Streetsblog Los Angeles

Bringing the band back together? Measure R never would have happened without Mike Feuer, standing to the left of Supervisor Yaroslavsky at this Measure R victory party. PhotoMetro Library/Flickr

Yesterday was the first day that state legislators could introduce new legislation and Assemblyman Mike Feuer wasted no time introducing a pair of bills designed to speed up Los Angeles’ rail expansion plans.  In 2008, Feuer introduced and tirelessly lobbied for legislation that allowed the Measure R transit tax to be placed on the ballot.

Feuer’s first transit speed-up bill, A.B. 1446, would allow L.A. County voters to vote on an extension to the Measure R transit tax which is slated to expire in 27 years.  This extension would enable Metro to bond against future Measure R proceeds and build those transit projects much sooner than originally contemplated, without relying on federal or state funding.

“If you like Measure R, you’re going to love Measure R plus,” says Move L.A. president Denny Zane in a phone interview.   Move L.A. led a coalition of transit backers, unions and other groups to support the Measure R transit sales tax in 2008 and rail planning acceleration for the last three and  half years.

In 2008, rail expansion advocates believed they had the perfect storm at the voting booth to earn the two-thirds support needed to pass a tax increase.  The same two-thirds super majority would be needed to extend the tax this year, but it remains to be seen if the same perfect storm exists.  In addition to the uncertainty concerning whether or note President Obama will turn out the same number of younger and transit-savvy voters that Senator Obama did is one factor.  The increasing unpopularity of High Speed Rail, which could also be on the ballot in some form, could also work against what one transit advocate termed “another train proposal.”

But Zane remains optimistic.  ”Tax extensions generally fare better at the ballot box than tax increases,” he notes.  ”In the past couple of years similar extensions have passed in Orange County, Riverside County and San Bernadino County and those areas aren’t as transit friendly as Los Angeles County.” Read more…

Century City Mailer for Web

The Beverly Hills newspaper of record, the esteemed Beverly Hills Courier, has been doing its best to rile the residents of the 90210 against the Westside Subway route that would take the Subway under Beverly Hills High School The paper all but declared the Mayor a traitor to the city for trying to negotiate with Metro. More recently, the paper has slandered the professors and other experts that weighed in on the geotechnical issues facing the subway.

But today, the paper has a big scoop, Metro mailed some fact sheets to people living near the tunnel area. From the Courier:

The Courier has learned that the Metropolitan Transit Authority will mail to each resident of Beverly Hills a four-page color brochure summarizing its case for a tunnel under Beverly Hills High School for its Westside Subway Extension. The Courier obtained an advance copy.

Must have been some cracker-jack journalism involved to discover that Metro had done a major mailing the day before. Or is it two days before? It’s hard to tell when a story is posted on “Thursday, November 18.”

The nefarious piece of Pravda propaganda is readily available on Metro’s Westside Subway website, but to make it really easy to find we’ve also embedded it above.

The pamphlet itself is pretty bland. It provides a summary of the two technical reports presented last month to the Planning & Programming Committee, notes that copies of the technical reports have been placed in the Beverly Hills and Westwood public libraries and also informs the public where they can find the reports and other information online.

This is the 13th fact sheet for this project since environmental planning began in 2007 and the 4th fact sheet produced during the current Final EIS/EIR phase. It is, however, the only fact sheet that covers a specific geographic portion of the alignment. Due to the interest in the results of the technical studies regarding the findings, Metro chose to complete this mailing in the impacted area to get their version of the story in the news.

Senators in Appropriations have to ask, Who rides the train cross-country anymore? Photo: Pignouf

The idyllic cross-country train trips that many Americans still take could get derailed by today’s “slash and burn” federal budget policies. Meanwhile, fears for the safety of rail passengers in the post-bin Laden era are drumming up political support for costly security measures and raising, once again, questions about why the federal government funds rail routes without any promise of profitability.

At this morning’s Senate Appropriations hearing on budget requests for the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak, the three senators in attendance were unified in their support for funding rail transportation. They’re working on the funding request for the FRA for 2012, not the rail piece of the overall transportation reauthorization. Still, with huge disagreements over spending levels in Congress still raging and a showdown looming over cuts as a quid-pro-quo for raising the debt ceiling, next year’s funding is a significant question.

