Part way through his presentation on the “28 by ‘28 Initiative,” an attempt to complete 28 transportation projects in the region before the 2028 Olympics come to Southern California, LA Metro CEO Phil Washington paused on a slide titled “Measure M Cost Management Policy.” Unlike the previous graphics, which were heavy with bullet points, this one had only a smattering of text, including the words “THE TRIPLE CONSTRAINT” encased in a grey equilateral triangle. It looked a bit like an explanatory diagram from a faddish self-help book.
Washington’s triangle, however, helped explain why so many people, including elected officials from the South Bay, had trekked through the year’s biggest downpour to attend a lengthy meeting last week at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Union Station headquarters. They were there because Metro was set to take a critical vote later that day on the future of the Green Line.
The Green Line, which opened in 1995, is a light-rail lane that runs east and west, from Norwalk through south Los Angeles to Aviation Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport. Then it bends south, cutting through El Segundo before ending at a station on Marine Street in Redondo Beach. It provides connections with bus and rail lines headed to and from downtown Los Angeles, and is by far the most visible piece of public transit infrastructure in the South Bay. But on Thursday, Metro staff was advocating shortening the line in 2020 to accommodate a connection with the Crenshaw Line, an under-construction line running south from Exposition Boulevard to the airport.
In the end, the Green Line was saved: the board approved a plan from Los Angeles Supervisor Janice Hahn and others that will keep the Green Line mostly as it is until at least the middle of 2021.
“The compromise that won today is a victory for Green Line riders and it was the many Metro riders, community leaders and elected officials who wrote letters and came to our board meeting today who helped convince the Metro Board of Directors to vote for this plan,” Hahn, whose district includes the South Bay, said in a statement after the meeting.
Almost everyone who addressed the board favored protecting the Green Line. El Segundo City Councilmember Carol Pirsztuk warned that shortening the it would negatively impact the city’s aerospace employers. “This unnecessarily penalizes the South Bay,” said Redondo Beach Councilmember Christian Horvath. Torrance Mayor Pat Furey said it would cut off his city just as it was preparing for a southern extension of the Green Line.
Although the Green Line is safe for now, how it happened reveals the changes and challenges that the South Bay will encounter as Metro embarks on what is perhaps the largest regional public transit expansion in the nation’s history. Measure M is a sales tax approved by Los Angeles County voters in November 2016 that will generate up to $120 billion over the next 40 years to fund transit and road improvements in the region. Pundits and policymakers touted its passage as proof that Southern Californians were ready to shed the car-centric approach to planning that shaped the region, or at least were so fed up with traffic that they were willing to try anything.
But, given the gridlock and driving habits of Southern California, even $120 billion can only go so far. Addressing plans to accelerate some of the Measure M projects to get the area ready for the Olympics, Washington pointed to his triangle and warned that Euclid’s axioms applied as much to it as they did to the concrete lines and angles: change one of the triangle’s sides — labeled “Scope,” “Schedule,” and “Cost” — and the others would have to change too. As Washington was attempting to make clear, even the substantial sums at Metro’s disposal are not infinite, and the agency is increasingly bumping up against its own existing projects. Metro’s Age of Expansion may also be its Era of Limits.
The Metro board members, a baker’s dozen of some of the most powerful elected officials in the region, seemed temporarily chastened by Washington’s stentorian tone. So he gave them a comedic break. “The board will be tested. Maybe even today,” he said with a knowing smile.
The standing room crowd, many of whom were awaiting the vote on the Green Line, vibrated with subdued laughter.
The end of the frontier
The Crenshaw Line, the newest member of Metro’s growing family of rail lines, will start carrying passengers in the summer of 2020. (It was scheduled to debut in fall 2019, but officials announced last month that construction delays have forced a new timetable.) When it opens, it will link the Expo Line, which connects downtown Los Angeles with Santa Monica, with the Green Line. Eventually, the Crenshaw Line will bring rail access to LAX, and enhance connectivity to neighborhoods in South Los Angeles that have long complained of economic isolation. But just how it would connect with the Green Line has been something of a mystery almost since the route was announced.
Trains on the Crenshaw Line as proposed run north-south. The Green Line runs north-south too, between Redondo Beach and the airport, but there it hooks to the east until it concludes in Norwalk. The result is a double “wye junction” in rail parlance, and a head-spinning number of ways to combine the two lines, all of which are limited by technical constraints.
As recently as May, Metro staff declined to say how the two lines would fit together. (Earlier this year, Metro posted an animated rendering of the Crenshaw Line’s path to its website; set to spirited electronic music and prepared by a student from Los Angeles Trade Tech College, the rendering depicts the line ending in a concrete nub at Century/Aviation, with the 105 Freeway, which the Green Line runs along, visible in the distance.) Then, in June, the board’s operations committee got a first look at two proposed ways of integrating the lines.
