A fight over the Expo Line, Part 3

I posted two long items last week about the controversy surrounding at-grade crossings on the first phase of the Expo Line, the light rail line under construction between downtown Los Angeles and Culver City. (Click here for Part 1, and here for Part 2).

Today I want to look ahead a bit to the second phase of the project, which is planned to extend the line from Culver City to downtown Santa Monica by the middle of the next decade. If completed, it would be the first modern rail line to travel the entirety of the Westside to downtown L.A., although much of the route is south of the 10 freeway and wouldn’t stop near job centers such as Century City and Beverly Hills.

The line is still in the planning stages, but it is also submerged in controversy over two significant items:

1. The route: Will it follow the old rail right of way that the MTA purchased years ago and goes through Cheviot Hills and other neighborhoods near the Westside Pavilion shopping mall? Or, instead, will it detour around Cheviot Hills and detour on Venice and Sepulveda boulevards before rejoining the rail right of way? (See above map.)

2.) How will it cross busy streets on the far Westside? Will there be gated crossings that tie up traffic? Or will it tunnel under or bridge over some streets?

Click below to keep reading...

The Expo Line Construction Authority won’t announce its preference for a route until later this year. As for the crossings, the Authority is scheduled to announce its intentions at a community meeting tonight at the Vista del Mar Child and Family Services Gymnasium (3200 Motor Ave. in Los Angeles). Click here for a map.

Two groups have emerged that are watching both of the decisions closely: Light Rail for Cheviot and Neighbors for Smart Rail.

Light Rail for Cheviot is backing use of the existing rail right of way. The group envisions a rejuvenated and park-like rail corridor that serves the neighborhood. Karen Leonard, who is heading the group, said that she believes most people in the area want the rail line. She’s taking a wait-and-see approach as to the issue of how the Expo Line would cross busy streets, but said that she’s comfortable with most at-grade crossings.

That stance puts her in direct opposition to Neighbors for Smart Rail, a group that is being supported by several homeowners associations on the Westside, including the Cheviot Hills Homeowners Assn. The rail line cuts through Cheviot Hills mostly in a trench (see photo below).

Neighbors for Smart Rail has two main arguments.

The first is that the existing right of way goes through low-density neighborhoods where ridership will be poor. The group said that putting the line on Venice and Sepulveda is a better bet, because there are more people and businesses that would be near the train –- thus, it would have more riders. The group acknowledges such a detour may slow the line down on its way to and from Santa Monica, but says the delay would likely only be a few minutes.

The group’s other big issue is with crossings. It believes that at-grade crossings and frequent trains spell big traffic trouble on north-south streets such as Overland, Westwood and Sepulveda. All three carry heavy commuter traffic to and from the Santa Monica Freeway from big job centers such as UCLA and Westwood, Century City and the rest of West Los Angeles.

“They are going to stop north-south traffic completely,” said Terri Tippit, president of Neighbors for Smart Rail. “We said either build it right the first time or don’t build it. If they build it at grade, we’re going to have a nightmare here to move the traffic.” (*An earlier version of this post misspelled Tippit's name throughout as Tippet).

Tippit points out that the rail line passes next to an elementary school on Overland and that a station at Westwood Boulevard would include a parking lot that backs up to people’s homes. Tippit also said the Authority has indicated it may run shuttles from some stations to nearby Fox studios, which she thinks would also further complicate traffic.

But the heart of my interview with Tippit concerned the issue of NIMBYism. She and other members of the group have long complained about traffic; some other members of Neighbors for Smart Rail last summer waged a recall campaign against Los Angeles Councilman Jack Weiss, alleging his approvals of developments is making traffic worse. (They failed to gather enough signatures to trigger an election.)

Some of the same members of the group more recently supported one of two lawsuits against Weiss' and Mayor Antonio Villaraioga’s plan to convert Olympic and Pico boulevards to streets that are quasi-one-way. They said the plan would speed commuter traffic to and from the Westside, while opponents -- and the opposition was considerable -- said it would result in lost parking for businesses and likely tie up traffic worse than it already is. It's also worth noting that Weiss and Villaraigosa support use of the existing right of way for the Expo Line.

