By Bus & Rail

Expo Line picks up speed

As the first “road tests” begin on the initial phase of the new Exposition light rail project, a series of recent decisions is blazing the trail toward the line’s ultimate finish in Santa Monica.

A partial opening of the Expo Line from downtown Los Angeles to La Cienega is planned for this fall, with the conclusion of Phase 1 to Culver City expected next year. Meanwhile, work is beginning in earnest on Expo Phase 2, which will extend the line to Colorado and 4^th Street in Santa Monica by 2015. (This interactive map shows the entire 15.2 mile route.)

Expo’s Board of Directors on March 18 voted to award the Phase 2 design-build contract to the firm Skanska/Rados. The board also voted to build an aerial crossing and station at Sepulveda instead of a street-level crossing, which was opposed by some neighborhood groups.

“Sepulveda is the major north-south thoroughfare on the Westside. Putting an at-grade crossing there is almost like putting an at-grade crossing on the 405 Freeway,” said Chuck Ray, co-chair of the Mar Vista Community Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which backed the aerial option.

The elevated crossing and station will cost nearly $5.3 million more than the street level version. But the city of Los Angeles is picking up the tab for the additional cost, using money from the West L.A. traffic mitigation fund. (The motion by Councilmembers Paul Koretz and Bill Rosendahl is here.) The Phase 2 overall budget is $1.5 billion.

“This is an enhancement to the project. It will be a benefit to the project, to the city and to the Westside,” said Samantha Bricker, Chief Operating Officer for the Expo Line Construction Authority.

The Expo Board also voted in favor of the “no-parking” option at the Expo Line’s Westwood station. This option was preferred by some in the community, who feared that a proposed 170-space parking lot would draw too much additional traffic to their neighborhood.

“Putting a parking lot in the middle of our residential neighborhood is asking too much,” said Sarah Hays, co-chair of the group Light Rail for Cheviot.

Expo officials will be soliciting more public input for the Phase 2 design-build process at a series of community meetings in early May. (The dates will be announced soon.)

Meanwhile, the line’s Phase 1 progress was visible around USC earlier this week when a mock-up of a future Expo Line train (actually a flatbed pushed by something called a speed swing) took a ride on the tracks to make sure everything lines up properly with the station platforms.

 

Posted 3/24/11

Union Station goes Metro

Los Angeles’ Union Station—considered the “last of the great railway stations” in North America—will be bought by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for $75 million from its private owner, clearing the way for the fabled facility’s expansion.

Metro began negotiating its potential purchase of Union Station last November with owner Catellus Operating Limited Partnership. The deal, expected to be completed in April, includes 38 acres of land and 5.9 million square-feet of entitlements, giving Metro room to expand the site and generate lease revenues from transit operators and businesses. Several stores and restaurants (including Traxx Restaurant) operate out of station’s legendary main waiting room. With the purchase of Union Station, Metro adds to its current holdings of the adjacent Metro headquarters and the adjoining Patsaouras Transit Plaza.

Initially approved by voters in 1926 as an alternative to a proposed regional elevated rail system, Union Station finally opened in 1939. World War II kept the station busy as a regional hub for lines such as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads. It also serviced the local Pacific Electric and Los Angeles railways. But the rail era would soon pass, giving way to a new age of air travel and the automobile. The Pacific Electric Red Car system was dismantled, and freeways began to increasingly dominate Southern California’s transit landscape.

Today, the pendulum has begun to swing back, with a network of new public transit lines in operation or under construction. Once again, Union Station finds itself at the heart of our regional transit network. The station currently serves Amtrak, Metrolink, the Metro Red and Purple subway lines, the Metro Gold Line light rail, L.A. FlyAway bus service to LAX, and many other Metro regional and local municipal bus lines serving the region.

Even if you’ve never visited Union Station, odds are you’ve seen it. Partially designed by the father-son architectural team of John and Donald Parkinson (who also designed Los Angeles City Hall), it starred in its own 1950 thriller Union Station. And it had supporting roles in plenty of others, including Blade Runner, Silver Streak, Speed, and Pearl Harbor, not to mention countless TV shows.

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Posted 2/24/11

Metro’s “Mad Men” riding high

Matt Raymond was an ad man on a mission when he set off for Metro headquarters in Los Angeles in 2002. Bound for a new job as the transportation authority’s incoming chief of communications, his first order of business was to find his new office at One Gateway Plaza. His second: “To make transit here cool.”

