Home » Archives » January 2008 » Nonstop To Nowhere
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01/10/2008: "Nonstop To Nowhere"
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In LA, we were late coming to the dance when it comes to mass transit. With hundreds of miles of freeway, and gas stations on every corner, we didn't need no stinkin' subway trains!
But time changes minds, and far too late the Powers That Be decided we needed a train. 'Course, it was waaay too late to dig subways - we'd already paved everything - but using railroad right of ways, freeways medians and, yes, the occasional tunnel, the trains did indeed come. But it wasn't without its political intrigue and wrangling.
The portion of El Segundo where I work is serviced by the Metro Green Line, an east-west train line that for the most part runs down the median of the Century Freeway. Logically, you'd expect it to service Los Angeles International Airport, which is across the street from my building. But for some reason, the line abruptly turns south a block short of the airport property. Even stranger, there's a stub of a branch line just east of the Aviation Station that looks like it was supposed to go to LAX but never did.
I always wondered why the stub was there (it's right outside the Wild Goose strip club, so I had many opportunities to wonder 
), but someone at the Daily Breeze took it one step further and actually found out:
At the western end of the Century Freeway, the line could either go north to LAX, which employed about 35,000 people, or south to El Segundo, home to about 90,000 aerospace workers.
"It was a clear decision it would be better to go into the El Segundo employment area," said Richard Stanger, who was the commission's director of rail planning. "The models and everything indicated it was much better to go into El Segundo and focus on the needs of the everyday worker."
But you know there has to be more to it than that ...
"We had a pocketful of money and communities that wanted rail, and we wanted to make rail real," recalls Jacki Bacharach, then chairwoman of the LACTC's rail planning committee.
"Part of what we were saying was, `OK, let's do it, let's show people we mean business.' So if we didn't get cooperation pretty fast, we closed up the end of the line and said let's use the money where we can use it."
When facts were faced, it didn't look good for the Green Line extension to the airport: Other projects had a higher priority, there was no legal requirement to take the line to LAX, there were significant planning and engineering hurdles, and money was short. The "northern extension" was dropped from the MTA's plan.
I can watch the cars on the Green Line as it makes the sweeping turn south away from LAX and towards Redondo Beach. There aren't many folks on it, no matter the time or day. You can't help but wonder how many more would be using it to go to the airport had it not been for the politicians ...