One would create a “one-seat ride” from Redondo to Expo/Crenshaw, and would truncate the segment of the Green Line originating in Norwalk at a new Century/Aviation station on the Crenshaw Line. The other would create a one-seat ride from Norwalk to Expo/Crenshaw, and would truncate the segment originating in Redondo at the Century/Aviation station. Under either alternative, a passenger wishing to travel along the entirety of the existing Green Line route would have to get off, wait for a different train to transfer, and double back over ground already covered. Metro’s staff favored the one-seat ride from Norwalk to Expo-Crenshaw, which would reduce the Green Line to a five-station “shuttle” going from Redondo to Century/Aviation.
Officials from the South Bay reacted with dismay, particularly at the prospect of the change being made at the staff level, rather than through a board vote. In a June 25 letter to the Metro Board, Kurt Weideman, chair of the South Bay Cities Council of Governments, lamented that the decision would cut off the South Bay just as Metro was making the system more useful by connecting to other regional destinations.
Metro has been on a building boom even before the passage of Measure M. Over the last decade, it has opened train stations from Pasadena to East Los Angeles to USC, as well as more far-flung suburbs. In 2016, Metro opened an Expo Line station in Santa Monica, connecting the city to downtown Los Angeles by rail for the first time since the Red Car lines were ripped out. Each of these connections, however, were the result of rail going where there was no rail before (or at least had not been rail for some time), not a line venturing through an area where Metro had already built.
“Normally when we build an extension, or recently when we’ve been building extensions, like with the Gold and Expo lines, it’s just extending the end of the line out, so you would just run the train further out. And it was sort of a no brainer,” Conan Cheung, senior executive officer for service development with Metro, said in a meeting earlier this year. “But with the Crenshaw extension, we’re actually tying into the Green Line mid-line between Aviation and Mariposa [stations].”
The shift Cheung described, from “no brainer” to complexity and opportunity, mirrors the broader history of development in Southern California. After decades of erecting homes on empty land, towns today from Hermosa to Hesperia are largely built out, albeit in varying density. And, as analysts of the state’s housing crisis will share, building in this environment is far more challenging. Metro’s shift from an agency drawing on a blank sheet of paper to one running into existing infrastructure is evidence that options for getting around are expanding. But it also signals that the challenges associated with linking the Crenshaw and Green lines are as much political as they are technical.
“When we get down to it, this is really what we do every month, but we don’t do it so obviously: choose people who would benefit, and people who would not,” said Board Member and Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.
Battle lines
Over the summer, Metro considered as many as 11 different options for bringing the Green and Crenshaw lines together. It eliminated five as technically infeasible, and presented six for public comment at forums around the county. Two emerged for consideration at last week’s meeting: the version known as “C-1”, creating a five-stop Green Line out of the South Bay, which remained the staff’s preferred option; and an alternate dubbed “C-3,” backed by Hahn, Inglewood Mayor James Butts and Duarte Mayor John Fasana, that would allow Green Line passengers originating in Redondo Beach to travel as far as the Willowbrook/Rosa Parks station, maintaining access for South Bay riders to bus and rail lines bound for downtown Los Angeles. Built into C-3 was a promise to reexamine the decision in mid-2021, with a year’s worth of Crenshaw Line ridership figures.
Part of the reason that Metro staff favored C-1 was the possibility of connection to Los Angeles International Airport. The Crenshaw Line’s Century/Aviation Station will connect to an automated people mover that will finally bring a rail connection to LAX. Although C-1 would require people wishing to travel east on the Green Line to transfer, it would allow them to go directly to the Century/Aviation Station.
But the people mover is not set to open until 2023. Until that point, riders would have to catch a bus to the airport, as they do now from the Green Line.
“Basically, this is a shuttle to a shuttle to the airport,” Hahn said.
The bigger issue, however, was usage patterns. Metro staff said that ridership data, as well as cell phone signal information from people in the South Bay, indicated that “there aren’t a lot of people from the South Bay using the Green Line” Cheung said.
“People [from the South Bay] are really travelling north-south along the 405 corridor. They’re not using [the Green Line] because it’s not going where they want to go,” he said.
Metro staff has said ridership on the Green Line is dominated by people starting their trip east of Aviation. The loss of a direct path to the eastern segment of the Green Line was not especially problematic for South Bay residents, they said, because buses to get to their favored destinations in Santa Monica and Los Angeles’ Westside remained available, with the Crenshaw Line’s Century/Aviation Station as a jumping off point.
Yet due to heavy traffic along north-south arteries like Lincoln Boulevard, it can sometimes be faster for a South Bay public transit user bound for, say, Century City, to go to downtown Los Angeles and head west, than it would be to take one of the bus routes Cheung alluded to. And for those new to Southern California public transit, as is the case for a disproportionate share of South Bay residents, the bus system can be harder to navigate than rail: removing it could have an outsized effect in discouraging these people from using public transit at all.
“The opening of the Crenshaw line should expand service, not lessen it,” said Don Szerlip, a former Redondo Beach councilmember and member of Metro’s South Bay Service Council.
But expand service for whom? People in the South Bay, who represent an untapped pool of riders, but are more likely to own cars and have other options? Or people in less affluent neighborhoods, who may have easier access to transit but are more dependent on it? The pot of money generated by Measure M has prompted a reckoning about which riders Metro ought to prioritize.
