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WILSHIRE BLVD. — Elected officials are telling residents to put the brakes on before getting too excited about the possibility of extending the subway to Santa Monica.
Would-be riders ditch the car keys at their own peril, for there is no guarantee that the Metro Red Line will be extended from the station at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue all the way to the coast.
That extension would cost an estimated $4.8 billion and may not be completed until 2015, or longer, according to a report released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA).
While new tunneling technology, coupled with renewed vigor from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have raised hopes that a subway to the beach could become a reality, Santa Monica elected officials said it might be wiser for residents to focus on the Exposition Light Rail line that is set to pull into Santa Monica in 2010. “New tunneling technologies mean a Wilshire subway to Santa Monica is feasible, but we mustn’t lose sight of the closer goal — surface light rail via the existing Expo route,” said City Councilman Kevin McKeown.
Other officials seemed to share McKeown’s sentiments.
“I don’t know if this (MTA) report is offering false hope or not,” said City Councilman Ken Genser. “I hope (the Red Line extension) does happen eventually, but it’s a much longer-term project and the council is focused more on the Expo line and getting that completed.
“With the Red Line, there’s too much speculation right now,” he added. “It could go as far as Westwood, and then getting to Santa Monica may be even harder.”
According to the MTA report, extending the subway past Westwood into Santa Monica would cost an estimated $1.6 billion in 2015, assuming the cost per mile will still be about $300 million.
MTA officials don’t know how many riders a subway would attract, while it has estimated that the proposed light rail along the Exposition right-of-way would have 43,000 people boarding daily between downtown and Culver City by the year 2020.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who serves on the MTA board and represents the Westside, said the subway must be completed to ease traffic congestion on the west side of I- 405, where it oftentimes takes up to an hour to drive from Lincoln Boulevard to the freeway.
“There is no other way to deal with mass transportation in the Wilshire corridor,” Yaroslavsky said. “You have to go underground.”
The region’s booming Westside has 1.5 million residents, 1 million jobs, many long-distance commuters and no rapid transit. Each weekday, some 500,000 cars and 100,000 bus passengers inch between traffic lights along Wilshire Boulevard, MTA officials said.
Yaroslavsky questioned the release of the MTA’s report, considering it offered no new information to those who have been following the issue.
“I don’t know why this is getting so much attention now,” he said. “The cost is nothing of a surprise.”
Before transportation officials can move forward, Rep. Henry Waxman (D- Los Angeles) must lobby his colleagues in Congress to pass a bill, H.R. 4653, which would lift a ban on federal funding for subway construction. The ban was put in place in 1986 after a pocket of naturally occurring methane gas exploded near the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax Avenue. Waxman said he is seeking to lift the ban after a report released in 2005 found that drilling presented no significant danger.
Once that occurs, the planning and design phase can begin, but then comes the question of funding by the state — which is in a budget crunch — as well as county and cities who would be served by it.
There already is a growing opposition to the proposal, including concerns from county supervisors and the Bus Riders Union about the cost.
“There might be a conversation one day about creating a larger capacity transit service that can move people, especially on Wilshire,” said Manuel Criollo of the Bus Riders Union, which has sued MTA for more bus service. “But to use $4.6 billion for a project that won’t be here in 20 years, which is just an estimate at this moment, just seems to us like a waste of money.
“We don’t even need half of that money to massively improve our bus service.”
Waxman’s bill, which was introduced on Dec. 22, is currently awaiting debate in the Subcommittee on Railroads.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 17, 2006. Read the original PDF.