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(see Graphic)
(see Graphic)
For all its reputation as a trendsetter, Los Angeles stands out from other
major cities such as New York, Tokyo, London, Paris and San Francisco
through one glaring deficiency: it has never had an underground railway, and
public transport of any kind has always been a rarity. But city planners
believe it is the model for 21st-century American cities in the way it is
becoming decentralised – and they are increasingly worried about how to curb
people’s reliance on their cars.

The first step was taken on 30 January when a 7-kilometre underground route
with five stations opened from downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood. This Red
Line is due for completion by 2000, when it should be 46 kilometres long,
and is part of a 30-year effort to ease the region’s chronic traffic
congestion. The complete system, called Metro, will be an integrated network
of underground and surface railways, shuttle buses and an improved freeway
(motorway) system with new routes, high-technology aids to improve traffic
flow, some toll roads, and ‘car pool’ lanes reserved for vehicles carrying
more than one person. Other elements of the Metro project include tow trucks
patrolling freeways to clear crashed or broken-down vehicles, car parks at
outlying rail stations, ‘dial-a-ride’ services for the elderly and
handicapped – and even expansion and improved maintenance of Los Angeles
county’s 800 kilometres of cycleways.

The sea change of attitudes that Metro represents is hard to overstate. Los
Angeles’s physical appearance, size and society have been shaped during its
rapid postwar growth by complete reliance on the private car. Railways have
not figured in the transport equation until very recently. In 1990 the Blue
Line, a 35-kilometre electrified rail service from Union Station to Long
Beach, began running along the route on which a similar service ran until
1961. And late last year three commuter lines started operating on existing
freight tracks into the same terminal, where the underground begins.

In the intervening three decades, the only public transport in Los Angeles
County has been a bus network. It runs 25 000 buses and carries 1.3 million
passengers daily, but much more is needed in a county that spreads over 11
340 square kilometres.

The Metro project is an attempt to reduce congestion and claw back some of
the lost time and productivity, cut pollution and dependence on imported
oil, and eventually improve the quality of life. But such dreams don’t come
cheap. The first short stretch of underground alone cost $1.45
billion, or about $200 million per kilometre. The alternative,
though, is grim, for the scale of the problem facing the area is enormous.

James Ortner, the air quality transportation administrator for the Los
Angeles County transportation committee, says it is clear that road building
alone can no longer meet the area’s transport needs. An enormous public
transport system, together with some expansion of the region’s
960-kilometre freeway network, is now seen as the only way to stop traffic
congestion getting even worse. With the population projected to grow as the
region’s inhabitants and their jobs become more scattered, traditional
forms of public transport will be effective only in limited areas.

CAR CULTURE

The 8.8 million people living in the county of Los Angeles today own six
million motor vehicles. By 2010 the population is expected to exceed 10.2
million. But travel between counties in southern California is so
significant that transport planning for Los Angeles County must also
consider the surrounding counties such as Ventura and San Bernardino, an
area of about 20 000 square kilometres. Its total population will probably
climb to between 21 and 23 million by 2010 and the number of vehicle
journeys each day will top 60 million – up from 45 million in 1990.

The population and physical area are combined with demographic trends and
land-use patterns which make transport planning difficult. Unlike, say,
London, which remains essentially a ‘mono-nuclear’ region, with commuter
travel patterns resembling a tidal flow to and from the centre each day,
downtown Los Angeles is just the most significant of many centres in
southern California. Despite being the focal point of Metro, the downtown
area’s dominance is expected to diminish in coming decades.

Settlements around Los Angeles have always been widely dispersed; unlike
European or American East Coast regions, they have never been tied to a
dominant trading centre such as a port. Paradoxically, it was the railways
which helped create this pattern. In the late 19th century railway companies
were encouraged to open up the American west with offers of cheap government
land. They built tracks and then sold on the surrounding land at a profit.
This resulted in the early development of far-flung agricultural communities
dispersed around Los Angeles (hence Orange County, where orange growers
predominated) and meant that the inhabitants of Los Angeles were second only
to Detroit – hub of the American motor industry – in their haste to adopt
the motor car early this century. The land-use patterns that make the
private car so appealing to southern Californians have worked against the
establishment of a public transport system. The idea of an underground
railway was proposed seriously in 1925, but the county’s voters rejected the
idea. As Ortner points out, even then city dwellers in central Los Angeles
who could have benefited from an underground were outnumbered by people from
the rural communities, who were already dependent on road transport.

Planners think that the population will grow fastest in suburban districts.
The percentage of total employment that is in downtown Los Angeles will
fall, despite it being the one best served by public transport. There is a
clear trend towards dispersal of both people and jobs to ‘edge cities’ in
the county, meaning the continued creation of new centres of commuter
travel. This problem is not unique to Los Angeles. Other American cities
such as Chicago, New York, and Houston are following a similar pattern.
Ortner and his colleagues are therefore concerned to get the Metro programme
working as effectively as possible so that the lessons can be applied more
widely.

However, the trend towards even greater dispersal can only make public
transport more difficult to provide and less attractive to people with cars.
Also, reducing congestion on the freeways encourages car use, meaning that
the proportion of journeys made on public transport falls. In the past
decade in San Francisco, public transport’s share of the journeys made has
fallen from 12 per cent to 8 per cent. The signs for Los Angeles are no more
encouraging. ‘If we built every transit project on the books we would still
only have about 11 per cent of commuter trips on (public) transit in 2010,’
says Ortner. And he reckons that even if by then everyone was making the
maximum use of telecommuting – using telephone links to work from home – the
figure would only grow to 13 per cent. Given the sums involved, the
cost-benefit seems unsatisfactory. Ortner admits that political
considerations could ultimately remove the resources needed to achieve even
that much.

