Derailment Dreams
Foes of Expo Line drive up the costs of a crucial project
With gas prices shooting over $4 a gallon and ridership on Metropolitan Transportation Authority trains and subways way up, you might think everybody in town would be cheering the Expo Line, now under construction from downtown Los Angeles to Culver City.
But that’s not the story of transportation projects in L.A. Most projects in the past 20 years have been hounded by foes who threaten to delay them and needlessly send the costs higher and higher.
And so it is with the Expo Line, which signed on a battery of lawyers who say they will not be satisfied until the Expo Line Construction Authority is forced to place the tracks underground at the Dorsey High School crossing, at Farmdale Avenue and
Exposition Boulevard. If successful, the move could tack millions onto the project and delay the opening of the L.A.-Culver City line by years. Similar concerns are being raised by the group about the train crossing near Foshay Learning Center at Harvard Boulevard.
Damien Goodmon, a longtime foe of the project, has joined forces with other community groups opposed to the light-rail line – which, if it opens in 2009 or 2010, would ease congestion on the Santa Monica Freeway and other major east-west arteries like Pico and Olympic boulevards. Goodman wants the entire stretch from Figueroa to La Brea to be placed underground, a radical idea that most project proponents see as a sign that he’s really out to kill the line.
The opponents signed up the law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, which is handling the case for free. The Sonnenschein legal team is led by Ivor Samson and Christopher Prince, who worked on the civil rights lawsuit that produced the now-expired 10-year consent decree that forced Metro to buy more buses. “We are trying to get the crossings built in a safe manner, which means putting the crossings in a trench or underground,” said Samson.
The Expo Line Authority is prepared for the long haul on this project. Already, costs on the $850 million project have gone up by at least $1 million to cover legal, design and other costs brought on by the challenge.
To address safety issues, the Expo’s governing board hired an independent consultant for $250,000 to review two possible alternatives – closing off the street to all traffic and building a pedestrian bridge, and keeping the street open and building a train bridge. A train bridge could cost $25 million, far shy of the $100 million that burying the line would cost; in fact, a court decision that the line be placed underground would kill the project.
The Public Utilities Commission is reviewing the matter and will hold hearings this summer before making a decision, most likely in November. Odds are the commission will either let the Expo authority proceed with the street-level crossing or order one of the less costly alternatives, which could set up a legal challenge. PUC decisions can only be challenged at the California state Supreme Court level. “If they do not decide in our favor, we will take it from there,” Samson said.
The Expo board is pushing for its original plan of a street-level crossing at Dorsey, which calls for a double set of crossing gates and, as an added precaution, a crossing guard to monitor traffic during school hours. Trains would slow to about 20 miles per hour.
Who knows, by the time this train rolls down the track, gas prices could be near $6 a gallon and Goodman and other foes will have to answer to a new cry from the community: Why’d the project take so long?
With reporting by Alex Comisar.
Published: 05/28/2008
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Comments
For the record, I did not post the comment by "Alan" on 5/29/08 @ 6:56 p.m. (I rarely leave comments, but when I do, I always use my full name.)
I have a simple solution: close down Dorsey High and move it somewhere else.
Now that would protect the kids.
I prepared the below when I first heard Damien’s comments and I have little to add except that the grade separations were biased on the number of cars that would be affected by the line, not by an activist looking for a problem. The new Gold East LA Line passes two high schools and there will be no gates at the crossings. There are about the same number of stations, spacing between stations, schools and grade separations in phase I as in phase II. The Sepulveda Venice detour was/is a NIMBY ploy to kill or keep the line away from them and should no more be considered than a grade separation at Farmdale. The crossing is so minor it does not even rare a traffic signal.
This a good example of a solution looking for a problem. Damien Goodmon a neighborhood activist that is looking for a cause to gain political recognition and is making a big deal out of nothing. He has cost us $250,000.00 to start.
The grade separations at USC, La Brea, LA Cienega and Culver City have many thousands of cars passing an hour with complicated intersections. If not separated there would be traffic delays even with only a 30 second period with the gates down as the cars passed. This is not the case at the Dorsey crossing.
Is Damien trying to tell us that the students are not smart enough to stay out of the way of an approaching train even with gates blocking their way? Somehow the students have figured out how to stay out of the street when cars are coming. Theses are bright High School students, give them some credit and not use them as pawns to gain political power.
There are many other surface LRT lines that pass schools and somehow the line does not put at risk the students anymore than crossing a street.
The MTA, the construction authority and the PUC had it right the first time with allowing an at grade crossing. Even if the money were there a grade separation should not be built