For one, they have their project and aren’t about to tolerate more years of disruption doing over the Orange Line. Besides, it’ll be a very costly do-over. You’d be adding nearly a billion dollars on top of the $400 million or so to build the existing Orange Line. It’s an expensive remodel.

Second, the San Gabriel Valley’s advocacy for the Foothill Gold Line extension was primarly about MIS irredentism. They wanted money, and wanted a rail line to show for it. They don’t care about the Gold Line per se, and if they did, the ridership figures had better be giving the region’s leaders some sleepless nights.

If the SGV can advocate for the Foothill extension of the Gold Line, there is no parallel movement I’ve seen advocating for the Orange Line to be upgraded to light rail.

Has any SFV State Senator or Assemblymember attempted repeal of the Robbins bill?

Those safety barriers would also probably reduce noise on rail platforms in the middle of highways (i.e. most of the Green Line and the last few stations on the Gold Line).

I wonder how much they would cost.

First of all, the orange line was originally supposed to be a rail line, but the NIMBY’s in that part of the valley opposed any sort of rail other than deep-bore subway.

The NIMBYs opposed the right of way being reactivated. They didn’t want a subway, either.

Former State Sen. Alan Robbins drafted a bill that said the right of way in North Hollywood could not have any rail running at the surface and mandated a subway. This was not done to reinforce a community concern.

It was death by equivocation. The Robbins bill specified subway deliberately to obliterate any chance of rail being extended as a subway because it would not meet any state or federal cost-effectiveness metric.

And why did the Orange Line end up being a busway instead of light rail? Zev Yaroslavsky. He went on a study tour of Curitiba, Brazil, and came back with a jones for busways. He came close to making every future Metro rail project a busway. He and Yvonne Burke wanted the Expo Line to be a busway because it would cost less in construction.

To Zev’s credit, though, he did a lot of the heavy lifting to get the Orange Line built. If we had held out for light rail, Zev would have likely sat on his hands or fought the project. He did advocate for a Curitiba-style busway and worked hard on the financing and political ends to get it built. It opened in 2005, and became a success. It also seemed to calm him down.

But as you said, David, Metro said the Orange Line has already hit its capacity at a level that would be considered underutilized for light rail. Maybe Zev knows that for the kind of ridership L.A. is expecting, busways would struggle under the burden.

The article mentions that this is the practice.

“Kent Zelas, who works in the readers representative’s office at The Times, was on a northbound train leaving the Del Amo Station on Wednesday and saw Cuthbertson fall onto the tracks.

“What I saw him do is put his cane in that empty space and he thought it was a doorway and he walked into it,” Zelas said. “What he didn’t do was tap the bottom of that space to make sure there was a floor to walk into. He just assumed it was a door.””

If I were blind and didn’t have a cane I would probably slide my foot off the platform and if I didn’t immediately feel the floor of the train, I’d not step forward.

Not that those barriers aren’t nice to have, though.

Also, not everyone who gets killed by a train is a “moron”. That’s a sweeping and inaccurate generalization. For example:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/in-wake-of-dead.html?cid=147376389

A Train does not make it-self dangerous. It’s the morons that keep ignoring the basic principles of common sense. If people would just obey the law and not cross, walk, or be on the rail tracks, the majority of the accidents/deaths would not happen. And the reason the rail lines run through minority neighborhoods is because these are the areas were people need public transportation, so most likely they are not going to oppose the line built though their neighborhood.
Plus, South Central and South LA is the same area. The name was changed due to the negativity that has been portrayed over time by the name South Central.
And the reason white wealthier people fight the MTA is because they are better educated and have the resources to do so, not because of race. Plus, the MTA has gone through a middle class white/Jewish neighborhood; the transit line is the Orange Line. Have you seen the houses on Chandler blvd?

I SUPPORT the underground option for the Regional Connector.

It’s frankly somewhat annoying to me when people presume to speak for the entire Japanese American community (and the community is a many “splintered” thing) on issues like these.

I do believe that Little Tokyo deserves to be preserved as a Japanese American ethnic community. In this sense, the Little Tokyo fight is going to be different from other NIMBY fights because the JA community is not fighting for some abstract concept such as “property values”.

That said, it is unfortunate that so many of my fellow JAs seem to be “fighting the last war.” Weller Court isn’t going to go away, and neither is Parker Center or the new apartments or the Koreans who now own Little Tokyo Shopping Center (it was ugly to begin with).

I knew when I first saw the wye that there was going to be trouble, because radical new ideas do take time to get used to. But I really don’t see what the big deal is about the Office Depot block. I think the design looks awesome, considering the limitations that the MTA had to work with – an existing light rail line, plus a proposed, but still quite vague, huge new development at the corner.

The MTA needs to address the local concerns. Construction is messy. But that connector is needed, and I think a lot of Japanese Americans will accept that IF Metro handles the situation well.

I hope that when the Eastside line opens, that transit fans will come to Little Tokyo, because that would send a positive message as well.

Technically it’s light rail in a tunnel. Subway usually means heavy rail, whether it’s underground or not. I don’t care though, it’s just semantics.

Also, how will high speed rail affect Little Tokyo?

#1
Don’t forget that the Regional Connector will be a downtown subway… connecting the Blue to the Gold Line to Pasadena and the Expo to the Gold Line to East LA.

#2
By the way, I don’t the issue in Little Tokyo. It seems trumped up. Yes, probably the whole block bounded by Alameda, 2nd, 1st and Central will get raised to construct a portal and provide a construction area of sufficient size…. HOWEVER, lots of space woudl appear avaialble for after construction to replace all the businesses and/or create an awesome park.

I have always had a sensitivity to Japanese-American’s that were placed in internment camps and lost their buisines and/or homes during WWII. Perhaps some type of monument recognizing their sacrifice would be appropriate?

#3
There is another project on the horizon that may affect Little Tokyo. However, it is not a Metro project. It is High Speed Rail.

@Matt: The most recent issue I remember was that the gold line had yellow barriers on the platforms that would help prevent people from accidentally falling in between the rail cars, while the blue line did not have those barriers until recently. This was highlighted by a case last spring (I think) where a blind man fell between the blue line cars (he thought the gap in front of him was an open train door), and was killed when the train started moving. The Bus Bench covered the incident and it was a while before the blue line had the barriers, though the gold line had had them for quite a while before.

Browne, not sure what you are getting at on the Gold Line being built with higher safety standards than Expo. I have never seen or heard any reference to that in the past. In fact, Fix Expo’s chief complaint was that it wanted to have Expo go underground, something the Gold Line does not do.

Is this going to be like that video where you recorded the Gold Line through Highland Park on Marmion Way and had to step out onto the street in order to get a good shot at the lack of barriers and the raised curb? I wonder if the irony was lost on anybody. You’re worried about the train but getting hit by a car didn’t seem to phase you.