Backers of C-1 presented it partly as an opportunity to serve the many disadvantaged residents who live in areas surrounding the Crenshaw Line. Metro staff had long planned for the Crenshaw Line to run with three-car trains, in anticipation of high use. Green Line stations in the South Bay, however, are built for only two-car trains. Alternative C-3, by sending trains along track shared with the Crenshaw Line, would force it to rely on two-car trains as well, in part because the aging electrical equipment on the existing Green Line could potentially malfunction if it had to switch between two- and three-car trains at the peak frequencies Metro is planning. Mark Ridley-Thomas, who serves on the Metro Board and represents South Los Angeles on the county Board of Supervisors, brought up the opening of the Expo Line from several years ago, when two-car trains were quickly overwhelmed with riders. The board should not allow the same thing to happen with the Crenshaw line, Ridley-Thomas said.
The rich-poor divide, however, did not ultimately determine board members’ votes.
“You should have been a police chief,” Butts, who spent 15 years as chief of the Santa Monica Police Department before becoming Mayor of Inglewood, said to Cheung. He preferred C-3, and accused Metro staff of raising doomsday scenarios in order to compel board members to vote for staff’s preferred alternative. “You’re supposed to give us the best advice, not push us into a corner.”
In the end, C-3 prevailed 7-4, with two of the board members abstaining. The motion allows for the alignment to be revisited in 2021, and Hahn said she would be guided by the year’s worth of ridership data when the time came to reconsider. But Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who also sits on Metro’s board, warned that political inertia could make that a fantasy, regardless of what the evidence indicated.
“It is 90 percent tougher to undo something once you’ve done it,” Garcetti said.
Path forward
After doing his best to convey to the board of directors the limits of Metro’s power, Washington, the agency’s CEO, went from stern to stargazing. He concluded his presentation on the 28 for ‘28 initiative with a vision of transportation in Southern California so ambitious as to be almost unrecognizable: a future in which public transit was free, and buses and trains arrived as frequently as every 90 seconds. One board member asked whether Washington was thinking of offering free transit only during the Olympics, akin to the temporary tweaks that famously calmed traffic during the 1984 Los Angeles games. Washington responded that his vision was “forever and ever.”
Unlike the day’s decision on the Green Line, a hard vote with the potential to upset people sitting 20 feet away, the board didn’t have to do anything with Washington’s plan. The enthusiasm with which they greeted it, though, was surprising because of how he announced that Metro intended to pay for it. Washington said the key was “congestion pricing,” in which motorists pay to drive on certain roads or at certain times. It’s been tried with some success in other cities, and a version can be seen locally in the FasTrak lanes on the 10 and 110 freeways. But Washington was essentially suggesting taking the status quo, in which driving is free but transit is fare-based, and flipping it on its head.
Such a plan is especially bold because it comes at a time when public transit use in the region is declining. Although some routes are becoming more popular, more have seen ridership losses in the last five years. Researchers have attributed this to an improving economy and the rise of ride-hailing companies, but the best explanation may simply be that more people have cars. According to a study released this year from UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, between 1990 and 2000, Southern California added 1.8 million people and 456,000 cars; between 2000 and 2015, it added 2.3 million people, but 2.1 million cars.
Not surprisingly, congestion has increased too, especially on the north-south routes that Metro data indicate are favored by South Bay commuters. According to the Federal Highway Administration, traffic volume on the 405 Freeway, which reached 300,000 cars and trucks per day in 2017, is expected to jump to 450,000 vehicles per day by 2025.
It’s possible that the Green Line could be part of a viable alternative. A four-stop extension deeper into Redondo and to Torrance is set to open within a decade, at which point Metro has promised to again reconsider the route of the Green Line. And the Crenshaw line may eventually extend north from Exposition Boulevard to connect with the Red Line in Hollywood. If the intersection of the Green and Crenshaw lines were reconfigured, South Bay residents could potentially have a one-seat ride to attractions and job centers in West Hollywood and the Fairfax district, one that would almost certainly be faster than driving. But this too faces uncertainty: the northern extension of the Crenshaw Line could be three decades away, Metro has indicated.
And although the Green Line is safe for now, last week’s meeting showed how easily things could have gone the other way. Up until just the vote, Hahn was pleading with her colleagues on the Metro Board, saying that approving C-1 would make it seem as though she were breaking a promise. The promise had to do with her support of Measure M. The transit tax appeared on the same November 2016 ballot as she did in her race for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Her opponent, current Manhattan Beach Mayor Steve Napolitano, opposed Measure M in part because its list of projects was too heavily tilted toward Los Angeles and away from the South Bay. In what she described as a “tough race,” Hahn defended it.
Thanks to Measure M, Metro has ambitious plans for the future. But it may struggle to get public buy-in if it continues to present key decisions as zero-sum games. By linking decisions about future projects to her past advocacy, Hahn captured the sense that many in the South Bay are still waiting to be convinced about the benefits of public transit.
“Please don’t make me eat my words,” Hahn said.
