Vision and strategy must go hand in hand

I attended Saturday morning’s Metro meeting on the Crenshaw line and came away frustrated by Metro's seeming lack of either vision or strategy. I understand the necessity of compromise for the sake of securing federal funding, but Metro seems intent on throwing away most of the benefits this line could provide just for the sake of getting something, anything, built. To that end, they’ve lopped off the section north of the Expo and aligned the southern section along the Harbor Subdivision route.

Reflecting Metro's strategy problem, the lack of a northern section is somewhat more acceptable because it leaves the open the possibility for the preferable La Brea alignment, which would be more politically feasible if it could connect to an existing Purple line extension. Less acceptable and illustrative of Metro's vision problem, their proposal to cut costs by using the Harbor Subdivision route, while somewhat understandable, would sacrifice potential land use objectives and squander opportunities to revitalize downtown Inglewood and to convert Century Boulevard to less auto-dominated usage.

At what point do we ask ourselves, “Why are we building this transit network? Do we really want to trade most of the potential benefits for the sake of expediency?” Sometimes, you have to demand it either be done right or not be done at all.

I get the feeling that Metro was robbed of an overriding strategy when pols like Yaroslavsky and Waxman derailed the Purple line. Now projects like Expo and Crenshaw seem to be filling the vacuum left in that line's wake. And with LA now staring at a true transit crisis and mounting public outcry, Metro is in the hot seat trying to piece together a solution with fragments of its long-term transit plan. But the Purple Line remains the key piece in a coherent public transit network: it’s a familiar, well-studied project with broad political support that the public both comprehends and, in general, supports, and, most importantly, it’s a good design that would serve as the logical backbone for the system while making secondary projects like Crenshaw that much easier to build political and popular support for.

Metro should be devoting its energies towards overcoming the very real existing obstacles to the Purple line. (The short-sighted politicians responsible for derailing it should also bite the bullet, admit they were wrong, and go to the mat for a solution, but we all know that's not going to happen). A strategy of pursuing fragmented, compromised projects such as the current Crenshaw proposal or the ill-conceived Phase II of the Expo line only undermines public support for long-term transit goals and saddles LA with poorly designed and ineffective transit infrastructure.

Update 2/25/08: In this comment thread at MetroLA, Scott Mercer and Jerard both make an interesting proposal for Inglewood and local developers to pay for the route to go under downtown Inglewood and Century Blvd. This is an intriguing idea that I could certainly get behind and could be a strategy for other segments of a regional transit system.