L.A.'s Once World-Class Regional Rail Network Steadily Being Revived – It's A RAIL-Volution

Los Angeles once had the world's largest mass rail transit system, with 1100 miles of track and 2,800 scheduled trains each day. We took that system out in 1960. But in 1990 we began to rebuild it. Put the county's current rail mobility strategy in context. Where are we today and where do we need to be regarding rail in Los Angeles?

We need to be back to where we were before the ‘60s, with a rail system that serves the region and enables us to take short trips to work, to school, and to places of entertainment while also allowing us to take longer trips to visit family, friends and relatives. That's the way it used to be until we decided we could do that better with automobiles. We're doing this interview on a Monday after a weekend during which I tried to do some region wide in my automobile-and, it probably would have been faster on that old rail system of the 1940s and 50s. It's just getting to be such slow speeds. Even on the weekends, even with carpool lanes, it takes forever to get anywhere.

We need to focus back on alternatives to the single occupancy vehicle, or even the double occupancy vehicle, because this is not providing very good utility to us now. It's causing a great deal of congestion, and a great deal of loss of life, property, and health. And, it's also polluting our air like crazy. The prognostication for automobile travel is that speeds are going to get slower and slower and slower. We operate around 35 miles per hour on average now. It's going to just keep getting slower and slower, and one day it's just going to stop dead.

Update our readers on the status of the new Valley Orange Line.

The Orange Line is back under construction, after being stopped by an appellate court stay. We finally got that worked out in mid-August, and the contractor has returned to work. It's kind of slow getting the subcontractors back on the job, particularly in light of fact that the opponents, COST, are threatening to go back to court. But, in light of all that going on, the contractors are kind of reluctant to get started again only to face the possibility of maybe having to stop work again. So it's kind of an awkward situation, as it has been all the way through. If we don't get any more stays, then we're back working on construction. The priorities are going to be to get the intersections that have been torn up back into usable shape, and then to continue our paving of the rapidway so that we can continue construction on it.

It's going to cost us a lot of money and probably some time because of all this court activity, and that's really unfortunate. I seriously doubt if we'll be able to open in by August of 2005 now, although we're going to continue to try.

And the Gold Line and the Expo line. Give us an update on these two rail projects.

The Gold Line's Eastside Extension is moving along very smoothly. Things are moving very much according to schedule.

On the Expo Line, we hope to be able to get our preliminary engineering and environmental impact reports done by this time next year. At that point, we would be able to start construction under a design-build contract if we can put the money together. If not, we'll have to put it on the shelf for a while. But, we're optimistic at this point. I'm referring only to the segment to Culver City. The other segment, going on to Santa Monica, still has all of its planning work and preliminary engineering work to go through.

There's been considerable civic and political effort to restore transportation funding in the state budget. The federal transportation budget is still up for re-authorization. RE the MTA's plans for the Expo Line, the Gold Line, and other major projects, are the needed funds likely to be available?

We're preparing our ten-year forecast now for the board, which details what we can do by using some of our tools differently than we've used them in the past. We are optimistic that state funding will start to flow again next year, and hopefully to the maximum degree. We're looking at various different bonding scenarios, using portions of our sales tax revenues for bonding for highway projects and guideway projects. Because of the decreased outside funding, we're doing a much more complete job of studying how those can be built and what the resulting cash flows would be. We always use federal and state dollars first, subsequently relying a lot more on our own resources and leveraging those resources so that we can do more sooner.

Re-authorization of TEA-21 has been at a standstill in Congress for much of the year. Can we expect budget authorization before the year's end?

I don't think so. There might be some action on it after the election, but I don't even know if that's going to be the case. It's going to depend a lot on what the economy's looking like and what everyone wants to agree to as a final number that goes into the bill. None of us are holding our breath. If it does pass soon, it's probably going to be a smaller number than we want anyhow. So, the situation in Washington is not looking terribly great.

How can a bipartisan transportation bill, which has so much support, fail to pass?

The administration is concerned about the deficit, so they've decided to take a stand on this bill and are seeking a lower number. The House and the Senate have much more ambitious feelings and would like to see a much bigger bill. The Senate came in at $318 billion and the House wanted $375 billion. It's just a wrestling match at this point to come up with a number. But, once that number is agreed upon, then there will be a lot of support for the re-authorization, because it does provide a lot of money for a lot of different projects around the country.

Roger, you began this interview by lamenting the court decisions that have temporarily held up construction of the Orange Line. The MTA also is under a ten year court consent decree that has stripped you of authority over the allocation of your resources between rail and bus. Update our readers on the status of that consent decree, as well as the challenges presented by such decrees.

