Bad News: “Subway To The Sea.” Good News: A Better Option.
By Walter Moore, Candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles, Walter Moore For Mayor.com
The L.A. Times reported yesterday that, over the last year, “Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called the ‘Subway to the Sea’ crucial to the city's future and made it a top priority.” The Mayor and his staff plan to increase your taxes to pay for it, by raising the sales tax, hitting all property owners with a bond, or singling out property owners along the route for higher taxes.
The bad news is that the “Subway to the Sea” would be a colossal waste of money. The good news is, for a fraction of what it would cost, we can gave a terrific mass transit system.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The few critical facts you need to know about the “Subway to the Sea” are that it would: cost at least $5 billion; take at least 10 years to build; and run just 12.5 miles, along one street, namely, Wilshire Boulevard. Here are the problems with that:
Problem No. 1 is that the proposed subway is too short. Are you really supposed to believe that adding a 12.5-mile long subway under one street will solve the traffic problems of a city that covers 469 square miles?
Problem No. 2: ten years from now? Please! We need gridlock unlocked yesterday.
Problem No. 3 is that the cost is prohibitive. Five billion dollars for 12.5 miles works out to $400 million per mile, or $75,758 per foot.
Problem No. 4 is that staggering overruns are almost inevitable. Have you ever known of a public works project of this magnitude that didn’t exceed its budget? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the original budget for Boston’s “Big Dig,” adjusted for inflation, was $4 billion, but it wound up costing $14.6 billion -- and that was before a big hunk of it fell down on a woman’s car and killed her. So you can bet that, once they start tunneling through the earthquake-prone and hyrdrocarbon-laden ground under some of L.A.’s most expensive real estate, someone will “realize” we actually need to spend far more than $75,758 per foot.
So much for the bad news. Now the good news: for a fraction of the cost, we could have terrific mass transit, and we could have it now, not 10 years from now. The solution is three words: “bus rapid transit.” It’s been done elsewhere, and we can do it here.
By converting parking lanes along key streets to “bus only” lanes, and buying enough buses to ensure one comes along every few minutes, we can make riding the bus an attractive alternative to sitting in one’s car. Buses are a relative bargain -- each one costs about $350,000 -- and can be delivered now, not 10 years from now.
To see how this would work, consider the 12.5-mile stretch of Wilshire that the “Subway to the Sea” would service. If we bought enough buses to put each bus just 98 yards apart from the next bus -- about the length of a football field -- all along that 12.5-mile stretch, guess how much money we would have left over from the $5 billion budget for the “Subway to the Sea?” We would still have $4.921 BILLION in our pockets! (Well, your pocket, mostly. I’ve got eight bucks on me.)
We could use some of that money to build parking structures to replace the parking we remove from the streets. Heck, we could even put parking structures underground, and put nice little parks on top of each one. By having enough buses running often, however, many of the people currently parking on the streets will presumably opt to take the bus instead.
Another thing we could do with the remaining $4.921 billion is provide mass transit to the many people in the City of L.A. who do not happen to live and work on Wilshire Boulevard. Get this: if we took the entire $5 billion that Villaraigosa wants to spend on a single 12.5-mile stretch of subway, and we instead spent it on buses, we could buy enough buses to have each one 98 yards away from the next one along 781 miles of road! You read that right. For the price of one mile of subway, you can saturate 62 miles of streets with buses, each just 98 yards from the next.
Do you see, now, why we should not dig the “Subway to the Sea?” It would not be not cost-effective. We would get much more “bang for the buck” by using our existing infrastructure -- our streets -- more efficiently than we do now. We can give it a catchy name if you like -- maybe “Smart Transit?” -- but we need to focus on practical, affordable solutions that will solve the traffic problem for the whole City, rather than basing public policy on alliterative slogans like “Subway to the Sea.”
Finally, speaking of your money, if you want a Mayor with practical solutions that do not require increased taxes or spending, please click here to contribute to the Committee to Elect Walter Moore.