So the three senators present wanted to know how they could be expected to defend rail funding without more transparency in the budget allocation process. They also asked pointed questions about what the administrators of the FRA and Amtrak were doing to keep riders safe from the terrorist attacks threatened by Al-Qaeda.

The FRA has taken on a greater role in the allocation of funding for rail projects over the last several years and senators appeared frustrated over a lack of clear information as to where the funding would come from. Indeed, some security projects appear in the FY2012 budget request but the FRA is also requesting a USDOT loan to for the same thing.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) was quick to commend FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo for his efforts, but called him out for not improving transparency about how, when, where and why projects are funded. “I support investments,” she made clear. “Now is the time to address critics head on. We must communicate with the people.”

Murray and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) presented a grim future for surface transportation if funding does not keep up pace with booming population growth. The only other senator to speak, ranking Republican Susan Collins of Maine, agreed and reminded her colleagues that the ambitious national rail plan proposed by the FRA, including high-speed rail, has yet to be followed up with any cost estimates, for construction or operations.

Szabo, for his part, could only promise that studies to be released within “the next couple of months” would present the “broader business case” for funding both high-speed rail and individual projects across the country. Szabo, the first union railman to hold his position, was proud of what his agency was doing to keep hazardous freight secure – but admitted that there are still unimplemented security measures that date back to 9/11. He pointed out that for every $50 spent on aviation security, only $1 went to surface transportation.

Read more…

Via our friends at Culver City Living, comes this 97-year-old training film for Pacific Electric rail car conductors.  The eight minute video isn’t just a fun piece of transit history, it also provides some old views of Culver City.

The sequence from 1:00 to 1:35 was filmed at the corner of Venice and Sepulveda. Look all those trees!

And here I thought the most interesting part of that intersection was that it was home to a Kwik-E-Mart.

A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

A government shutdown could empty out the D.C. metro system. Photo: Examiner

Just a month ago, AASHTO sounded the warning that the transportation sector could lose up to $100 million a day in case of a shutdown. However, Congress’s extension of SAFETEA-LU through the end of the fiscal year (September 30) has put their minds at ease. Now, AASHTO spokesperson Tony Dorsey says spending for federal highway programs will continue unabated, despite a shutdown. “At this point,” Dorsey said, “we’re not anticipating any issues.” Still, he said, they’re hoping that “should there be a shutdown, it will be a very, very short one.”

But that’s not the whole story. According to a detailed DOT shutdown plan, the vast majority of the Federal Transit Administration would shut down, keeping only 54 out of 575 positions working. Already-awarded stimulus grants would continue to receive oversight and the Lower Manhattan Recovery Office would continue to function. The $270 million that the FTA normally remits to transit agencies every week would cease.

Jeff Rosenberg, government affairs director for the Amalgamated Transit Union, says the SAFETEA-LU extension only continues government’s authority to pay for transportation programs. But “if the FTA isn’t authorized to open the door,” he says, those payments will cease. That could be especially damaging for smaller metros that receive operating assistance, not just capital funds, from the feds. However, he’s hopeful that a potential shutdown would only last a couple of days and would just be “a blip on the screen.”

What else can you expect to happen if the government does shut down as of midnight tonight?

• At least 800,000 federal employees would be furloughed immediately. That would cause a massive drop in transit ridership, especially here in D.C., where Metro is predicting a five to 20 percent drop in case of a shutdown. Michael Perkins of Greater Greater Washington estimates that this would result in a loss for Metro of a quarter million dollars a day.
• Amtrak’s federal subsidies – up in the air for months now anyway as Congress debates whether to eliminate them, reduce them, or maintain them – will stop. However, Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman recently assured employees that the rail operator can keep going on ticket revenue alone in the short term.
• The Federal Highway Administration will stay open, with no positions furloughed, according to the DOT shutdown plan. The FHWA is funded with contract authority and has enough funds available to operate in that way for about a month.

