With its expansive geography and wide boulevards laid out in neat grids, the San Fernando Valley has always been an unapologetic symbol of California's car culture.
So perhaps it's fitting that the first mass transit line entirely within the Valley will come not in the form of a subway or light rail but on rubber wheels. The Orange Line, scheduled to open a week from Saturday, is a concrete roadway carrying high-tech buses that look more like Japanese bullet trains than like the MTA coaches seen crawling along Ventura Boulevard.
Transit planners hope the $350-million, 14-mile bus-only line between North Hollywood and Woodland Hills will get Valley residents used to mass transit and encourage the development of more apartments and mixed-use projects along the route. The system's most optimistic boosters predict that the link between the Orange Line busway and the Red Line subway to downtown Los Angeles will help tie the city together.
"This is going to ... join us again to greater metropolitan Los Angeles," said Van Nuys resident Andrew Hurvitz, noting that the opening of the busway comes three years after the Valley tried to secede from Los Angeles. "It's going to de-isolate the Valley.
"I feel like we're at a turning point," he added. "We are finally becoming less of a cliche than we were before. We're a dense, urban city and must live differently than we did in the 1950s. We can't [all] live in a single-family house with a three-car garage anymore."
But Hurvitz, an associate producer for a documentary film company with offices on Ventura Boulevard, said he's unlikely to ride the Orange Line, although he thinks a student to whom he rents a room in his house might.
And therein lies the recurring conundrum of mass transit in Los Angeles: If you build it, who will come?
Skeptics note that because the buses must still stop at any red lights along the route, the Orange Line can't match the speed of rail -- or even a car on a good day. The MTA says its clean-burning, extra-long and quiet coaches will be able to deliver commuters from Warner Center in Woodland Hills to the Red Line subway stop in North Hollywood in 38 minutes or less -- a run that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour by car, depending on the notoriously unpredictable traffic on the 101 Freeway.
