I continually find it interesting how this whole L.A. dialogue regarding "permanence" is touted despite the fact that we have a Blue Line which has been running for 19 years and has produced NONE of these said benefits.

Which parts of the Blue Line?

If it's the right of way section between Washington and Rosa Parks, it is tied to what was the predominantly African-American population near the station. This is not unique to L.A., as the situation is the same in Cleveland, St. Louis, Oakland, Miami and other places around the country where rail lines did not bring in any transformative businesses or development to black areas.

Because the issue is fundamentally about race, most people here feel very uncomfortable about even discussing it. If it does, it will likely devolve into "you people ..." factions.

Still, out of the entire line, keep in mind that it is Compton that leveraged the best use out of its station. It has the civic center, which includes a post office and a courthouse that brings in people throughout the South Bay and Long Beach areas; it has the transit center, which includes Greyhound service; it also has the two large shopping centers that provide a place to shop, jobs and much-needed sales tax revenue. Compton, in particular, set aside much of its commercial land for industrial warehouses that take up large swaths of land and provide few jobs.

Long Beach, though, dropped the ball repeatedly with leveraging development. It had seen its seedy Navy-town downtown revive shortly after the Blue Line arrive, yet the city put all of its efforts to first revive Pine Avenue (parallel to the stations) then to the south waterfront (out of reach except for the Passport bus).

Then came the Wrigley "transit oriented development" next to the Willow station. The only thing transit-oriented is the parking garage for commuters; the actual shopping center was designed as a suburban strip mall with a huge moat of parking separating the shops from Willow Street. Also, Blue Line riders have no idea what kinds of stores are in this shopping center, since everything is oriented to the parking lot and train-facing signage is poor.

I can also recall an interview I conducted with a pair of architects who helped establish a CSUDH exhibit on a once-prominent fellow Long Beach architect. They pointed out that Long Beach Boulevard is a diamond in the rough that could be the city's signature street ... if it hadn't been for the city. They told of plans they had for a developer who had wanted to build Baltimore-Washington-style townhouses with ground-floor retail on the used-car hovel between Willow and PCH. The neighborhood ran the developer out of town and the planning board duly poured water on those plans.

There's a very strong anti-gentrification, anti-development movement around the Blue Line in Long Beach, and that's also why the city is loath to leverage development on the Boulevard.

Downtown L.A. had been a late-comer to development, and only Staples Center really factored the Blue Line in to its location. Nothing else did, so anything else cropping up there is coincidental.

I continually find it interesting how this whole L.A. dialogue regarding "permanence" is touted despite the fact that we have a Blue Line which has been running for 19 years and has produced NONE of these said benefits.

The development, the restaurants, the residences locate where there is market demand. And where there is NOT market-demand, the government creates it with development subsidies. Subsidies that can be provided with or without a subway, light rail or trolley, i.e. Downtown Culver City, Santa Monica Promenade, West Hollywood, etc.

It's a terrible distraction from the primary purpose of these lines (transportation), and allows MANY good-natured people to forget or diminish that purpose by focusing on things that are simply unsupported.

At least its not public money. I have a vision of the Feds paying for 300 "downtown streetcars" while ignoring the regional transit links needed to get around metropolitan areas.

The maps show a lot of one-way looping, which, if you've ever had to use a bus on such a route, is annoying. I don't care much for the one-way travel on Broadway, which is currently a 2-way street. (One direction gets dumped on Hill, which is nice, or Main, which is up-and-coming, but neither have much to do with Broadway except paralleling it.)

First: The history lesson to be learned from the past (say, 1920s), is not necessarily that Angelenos chose cars over streetcars. It's that planners, in a city whose very sprawl was created by the far-flung streetcar system, were unable or unwilling to provide a viable alternative to the automobile.

Look at the history clearly, Bruce.

You know why the streetcars disappeared? It wasn't cabalism. There wasn't a grand conspiracy by car companies. It wasn't planners ineptitudes.

The people responsible for L.A.'s fate were the people themselves. L.A. was the western outpost of the people from where pundits now call "Middle America" or "Flyover Country."

These emigres from the prairies and the backwoods of America simply turned L.A. into their own South Africa. You had millions of people essentially believing they were in a small town, and they squinted hard enough to make Southern California look like Peoria or Paducah. They really wanted to stop urbanism, and did so for many years, until urbanism was like a dam that they could no longer contain.

They've now surrendered L.A. to those of us who want to build a thoroughly urban city. They're now the rest of the Sun Belt's problem.

Second: Rail adds a certain "permanence" to any transportation route. Businesses, shops, restaurants and residences locate near stations in much the way they locate at freeway exits. They don't locate (with any permanence) at bus stops or on bus routes because those are too easy to change. Buses follow people; people follow trains.

Third: Let's not discount the tourist. I just spent a long weekend in Portland. Flew in and out, had a great hotel, ate at wonderful restaurants, toured some parks and squares, went shopping - and did it all without a car. Granted, LA is far larger than Portland but tourist staying in downtown LA can already travel to LA Live/Convention Center, Hollywood, Universal City, Pasadena's Old Town, Long Beach and the Queen Mary, on Merorail. A downtown trolley will only add to those options. Baby steps, yes. But it all adds up.

