The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is planning a series of public meetings to discuss ideas about mass transit in the city, including subways, monorails and new bus routes.
These meetings are one of the first steps Metro is taking in its Westside Extension Transit Corridor Study. The Westside Corridor is the area encompassing Santa Monica, Westwood and Culver City, going as far north as Vermont Avenue and east to Exposition Park and the University of Southern California.
Dave Sotero, the senior public information officer for Metro, said UCLA may benefit from the final result of the study.
Jody Feerst-Litvak, the operations community relations manager for Metro, added that college students are a definite percentage of Metro’s passengers.
“Everybody gets that there’s a huge demand in … Westwood. The station there will have a lot of ridership,” she said.
Feerst-Litvak said officials have gotten many of different ideas from the public.
“We heard a lot of comments for a subway alternate, we heard people looking at other options such as aerial light rail or three-level light rail or monorail or bus improvements,” she said.
Feerst-Litvak said the Metro Board of Directors, of which she is a member, is now charged with selecting the most viable options.
“We’re sort of trying to narrow all of those down into a workable number,” she said.
After this series of meetings, the board will have to determine the public preference and then determine environmental factors.
“(We will) ask the board to authorize us to take that alternative and do a full environmental analysis,” Feerst-Litvak said.
She said the “early scoping” meetings held last fall were very successful.
“The meetings in October, we had nearly 500 people show up. We got over 450 comments,” she said.
Stanislav Parfenov, an urban planning graduate student and president of the student group Transportation Planners, said the current bus system has several key flaws.
“I think the problem with the bus system is that people have to change the busses to get to their destination. This waiting time … is actually one of the deterrents of people using the system,” Parfenov said.
He also said there are positive and negative aspects to any idea.
“It’s a debate, because some say subways will take so many cars off the road, but it is really expensive to build. With the bus, people aren’t sure it’ll have as many riders as the subway. It’s a mixed bag. There are pros and cons for each mode of transit,” Parfenov said.
Feerst-Litvak said financial backing is one of the major hurdles for this project, especially since the Westside Corridor study is one of several Metro is currently undertaking.
“We are sorely lacking for sufficient funding to build and operate the current system we have, and to build anything new to accommodate for the growth that we know is coming to Los Angeles,” Feerst-Litvak said. “Money is short.”
She said these upcoming meetings are a chance for the public to see Metro’s progress and their options for the future.
“The meetings we have coming up … (are) our opportunity to go back to the pubic and say, “˜Okay, this is everything you told us, we’ve now sort of synthesized everything, here are the various alternatives that we will be taking through for more in-depth analysis as the process goes forward,'” Feerst-Litvak said.
Parfenov said he hopes Metro will find a way to get the money and improve the city’s mass transit.
“I hope (Metro) will step up,” Parfenov said.