I suggested to Tippit that fighting a rail line in their own backyard certainly makes them appear to be NIMBYs, considering their history of complaining about traffic. At the least it raises the appearance of hypocrisy, if you believe the train may provide an alternative to sitting in traffic.

Tippit was having none of it.

“We’re not NIMBYs,” she said. “We’re the ones that end up working to make the project a better project. We’re the ones that work to get it right the first time -- maybe that gets longer and people get impatient, but in order to get it right the first time, it takes time.”

“They really need to build it right the first time,” Tippit added and said there was a good incentive to do so: such rail lines cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “It’s not that we’re against transit. No one likes sitting in a car. But if you’re going to build it, build it right. Learn from mistakes on the Gold Line. It’s almost as if these people are arrogant –- we’ll just build it anyway.”

Leonard, of Light Rail for Cheviot, sees things differently.

"I think for one thing a lot of people against it fought it 20 or 30 years ago, and they see it as an intrusion in a bucolic neighborhood," Leonard said. "Also they’re worried about the school and about property values. They’re just afraid. I think some people are afraid of other parts of the city coming on down [here]. One fellow stood up in the meeting and said something about his daughters being at home in the daytime. They’ve invoked the fear of crime."

The most interesting twist is that Tippit’s group is involved in the crossing gate disputes on the first phase of the project. The Authority is seeking approval from the state Public Utilities Commission to build the line at-grade next to two schools in South Los Angeles. Tippit said that her group is an "interested party" in the proceedings before the PUC and that her group also helped another group – the Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Line – get an attorney to fight for grade-separated crossings.

I told her that some people within the MTA privately believe that her group is trying to stop the train in its tracks in South Los Angeles, by getting the PUC to require expensive grade-separated crossings that would cost millions of dollars -- dollars the MTA doesn't have.

Tippit said that's not true. The group, she said, wants to make sure the right precedents are set on Phase 1 of the project so that crossings are properly built on Phase 2, should the existing right of way be used for the second phase.

The PUC is scheduled to make a decision on the Phase 1 crossings in November. The PUC will also have to eventually approve all the crossings on a second phase of the Expo, assuming it ever gets funding and construction goes forward.

It's not exactly thrilling stuff, but if you've ever wondered how decisions are made about where light rail goes and how it's built, the answer is that it's often done years ahead of time -- and is the result of discussions and arguments like the one detailed above.

What do you think about the Expo Line and where it should go? Leave a comment below.

--Steve Hymon

Map: Expo Line Construction Authority

Photo: Steve Hymon / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Morgan Wick]

The Expo isn't stopping near Century City and Beverly Hills, and its closest point to Westwood is near Pico, because it was always a stopgap replacement for the Subway to the Sea. All three of those places would be served by the Purple Line, which would make the Expo quite a bit redundant, especially west of the 405. Even following the Expo ROW through Cheviot Hills, the Expo would not be as direct a route between Santa Monica and Downtown as the Purple Line.

One big plus to Venice/Sepulveda is that it reduces the cost for a future extention down Venice to the beach, as well as a future light rail line down the 405 corridor, which I know a lot of people support. Both of those are projects that might get built regardless of how Expo gets built. It also serves "job centers" (as in, part of Culver City) better than the Expo ROW that serves a neighborhood that would practically need to be torn up to support the high density that makes transit work. That means the track wouldn't become obsolete the instant the Purple Line opened.

Of course that's my opinion, I could be wrong.

[Darrell Clarke]

"wouldn’t stop near job centers such as Century City and Beverly Hills"

See http://friends4expo.org/expo.htm for some major job centers in West LA and Santa Monica that the Expo Line phase 2 goes right to. In addition, Westwood and Century City will have direct bus connections. The Expo Line will finally provide an alternative to horrible east-west traffic to Westside jobs.

