The mystery of the LACMTA Green Line
01/09/2008 01:24:01 AM PST
Standing as a testament to government dysfunction, the Green Line
light-rail line stops two miles short of LAX.

From the platform at the Aviation Station, passengers can see the
track heading toward the planes in the foggy distance, but stopping
abruptly in a nearby parking lot.

How could Los Angeles transportation officials have spent $700
million to build the Green Line, which runs 20 miles between Norwalk
and Redondo Beach, while dodging the nation's third-busiest airport
along the way?

In the dozen years since the Green Line opened, cities like San
Francisco, New York and Portland have built rail lines directly to
their airports.

Meanwhile, efforts to complete a two-mile spur to Los Angeles
International Airport have stalled for lack of funding, making the
original decision to avoid the airport all the more frustrating and
baffling.

"Most people look at government and they think it's a conspiracy.
It's so hard to believe it's as inept as it is," said Ruth Galanter,
a former Los Angeles city councilwoman whose district included the
airport. "I used to believe in conspiracies, until I discovered
incompetence."

The culprits cited most often by conspiracy theorists are the taxi
drivers. How could they get away with charging $50 fares if travelers
could pay a few bucks and hop on light-rail instead?

This theory explains a boondoggle in terms of a recognizable human
motive: greed.

But Mitch Rouse, who owned
SuperShuttle and several cab companies at the time the Green Line was
being built, says he would have welcomed an LAX stop.
"Anything that gets people out of their cars benefits the taxi
industry," Rouse said. "Some would take rail into the airport and
then not want to wait in line when they got back and jump in a cab."


And while he was a donor to various political campaigns, Rouse said
he didn't have the clout to sway the officials deciding the Green
Line route.

"I should be flattered that somebody would think I'd have that much
power," he said. "But, alas, such is not the case."

Others involved in the planning of the line confirm the taxi industry
played no role in bypassing the airport. Which brings the theorists
to the second potential culprit: Los Angeles World Airports, the city
entity that owns and operates LAX and had the power to block the rail
line.

And, arguably, it also had a motive since the airport draws much of
its revenue from parking fees.

But LAWA officials say that wasn't a concern since rail would have
had a relatively trivial effect on parking fees compared with other
opportunities for growth.

"Transit isn't going to have a significant impact on our revenue,"
said Mike Doucette, chief of airport planning. "We'd prefer to see
it. If there was a great regional transit system that fed the
airport, that helps us."

Asked to respond to the conspiracy theories, Doucette said, "They all
came from the grassy knoll."

The actual explanation for the route is much more complicated.

The first thing to understand is that the Green Line was not built on
its own merits, but as a condition for the construction of the
Century Freeway.

Planning started in the 1970s, with the thought that the 105 Freeway
could relieve traffic congestion along Century, Manchester, and
Firestone boulevards and Imperial Highway. But there was fierce
opposition from the community because the project would destroy homes
and slice up neighborhoods, many of them housing low-income
residents.

Lawsuits were filed, resulting in a 1979 federal consent decree that
allowed transportation officials to move forward with the project.
However, they had to provide affordable housing near the freeway,
along with a mass-transit line that would be built along the freeway
median to minimize its disruption to the community.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, the precursor to
today's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, began the process of
planning the route.

At the western end of the Century Freeway, the line could either go
north to LAX, which employed about 35,000 people, or south to El
Segundo, home to about 90,000 aerospace workers.

"It was a clear decision it would be better to go into the El Segundo
employment area," said Richard Stanger, who was the commission's
director of rail planning. "The models and everything indicated it
was much better to go into El Segundo and focus on the needs of the
everyday worker."

But the models could not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union
and, with it, the aerospace industry. By 1993, El Segundo had lost
45,000 jobs.

By that point, however, construction of the Green Line was well under
way.

So transportation planners studied ways to build a "northern
extension" connecting the Green Line to LAX. However, the concept was
beset by problems, most of which still exist.

At the time, LAWA was working on a modernization plan that included
a "people mover" - a monorail that would serve all the terminals and
deposit passengers at an off-site location. Clearly, the train should
go there - but where would that be?

(Fifteen years later, the modernization plan is progressing, with
improvements to runways and separate terminals. However, the off-site
element has been taken off the table.)

The Federal Aviation Administration also worried that a rail line
would interfere with navigational equipment at the end of the runways
and that overhead electric wires would intrude into flight paths. To
solve that issue, the line would likely have to go underground,
greatly increasing its cost.

Although LAWA officially supported the Green Line link, the transit
panel felt the support didn't go very deep. Members speculated that
LAWA didn't want to give the county control over its property, didn't
think people would use the train or believed the project was simply a
pipe dream.

Whatever the case, the Transportation Commission didn't press the
matter very hard.

"We had a pocketful of money and communities that wanted rail, and we
wanted to make rail real," recalls Jacki Bacharach, then chairwoman
of the LACTC's rail planning committee.

"Part of what we were saying was, `OK, let's do it, let's show people
we mean business.' So if we didn't get cooperation pretty fast, we
closed up the end of the line and said let's use the money where we
can use it."

When facts were faced, it didn't look good for the Green Line
extension to the airport: Other projects had a higher priority, there
was no legal requirement to take the line to LAX, there were
significant planning and engineering hurdles, and money was short.
The "northern extension" was dropped from the MTA's plan.

When the Green Line opened along the Century Freeway route in 1995,
It was immediately tagged the "train to nowhere."

It was the least-used train in the MTA light-rail system until 2003,
when the Gold Line opened and fared even worse.

MTA set up a free shuttle between the Aviation station and LAX, but
it's used by just .3 percent of LAX passengers, officials say. The
shuttle is used primarily by LAX employees, who now number about
54,000 - enough to rival the El Segundo employment area.

As things now stand, the best near-term prospects to connect the
Green Line and the airport would be to build a people-mover between
LAX to the Aviation station - a plan proposed earlier this decade and
then shelved - or a light-rail system from Crenshaw that would
connect with the Green Line at Aviation and would require an LAX
people-mover at Century Boulevard.

Though that project is at the earliest planning stages, it has
dedicated funding and would also provide a more direct route to
downtown Los Angeles than the Green Line offers.

As for the long-term prospects, a coalition of elected leaders and
transit advocates are still working to extend the Green Line to the
airport and beyond - perhaps as far up the coast as Marina del Rey.
Assemblyman Ted Lieu offered a bill this session that would create a
Green Line construction authority, but it was defeated.

Ken Alpern, who co-chairs Friends of the Green Line, says there's
some cause for optimism since LAX officials are cooperating with
politicians and transportation planners. They see an emerging
consensus, and hope that means there will be a second chance to cash
in on a huge missed opportunity.

"The history of this is so sordid," Alpern said. "But the future of
this looks so promising."