"Stripped" is kind of an understatement. It's really had a huge impact on the agency and has forced us to spend a lot of money for absolutely no benefit. The people behind the consent decree continue to want us to spend money for nothing at all. I just don't understand that mentality, but nevertheless we will comply with the mandate.

The Bus Rider's Union asked the special master to extend the consent decree, which he declined to do. Although, he said if there was a need to do it later on, he would reconsider that matter. It would be hard for him to do that. Certainly, if they did it beyond the ten years, it would not be an agreement any more, because we aren't going to agree to that. So, we're still having to deal with the consent decree by buying additional buses and spending a lot of money when our service is running in many parts of the region in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. In the next couple of years, we're already making plans on how we would look at vastly improving the service while still maintaining decent load factors on the system.

The LACMTA clearly competes for scarce public transit dollars. In that regard, much has been made in the press lately re the SF/Oakland Bay Bridge cost overruns. Does Southern California and the MTA have a stake in the outcome of the running debate over how the Bay Bridge is ultimately paid for- state or local funding?

Recently in Sacramento, we were involved in a lot of those discussions, but ended up not having a bill. Nevertheless, the price of the Bay Bridge's construction has gone up substantially-steel prices have gone up, concrete prices have gone up a lot. Originally it was said to be a state funded project, so essentially the money that went to build it came out of Southern California as well as other parts of the state. And there are a lot of people in the South who don't really agree that the overruns ought to be borne by the whole state, particularly in light of the fact that the Bay Bridge raised their tolls, and used the toll money to expand other transportation projects. So we're still working with all the different parties to see if there isn't some kind of a way to resolve the issue without having to have the whole state pay for all those overruns.

The Bay Bridge will be a major discussion when the Legislature comes back for the next session, and I suspect for some time to come. We have such great needs for improving our transportation here in Southern California. When it comes to goods movement, we move so much cargo through the ports and on our freeways and the whole state benefits from that. As a result, the whole state ought to pay for the maintenance and improvements to that infrastructure. It's hard to argue that the whole state benefits from the Bay Bridge.

In addition, there's going to be a big issue about how the money is divided up between north and south. Our studies show that the north generally gets more of the state pot than the south does, even though the south has a greater population. So, there will certainly be some interesting arguments with the state in the coming year over the way the money is distributed.

Roger, share again why the MTA is a co-sponsor of the four day Rail-Volution conference that kicks off September 18th in Los Angeles. More specifically, what will those traveling from throughout the country to the Railvolution conference see & experience that may surprise them about public transit, and transit oriented development, in Los Angeles?

I think a lot of them don't really understand that we actually do have a subway and we do actually have rail lines that have induced transit oriented development and sustainable communities. One of the things they'll be surprised to see is the whole breadth of different types of development that we'll be able to show them. A lot of Railvolution relies on the mobile workshops, and we have 20 mobile workshops taking people to all different kinds of examples of development throughout the region-from Hollywood and Highland, to Old Pasadena to Long Beach, to Santa Monica.

We can show them some great examples of what's being done along the Gold Line, such as the Del Mar project and Mission Meridian. In Hollywood, they can see Hollywood and Vine, which is going to be starting shortly. They'll be able to get some idea of the fabulous possibilities up at the North Hollywood station for development. So, they are going to be able to see a whole bunch of different kinds of settings that demonstrate a tremendous diversity in the retail space and housing types. And, I think people are going to be surprised when they get here.

Lastly, four members on the MTA's board are appointed by the Mayor of Los Angeles, and in the spring of '05 there clearly will be another competitive Mayor's race. What issues applicable to your work and responsibilities with the L.A. County Metropolitan Transit Authority ought, in your opinion, to be seriously addressed by all the candidates now contesting Mayor Hahn for leadership of the City?

The city of Los Angeles is certainly a huge player in the county and has even bigger transportation needs. I would encourage all of the candidates for mayor to have an overall mobility agenda-and the model for that should resemble what Mobility 21 has been doing. The city's been very much involved with Mobility 21 from the very beginning. The city also has a very active Department of Transportation, which has been working as a partner with the MTA and Mobility 21 all the way through.

So I hope that there will be discussions about how we're going to improve mobility for the citizens of Los Angeles as we get into this mayoral race. All of the candidates need to have an understanding that there's going to be a lot of work – a lot of heavy lifting – for coming up with different alternatives for making the city go forward, on our streets, freeways and rail lines. The members of our board understand that and have worked hard to advance the MTA agenda.