First and foremost, LA needs designate Downtown, Hollywood, and Westwood as transit hubs that will act as high traffic, high capacity regional connectors for future lines that will radiate from them. The concept of a poly-centric city connected by freeways or trains is not workable. LA must strategically select hubs to recentralize around and build its transit system outward from them.
The reasoning for these specific transit hubs are as follows:
1) Downtown: Despite LA’s reputation for decentralized sprawl, Downtown maintains a strong centralized orientation that should be reinforced. However, the core remains highly under-utilized even though it is surrounded in all directions by the highest density neighborhoods in LA. Downtown is also the dominant regional hub with Metrolink providing direct access to and from the LA Basin, the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, and Orange and San Diego Counties. These are strengths that must be built upon (see the Regional Connector).
2) Hollywood: Nestled at the mouth of the Cahuenga Pass, Hollywood is an established gateway to the eastern San Fernando Valley. Currently this gateway is choked with traffic which funnels through the pass, pours into surface streets, and, suppresses Hollywood’s pent-up development potential. A transit hub at Hollywood and Highland would collect traffic from the valley and distribute it through out the central area via a variety of lines radiating east, west, and south. It would also provide much needed internal mobility for its dense and transit-oriented population.
3) Westwood: Westwood sits at the mouth of the Sepulveda Pass through which squeezes all the car traffic between the San Fernando Valley and the Westside and LAX. Additionally, the 405 acts as a wall restricting east-west traffic. Like Hollywood, much of this traffic could be consolidated and collected at a transit hub and distributed throughout the Westside. Given the Westside’s greater decentralization and lower-densities, heavy-rail (i.e. the “Subway to the Sea”) would not be appropriate. Instead, a network of BRT or LRT would be better suited until ridership and the Westwood hub are more firmly established.
In addition to these three hubs, Wilshire Boulevard constitutes another dense concentration of jobs and population and would provide significant points of transfer, particularly for traffic from South LA. However, with no trains originating or terminating here and with no single point of convergence, Wilshire acts more as a corridor than as a hub. The Purple Line is as a single-line, but acts like two radial sections attached end to end: the eastern half radiates from downtown to Hancock Park via Westlake and Koreatown while the western half radiates from Westwood and Century City to Miracle Mile via Beverly Hills. The Purple is bookended by Westwood and Downtown, creating a strong bi-directional orientation that will boost ridership.
The following Westside projects would provide immediate benefits but also strategically lay the groundwork for future expansion:
Priority #1: Extend Purple Line to Westwood and construct a multi-modal “Westwood Connector”* (i.e. an underground transit facility that serves as a hub for regional transit).
Priority #2: Build a “Hollywood Connector”* and a Pink Light Rail Line from Hollywood/Highland to Santa Monica via Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevards. The Pink line will run under Santa Monica Boulevard from the Hollywood Connector to La Cienega. West of La Cienega, it will run at grade in separate center lanes (similar to the new 3rd Street line in San Francisco). It will stop only at traffic lights until it reaches Beverly Hills, where it will utilize the existing right-of-way. It will enter a tunnel east of Beverly Hills City Hall and emerge from it west of Wilshire Boulevard. It will travel at grade for the remainder of Santa Monica Boulevard until it enters the Westwood Connector. It will exit the Westwood Connector at Wilshire Boulevard and travel to downtown Santa Monica, though I have not hashed out any ideas regarding grade separation at the moment.
Priority #3: Complete Phase II of Expo Line along Venice and Sepulveda Boulevards through the Westwood Connector to UCLA Campus.
*Regional connectors should be built with excess capacity (preferably four tracks)
These three lines, forming the core of this system and closing the circuit of transit hubs, would look like this (Downtown Regional Connector not shown):
7 comments:
I am a huge supporter of the Pink Line and I think your triangle design is well thought out and wonderful.
I imagine we will speak of people living and working "in the triangle".
The Red Line is built and the Purple Line is well supported by transit advocates. The Pink Line needs your support. Please contact the MTA within the next few days and let them know you want a Santa Monica Blvd. alignment included in their Long Term Transportation Plan.
One more thing.
North Hollywood is also going to become a hub as well.
If Alternative #9 is chosen in the Westside Transit Corridor Extension Study, that would provide for BOTH a Purple Line expansion along Wilshire and the Pink Line Alignment directly from North Hollywood to Century City/Westwood along Santa Monica Blvd.
Please contact the MTA within the next few days at BOTH the following e-mail address:
WestsideExtension@metro.net
metroplan@metro.net
and please let them know you support BOTH the Purple and Pink Lines and you want BOTH included in the MTA's Long Range Transportation Plan.
MTA doesn't want the Pink Line.
I think it is a good idea. It's such a good idea that the cities of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills should build it themselves. 85% of the line will be located within those two municipalities.
They should set up a city sales tax and sell some municipal bonds and just build it. The ROW is there, along Santa Monica.
Obviously, it should be surface light rail, perhaps elevated at key intersections (Fairfax, Doheny, Wilshire) and should connect Hollywood/Highland to Century City. It could be built in about 3 years.
A heavy rail extension for the "pink" line creates a one-seat ride for trips from the eastern valley to Century City and Westwood. Also, the direct connection between Hollywood, West Hollywood, and the West Side becomes an efficient one-seat ride. I understand the cost savings in choosing LRT for this connection, but it will be at the cost of a critical loss of efficiency and ridership. In addition, upscale communities along the line would likely require subway construction for LRT for much of the row, anyways.
I don't think that's quite right, Scott. The MTA doesn't want to have to think about the "Pink Line". They've been so Wilshire Blvd. focused that the support for a Santa Monica Blvd. alignment has caught them off guard. That they don't want it or want to think about it doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
It's a one-seat ride from the East Valley to Century City that makes it even more important that the parochial interests of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills themselves.
Instead of stopping in the back end of Beverly Hills, I'd make one slight detour down to the Beverly Center/Cedar Sinai, then rejoin the Purple Line at LaCienega/Wilshire.
However, too many people are looking only at the East/West part of the Pink Line along Santa Monica Blvd. If it goes directly into North Hollywood, there are invaluable North/South benefits too. That the San Fernando Valley would also benefit from something invaluable to the Westside as well makes it attractive and a suitable companion project to the "Subway to the Sea", which I think all reasonable people agree is the highest public transit rail priority for Southern California.
In a distant future with the purple line and other connectors already built, I'd also like to see some extension of a north south line from the valey to the west side, and in the even more distant future, a line down Ventura blvd.
I don't think people should take the lack of support for a pink line as an offense. I agree it should be built, but the purple line itself is so ridiculously vital and has been such a painful, uphill battle for 20 years, that I think it's hard for metro to imagine getting the billions more necessary to build it.
It would be an incredible accomplishment to build both ala Alternative #9.
"I don't think people should take the lack of support for a pink line as an offense."
See, I don't think there is a lack of support. Jody Litvak of the MTA said in the City Beat that the MTA was surprised about how much support there indeed was for a Santa Monica alignment.
I totally agree with you that the Purple Line should come first. That and the Downtown Regional Connector are by far and away the most important public transit projects that we need to fund right away.
Post a Comment