What’s the real issue? Neighbors for Smart Rail rail against, well, rail

Phase 1 of Metro’s Exposition Corridor light rail (currently under construction—expected completion in 2012) will extend from 7^th Street and Metro Center to a station at Venice and Robertson. From Venice and Robertson, Phase 2 is planned to continue through west Los Angeles and Santa Monica, ultimately reaching its terminus at Colorado and 4^th Street in downtown Santa Monica. The Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for Phase 2 was certified in February of this year, giving Metro the green light to commence design and engineering for the preferred alternative. Design and engineering for Phase 2 is expected to begin by the end of this year, with revenue service beginning in 2014-2015.

This latter phase is aligned primarily along the right-of-way for the defunct Pacific Electric Red Line; however, this right-of-way passes through the affluent neighborhood of Cheviot Hills. The neighborhood association and some residents in Cheviot Hills oppose the Expo line along the PE right-of-way, and front lawns in the neighborhood are peppered with signs advertising reasons why the Expo is a bad idea. (Ironically, the Pacific Electric trains that once ran along the right-of-way are part of what made Cheviot Hills and the surrounding communities attractive in the first place.)

This opposition is nothing new. In the 1980s when this line was first proposed, Cheviot Hills residents lobbied against and succeeded in stopping the Expo line. With Metro again planning to extend rail to the Westside along the Exposition alignment, opponents have regrouped. The signs in some residents’ front yards attack the line for safety issues (“Kids and trains don’t mix”) and concerns for increasing congestion (“Don’t let light rail block our roads” and “Don’t let Expo block access to the freeway”), but one wonders whether these are proxies for concerns about property values and “outsiders” (read: lower-income people and minorities) riding the train through the neighborhood.

A statement made previously by a former association president seems to support this. In 2007, an article in the LA Times (by our own Jeff Rabin, no less!) quoted Benjamin Cate as saying, "Do you think the people who live in Cheviot Hills are going to take this bloody train? No, they are going to get in their cars. The people who are going to use this are the people who work in the hotels in Santa Monica, and they are going to come from the Hispanic areas nearer downtown. Now they take the bus" (LA Times article).

However, this opposition to the Expo line is not unanimous. Other neighborhood groups and residents, including Friends 4 Expo Transit, Light Rail For Cheviot, and others, support the rail line as a way to improve connectivity and alleviate congestion.

This latter argument about rail’s effect on congestion (and the counter argument by Neighbors For Smart Rail) might be moot, as Dr. Brian Taylor’s research on congestion suggests. Transit, like roadway widening, doesn’t cure congestion, but the greater capacity can instead facilitate increased social and economic opportunities.

In “Rethinking Traffic Congestion” published in 2002 in Access, Taylor argues,

“…[T]he effects of latent/induced demand are not limited to road widenings. If a new ramp-metering program smoothes traffic flow and reduces delay in the short-term, it has the same effect as increased capacity on the time-cost of travel; so does a new rail line that lures a substantial number of travelers off a parallel roadway. This is why congestion on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was only temporarily reduced when BART opened in the 1970s. Absent some corresponding increase in the monetary price of a trip, any change that reduces delay and travel times is subject to these effects” (Full article).