LA named best public transit system in the country!!!

In October, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) named Los Angeles County's Mass Transportation Authority the best public transportation system in the country -- truly a man-bites-dog turnaround for an agency that for years was known for incompetence and shady deals. Other cities interested in expanding their public transit systems, notably Atlanta and Tampa, are even studying Los Angeles.

In November, voters in California approved the biggest infrastructure bond package in U.S. history, which will provide the MTA at least $2 billion to continue to build the system, thanks to lobbying from Los Angeles's determined mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa (D).

"The untold secret about L.A. is while it's known for its freeways and for the attitude that the highway is king, it has -- in fits and starts -- begun to piece together a world-class mass transit system," said APTA President William W. Millar. "This is an enormous change."

To be sure, the car still rules in Los Angeles, and the APTA's award appears to be not so much for the system that is -- a motley collection of buses, subways and light rail -- than for what will be. (It took this reporter two hours to travel 20 miles on three buses to interview the mayor on a recent Friday.)

Only 6.6 percent of the workforce in this region uses public transit to get to work. Each day, automobiles on Los Angeles's freeways travel 136 million miles -- tops in the nation

Commuters here spend more time caught in traffic jams than those in any other city in the country -- almost four days and nights per person per year, burning 407 million excess gallons of gas in delays that cost $11 billion, 50 percent more than in the runner-up, New York.

Los Angeles is known throughout the world as 100 suburbs looking for a city. But although it lacks the downtown core of a Manhattan or a Washington, it is hemmed in by mountains and the Pacific Ocean, and it has evolved into the most densely populated urban region in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This "dense sprawl," as it is known in the argot of urban planners, has helped shift public opinion toward support for public transportation. Roger Moliere, who heads the MTA's real estate development business, speaks of a "paradigm shift" in the way Angelenos view mass transit. Real estate ads now regularly use proximity to transit as a selling point.

Work is continuing on a six-mile extension of the Yellow Line -- a light-rail route running from Pasadena to downtown -- into East Los Angeles, a predominantly Latino area. Construction has just begun on the Exposition Line, which will link downtown with the University of Southern California and Culver City on the Westside.

Also on the books is a downtown subway system that will connect two light-rail systems and the city's lone subway line, which were never joined because of shoddy planning.

But the Holy Grail for Villaraigosa and others in the city administration is what he calls a "subway to the sea" that would run under Wilshire Boulevard, one of the most heavily traveled avenues in the nation, and bond the Westside with the rest of the region.

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."

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."

SOURCE: John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 17, 2006; Page A03