Posted on 02/20/2014 11:54:53 AM PST by BenLurkin
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Federal transit officials Thursday will announce a $670 million construction grant to build a light rail transit line that will connect three other rail lines in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
The grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) marks about half of the money needed to complete a $1.4 billion project to build the two-mile Regional Connector light rail transit line, which will connect three existing transit lines with a new tunnel and three new stations.
The project will utilize the existing Metro Gold line in Little Tokyo and the Exposition and Blue light rail lines, which currently terminate at Flower and 7th Streets, according to transit officials.
Officials say the grant – which also includes four new light rail vehicles – will help eliminate the need for riders to make cumbersome transfers from light rail to the Metro Red or Purple Line subway system, and then back onto light rail, to reach their destinations.
“The traffic gridlock of Los Angeles has been the roadblock for many residents who need better, more reliable access to the jobs and educational opportunities offered across the metropolitan area,” said FTA Deputy Administrator McMillan.
The Regional Connector is scheduled to open in 2020 and is projected to handle roughly 60,000 trips or more every weekday.
Damn! Now here I thought they’d solved that ‘coupling’ problem back in the olden days.
Good idea. This should have been built a long time ago. The decision to end the Blue Line at 7th & Flower was an error of magnificent proportions. It’s good to see a genuine network emerge from the rubble of earlier decisions.
This union mafia construction will drag on for decades like in that movie “Falling Down”
Corruption in major Southern California construction projects does not originate in any kind of union or Mafia connection. It always originates in personal political connections of certain highly placed political types. This has been true, not only for the construction of public transportation infrastructure, but for the construction of the freeways, and before that the aqueducts.
I don’t doubt that you are correct but one of the first rules that you learn in construction is “don’t kill the job!”
String it out as long as you can to get paid as long as you can
The only useful destinations are connecting to all the major airports but the stupid cabbie union in LA won’t allow that! Just a GIANT waste of taxpayer money! The f’ing unions love taxpayers money!
It’s not the cab drivers’ union, but the Port of Los Angeles, which wants to maintain its empire of airport parking lots.
Why is it a good idea for anyone’s tax dollars outside of LA? If CA wants trains, they should build it themselves.
They are building it themselves, except for the federal grant, which they applied for. The feds appropriate money for grants for urban mass rail transit, and the MTA simply applied for one grant. Most transit systems engaging in a large building effort apply to the feds for one of those grants. It’s been going on for decades.
OK...thanks for the correction.
I’d rather see them spend the money on connecting water pipes to the drought stricken agricultural centers.
Yes, I know everyone gets grants. Doesn’t mean it’s right.
Large urban mass transit rail projects have received federal dollars since the first fuel crunch of 1973-74. Standards are fairy stringent for these projects to get federal money.
You may not want your tax dollars to finance a project in California, but those dollars also finance projects in your Texas.
There is a fascinating book, Getting There, by Stephen Goddard, that goes into this question, which dates all the way back to federal financing of canals in the 1820's. None of this is new.
I use to ask myself why liberals are so infatuated by trains. But it makes perfect sense to me now. Trains go, where a liberal says they will go, when a liberal says you will go, and employs affirmative action liberals. It is also incredibly expensive and liberals get to spend other peoples’ money to make these boon doggles.
When I was listening to the debate about the Honolulu light rail project (ridiculously stupid and expensive)the pro side was claiming Hawaiians won’t have to pay for it. “The government will pay for it.” If they ever get that project moving it will make the “Big Dig” look like it was an efficiently managed under budget tunnel project.
and what is the daily/monthly/annual passenger-mile use of the lines, and the subsidy share of operating costs, for some transit line that’s going to cost approx $700 billion per mile, for all of 2 miles!!!!!
even if the expo line were to meet ridership hoped for when the line is completed to Santa Monica, its revenue would not pay for the capital costs of building it for 35 years, and even that requires full capacity, all the time; and that’s not counting the fact that fare revenue does not pay 100% of operating costs anyway
in other words, were all the non-rider tax payers not taxed to subsidize the system, it could not exist
at least with roads, those using them are paying the state and federal fuel taxes that for them
no, given the costs, for a system serving less than 5% of L.A.’s population (pop 3.85mil, daily boardings 201,900), the system is too costly
meanwhile
the orange line - a BRT line - articulating commuter buses running in a dedicated road bed between stations and/or on non-dedicated surfaces when heading to or from service or as safety conditions warrent - has proven as effective at attracting customers, meeting expected operation efficiences and yet with capital costs that are 1/3 the costs per mile as the light rail lines and operating costs 1/2 the costs per mile of the light rail lines
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