TV cameras in tow and champagne at the ready, a dozen of the county’s most powerful civic leaders , including the mayor of Los Angeles, L.A. City Council members and county supervisors , touted the latest and glitziest new development in Hollywood: the planned W Hotel and apartments at the storied corner of Hollywood and Vine.

This project, they pledged at the groundbreaking earlier this year, would restore a sagging neighborhood while also minimizing traffic , an important promise in increasingly gridlocked Hollywood.

“People could live here and never use their cars,” declared MTA Chief Executive Roger Snoble at the February event.

It’s a vision expressed frequently by local government officials, who see building large mixed-use developments next to mass transit lines as a key solution for not just the region’s traffic congestion but also its spread-out geography and reputation for being unfriendly to pedestrians.

In Los Angeles alone, billions of public and private dollars have been lavished on transit-oriented projects such as Hollywood & Vine, with more than 20,000 residential units approved within a quarter mile of transit stations between 2001 and 2005.

But there is little research to back up the rosy predictions. Among the few academic studies of the subject, one that looked at buildings in the Los Angeles area showed that transit-based development successfully weaned relatively few residents from their cars. It also found that, over time, no more people in the buildings studied were taking transit 10 years after a project opened than when it was first built.

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