Streetsblog Los Angeles

here we go again.

screw the west side, if they don't want rail, then no rail for them. I will gladly take that rail to be used for the woodland hills to chatsworth extension of the orangeline.

Please, they should be happy they aren't just getting a damn overcrowded bus.

Not just in LA. Arguments to stall at-grade light-rail and metro have stopped projects in Washington DC and Atlanta too, if not elsewhere.

You gotta love the NIMBY's...it's probably a bunch of old people complaining that "the trains are too loud." That also tends to happen when people move into a house that is next to railroad tracks and then complain about trains going by...even though the tracks were there LONG before the houses.

I think there should be some kind of law passed where if someone buys a house next to existing railroad tracks, they automatically forfeit ALL rights to file any complaints. Period.

@ Chris:

It seems this would be very easy to get into law. When I bought my house near Long Beach Airport, I had to sign disclosures that I understood I was near an airport, as well as possibly military ordinance.

Anyway, this ROW was used for both rail transit and freight. Over half of the section between the 10 and the 405, the ROW is deep in a canyon, where there are no at-grade street crossings and where it is far enough away from most houses that people will barely hear anything.

The 10 freeway roars past their neighborhood 24-7: it will mask most train noise.

Anyway, these people live in the middle of America's second-largest city. They can put up with a little city noise.

@Warren -- The whole Westside should not be punished because of a relatively small group of obstructionists. Most people on the Westside want rail transit, and many people need it. When people lump the Westside together into one "rich" mass, it's not right.

The rail lines along Exposition Boulevard in west Los Angeles carried freight during daylight hours only, when they were in service. At night, the noisiest activity on those rails was the manual pushing of empty flatcars, and the voices of the men who were pushing the cars was louder than the sound the cars made. Exposition Boulevard in this area is a quiet residential street, not an industrial thoroughfare. The proposed passenger traffic on that right-of-way is scheduled to run 22 hours a day, on average every two-and-a-half minutes, less than fifty feet from the homes in the area. It is altogether untrue that the opposition is to rail, itself. The opposition is to noisy trains, 22 hours a day, loud horns, bells, and rumbling; it is to blockage of all north-south arteries except for the San Diego Freeway every two and a half minutes, and an EIR that was based on the exclusion of important data. On earlier at-grade installations, already 99 persons have been killed by this sort of train. If that isn't reason enough to call for a review, then there is no sense in making any review whatever of any construction projects that a power-greedy government may choose to impose on the people.

I've lived in this neighborhood for 66 years; I remember the trains that used to run on those tracks. They did not make anything approaching the noise that the proposed project will make, and they did not disrupt traffic most of the day. They ran no more than twice a day, not over five hundred times a day.

@Steve - As any one who has ever taken Brian Taylor's transportation planning class at UCLA can tell you. Transit never relieves traffic, it just allows more people to move around. Any relief is quickly filled up by new drivers. At-grade, below grade. It really doesn't matter. Look at New York, they have the best transit in the world and still, and always will have traffic. Its called urbanism, and congestion is the price of connectivity.

Doing construction work late at night is totally disrespectful of people who live near construction sites. It should only be done under emergency circumstances.

If you want to really effectively piss people off for life, build something next to their house at 4AM. Metro doesn't need any more enemies. This kind of stuff should be common sense.

Do unto others . . .