Public Transit and L.A. Politics

14 August 2005 |permalink | email article

Los Angeles once had a vast rail system, the nation’s largest. In the peak years in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, the Pacific Electric’s interurban network fanning out from the downtown hub carried millions of passengers and encompassed 1,000 miles of track and 700 route miles of service.

Former Mayor Fletcher Bowron once remarked that “the economy of Los Angeles is rubber tired.” Even before the mayor took office in 1938, automobile, gasoline and tire companies formed a consortium to begin converting existing electric trolleys and street cars to motorized buses. By the mid-’50s the “Big Red” cars were history.

But even with the completion of the Pasadena Freeway in 1940, the first in the West, local politicians and state highway engineers for decades failed to foresee the importance of adding light-rail lines along freeway strips to ease today’s gridlock. It was a classic example of bureaucratic nearsightedness - the automobile friendly lobby still ruled.

Newly elected Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, like his predecessors, finds himself confronted with the vexing L.A. issue of public transportation. I mean, how do you balance the needs of maintaining and expanding bus service and pushing for a 21st Century county version of the P.E rail network Henry Huntington created in 1901?

Villaraigosa is demonstrating, unlike his predecessors, he’s intent on fulfilling a campaign pledge to do something about both buses and rail. While Jim Hahn declined to serve as chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the mayor intends to use the post as a bully pulpit, and has appointed three members to serve with him on the board.

The mayor has received high praise from local members of Congress for going to Washington shortly after he took office July 1 to lobby for more transit funds. The result is the region will get $4.5 billion by 2009 from the new highway bill - $833 million more countywide than was allocated in the last bill - for mass transit, freeways and roads.

Included in the big-ticket items are $400 million to expand the Gold Line from East L.A. into the San Gabriel Valley and start-up funding of $11 million for the Exposition LIne, feeding off the Blue Line via Culver City to Santa Monica. Villaraigosa also supports connecting the Green Line to LAX.

The mayor’s biggest challenge - one I do not believe will succeed - is his dream of extending the Red Line from downtown to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica along the 16-mile Wilshire Boulevard “crown jewel” corridor via subway.

Local transit boosters have been thwarted by a federal ban, initiated by Rep. Henry Waxman, on tunneling in Los Angeles County, in place since 1985, due to potentially explosive underground methane gas pockets.

Such pockets are said to exist in the Wilshire-Fairfax area known as the Miracle Mile. The projected non-subway Exposition Line from downtown west to the beach - a new version of the “Big Red” Venice Short Line - lacks such problems.

Increased MTA bus and light-rail ridership for the fiscal year ending June was substantially up. Whether or not higher gas prices had anything to do with the jump, Villaraigosa now has a more solid talking point in fighting for more federal and state transit funds in the war against more traffic and air pollution.

The mayor should start pressing Democratic congressional leaders now to do something about the disparity in federal highway bill funding. Conservative and rural Kern County got more money per capita than Los Angeles - $1,000 per resident compared to about $60 in Los Angeles County. Go figure!

412