Read more…

USDOT Deputy Secretary John Porcari kicked off the Transportation Equity Network’s “One Nation, Indivisible” conference yesterday with a call to think long-term. By 2050, he said, we can expect the U.S. population to grow by 100 million people, and nearly all of them will live in large urban centers. Problems like crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transit systems, grinding traffic and pollution will be much worse then if we don’t start acting today.

“Are we doing right by the next generation?” Porcari asked. “We know we’re not.”

Echoing President Obama’s “winning the future” rhetoric, Porcari framed the administration’s push for a six-year, $550 billion transportation bill as a potential watershed that can reform a transportation system which has become increasingly burdensome for lower income Americans. “If you make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year,” he said, “odds are that transportation is your number one household expense, higher than housing.”

With the GOP-controlled House making noise about a much smaller reauthorization bill than the one Obama has proposed, better days for affordable transportation are not here yet, nor are they necessarily around the corner. Transit agencies have already been through a couple of years of widespread service cuts and fare increases. The brunt of these cuts have been felt by people of color — who make up at least 60 percent of public transit ridership.

So in addition to not doing right by the next generation, our current policies are not doing right by today’s generation.

Read more…

Bill Lind is a big man. The director of the Center for Public Transportation at American Conservative stands well over six feet tall, and when he really gets going, he seems to loom even larger. Maybe that’s why he hates buses so much. “Those seats designed for garden gnomes,” he said.

Gabe Roth, left, and Bill Lind battle out the bus vs. rail question at yesterday's roundtable. Photo courtesy of the Mobility Choice Coalition

A roundtable discussion yesterday sponsored by the Mobility Choice Coalition on ways to make public transportation align with principles of fiscal conservatism quickly morphed into an all-out brawl over buses vs. rail.

Lind is a rail guy. “Most Americans will not ride a bus if they can drive,” he said. “Buses carry primarily transit dependents.”

When others tried to “defend the honor” of buses, Lind stepped up his rhetoric, first declaring, “buses have no honor!” and then this stunner: “Live like a roach, ride a motorcoach.”

That was more than enough to raise the hackles of Daniel Hoff: “The American Bus Association represents those roaches.” He said bus riders in the Northeast Corridor make over $60,000 a year. And modern intercity bus service is clean and comfortable and has wi-fi.

Lind acknowledges that it’s the urban transit buses, not the intercity coaches, that he’s calling “rolling torture racks.” But still, he says, middle class people want to ride trains and streetcars, not buses. “Basic fact of life,” Lind said. “You can call it rational or irrational – it’s a mixture of both – but it’s a basic fact of life.” He said the user experience of buses just isn’t pleasurable enough to encourage people to leave their cars at home.

He chalks it up to “the stink factor.”

Read more…

(I noticed an uptick in press discussions about “density and transit” and “density and West Hollywood.”  To respond to these articles, many of which are predicting doom for anyone foolish enough to try and densify their cities, I asked Dan Wentzel, a transit advocate who resides in West Hollywood, to take take a turn at the Streetsblog helm.  His article is below.  For more Wentzel, you can pretty much read any transit-related story’s comment thread here on Streetsblog.  Or check out his personal blog at Ride the Pink Line. – DN)

To see the full image, click here.

This above map was an attachment to an initial review of connecting the West Hollywood Transit Corridor to the Crenshaw/LAX Transit Corridor via San Vicente, and possibly going south all the way to Long Beach (or San Pedro). The next step would be a full study of this corridor, of which the Santa Monica Blvd./Beverly Center portion has already been studied as part of the Westside Subway extension project. Metro has stated that while it did not recommend the West Hollywood corridor as part of the Westside Subway Extension project at this time, that the West Hollywood corridor has high potential as a transit corridor and a light-rail subway might be more competitive for federal funding, as reported here.

West Hollywood voted for Measure R more than any other city in Los Angeles and this is a very pro-transit area with lots of “YIMBYs”.

While the map shows both a La Brea alignment and this Santa Monica / San Vicente alignment, it is really a no brainer. The La Brea alignment would miss all the ridership generators further west, and the San Vicente / Santa Monica alignment would make it easier to get to the Beverly Center, Cedar Sinai, the City of West Hollywood, the Grove/Farmer’s Market and even the Sunset Strip.

