New Busway Gears Up for Fall Debut

Every weekday morning, a few minutes before 8, Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine steers his Ford Crown Victoria onto the 101 Freeway in Woodland Hills.

From there, it’s about 25 miles to City Hall -- or about 60 to 90 minutes. The only thing that makes the stop-and-start drive tolerable for Zine is passing the time by talking on his cellphone.

“The 101 is making me crazy,” he said.

Beginning this fall, Zine will have an alternative. He can ride on a new 14-mile busway that will stretch from Warner Center in Woodland Hills to the Red Line subway stop in North Hollywood. He said he may take advantage of the busway -- scheduled to open in late October.

The question for Zine and every other potential rider will be whether the bus is fast enough, cheap enough and convenient enough to get them out of their cars.

Traffic has been very slow on the 101 Freeway and surrounding streets for as long as many motorists can remember. For nearly as long, idea after idea has been floated to ease congestion. But none of them -- light rail, subway, monorail, freeway widening or a double-decker highway -- came to fruition.

After surviving legal challenges and budget negotiations, the $349.6-million east-west busway is on track. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will operate it much like a train, running mostly on an exclusive, two-lane road from Woodland Hills to North Hollywood.

Given the MTA’s record with other large projects, the San Fernando Valley busway, which has been dubbed the Orange Line, will be watched closely. Since 1990, the agency has completed four rail lines at a cost of nearly $7 billion. But ridership has increased only 7% since 1988, when the MTA ran only buses.

The Orange Line will open two years after the debut of the $859-million Gold Line, which even MTA officials admit is very slow. And its ridership -- almost 15,000 passengers per weekday -- is fewer than half the number expected by the transit agency.

But if the busway gets too few riders, the city of Los Angeles -- the biggest community that’s part of the regional transit agency -- will step in and insist on changes, said David Fleming, who was appointed July 6 to the MTA board by new L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Villaraigosa, now the president of the MTA board, has said Los Angeles would play a greater role in the agency than it has in the last four years under former Mayor James. K. Hahn. In the past, Villaraigosa has been an ardent supporter of MTA rail lines; he is pushing for both a light-rail line and a subway to the Westside.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the new busway is a calculated risk, but worth it.

“Unless you enjoy playing Russian roulette with traffic on the Ventura Freeway, the busway is the best possible solution we can have in our lifetime,” he said, adding that he expects ridership to be strong.

It remains unclear how much time the busway will save. From Woodland Hills, a bus will take about 38 minutes to reach North Hollywood. Then it’s an additional 25 to 30 minutes for riders taking the subway to downtown. That does not include time getting to and from the stations.

The MTA said the ride will be more comfortable than driving. And at $3 per round trip to downtown -- or less with a monthly pass -- the Orange Line will be a little cheaper than driving. The question is whether that will be enough of a draw.

“Total time from door to door is the No. 1 factor people use when selecting a mode of transportation,” said Ryan Snyder, a transit planning consultant in West Los Angeles. “Beyond that, cost is very important and everything else is secondary: safety, comfort, ability to read.”

Snyder said the MTA would better serve the region by aggressively expanding the number of its rapid buses -- which make fewer stops than regular buses and have the power to keep traffic signals green. The rapid buses are so popular that New York City officials came to Los Angeles in the spring to study them.

In the Bay Area last year, Caltrain -- similar to Metrolink in Southern California -- cut the 47-mile journey between San Jose and San Francisco from 75 minutes to 57 minutes. Ridership immediately went up 12%, which Caltrain officials said is a huge leap.

“We find our passengers want as much frequency as possible, and they want speed,” said Jayme Kunz, a spokeswoman for Caltrain. “And if you can give them the double whammy of frequency and speed, people will crowd onto the trains and stand for an hour.”

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MTA officials said they expect 22,000 people to ride the Orange Line each weekday by 2020. They are working on the assumption that 25% of those riders will forsake their cars to do so and that the rest are people who already use mass transit.

The MTA’s chief executive, Roger Snoble, said the busway will lure riders because it mimics cross-Valley traffic patterns. “I do think we’ll be able to save people time,” he said.