He didn’t fare so well on the first front. “You know how, when you get off the subway here, if you go one way you go to our building, and if you go the other way you go to Union Station?” Raymond confesses, chuckling. “Well, I went the wrong way.”

In his broader goal, however, everything seems to be headed down the right track. With a clear message and a talent pool that Don Draper himself would envy, Raymond’s in-house creative services department has spent the last eight years selling L.A. on mass transit the way gas-guzzlers have been pitched for generations by private ad agencies.

Under Raymond’s direction, Metro has been churning out the kind of prize-winning work usually associated with boutique ad firms. In the process, he and his team have reshaped the public image of the nation’s third-largest public transportation authority.

The creative services department, whose 13-person staff generates all the ads, maps, graphics, web/mobile data, merchandising and fleet design for Metro, has won more than 50 awards in the past five years for its rebranding efforts, including at least a half-dozen this year from such organizations as Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Society of Environmental Graphic Design. Raymond was personally recognized this year for “dramatic improvements” in changing the perception of transit at the industry’s international Metros Awards.

It’s a far cry from the mid-1990s, when the conventional wisdom about public transportation in Southern California was that it was useless and/or dysfunctional. After investing billions in L.A.’s first subway system, the agency’s finances had crumbled, and headlines routinely billed the MTA as profligate, quarrelsome and prone to engineering screw-ups.

The authority eventually improved, first under the leadership of corporate turnaround specialist Julian Burke and then under the recently retired Roger Snoble. But until Raymond was brought aboard in 2002, the agency’s image lagged.

“There was awareness of the agency,” he says, “but it didn’t have a very positive perception.”

Like Snoble, Raymond had come to Los Angeles from Dallas’ transit system, where marketing—not just to individual riders, but to businesses and community stakeholders—had been central to the mission. Advertising, he had learned, was not just billboards and commercials when it came to persuading a car culture to try mass transportation; everything from the look of the buses to the ease of the maps had to be part of the sales pitch.

For example: That wrong turn he made on his first day? Poor salesmanship, he decided.

“The first thing I did when I got the job was put better signage in all the stations,” he recalls.

More broadly, he believed that Metro needed a single, strong voice if the agency had any hope of getting through to car-centric Southern California. “Unbelievably, the agency didn’t have a central communications unit,” recalls Maya Emsden, Raymond’s deputy executive officer for creative services. “We had over 300 departments/programs, each with their own logo and each doing their own communications. The public didn’t even know some of them were part of the agency.”

Raymond corralled all those initiatives under a single communications department. Then Metro’s buses were repainted to drive home that friendly, consistent image—bright red for the rapid buses, “California Poppy” for the community locals, and silver for the express vehicles that travel the Orange Line’s dedicated busway. Then came a series of highly effective advertising campaigns that sold Metro as the simple solution to traffic, gas prices and other problems.

One award-winning campaign used simple pairs of black-and-white logos to depict Metro as, for example, the “hero” to the smoggy car “villain”, or the “sweet” solution to “bitter” gas prices. The ubiquitous images were on everything from bus benches to the t-shirts of baristas at L.A. cafes.

The creative services group—a closely-knit team that includes four graphic designers, one web designer and one signage designer—was transformed into Metro’s own mini advertising agency and print shop, saving the MTA huge sums on outside consultants. The group also taps local universities and art schools for talented interns, 10 to 15 of whom are on staff at any given time.

“Working with Metro has become a coveted job in these design schools, not only because we’ve been winning these awards, but also because of the pace and quantity of the work,” says Emsden. “Most internships, you work four months just to get a single brochure out. Here, we produce, like, two a week.”

Although the advertising has gotten the most attention, about 95% of the group’s time is spent on basic customer information that includes signage, literature, maps and such web features as Facebook,  Twitter and Metro’s popular new blog, The Source. Coming soon: a new mobile app that tells customers when their next bus arrives.

Ethan Arpi, who is conducting a study of transit marketing for EMBARQ, the transit arm of the World Resources Institute, an environmental advocacy organization and think tank, says one key to Metro’s success has been its decision to give organizational stature to its communications chief.

“L.A. isn’t a transit-friendly market. It’s not just, ‘If you build it, they will come’, Arpi says. “If you build it, you have to sell it.”

