L.A., Long Ruled by Cars, Becoming a Transit Leader

Estimated to cost a whopping $350 million per mile, the 13-mile subway, named the Purple Line, was long considered impossible. In 1985, a building blew up on Wilshire Boulevard after subway tunneling hit a methane pocket. That prompted Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) to write legislation banning the use of federal funds for subway construction in a 400-square-block area -- a move that many here saw as a ploy by Waxman's constituents on the richer, whiter Westside to stop mass transit from bringing the poor into their part of town.

But now, forced by gridlock, Waxman and his well-heeled constituents have dropped their opposition, and Congress is expected to change the law next year.

Villaraigosa said he plans to lobby Congress aggressively for federal funds to bankroll his dream. "We want to rethink what the city looks like," he said, "to focus on a new urbanism that makes transit-oriented development and mixed-use development the future of L.A."

Lucille Rawls, 50, a data-entry technician, is a believer in the mayor's vision. She's been riding Los Angeles's buses for years and is also a fan of the short subway line. "It's funny," she said after spending 90 minutes to go nine miles downtown. "I have some rich friends, and none of them know about the improving system. But my poor friends can't do without it."

For many years, it did not seem that Los Angeles could ever build a mass transit system. From 1948 to 1980, at least six plans including some form of rail transit were placed before voters and failed. But in 1980, voters in the county passed propositions for a subway, a light-rail line to Long Beach and lower bus fares. Cost overruns turned the Red Line, the city's 17.4-mile subway line, into the most expensive subway system ever. It is the only one in the United States that runs on the honor system.

Problems have been plentiful. Eighty-one people have died in accidents involving Blue Line trains along the 22-mile light-rail system to Long Beach, the most of any light-rail system in the country, since it opened in 1990. A sinkhole opened on Hollywood Boulevard, and more than 2,000 feet of a subway tunnel was found to be half the required thickness. Wags dubbed the MTA the "Money Train Authority" and called its plush new headquarters at Gateway Plaza near Chinatown the "Taj Mahal." In 1998, voters, fed up with waste, approved a ballot measure barring the use of sales tax revenue for tunneling.

"But all this is changing, because we realized that the status quo was unworkable," Villaraigosa said, noting that the management of the MTA has been overhauled.

In a sense, Los Angeles is returning to its roots. In the 1920s, the region was home to the most elaborate rail system in the country: almost 1,500 miles of track connecting the eastern desert with the Pacific Coast. It was Los Angeles's great transit network, not the automobile, that jump-started the region's sprawl, said Martin Wachs, a transportation expert at the Rand Corp. But by the 1960s, the car had taken over, and all the trains were gone.

The MTA now finds itself rebuilding the old system -- in some places along the same rights-of-way.

"Sometimes retro is the wave of the future," mused Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, a Southern California-based nonprofit organization. "L.A. can't really sprawl anymore. So we are retrofitting our city. There really is nowhere else to go."