Valley Express Busway to Get Crosswalk at Transfer Stop

The eastern terminus of the soon-to-open $350-million Metro Orange Line busway in the San Fernando Valley is just across the street from its most important transfer point, to the Red Line subway. But for years, government agencies argued over how to provide commuters with a safe and easy way to transfer between systems.

Until Tuesday, just six weeks before the scheduled opening of the express busway, plans called for a convoluted and time-consuming walk for passengers to get from station to station across busy Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. Some transit experts worried that the lack of a pedestrian tunnel or a direct crosswalk would discourage ridership and encourage jaywalking.

Los Angeles County’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is building the 14-mile busway, and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, which controls city streets, had been blaming each other for the awkward transfer point.

The MTA wanted the city to add a crosswalk between the two stations. But city transportation engineers originally rejected the idea because it would disrupt car and bus traffic.

The city had asked the MTA to give higher priority to digging an underground walkway. But the MTA said it couldn’t afford a tunnel, expected to cost more than $10 million.

On Tuesday, the city Transportation Department reversed course and decided to put in a crosswalk with flashing red lights after all, in what officials conceded was reaction to questions from The Times.

“We were not going to do it. We really were not,” said James Okazaki, assistant general manager for the department, who participated in Tuesday afternoon’s decision to build a $50,000 crosswalk in time for the busway’s Oct. 29 opening.

“It all came down to this: We didn’t want any public outcry that we didn’t help make using transit easy,” Okazaki added. “The department did not want to be accused of not making it easy to go from the Red Line to the Orange Line.”

The MTA was surprised by the city’s sudden reversal.

“I’m happy that they looked at it again,” said Kevin Michel, an MTA regional planning director who said his agency had been discussing the matter with the city for years.

Some contention remains, however. The city wants the MTA to help pay for the project, and that will require more talks.

Transit advocates expressed relief about the crosswalk decision because, they said, the previous plan would have led to jaywalking.

“Well, thank God someone realized it before someone got killed,” said Dana Gabbard, spokesman for Southern California Transit Advocates, who had raised alarms about the issue at the MTA’s citizen advisory committee meetings. “This was a disaster waiting to happen. How in the world did they think we didn’t need a crosswalk there before?”

Without the crosswalk, connecting riders emerging from the subway’s northern terminus were to be directed by signs to walk about 220 feet south down Lankershim to Chandler Boulevard South, wait for traffic lights to turn green, cross to the other side and then walk another 200 feet back up the boulevard to the Orange Line’s boarding area.

A trial trek by a reporter following that route from the Red Line’s underground platform took about five minutes, including a half-minute wait at a red light.

For transit advocates, that would have been too long and complicated.

“Public transit should be absolutely seamless,” said Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, an advocacy group based in Sylmar. He described himself as “absolutely thrilled at the reversal of long-held decisions” about the crosswalk. “It will make the busway super user-friendly.”

In riders’ minds, travel time can seem longer when they face a complicated connection, experts say. People usually don’t like having to go from indoors to outside and feel uneasy when walking down a dark street at night. And people despise waiting -- whether for a red light to turn green or for the next bus to come.

“People generally do not like to transfer,” said Ata Khan, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Transportation Research Center at Carleton University in Ottawa, who has led research on the topic. “If it takes one minute to make a transfer, people will perceive it as 1.5 minutes.”

The result can discourage ridership, according to Hiroyuki Iseki, a researcher at UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies.

“If you’re uncomfortable and insecure, your perceived travel time increases,” Iseki said. “The burden of making a transfer can be very significant, and that can affect people’s likelihood of taking public transit.”

The Orange Line is being touted as a shortcut across the Valley and an alternative to the congested 101 Freeway. The express bus-only corridor, which will travel a newly paved-over defunct rail corridor, stretches from North Hollywood to Warner Center.

Test runs have taken about 40 minutes. Extra-long, 60-foot silver buses will stop only every mile or so to allow speedier rides. Traffic signals at street crossings are equipped with sensors so that buses will encounter fewer red lights.

The MTA does not make ridership projections for the near future but predicts that 15 years from now, 5,000 passengers a day will connect to or from the busway’s North Hollywood station. Total ridership along the Orange Line is projected to grow to about 22,000 a day.

Years ago, when the busway was being planned, MTA planners considered building a pedestrian tunnel with an elevator and escalators at the eastern terminus but backed away because of the high cost.

The MTA still hopes to someday build a tunnel by persuading developers interested in MTA-owned land near the station to help foot the bill.

The MTA also once considered extending the Orange Line a few hundred feet farther east, so buses would cross Lankershim and drop riders off on the same side of the street as the subway and an adjacent hub for regular buses.

But the agency dropped that idea after considering the effect on the busway’s travel times.