Interestingly enough, there have been a couple of recent blog posts bashing the City of West Hollywood over development projects approved in expectation of an eventual subway through the city. Read more…

If Downtowners want to see a Regional Connector Station at 5th and Flower, they're going to have to find the money themselves. Photo:Clovis Bouhier/PBase

Here’s a quick rundown of the major votes by today’s Metro Board. Each of these five motions were discussed at Streetsblog over the last couple of weeks, and links to those stories can be found at the end of each summary.  Streetsblog will have links to all news reports on today’s meeting tomorrow.

Westside Subway Locally Preferred Alternative/Environmental Studies
As expected, the Metro Board of Directors unanimously voted to approve the Westside Subway “Locally Preferred Alternative” as the 9 1/2-mile route to the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Brentwood from the current end of the Purple Line at Wilshire/Western in Koreatown.  Despite over an hour of public comment from the Beverly Hills’ NUMBY’s, there was no decision made on whether the subway should have a stop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City or Constellation Avenue.

Yaroslavsky’s motion, which seemed to place the concerns of Beverly Hills regarding the Constellation Avenue/Santa Monica Boulevard debate ahead of those of other communities, was amended by the author to urge the staff to provide a detailed account of the impacts of both alternatives through the Westside.  This would have happened regardless under the Final Environmental Impact Statement that the Board approved funding for today.  For background on this motion, read yesterday’s Streetsblog story or an update on today’s vote from LA_Now.

Regional Connector Locally Preferred Alternative/Environmental Studies
The Metro Board also approved the “Locally Preferred Alternative” and funding for the environmental studies needed for the Regional Connector.  The debate was dominated by Little Tokyo business groups concerned that “cut and cover” subway construction would disrupt the community and cost them business. Downtown interests and LA City Councilwoman Jan Perry also expressed concerns about the exclusion of the 5th and Flower stop from the LPA.  The Board narrowly voted to exclude the 5th and Flower for now, but left the door open to include it in the environmental studies, if local businesses raise the roughly $2 million needed for that part of the study.  For more background, read this story at Streetsblog or an update on today’s vote from Blog Downtown.

“BikeWood” Hub at Hollywood and Vine Read more…

Note: If you choose to share your thoughts at the bottom of this article, I would also urge you to “make it count” and put it on the official public record by sending your comments directly to Metro by October 18^th 2010.  Instructions on how to comment can be found at the end of the article.

Relishing the fact that evening ocean breezes were taking back the air from the day’s stagnant heat, a packed audience filed into the downtown Santa Monica Public Library auditorium on Wednesday night to review the status of the planned Westside subway extension and to make official public comments on it.

Just two days ago, the prevailing aim of comments at Metro’s subway hearing in Beverly Hills was to slam a proposed route that would tunnel under a residential area, which would occur if a station were built in the heart of Century City at Constellation Boulevard.  By contrast, at Wednesday’s hearing each person who commented on the proposed Century City station supported locating it at Constellation Blvd., citing that location’s improved access to jobs and entertainment, as well as the higher projected ridership.

More broadly, the comments in favor of the Westside subway extension advocated building as much subway west of the 405 Freeway as soon as possible.  Under the current schedule, an extension of the subway would only reach Westwood or the VA in the next 30 years (assuming no 30/10 project acceleration).

Alignment 5. Alignment 3 is the same thing for Santa Monica residents, but loses the spur through West Hollywood.

Undeterred, several speakers urged Metro to push forward on subway Build Alternatives 3 and 5 (PDF: EIR Executive Summary, pp. 15-21).  Both of these would have the Purple Line continue down Wilshire from Westwood and terminate in downtown Santa Monica at 4^th Street.  Although Metro currently lacks the funding to build the line past a Westwood or VA station, adding a “segment to the sea” would boost ridership on the whole extension by 28 percent and likely add an four more stations.

In contrast to those who commented on how they want the subway to be built, six speakers from the Bus Riders Union voiced strong support for the two non-subway alternatives for transit on the Westside, the “no-build” and “Transportation Systems Management” options.  The former is literally what it sounds like, and the latter (TSM) entails increasing the frequency of existing bus service on the Wilshire Corridor. Read more…