Los Angeles To Long Beach Light Rail Line

More than 70% of the tunneling needed to finish the Rapid Transit District's 4.4-mile subway system in Los Angeles has been completed, RTD officials announced Wednesday. After five months of work on the system, contractors completed the tunnel segment between the Pershing Square Station and the 7th Street/Metro Center Station, RTD General Manager Alan Pegg said.

Transit officials could save $175 million and open the financially troubled Pasadena Blue Line three years early by scaling back station plans, eliminating one depot and revising bloated estimates for design work and other expenses, according to a report to be released today. The report, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and culled from documents and interviews with agency staff, has been anxiously awaited because of uncertainty about the planned 13.

About 25,000 Southern Californians did the unthinkable Saturday, forsaking the comfort and privacy of their cars for an elbow-to-elbow ride on Los Angeles' $877-million transit gamble: the Los Angeles-to-Long Beach light-rail line. In a public relations extravaganza beneath a scorching summer sun, county transit officials lured curious motorists and nearby residents to the so-called Blue Line with offers of free tickets, music and community celebrations.

In a hotly debated meeting marked by a raucous public demonstration, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority adopted a $2.9-billion budget Wednesday that includes spending $123 million for projects on the Pasadena Blue Line light rail system. The authority's approval of a 1994-95 fiscal budget was unanimous.

After driving buses for 30 years, Walter Wadlington has pretty much mastered the rules of the road. But a few months ago, the veteran Southern California Rapid Transit District driver found himself going back to the basics. As one of 43 train operators selected for the new Long Beach-to-Los Angeles Light Rail, Wadlington had to acquaint himself with the rules of the rail and with operating a train. "The class was the hardest part of the training," Wadlington said.

Light rail systems, like the Blue Line that will begin to run between Los Angeles and Long Beach this weekend, are attractive and fun to ride, but they tend to be expensive money-losers that do little to solve urban transportation problems. That is the widely held view of academic experts who have studied the new light rail lines that have been built in various American cities in recent years. A recent U.S. Department of Transportation study of new light rail projects in Buffalo, N.Y.

I'd heard they were testing the trolley cars on the new Long Beach-to-Los Angeles commuter rail line. Always interested in anything that runs on rail, I headed to the maintenance yard to catch a ride. I drove to the yard alone, oblivious to everything except the traffic on the San Diego and Long Beach freeways and the radio news. This is how most of us commute--isolated in our private worlds. Commuting by rail isn't like that.

More than 600,000 passengers have tried the Los Angeles-Long Beach light rail service since it opened free of charge two weeks ago. Now comes the real test, RTD officials acknowledge, when the $1.10 one-way fare takes hold Wednesday. "We're delighted with the response," said Alan F. Pegg, general manager of the Southern California Rapid Transit District.

Bells rang, lights flashed and an ear-splitting horn sounded, but the well-dressed woman in the yellow-and-tan Cadillac Eldorado still thought she could scoot under the railroad crossing gate as it descended. She made it past the barrier--barely. She made it past the train. She did not make it past Officer Harold Chilstrom of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He pulled her over and issued her a $71 ticket.

After three hours of contentious debate, a sharply divided Southern California Rapid Transit District board passed a compromise plan Thursday that would allow sheriff's deputies to provide security on the Metro Rail Blue Line for another year while the Transit Police gear up to take over.

A photograph may be worth more than a thousand words to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, as it gears up to fine motorists who illegally cross the tracks in front of Blue Line trains. "What we're trying to do is to keep people from making left-hand turns against a red left-hand arrow," said Linda Meadow, manager of systems safety for the MTA. "A lot of our accidents aren't real serious in terms of fatalities, but they hit the train."

One man's sore throat can turn into another man's sore feelings. That is how the case of the trolley line lozenge seemed to end Tuesday in Compton Municipal Court as a charge of "illegal eating" was dismissed against a 31-year-old Long Beach man. Ricky Gonzales was accused of misdemeanor munching after Sheriff's Deputy Brandan Hinkle caught him standing on the Metro Blue Line's Florence Avenue passenger platform with a suspicious substance in his mouth. "Cough drop," claimed Gonzales.

A Long Beach man accused of breaking the law by eating a cough drop on a Metro Blue Line passenger platform has been ordered to stand trial Feb. 1 in Compton Municipal Court. Ricky Gonzales, 31, was cited by a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy for eating "hard candy" at the trolley line's Florence Avenue station, where consumption of food is banned. Gonzales has claimed that he popped the cough drop in his mouth Nov. 23 because he was suffering from a sore throat brought on by the flu.

Two people died Monday after they were hit by commuter trains--one of them a man who apparently deliberately stepped in front of an oncoming train, the other a motorist who crashed through a crossing gate and into the path of another train. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies said Joseph Coutee, 51, of Los Angeles parked his pickup truck in the 1800 block of Willowbrook Avenue in the Compton area about 9:30 a.m.

Two men in a stolen car were killed and four passengers on a Blue Line train suffered minor injuries Tuesday when the car went past a lowered crossing gate and collided with the train in Willowbrook, officials said. County fire officials said one man died at the scene and the second, who had to be extricated with emergency equipment, died at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

Residents interested in a proposal to move the Blue Line Station on Wardlow Road about half a mile north are invited to a public hearing Wednesday. Transportation officials are considering moving the station at Wardlow Roand and Pacific Place because the site has too few parking spaces, said Brynn Kernaghan, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Transportation officials announced Monday that they will use a low-pollution, "space-age" fuel cell to provide most of the electrical power for the computer system at the Metro Rail Blue Line's central control facility in the Watts-Willowbrook area. It will be the first time such a cell will be used to power an integral part of a public transportation system, officials of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission said.

In a hotly debated meeting marked by a raucous public demonstration, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority adopted a $2.9-billion budget Wednesday that includes spending $123 million for projects on the Pasadena Blue Line light rail system. The authority's approval of a 1994-95 fiscal budget was unanimous.

By coincidence, the Orange County Transportation Authority launched a new commuter bus service here on the same day a citizens' panel publicly complained that such service is lacking. On Monday, the city's Environmental Board told the City Council that the lack of a non-transfer commuter bus service from Huntington Beach to Long Beach was an environmental problem.

A much-ballyhooed, $25,000 program meant to ticket drivers who illegally cross Blue Line tracks has resulted in no citations, officials acknowledged Thursday. The program--announced amid much fanfare more than a month ago--was intended to snare errant motorists by photographing the drivers and vehicle license plates and then mailing a $104 ticket. But because of a paperwork foul-up, the Department of Motor Vehicles refused to release names and addresses of the violators, stalling the project.