Although it’s difficult to definitively assess the impact of Metro’s marketing efforts, transit advocates widely credit the communications group with persuading Southern Californians that the transit authority everyone loved to hate in the 1990s was actually a clean, hip, worldly alternative to their beloved cars.

According to public opinion and customer satisfaction surveys due for release by December, public approval of the authority has risen in the past eight years to a solid 64% this year from a lackluster 41% in 2002.

Some 98% of the public has heard of Metro, 79% are familiar with its system of buses and subways and 75% know about an actual service, such as a bus stop or rail line, near them, says Raymond. Also—and this is no mean feat, given the number of names the system has had over the decades—54% of the public now refers to the authority by just one name, “Metro” (as opposed to LACMTA or MTA).

Despite the encouraging numbers, some critics of the marketing strategy argue that Metro would do better to spend its money on improving its transit systems.

“I think they would better serve the public by making the system more accessible, rather than these ads that just say, ‘We have a bus and you can avoid traffic by taking it’,” says Nate Berg, a contributing editor at Planetizen.com, an urban planning news web site based in L.A.

“We know we have a bus. What we don’t know is where it goes, and when it’ll get there, and whether it will be there for them when they’re drunk in a bar at two in the morning.”

That said, however, Berg added: “I’ve got to say, they’re all over the place. And some of their ads are pretty good.”

Posted 10/20/10

Subway 90210 needs more review

L.A. County Supervisor and Metro director Zev Yaroslavsky is asking for more work on a staff-recommended Westside Subway route that leaves open the possibility of tunneling under Beverly Hills High School.

Yaroslavsky, addressing strong community opposition to going under the high school and nearby homes, won support Wednesday from a Metro committee for a broad study of the concerns raised by the residents.

“It’s not a done deal,” Yaroslavsky said of the proposed tunnel—a statement that brought a measure of relief to Lisa Korbatov, vice president of the Beverly Hills Board of Education. “We’re thankful he understands our issues,” she said after Metro’s planning and programming committee approved the motion.

Korbatov, testifying on behalf of a contingent of riled Beverly Hills officials and residents, said the Metro staff report that includes the possibility of tunneling under the high school is full of “gaping holes and glaring omissions.”

The argument that seemed to get the most traction, however, was whether a tunnel under the school would undermine a $334 million bond measure passed in 2008 by Beverly Hills voters to modernize the campus.

Among other things, the school plan calls for three levels of subterranean parking, according to Korbatov and other speakers, who said the tunneling would make this impossible. They’re pressing for an alternative route down Santa Monica Boulevard, which also would require further analysis because it sits directly above a seismic fault.

Yaroslavsky, in proposing further study, said he did not believe the school garage plan and the subway tunnel were mutually exclusive. “I’m going to take a very hard and objective look at this,” he said. He suggested that the residents of Beverly Hills do the same: “I would encourage you to work with us and keep an open mind.”

Specifically, Yaroslavsky is asking the Metro staff to explore a variation on the so-called Constellation Station Option that would avoid going under the historic high school building. He also wants a full exploration of the potential risks of having a subway line and station under Santa Monica Boulevard, on top of a seismic fault.

At the heart of the controversy is a Metro staff recommendation for a 9-mile extension of the Purple Line, which would run from Western and Wilshire to the VA Hospital in Westwood. The staff report leaves open where the line’s Century City station should be located–including both the option that goes down Santa Monica Boulevard and the option that goes under Beverly Hills High School.

But many in the city are adamantly opposed to any alternative that includes the high school.

“Beverly Hills residents do not want tunneling when there’s a viable alternative,” Korbatov said.

The full Metro Board of Directors will consider Yaroslavsky’s motion at its October 28 meeting. That’s when the board also will take up the Metro staff’s recommendation for the subway’s “locally preferred alternative” route.

Whichever route the board adopts will receive intensive study during the project’s final environmental review process. It also will help place the Westside Subway project in line for federal funding consideration in fiscal 2012.

Building the subway, which has a $4.2 billion price tag under the staff-recommended route, will require federal dollars along with revenues from Measure R, the half-cent sales tax approved by voters in 2008.

Posted 10/20/10

Metro’s favored Westside Subway route [updated]

Racing the clock to obtain federal funding commitments for the Westside Subway in the next fiscal year, Metropolitan Transportation Authority staff this week recommended what it considers to be the best, most cost-effective route for the project.