[The Real Zajac]

I'm of the opinion that trains should go down both Venice and the Expo to Santa Monica.

[Hallett Newman]

BLOG said: "If completed, it would be the first modern rail line to travel the entirety of the Westside to downtown L.A., although much of the route is south of the 10 freeway and wouldn’t stop near job centers such as Century City and Beverly Hills."

"won't stop near jobcenters"? Do you see a problem with pouring billions of dollars in to a light rail system that won't stop near job centers? If the people who are touting, planing, and building a light rail systen and have any expectation of people using it, it NEEDS to go from where people live and sleep to where people work.

[Anthony for Expo and more light rail across LA!]

Thank goodness for posters like Bob. As a current Culver City resident, I too can't wait for the Expo Line to open. It has been a dream of mine for some time to be able to ride by train to the beach.

I don't understand the stance of the Cheviot Hills Homeowners against the Expo Line. The right of way is OWNED by the MTA. It's their property, they should get to use it! I would understand their stance far more if the Expo line was getting thrown in the middle of their neighborhood with no previous rail or right-of-way, but that's not the case. If residents were fine with the rail before, they should be fine with it now. For the newcomers, the MTA bought that land so long ago they should have seen this coming.

Why don't they just admit what we all know, and not hide behind these "facts" of "traffic blockage" and "at-grade danger": They simply don't want a train running through their neighborhood, especially one in which creates some noise and brings non-residents. Instead, the people living in Cheviot Hills that already own more than most of us (since they live there) are willing to congest an area further south they don't have to deal with and cost us (the tax payers with less money) more for their minor inconvenience.

And by the way, how does a train that goes through an intersection/road within 30 seconds slow down a road any more than the many signals they already feature? Last time I checked most of Cheviot's major roads are already crawling and adding a 30 second intermission between brake slamming isn't much to complain about except some brake dust.

[karen leonard]

Light Rail for Cheviot is on record preferring grade separation at Overland and Exposition, and we find out tonight what the Construction Authority is proposing for Overland and the remaining grade crossings of phase 2 (Westwood, Barrington,Centinela, Sepulveda, and Charnock) and how the Authority is justifying those proposals. We have proposed a project that would make Overland to Westwood and beyond a below-ground transit parkway that would also filter and clean water (the area is a drainage one), and possibly other state and federal funds could help fund that.

We certainly want the best line possible and are concerned about several of the proposals already put forward, for example the parking lot with access only from Overland across from the school there. But we recognize this is a light rail system, not a subway, and we need it as soon as possible. We await the proposals tonight and then the EIR/EIS in the fall so that we can decide for what mitigations we will work, and we will work hard for them.

Karen Leonard, co-chair of Light Rail for Cheviot

[Darrell Clarke]

Details of both potential phase 2 routes are illustrated at http://friends4expo.org/phase2.htm .

[Bob Zwolinski]

Steve, thank you for posting Chapter III of your now famous “Expo” blogs.
I’m sure there will be plenty of comments on this one.
Being a Santa Monica homeowner, living within 2 blocks of a proposed station, I can’t wait for this segment to become operational! It will be great to leave my cars at home and hop on the train!
I can’t imagine the line doing the “dog-leg” through West L.A down Sepulveda & Venice. There is no room in either boulevard to accommodate a train. If built, it would add 15 minutes to the route, making it very unattractive for Westside commuters.
I hope that the line will follow the original right-of-way with grade separations [in a cut or as an aerial structure] at both Overland and Westwood Boulevards.
I’m sure that the cars-per-hour on Overland is double the amount to necessitate grade separation there.
Having been born and raised in Chicago, where at-grade urban and suburban rail lines abound, I don’t get what the big deal is. If you see the lights flashing and the semaphores go down, you stop for 15 to 20 seconds to let the train go by. No big deal.
Let’s get this line built ASAP on the original PE ROW. It worked 60 years ago. It will work again!