This streetcar if nothing else will be an experiment. If it works well, it will catch on in other places. If it doesn't, it won't.

I do not think this is our highest transit priority by any means. But, let's see what happens and what we can learn from it. If we get Portland streetcar benefits, great. If we get Seattle monorail non-benefits, we'll we've learned something.

I would certainly agree with the idea that the Regional Connector is a much higher priority, not just for downtown, but for the region as a whole.

We need modest affordable flats more than we need yuppie condos, and we need both more than we need streetcars with no speed benefits to replace existing bus lines in downtown LA.

There are so many areas that are held back partially because the transit service there is poor. While I realize that this is kind of a chicken and egg issue (density supports transit, transit supports density), I still feel like, there are areas that would benefit more from the expenditure of transit money, even if that money is being spent by LADOT and not Metro.

One of the failure of DASH is that the people who will benefit the most from it (i.e. office workers in the high rise buildings) find it too intimidating to learn which bus to take and where the bus will take you...

So DASH is responsible for society's lack of common sense?

REALLY?!

So downtown workers cannot ask a DASH driver where the bus goes? Find a map in the schedule racks that are usually well-stocked? Read the back of the buses that have the phone number and the URL to the Web site? Ask one of the purple downtown patrol people? Ask a colleague or a building security guard?

Did any of this even cross the persons' minds?

If reading maps or asking for information has become beyond the capabilities of society, we've got a whole mess of other problems to solve before we even consider streetcars.

I am an "expert transit user" and still I can't figure out how transit downtown works, especially DASH.

Though I don't doubt your point regarding tracks being a better indicator, the DASH problem is easily solved by posting maps on the polls at a DASH bus stops. We have them on most DASH stops in my community, and I see no reason they couldn't be implemented downtown.

It's also about development and redevelopment of an area that needs to be part of recentrification in the days ahead.

Dan,

What you will quickly find when evaluating the whole "street car drive development" meme, is that a lot of government subsidies are involved to encourage development, and the street car is just one of them, and especially in areas that already have extensive transit options, the same subsidies can be used in the same areas, regardless of whether there is an inch of street-car track being laid. And if the question is where in LA are government subsidies least needed to encourage development, Downtown is near the top of the list.

Speaking of subsidies, the $64,000 question is who is going to pay the system's operating costs? Is it going to be the BID (taking necessary money away from police patrols and other issues). Is it going to be the CRA? Or even worse will it be LADOT? Because absent some government subsidy, this is going to be a $5 tourist trolley.

As with everything rail transit, the devil is in the details.

Sooner people begin understanding that 90% of support for rail transit expansion in this city has nothing to do with rail transit and all those other statements spewed by elected officials at groundbreakings, public events, etc. and actually has everything to do with development, the clearer a lot of things become, including why the DTC has limited political support.

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But this isn't just about moving people around. They do not have "duplicate" functions. This is why bus service alone doesn't cut it. It's also about development and redevelopment of an area that needs to be part of recentrification in the days ahead. Somehow "development" became a dirty word over the last few decades because it was done so poorly and with a dependence and reinforcement of an unsustainable car culture.

There is going to be development because Los Angeles County is going to continue to grow in population. It is important to have as much of that development happen in transit friendly ways as possible.

Also, the pools of money for the regional public transit system and this local transit system are two different pools of money, as limited as they both are.

We can already move around downtown easily enough on transit, but there are lots of other trips in the region we can't yet make conveniently on transit.

Additionally, the planned connection with Broadway transit plaza with financial district and Southpark will really help bring Downtown together and eliminate the class (and racial) divide. Buses (DASH or not) will never be able to do that.

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Measure R only partly funds the Regional Connector. In the same way Dana was stating on a another thread that no one on the Authority really has their primary eye on the welfare of the agency as a whole, as opposed to their parochial interests, the Regional Connector doesn't benefit any one region enough to overcome the parochial interests involved to politically move it up the ladder at the moment. However, anyone with common sense concerned about the system as a whole would see it as a top priority.

As for what these two projects are trying to address, mobility isn't the only issue here. The streetcar is seen as a redevelopment tool more than a faster way to travel. It's really the power tool vs. hand tool argument.

There is a anti-downtown and overall anti-L.A. bias in the region. That is why the preferred term is the Regional (not Downtown) Connector. I have said in a similar vein the folks pushing the Gold Line Foothill extebnsion should promote the connector as its existense would provide throughput that should make their projected ridership less anemic.

Early on the streetcar folks promised to not touch transportation monies to fund it. More recently they have whined about not being allowed to do so. I see this mostly for tourism, have doubts about how viable it is given the massive auto traffic in downtown and see it receiving way too much attention/political mojo versus real projects like the Connector. But for those who are enthused, go for it...

They will indirectly all support each other because transit riders will use both.

I would think that all Southern California politicians who's districts contain the Gold, Blue and Expo Lines would get behind the DRC because even if it isn't in their districts, it will improve the rail service that is in their district by reducing transfers downtown. But for some reason it is not considered the high priority it needs to be.