The difficulty highlights two problems. One is that, in Ortner’s words, ‘the
models which transportation planners have to work with are based on
core-dominated urban regions of the 19th or early 20th century.’ But Los
Angeles, and most cities in the western US, are multi-nuclear areas, and the
traditional models do not work for them. ‘We’re putting a round peg in a
square hole,’ he says.

There is an extra twist which is probably not even unique to Los Angeles: it
is that commuting is not the biggest problem. Nonwork trips – whether for
leisure or as diversions from a commuter journey (to drop children at school
on the way to work, say, or to buy food on the way home) – at present
account for a steady 80 per cent of all vehicle journeys. In southern
California, the worst day for air pollution is not during the working week,
but on Saturday, when commuter traffic is negligible.

WRONG ROUTE

‘For 30 years government money has been going on dealing with the commuter,
and now we find that the nonwork trip is the biggest problem,’ says Ortner.
‘We don’t know how to handle it.’ In short, the well-cultivated freedom of
movement that comes with cheap cars and low-priced petrol makes public
transport an ‘inferior good’. ‘I don’t know how you fight that,’ says
Ortner. Los Angeles is thus a prisoner of its car-bound freeways; breaking
free will entail changing lifestyles. ‘The British should be forewarned,’
says Ortner. ‘If they want to stop the (traffic) onslaught, now is the time
to do it.’

Restrictions on the use of the road network might never be politically
acceptable, but some steps will be taken. Ortner points to the recent
introduction of toll roads, a novelty in southern California, with
‘congestion pricing’ which makes the roads more expensive at peak hours.
More ambitious are plans to increase the data capacity of the region’s
telephone system with fibre-optic cable to make it easier for people to
telecommute. ‘Our goal is to redirect 20 per cent of future trips to home or
satellite work centres. It is too soon to tell whether or not that will
work,’ says Ortner.

The underground appears to have gone down well with the public. During its
first week 21 000 people travelled on it each day – three times the
projected number – helped by a one-week ‘introductory’ flat fare of 25
cents. The figure fell in subsequent weeks, but the combination of existing
and planned surface rail connections to Union Station and a network of local
shuttle bus routes raises the hope of reasonably efficient commuting to
downtown Los Angeles.

As a construction project, the underground is a large and challenging
undertaking. One construction manager at a station that has yet to open
describes it as the biggest civil engineering project now running in
America; another calls it the eighth engineering wonder of the world. The
hardest part about digging in any built-up city is to do it without causing
major disruption on the surface. The tunnelling itself is relatively easy:
just as with the Channel Tunnel or Thames Water’s ring main around London,
‘mole’ machines did the burrowing, producing tunnels 6.7 metres in diameter
and 21 metres below the surface.

Unlike the London underground’s labyrinthine networks of tunnels, the Los
Angeles stations are simple concrete boxes. Designed with security in mind,
they are equipped with video surveillance and patrolled by armed guards.
There are no nooks, crannies or corners. A spokesperson for London
Underground describes the system – like those in Washington and San
Francisco – as being ‘built like tubes; and the stations are just bigger
tubes.’ The designers were able to keep things simple because they were
working from scratch on a system that only involves one line. Yet despite
the emphasis on security, the platforms, entrances and exits are obvious
targets for the criminal activity that is rife: 13 different gangs operate
in a central section of the city, and defend their turf with guns.

Besides the human threats, there are two natural hazards: gas and
earthquakes. Underground, the potential for methane explosions is a serious
danger. The tunnels run through what Richard Seal, a senior construction
inspector, describes as ‘very gassy’ ground, where commercial oil drilling
continued into the early 1900s. During construction, checks are made every
four hours for gas, and the completed tunnels are lined with plastic 10
centimetres thick to keep the gas out. Because of the earthquake threat from
the San Andreas Fault, they are also lined with concrete. The underground in
San Francisco, which uses similar techniques, resumed service almost
immediately after the October 1989 tremor, which measured 6.9 on the Richter
scale and had its epicentre only 100 kilometres away.

One thing that cannot be built into a system is a ‘subway culture’ of
passenger etiquette and safety awareness. So far though, all seems orderly
underground. On the surface, however, the level crossings for the Blue Line
have caused some trouble: since October eight motorists and pedestrians have
been killed after ignoring barriers. Several of the deaths are thought to
have been suicides, but other victims may have been people not used to
frequent passenger trains travelling at up to 100 kilometres per hour on
lines until recently used only for freight.

Long-term funding for the underground is secure. In 1980 Los Angeles voters
approved a half-cent sales tax on petrol, which raises about $400
million annually, of which 35 per cent goes to railway building. Another
half-cent petrol tax approved in 1990 should raise another $400
million each year, specifically for the Metro project and highway
improvements.

What remains to be seen is whether the local culture can alter sufficiently
to make public transport work. Legislation might help – for example
repealing the local regulation which requires car parking to be made
available as part of any development project – but the fear of crime may be
the greatest obstacle. Economic uncertainty, the riots last year and the
general scale of violent crime have left Los Angeles on edge. And though the
underground hardly passes through the most crime-ridden parts of the city,
it does visit areas which many would rather avoid.

The search for a solution to Los Angeles’s transport problems may turn out
to be wishful thinking. There may simply be no hope of changing the
behaviour patterns of most long-distance car commuters. Ortner remains
convinced that the effort is worthwhile, but admits that the decision made
during the 1950s to rely on freeways and private cars has created a pattern
of land use which will dominate Los Angeles for decades to come – possibly
forever. ‘We will carry on through the fog and try to make life better for
people,’ he says. ‘They may or may not want to use it. But we can offer an
alternative which will help, though it won’t change land-use patterns all
that much.’

Dan Thisdell is editor of Cycle Trader magazine, and a former resident of
Los Angeles.