Under the “locally preferred alternative” favored by Metro, the Purple Line subway would be extended nine miles from the current station at Wilshire and Western to the VA Hospital in Westwood, at a cost of about $4.2 billion. Building the VA Hospital station, in addition to one at UCLA, would provide an important access point for the subway west of the 405 Freeway, the staff report said.

Metro’s Board of Directors will consider the recommendation at its meeting on October 28. Whichever route the board adopts will then undergo intensive study during the project’s final environmental review process. The board’s adoption of a preferred route also will move the project into competitive consideration for federal dollars in fiscal 2012. Those funds, along with revenues from Measure R, the half-cent sales tax approved by voters in 2008, will be needed to build the subway.

“We’re looking for federal dollars and the subway project is a really good candidate,” said Martha Welborne, Metro’s executive director of countywide planning. “We want to make sure we’re in the next cycle, or we’ll miss a whole funding year.”

In addition to the hoped-for “New Starts” funding, the federal government also is being asked to help accelerate the pace of building the subway under the 30/10 Initiative. Under that plan, local leaders are seeking to borrow against future Measure R revenues in order to fast-track an array of regional transportation projects. The aim is to complete the projects in 10 years, instead of 30.

The staff’s recommendation on the subway route came during the final stretch of a 45-day public comment period. But there’s still time to weigh in before the October 18 deadline. The electronic comment form is here.

The staff recommendation is one of five route alternatives—ranging in cost from about $4 billion to $8.7 billion—that were considered in the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report, issued in September. One of those would have added a series of subway stations in West Hollywood but Metro staff rejected that option, saying there is not enough funding to build the West Hollywood stops in addition to the Purple Line extension to the VA. That recommendation came as a disappointment to those in the community who had advocated strongly for the West Hollywood stations.

“There are a lot of disappointed people,” said Dan Wentzel, an actor/writer and transit advocate who writes a blog called The Pink Line. He said voters in West Hollywood had supported Measure R more than those in other cities, and have collectively responded to the subway plan by saying, “Build here! Build here!”

In Beverly Hills, however, many residents have expressed serious concerns about tunneling under homes and schools, particularly under Beverly Hills High School.

A full page ad in this week’s Beverly Hills Weekly, signed by more than 350 people and endorsed by numerous organizations, voiced support for a subway route under Santa Monica Boulevard and strongly opposed alternatives that would go under the high school.

A column in the newspaper quoted a Beverly Hills City Councilman, Barry Brucker, as calling Metro’s staff recommendation on the subway route a “slap in the face.”

In an interview, Brucker faulted the Metro report’s “glaring omission” of community concerns about tunneling under the high school–which he said is the primary issue about the subway in town.

“Not one word about the high school,” he said. “That led the whole community to believe this is all a whitewash and a fait accompli.”

The staff-recommended route would have seven stations, six of them along Wilshire Boulevard: La Brea, Fairfax (next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,) La Cienega, Rodeo Drive, Westwood/UCLA and the VA Hospital. The line also would extend into Century City for one station before rejoining Wilshire. The staff recommended leaving the exact placement of the Century City and Westwood stations open for further analysis during the final environmental review process.

The staff recommendations, contained in a report to Metro committees scheduled to meet next week, propose dropping a possible station at Crenshaw and Wilshire. Doing so would save $153 million and improve the project’s “cost-effectiveness index” (a measurement of cost per hour of “user benefit”) to $31.96, the staff report said. That would make the subway a better candidate for inclusion in the next phase of the Federal Transit Administration’s “New Starts” program, which favors projects with a cost-effectiveness index of $31 or less.

The staff also recommended against building a “connection structure” that would have served as a gateway for future heavy rail stations in West Hollywood. It suggested that other transit alternatives—such as a light rail subway—might end up being a more cost-effective option for West Hollywood, which would make the structure unnecessary.

Transit blogger Wentzel said he was encouraged by the report’s acknowledgment that a West Hollywood line “has very high potential as a transit corridor.”

“That’s the one silver lining,” Wentzel said, describing himself as a continuing subway backer and an optimist about bringing transit alternatives to West Hollywood. “It’s a miracle how far the Santa Monica Boulevard corridor has come.”

Posted 10/14/10

Updated 10/21/10: Metro’s Board of Directors will consider the Westside Subway project at their meeting at on Thursday, Oct. 28. For more information, including how to get there via public transportation, click here.

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