MTA in the Driver’s Seat

There has been no greater local effort at imaginative fiction over the past decade than the long-range transportation dreams of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its predecessor agencies. Where else, for example, could you find a $183-billion plan for 296 miles of subways and light rail lines in 1992, in the middle of a post-Cold War recession? At the low point, in 1996 and 1997, the federal government played after-school detention teacher, forcing MTA planners to the blackboard again and again until they were grudgingly reduced to the immediacy of the Red Line subway extension to North Hollywood. The agency’s latest plan, however, has its feet firmly on the earth.

It’s a shame that the MTA’s sober, conservative and thoughtful look into the future has come only now. California’s deep energy crisis may scuttle long-term state largess in local transportation funding. The state has gained former California Rep. Norman Y. Mineta as President Bush’s pick for Transportation secretary, but it has lost a very generous Clinton administration.

Locally, there is a full plate of competing news with a new mayor and largely new City Council being elected in Los Angeles this spring. The MTA will have to fight for a share of the public’s attention, but a set of plans that cannot be dismissed will help. The MTA is expected to release a draft of the plan later this month for a 45-day public comment period.

Emblematic of the MTA’s new long-range thinking is that its primary public transportation plan revolves around expanding its popular Metro Rapid Bus demonstration projects to 22 and possibly 36 additional lines. It also hopes to fill the gaps between those lines with agreements with other local bus companies on intercommunity transit lines and so-called “local circulators,” or small buses and vans.

The MTA plan also seems to have properly reasoned that the best, least expensive and most flexible way of testing new routes in the expected high-population-increase areas of northern Los Angeles County and the San Gabriel Valley is with buses first, with studies on potential fixed rail routes to come later.

The draft plan is also correct in renewing a commitment to high-occupancy-vehicle carpool lanes on county freeways outside the downtown core. Non-freeway arterial improvements, including several road widening projects, are also part of the draft plan.

Of course, there are stumbling blocks. Moving forward with three projects depends on Congress and the Bush administration honoring an agreement allowing the MTA to use money otherwise earmarked for subway construction. Without that funding, one or more of the Eastside, Mid-City and San Fernando Valley east-west corridors could be delayed.

Perhaps the most difficult barrier to a comprehensive approach is sprawl: the spread of housing farther and farther away from jobs and routine personal services. Slapdash planning guarantees an overreliance on personal vehicles for longer and longer commutes. At some point, local governments will have to better coordinate business development, housing and public transportation.

Other locales are working harder than Los Angeles to inhibit sprawl. San Diego will try to accommodate 1 million more residents in existing neighborhoods, rather than simply spreading further out; San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales may allow higher-density housing in the city and reconsider other development controls.

Los Angeles and its neighboring communities need housing and employment and other services close enough to one another to make a short bus trip to work or walking to a store feasible.

It’s a tall order, but at least this time the MTA, much thanks to departing CEO Julian Burke, is trying to be part of the solution.