Westside Subway

The first of several major issue scheduled to be addressed by the Metro Board of Directors was the approval of the environmental documents for the Westside Subway.  After the Beverly Hills City Council formerly requested a hearing earlier this week, Metro staff recommended that the Board split approval for the Subway into two parts so that part could be approved today and part could be approved after another hearing was held.  The first part would cover the extension from the current Wilshire/Western stop to Wilshire/La Cienega.  The route approved would be 3.9 miles of the 8.6 mile route that was proposed by Metro staff.

(Update, Dave Sotero, a Metro spokesperson responds to the story via email: The Beverly Hills hearing request was received. The Westside Subway Extension Project is still on the board’s agenda for Thursday. The Board of Directors will discuss the hearing request at that time.) It was a good news/bad news sort of weekend for Metro and backers of the Westside Subway thanks to the Los Angeles Times and the Beverly Hills City Council.

On Friday night, I received two emails as an online subscriber to the Beverly Hills Courier concerning the Westside Subway.  The first was a screed by the paper's publisher urging Beverly Hills City Council members to vote for a proposal for the city to officially rescind its support for the subway project altogether.  The second was far more interesting.   The Courier announced that Metro "will now consider an elevated subway station at Santa Monica Boulevard and Century Park East."

Last week, battle lines were drawn between the City of Beverly Hills, the Beverly Hills Unified School District and Metro over the location and routing of the Westside Subway. While Metro held a series of public meetings to show the results of their environmental studies, the last of the three hearings turned into a sort of rally against the project in Beverly Hills. For those scoring at home, Streetsblog has the highlights from last week.

"This is a project Los Angeles has been talking about for fifty years," Jody Litvak, Metro.

During yesterday's Metro Board Meeting, CEO Art Leahy reported that the Beverly Hills Unified School District would not allow Metro's experts to take advantage of the ongoing trenching studies going on at Beverly Hills High School, which are scheduled to end this weekend, without paying a cool $500,000 to the School District.  The trenching process is part of a study being conducted on behalf of the school district to respond to an earlier geotechnical study by a team of experts paid for by Metro that found that the safest place to run the Westside Subway was under a portion of the Beverly Hills High School Property.

While Metro has a dozen transit projects under construction or in the works, two have always stood out for the attention they attract.  The Westside Subway has always been the jewel of the transit agency's plans, capturing the imagination of the transit starved city.  But, it was the Regional Connector, the Downtown light rail project that will unite them all that has been viewed by many as the most important of these projects.

(Note, the Beverly Hills Courier points out that they had the story first on Thursday evening despite my call that Patch broke the news. You can read their coverage, here. - DN)