Villaraigosa Offers Plan for Traffic

Mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa released his transportation plan for Los Angeles on Thursday, proposing an enormous expansion of subways and light rail that would transform how people move around the city and the region.

The Eastside councilman said his plan would extend subways or light rail to the beach, the San Gabriel Valley, Sylmar and the western edges of the San Fernando Valley, and could take 20 years or more to build.

Villaraigosa, who was on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board until September, acknowledged he has no plan to pay for it and could not give an estimate of the cost.

“I’m not a used-car salesman,” he said, adding that he understands there is no easy fix for the city’s traffic problems but said that they demand a bold approach.

“The question isn’t how much is it going to cost. The question is where is the leadership and the willingness to dream big.”

Saying traffic congestion costs Los Angeles’ economy $11 billion a year, pollutes the region’s air and “keeps us away from our families,” Villaraigosa promised to enact a number of small improvements to get traffic moving. Among them: forbidding construction on major arteries during rush hour, creating reversible lanes on major streets to speed traffic during rush hours, encouraging carpooling and repairing thousands of potholes.

Kam Kawata, campaign strategist for Mayor James K. Hahn, dismissed Villaraigosa’s plan as a mixture of implausible proposals and initiatives that the mayor has undertaken.

Traffic congestion in Los Angeles ranks as the worst in the nation and has emerged as a prominent campaign issue in the final weeks before the March 8 election.

Kawata took issue with Villaraigosa’s proposal to extend the Red Line subway to the ocean, saying that if Villaraigosa proposed to tunnel underground, “then he’s not doing his homework” because members of Congress have blocked such plans.

He also criticized Villaraigosa, a former Assembly speaker, for allowing legislators to take transportation money from local coffers when he served in the Assembly from 1994 to 2000.

The Hahn campaign leveled the same criticism at another opponent, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, when he released his transportation plan three weeks ago.