By William Claiborne
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 10, 1998; Page A01

LOS ANGELES, June 9—The federal transportation bill signed by President Clinton today provides more than $41 billion for mass transit across the country, federal backing for the idea that commuters should get out of their cars and onto buses and trains. But here in Los Angeles -- a prototype American city defined by its automobiles -- the trouble-plagued "subway from hell" may be running out of track after just 5.2 miles.

Los Angeles transport authorities have spent more than two decades and $5 billion in taxpayer funds on the dream of building a 400-mile network of commuter trains and interconnecting bus routes, envisioned as a panacea to freeway gridlock. But now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is being pressured to throw in the towel on large portions of the project. The authority has suspended work on three of the most controversial rail projects and congressional critics are threatening to pull the plug altogether unless the MTA proves that it can finish what it started on a cost-effective basis.

Lots of things have been blamed for what subway critics contend is a fiasco of epic proportions -- which they say has made Los Angeles the laughingstock of the nation. Reasons given include enormous cost overruns, repeated redesigns, corruption, mismanagement, engineering failures, tunneling accidents, economic recession and political infighting by local politicians hungry for lucrative subway contracts in their districts.

But the fact is that Los Angeles, like so many sprawling U.S. cities, does not have much population density, and its job centers are scattered over 4,000 square miles, making the job of connecting them highly expensive. Having grown around the automobile, it is just not a subway town like New York City.

Citing similar reasons, experts fear America may not be a subway country. For Los Angeles is in many ways a paradigm of American cities, which have spread to the suburbs and then found that building a mass transit system to accommodate travel from suburb to city center -- and, increasingly, from homes in one suburb to jobs in another -- is easier said than done.

"It's a crackpot idea through and through, and in their heart of hearts I suspect the board members might realize that," said Peter Gordon, a professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California and a vocal opponent of the Los Angeles subway plan. "But they just haven't been able to bite the bullet and ask themselves, 'Can we even continue operating the thing, much less keep building more subway lines?' "

Opened in 1993 after several contentious elections and two sales tax increases, the only operating portion of the subway is the 5.2-mile Red Line. Carrying passengers along a route running west from downtown Los Angeles to the Wilshire area, it links only one of the city's scores of major job centers -- downtown -- to a commercial area west of the high-rise office district.

The Red Line subway is clean, modern and fast -- seven minutes from its terminus to the Metro Center hub station downtown. But unless a rider happens to live or work along the Wilshire corridor or wants to transfer to buses, it has limited appeal.

Nonetheless, Michael Reyes, 28, who lives near the westernmost station and commutes to his part-time job downtown, likes the subway. "It's fast and you can always get a seat. It's much nicer than the bus," he said, referring to crowded Metro buses.

Twin tunnels also have been bored through the Santa Monica Mountains for a 4.6-mile extension of the Red Line to North Hollywood, in the San Fernando Valley. MTA officials say the extension is so near completion that scrapping it is unthinkable. The MTA has already sunk $717 million, half of it in federal funds, into the North Hollywood line.

The projects so far have consumed $3.1 billion -- slightly more than $300 million a mile -- and have been beset by so many cost overruns that they have plunged the MTA $3.5 billion in debt.

Besides the underground line, the MTA has completed 42 miles of above-ground light rail commuter lines: the 22-mile Blue Line to Long Beach and the 20-mile Green Line to near the Los Angeles International Airport, at a cost of $1.5 billion.

The trains do attract riders, although hardly enough to justify their cost, according to MTA critics. Average weekday boardings of the Red Line subway total 33,300, while the Blue and Green lines get 49,500 and 20,400 fares a day, respectively, for a total of 103,200 passengers. Although those numbers easily exceed first-year projections, that is only about 1 percent of Los Angeles County's population. By comparison, an estimated 275,000 people a day ride the Washington area subway system.

One persistent worry of subway opponents here is that even if a larger subway system were built, it might not be used enough to justify its cost because Angelenos are so dedicated to their automobiles. When the 1994 Northridge earthquake buckled freeways and forced many commuters to turn to trains and buses, transportation officials hoped that mass transit would become the beneficiary of a new fare-paying commuter class weaned from the culture of the car. But when the freeways were reopened just months later, the commuters went back to their cars and the mass transit project became more deeply mired in contention and uncertainty than ever.

Faced with mounting criticism in Congress and at home, the MTA in January was forced to suspend work on three major rail projects: an above-ground Blue Line to Pasadena and two subway extensions running east and west out of downtown. But Julian Burke, a corporate rescuer recruited by Mayor Richard Riordan to be the MTA's interim chief executive, insisted in an interview that he is not abandoning the subway and light rail concept and that he intends to make "re-presentations" for continuing the suspended projects in a more cost-efficient manner.

Burke said it "seems unwise to suggest that rail is dead in Los Angeles" because 60 miles of operating or nearly completed subway and above-ground rail lines are already in place. These, along with designated busways and, possibly, elevated rail lines, should serve as the core of an affordable mass-transit system. Buses currently carry 91 percent of Los Angeles's transit riders.

Sounding a theme frequently used by corporate rescue specialists, Burke said: "We should focus on our core business and complete the rail system that we started, because over time our freeways are not going to be able to sustain the kind of population growth that this region is going to experience."

In an effort to regain credibility with an increasingly skeptical Congress, the MTA has drafted a plan to restructure its finances, including deep administrative cuts and fare increases that are aimed at balancing the agency's deficit-ridden budget. Among other things, the recovery plan also calls for completing the North Hollywood segment of the Red Line and attempting to meet a federal court order to reduce overcrowding on the bus system.

The MTA board, Burke said, "has come to understand the need to refocus what we're doing so we can become more credible with our funding partners. We need them to understand that we are in control, that we are finishing what we started on the subway."

But critics argue that the MTA is beyond getting its house in order because it is wedded to a concept that is impossible to sustain financially.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member who supported the subway project for nearly 20 years, now says: "It's become plain that we're just not going to be able to build a lot of subways at a cost of $300 million a mile. At some point, somebody has to wake up and smell the coffee. We're not going to have that kind of money."

Yaroslavsky recently launched a campaign to pass a ballot initiative banning local funding of subway work beyond the North Hollywood extension -- after the line reaches his district.

Another MTA board member, County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who for a long time pushed for a subway extension to her heavily Hispanic East Los Angeles district, now says she is against the entire project because it is draining resources from the bus system that is so vital to her constituents.

An influential East Los Angeles congressman, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D), also urged a halt to subway construction, including the nearly completed North Hollywood line, if the transit agency cannot demonstrate that it is economically viable.

"Why are we going underneath a mountain with a subway? It makes no sense to me when we could have easily gone along the surface with light rail," Becerra said in a telephone interview. "We may not have any other alternative than to go ahead with the [North Hollywood] project because we've already spent $700 million on it. But I haven't got an explanation of why a subway, which costs four or five times as much as light rail, is the best plan."

Becerra made it clear that while California is scheduled to get about 14 percent of the mass transit funds to be allocated nationally under the transportation bill's formula, funding for specific projects such as Los Angeles's Metro Rail still must be determined in the congressional appropriations process.

"For the most part, Los Angeles is not conducive to expensive mass transit projects like subways, and if they [MTA officials] still think it is, they are going to have to demonstrate that very convincingly," Becerra said.