‘Maglev’ and L.A.’s Needs May Be on Opposite Poles

Why can’t Los Angeles and Southern California have a world-class transportation system like other great cities?

That question arises again because the city and region are in the running for federal funds to build a magnetic levitation system in which trains are propelled on waves of magnetism free of direct contact with an underlying guideway.

That’s not science fiction, but it is an unproved technological experiment. And that makes it a poor choice for an urban transit system. Magnetic levitation, or “maglev,” also is too fast for use in town. The technology is most effective if trains can run at 200 miles per hour and faster. But such speeds are impractical for urban systems, which must make frequent stops to pick up and discharge passengers.

Experimentation also doesn’t come cheap. A proposed $950 million in Federal Railroad Administration funds for construction and deployment of a maglev system would have to be followed by $4 billion in local bond financing to complete the initial phase, which would run on guideways above existing freeways from Los Angeles International Airport to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles to Ontario Airport and on to the former March Air Force Base in Riverside County.

“A 92-mile maglev system can be built for the same $5 billion to $6 billion that MTA spent on the 18-mile Red Line subway,” says Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG), a six-county planning organization that is maglev’s chief local proponent. Pisano sees links to Van Nuys, Anaheim, Arcadia and San Bernardino being added later.

The question, however, is not so much if maglev can be built but whether it serves this region’s needs. Southern California’s proposal has many critics, including City Council member Ruth Galanter, California High Speed Rail Commission Chairman Michael Tennenbaum and even the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., which favors looking at alternative transit systems such as a Japanese maglev model designed to go 80 miles per hour that could make frequent stops. Japanese maglev experiments have had their failures, however.

Critics make some good points. But arguments do nothing to change the fact that even after the current transit strike is settled, Southern California’s residents will be stuck for years to come with severely inadequate public transit and ever more crowded freeways.

This area crows that it is the capital city of the 21st century. But its shoddy public systems betray it as a capital wannabe. Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco-Oakland and scores of other cities have built public transportation systems that benefit their economies and social lives. Los Angeles and Southern California have not been able to do the same.

Yet this maglev boondoggle could provide an opportunity to do better. It’s likely that Southern California will get funding to study a maglev project later this month. The region is competing with Nevada, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia and Louisiana for federal money. And because this is a presidential election year, the Democratic administration is likely to choose Southern California as one of three areas to conduct further study on maglev systems. The big money for maglev construction is likely to be awarded in 2002.

Southern California should take the government funds to study a wide range of alternatives to meet its transportation needs. It should not get locked in to the system now being proposed by Washington--a high-speed maglev system that is the product of a German corporate consortium that has now been joined by Lockheed Martin to spread maglev technology in the United States. The German government refused to fund that very system proposed between Hamburg and Berlin.

Similarly, the Japanese government has refused to fund maglev at anything beyond experimental stages. The U.S., and potentially Southern California, stand to be the global test track.

That being the case, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties should decide what kind of interlinked transportation systems they want and then lobby hard for federal, state and private investment to build them.

For urban areas, the 80-mile-an-hour Japanese system should get a try. But so should light rail and fast bus systems that connect with each other. For such a multi-centered area, with millions of people traveling in all directions every day, flexibility has to be key to transit.

Regional authorities should take many factors into account in studying transportation needs. Los Angeles International Airport needs to distribute commuter flights to other airports in the Inland Empire and Orange County. Speedy rail links could make that possible.

Given the crowding on highways between Los Angeles and San Diego and Los Angeles and San Francisco, many favor high-speed rail systems to link those cities and the Central Valley.

High-speed rail is expensive, however. A maglev system from Los Angeles to San Francisco would cost $31 billion. Can such an expenditure be justified when air travel now serves the region well?

Those are secondary questions. Transportation planning for Southern California must begin from the undeniable fact that the population is growing and traffic is slowing. In the next decade, freeway speeds in urban areas will crawl to an average of 15 miles per hour from 35 mph today, according to a study sponsored by USC and the Irvine Foundation.

Practical urban transportation systems must be devised and built in the next 10 to 20 years. If money to study magnetic levitation helps push that cause along, so much the better. But the region has suffered boondoggles and failures in the past--flawed rail lines, badly planned bus lines.

This time, maybe Los Angeles and Southern California can get it right--just like other great cities do.

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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.

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‘Maglev’ at a Glance

* How it works: “Maglev” stands for magnetic levitation, which uses the property of magnets of the same polarity to repel each other to lift the train off the track. With a magnet on each side of the train’s bottom, the magnets on the track elevate the train with minimal power and friction. An engine is used only to get the train up to speed and maintain speed despite wind resistance.

* How fast do they go? German maglev trains have been clocked at 271 mph, and Japanese trains have reached 323 mph.

* The local project: A line is proposed between Los Angeles International Airport and Union Station that would eventually stretch eastward to Ontario Airport and March Air Force Base. It would cost at least $5 billion to build. By 2020, ridership is projected to reach 75,630 passengers per day, generating annual revenue of $394 million.

Sources: Southern California Assn. of Governments, Times research