and the County Transportation Commission. The bus and rail agencies were pushing competing and incompatible projects until the merger, Katz said.

Despite the legislative pressure to make sure the Valley got its subway, public opposition grew feverish in the late ‘80s to the idea of extending the rail line across the San Fernando Valley to Warner Center. At one meeting, 2,000 people from the Burbank-Chandler corridor area went to a public hearing to oppose an above-ground system. On the other side of the issue, the business community was pushing hard for an extension of the rail line in the Valley, Robbins recalled.

Robbins said it was a “political war” that was threatening to disrupt plans to extend the subway from Hollywood to North Hollywood.

In 1991, the senator won approval for legislation requiring that any heavy rail system across the Valley be built underground, which at least temporarily ended the squabble, he said.

Another bump in the road occurred in 1993.

MCA Inc., then the parent company of Universal Studios, asked that the Universal City subway station be moved a half-mile closer to its CityWalk attraction.

Transit agency officials estimated at the time that the change could add $42 million in cost and two years of delay to the project.

After five months of haggling, the two sides reached an agreement in February 1994. The station would stay where originally proposed but the transit agency would build two additional station entrances, including one on the east side of Lankershim Boulevard, closer to the theme park.

Later in 1994, the transit officials approved a $65-million contract to drill the tunnels between North Hollywood and Universal City, but extraordinary efforts to shore up the soft ground and prevent sinkage drove that one contract cost up to $94 million.

In February 1995, a 200-foot tunneling machine began boring a two-mile tunnel from North Hollywood to Universal City at a rate of about 100 feet per day.

Despite efforts to prevent soil from collapsing, businesses along Lankershim complained of sinkage and cracked floors. Others said they were losing significant business as the construction project blocked streets.

City officials eventually decided to allocate $2 million to the North Hollywood merchants to make amends, but some merchants went out of business in the meantime.

When the MTA proposed drilling under the Santa Monica Mountains, a number of residents and subway opponents warned of catastrophe.

“The doomsday predictions of lakes drying up and the mountains collapsing didn’t happen,” Katz said.

Still, the political disputes continued.

The MTA board acted to seize property rights under the Santa Monica Mountains in January 1996 despite fierce opposition from state Sen. Tom Hayden, actresses Marilu Henner and Donna Dixon, and others.

At one point in 1996, the city Parks Commission rejected an MTA offer of $500 for permission to dig subway tunnels under Weddington Park in Studio City. After months of negotiation, the transit officials agreed to pay the city $75,000.

In August of that year, a giant subway tunnel digging machine became stuck under the Santa Monica Mountains. It took a month and a half to free it.

Then came the accidents--all in 1997.

Subway worker Jaime Pasillas died in February when he was struck in the head by a falling bucket while working in a tunnel under Hollywood Boulevard near Cahuenga Boulevard. In June, subway worker Eleazer Montes was killed when he fell off scaffolding at the Universal City station.

In October, subway worker Brian Bailey was killed at the same station when he was struck by heavy equipment after allegedly wandering into a restricted dumping zone.

End of the Line

In November 1998, county voters approved a ballot measure by Yaroslavsky and said no to spending any more local sales tax money on new subway construction. In January 1999, the MTA board voted to halt work on rail projects beyond the North Hollywood extension.

Once a subway supporter, Yaroslavsky said that, beyond the cost, images of sinkholes, stuck equipment and inferior bus service made further extension of the subway politically unfeasible.

So transit officials are now pursuing a high-speed busway on dedicated roads across the Valley.

In April, Gov. Gray Davis proposed an additional $100 million in state funds for a $291-million busway project, which would boost the state’s share to $245 million.

Still, many view the arrival of an underground train--even if only in a corner of the area--as reason for optimism.

“I think it’s going to be something people will use to a large extent,” said actor and environmentalist Ed Begley Jr., who plans to use the Universal City station. “It will get some people out of their cars.”

Transportation scholar Brian Taylor of UCLA said the political and symbolic significance of the project also should not be underestimated.

“The nature of the Valley’s relationship with the other side of the hill suggests there has been a concern that the Valley would be left off the train,” Taylor said. “With these stations opening, this shows symbolically that the rest of the city is reaching out to the Valley.”