Busway Bluster Steers Into Hysteria

Not far from a phalanx of frontyard banners that scream out against a proposed busway on Chandler Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, two dapper gents waited and waited and waited for the 156 line at Laurel Canyon Boulevard on Monday afternoon.

Paul, 74, had been checking his watch for 25 minutes, and he was getting ticked off. He had errands to run, and it wasn’t getting any earlier.

“That’s a lot of wasted land,” he said, pointing to the scruffy, weed-choked median where a fleet of faster buses would zip along at quicker intervals.

“I’m all for it,” said Charles Alpers, 94, who wore a fine straw hat for a trip to the Post Office. “I think it’d be much faster and take a lot of cars off the road, too.”

Amen, said a dozen students and laborers who depend on the bus to get from here to there.

But their proletarian whimper is no match for anti-busway howls that began in an Orthodox Jewish community in Valley Village and have now spread beyond.

And there is speculation that Mayor James K. Hahn, whose boldest vision for addressing gridlock is more left-turn lanes, is preparing to sandbag the busway proposal at a Thursday meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Let’s begin with the hysteria, best exemplified by this Page 1 headline--over a photo of a bus--in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles:

“There Goes the Neighborhood”

Opponents have lost sleep over fears of traffic, noise and “Berlin Wall-type” sound barriers for the busway, a 14-mile link that would cut travel time in half between Woodland Hills and the Red Line station in North Hollywood.

But it’s the 1 1/2-mile stretch along Chandler that has generated the most hyperventilating, with opponents saying the busway threatens the Sabbath custom of walking from home to shul. The noise. The traffic. How could they cope?

In a story by The Times’ Andrew Blankstein, one member of Shaarey Zedek Congregation lamented: “If we don’t prevail, we will be destroyed.”

Growing up in a different discipline, I was familiar with ruination by fire and flood, Satanic plots, even rising hemlines, but not by improved bus service.

It’s a particularly curious debate for me, having just moved to L.A. from New York City. There’s a synagogue and a major transit route about every 100 feet in New York, and I was unaware of any impending apocalypse.

It’s not just the impact on Shaarey Zedek that concerns him, argues Rabbi Aron B. Tendler, who said he’s OK with more buses on more corridors. “We truly believe this is not the best plan for the Valley.”

It’s never the right plan in L.A., which has had the worst traffic in the country 16 years running and seems to like the view from the top of the mountain.

Tendler told me people moved to the Valley to get away from “the city” and don’t want the hassle of urban nuisances, like major transit lines.

With all due respect, let me point out that the Valley ain’t Montana.

The transplants still happen to be living in the country’s second-largest city, which has approximately 6 million vehicles on the road and another 2.7 million people expected to move here in the next 20 years. There’s a chance country living could become a casualty.

The Chandler line would cost $40 million more than an Oxnard Street alternative, but the latter would be a longer commute, it’s got engineering complications, and it’s got its own set of screaming ninnies.

The MTA already bought the Chandler land with $160 million in taxpayers’ money, and it’s promised to add crosswalks and pedestrian bridges, build bikeways, and beautify a stretch of property that does not currently resemble the Champs Elysees.

If you’re into irony, much of the property still has tracks on it, because Red Cars ran this route before the city dumped mass transit in one of the great bonehead plays of the 20th century.

The problem here is that Mayor Hahn and opponent Antonio Villaraigosa, doing what candidates do best in a campaign, pandered to NIMBYs and promised no Chandler busway.

Fair enough. But if the mayor’s still against it, he ought to come out of hiding and explain why. The guy’s been dickering for seven weeks on his three appointments to the MTA board while the issue burns hot.

Busway proponents fear he’ll name his three lackeys before Thursday’s meeting, and then scuttle the project indefinitely by claiming they need more time to study the issue. That’ll mean more time for more people to cook up Berlin Wall fantasies, and could sink a project that’s been planned for years.

No comment Tuesday from His Honor’s office, except that he’s still opposed and plans to make his debut at Thursday’s MTA meeting, which could turn into a brawl.

“When it comes to transportation,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, “the Valley never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Light rail got shot down. Heavy rail got shot down. This is the way to go, and we are not going to walk away from this opportunity. We’re throwing a life preserver to commuters in a way we could never duplicate.”

Not to mention that maids would get to the homes of busway opponents a lot earlier.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com