For some Valley residents, it probably would be 20 to 30 minutes faster to take Metrolink trains to get downtown, though those trains mostly run only during rush hour and are more expensive, with a round-trip ticket from Van Nuys to downtown costing $9.75.

Most of the busway is built atop an old rail right of way that the MTA obtained. It was scheduled in the 1990s to be a subway, but for reasons of cost and politics, the project was reconceived as a busway based on a similar project in Brazil.

The Orange Line’s buses are 60 feet long and seat 57 passengers. They are sleek, spacious and low to the ground to make them easy to board. For the same reason, each has three doors instead of the usual two. Riders can buy tickets from machines at the curb, which the MTA said will reduce the time buses sit idle while passengers fumble with change at the fare box.

The MTA also is planting more than 800,000 native plants and 5,000 trees along the busway, with significant stretches including bike and pedestrian lanes. The busway will include stops near Los Angeles Valley College and the Van Nuys Civic Center. The scene is pastoral in the Sepulveda Basin, where the busway cuts across a former farm field before crossing the Los Angeles River on a new bridge.

But can good looks trump the issue of time?

Driving speeds on the 101 often range from zero to 35 mph during rush hour, according to Caltrans data. The average speed of the buses is expected to be 22 or 23 mph.

There will be no express service on the busway, and initially only six of the 13 stations will have parking, for a total of about 3,000 free spaces. MTA officials hope those who can’t find parking at the Red Line’s North Hollywood or Universal City stops -- which fill up early each morning -- will use the Orange Line.

Officials also said that if the line is extremely popular, it can be converted to light rail in the future -- but that could mean crowded buses until then.

Unlike train lines, there will be no gates at the many north-south streets the Orange Line must cross. New traffic lights at those intersections will be programmed to give buses priority, but the buses won’t be able to cruise through the Valley at freeway speeds.

James Okazaki, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, said his agency wanted the busway to go over or under major north-south streets, but that would have cost too much.

Okazaki said such over- or underpasses usually cost $20 million to $50 million each, but they allow buses or light-rail trains to run faster by avoiding traffic -- which also is safer.

Significant segments of the Gold Line and Blue Line light-rail routes were built at street level. In the last 15 years, 74 people have been killed at Blue Line crossings, the MTA said, noting that 15 of those deaths were suicides.

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Some bus riders are already not enamored with the Orange Line.

The MTA “originally sold it as an expansion of the bus system, but it’s extracting resources from the current bus system,” said Manuel Criollo, an organizer with the Bus Riders Union. “It’s definitely cheaper than rail, but if they wanted a bus lane, all they need is a bucket of paint and a street.”

Criollo said he worries that the existing bus system will not be well coordinated with the Orange Line, and that riders will spend a long time traveling on local buses to the busway. That’s already a problem with bus and rail lines, he said.

On a recent afternoon in Pasadena, for example, the Gold Line deposited its few passengers at the Allen Avenue station. Two minutes later, a Pasadena bus pulled up to a nearby stop -- and then sat for 10 minutes while the driver took a break.

“I think if we had a system where people knew that they could walk to the corner and get a bus that takes them to the train and that the bus and train schedules were synchronized, people would use it -- but we don’t have it,” said Councilman Ed Reyes, an MTA board member for the last four years.

Reyes said the Orange Line will be a good investment -- if the MTA or the city is creative about creating more DASH lines or even van lines that circulate through neighborhoods frequently and take residents to transit stops or commercial areas.

In other places, busways have worked, particularly in the Miami area, Ottawa and Sydney, Australia. It remains to be seen whether the widely dispersed commuting patterns -- and to some extent the behavior -- of Angelenos will be a good fit.

New MTA board member Richard Katz, a former assemblyman appointed to the panel by Villaraigosa, said that if commuters use the new busway even one day a week, it may significantly reduce traffic.

Councilman Greig Smith, who represents the northwestern San Fernando Valley, is not sold on the project, though he said he hopes his expectations are wrong.

“It won’t be fast enough do the job,” Smith said. “You’re not going to get people out of a car to take a bus.”