Despite being known as one of the nation's worst repositories for transportation gridlock, the Los Angeles area managed Thursday to miss out on qualifying for hundreds of millions of federal dollars for traffic-busting programs.
Although no official would say so on the record, several suggested privately that Southern California transit agencies and the elected officials who oversee them lost out because the grant required communities to offer some type of "congestion pricing": tolls that politicians know voters hate.
Instead, the application submitted by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority on behalf of local agencies requested money only to help pay for a study of congestion pricing.
The MTA is headed by county Supervisor Gloria Molina.
But one critic of the application shortfall expressed his disappointment with a co-chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has repeatedly vowed to lobby the state and Washington for more money to fight gridlock and expand mass transit.
"The mayor really missed the boat," said Bob Poole, director of transportation studies for the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based libertarian think tank.
"They submitted something that didn't respond to the criteria" that the Department of Transportation "clearly set out, and it's really a shame, because I can't imagine how Los Angeles wouldn't have been a finalist with a credible application," Poole said.
Los Angeles County could have proposed using the grant for a pilot program or, on a larger scale, to convert its estimated 468 miles of carpool lanes to congestion pricing lanes -- and use the revenue raised by the tolls to build carpool lanes throughout the county, he said. In particular, he mentioned the often clogged Santa Monica Freeway.
"You could have a network of these lanes all over Los Angeles County, run express buses on them and give public transit a big competitive advantage compared to people sitting in traffic," Poole said.
Molina could not be reached for comment.
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member who has also been outspoken on transportation, declined to comment through a spokesman.
News that Los Angeles had lost out in the federal competition came early in the day when U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters announced that nine other large metropolitan areas -- including New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Denver -- were semifinalists in a competition for $1.1 billion in federal assistance. The money will be divided among up to five winners to be announced in August.
