Projects

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By LARRY KANTER

Senior Reporter

You don’t have to be a transportation expert to realize that Los Angeles has a serious gridlock problem.

It’s not just the freeways during rush hour. As L.A. emerges from the recessionary years of the early 1990s, the city’s surface streets, seaport and international airport all are operating at or near capacity a serious issue for a city that aggressively markets itself as the capital of the Pacific Rim.

But if the problem is big, so is the solution.

“L.A. is putting in more for big-ticket infrastructure projects than any city in the country,” said Stephen Erie, a UC San Diego professor who studies regional transportation issues.

Between the Alameda Corridor, Metro Rail and capital improvements at the Port of L.A., the city has $4.3 billion in port and rail developments under way or on the horizon. That compares to $3.2 billion in the San Francisco Bay Area, $2.1 billion in New York and $1.2 billion in Seattle-Tacoma, according to Erie.

And the total for L.A. does not include the estimated $8 billion to $12 billion it will cost to renovate LAX.

“It is a preemptive bid to ensure L.A.’s position as the country’s premiere Pacific Rim gateway,” Erie says of the various projects. “It’s about locking in a lion’s share of the market.”

After years of planning, 1998 is poised to be a turning point for each of L.A.’s big infrastructure projects. What follows is a look at where each one stands and what challenges they are likely to face in the year to come.

– The Alameda Corridor. A $1.8 billion, 20-mile high-speed railroad line designed to move cargo from the seaports to the railyards and distribution centers south of downtown L.A., the Alameda Corridor has spent much of its life in litigation.

That changed earlier this year, when the California Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by a number of smaller cities along the corridor’s proposed route.

With legal hurdles out of the way, the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority, or ACTA the agency overseeing the corridor’s development has wasted no time in getting down to business.

The agency has been working on railroad grade separations at the route’s northern and southern ends. More significantly, ACTA in August began the process of soliciting bid requests for design work in the heart of the corridor a 10-mile-long, 30-foot-deep trench of depressed railway running along Alameda Street, from Santa Fe Street in L.A. to state Route 91 in the city of Compton.

ACTA will issue requests for proposals to qualified teams in January and a contract is expected to be awarded in September, said ACTA General Manager Gill Hicks. The corridor is scheduled to be completed in 2001. Once completed, it will handle up to 100 trains daily at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.

The corridor, however, is likely to face renewed pressure from community groups.

A recently formed group, the Alameda Corridor Jobs Coalition, is demanding that ACTA guarantee that 30 percent of the construction workers hired be “very low-income” individuals; and that the agency fund training programs for minority and low-income workers.

“It would be a travesty for the community to be affected (by the corridor) not to be involved in its construction,” says Robert Rubin, the group’s executive director, who promises pickets and even lawsuits if the group’s demands are not met.

– LAX expansion. With a projected price tag of up to $12 billion, the airport’s so-called “master plan” to guide growth through the year 2015 may be the most ambitious of L.A.’s infrastructure projects.

It also may be the most controversial if a series of public “scoping” meetings held last June are any indication.

At those sessions, held to gather public testimony on what should be included in the project’s draft EIR, Department of Airport officials collected 360 pages of verbal commentary and thousands of pages of written comments from nearby residents nervous about everything from increased noise and traffic to air and water quality issues as a result of the massive expansion.

The draft EIR is expected to be completed by June, said LAX spokeswoman Susan Gilmore. After another public review period, the final EIR will be issued by the end of the year, at which point requests for proposals will be issued to find a contractor to design and build the expansion.

Amid the outcry, LAX is fast outgrowing its current facilities.

In the first nine months of 1997, cargo volume grew 9.6 percent from the like period a year earlier; passenger traffic was up 3.2 percent.

That growth is expected to accelerate in the years to come. According to Department of Airports forecasts, passenger traffic will nearly double to 98 million passengers a year over the next two decades. Cargo traffic is expected to more than double from 1.7 million tons in 1994 to 4.1 million tons in 2015.

Without the expansion, airport officials fear that LAX could lose customers to less congested international airports, such as Denver or San Francisco.

Nonetheless, the expansion plan will face a bruising political fight in the years to come. Any eventual expansion needs to be approved by the L.A. City Council, the mayor and the Federal Aviation Administration.

– Port of L.A. expansion. L.A.’s seaport is in the midst of a major capital improvement program although the business of dredging harbor waters to create Pier 400, a 315-acre landfill adjacent to Terminal Island, tends to garner fewer headlines than LAX’s plans to build new runways.

The port’s plans for the future, however, are almost as ambitious.

When completed, the $600 million Pier 400 facility will be the largest terminal complex in North America, with state-of-the-art intermodal equipment designed to service the next generation of huge containerships. The facility, along with the recently completed Pier 300 project currently occupied by American President Lines will significantly boost the port’s competitive edge, says Larry Keller, the port’s executive director.

The harbor’s recent transit troubles which led some port customers to send their ships to alternate locations in Oakland and the Pacific Northwest demonstrate just how high the stakes can be. Indeed, shipping companies say they lose $50,000 a day when their vessels are delayed.

As it is, the port is operating at about 90 percent capacity, adds Keller.

“That’s a little closer than I’d like to see us,” he says. “More capacity is sorely needed.”

The dredging and landfill component of Pier 400 is scheduled to be completed by 1999 and the terminal will be ready to be occupied by July 2001.

– Metro Rail. In Los Angeles, moving people is as crucial as moving cargo. And on Jan. 17, the agency responsible for doing that, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, will face a day of reckoning.

That’s when the MTA board is expected to vote on a sweeping plan by its chief executive, Julian Burke, to put planned rail lines to the Eastside, Mid-City and Pasadena on hold indefinitely.

The MTA faces a $727 million shortfall in its $2.4 billion, six-year rail construction program, one of the most ambitious public works projects in the United States.

Burke, who has a reputation as a skilled corporate turnaround artist, has proposed that the agency complete the subway line to North Hollywood and suspend work on other rail projects until the agency cleans up its financial mess and improves its bus system.

“We are in a reassessment mode,” says Jim Dela Loza, the MTA’s director of programming and planning.

Burke’s plan has drawn strong opposition from a number of powerful L.A. lawmakers, including Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Los Angeles and Esteban Torres, D-Pico Rivera, who warn that suspending work could jeopardize state and federal funds already committed to the lines.

But MTA board member Larry Zarian said Burke’s plan is necessary precisely to win credibility with increasingly wary state and federal transit officials, and he expects the program to win the support of the board.

“The votes are there,” said Zarian. “I don’t see any other solution.”

Dela Loza stressed that the MTA remains committed to building a regional rail system. The agency continues to project that rail will account for 22 percent of the region’s transit by 2020; a new forecasting plan for continuing rail development should be complete by June, he said.

But first, he said, the agency needs to focus on improving its bus service under a 1996 consent decree.

“The priority has to be on serving the riders today and the riders today are on the bus system,” he said.

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