Transit System

I knew Tuesday's column on public transportation would get a big reaction from frustrated commuters. But I wasn't expecting the message that was waiting for me that afternoon on my voice mail: "The mayor is trying to reach you. He wants to speak with you." And that's how I found myself in City Hall the next day sitting at a big table opposite Jaime de la Vega, the deputy mayor for transportation. We spent nearly two hours discussing and arguing about ways to make public transit more attractive and practical for Los Angeles residents.

Bay Area transit officials expressed their condolences Saturday over the deaths of two maintenance workers who were killed when they hit by a BART train as they conducted a routine track inspection on the second day of a transit strike. "This is a tragic day in BART's history,” Grace Crunican, general manager of the public transit system, said in a prepared statement. “The entire BART family is grieving. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of our deceased co-workers.

Scott Martelle's article ["Seeing Green in San Diego," Nov. 23] leaves the erroneous impression that the city's public transit consists solely of trolleys. In fact, the three trolley lines are integrated with an extensive bus system, and day passes access both. Frequent buses to the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld connect with trolley stations throughout downtown, at the Amtrak depot and in Old Town. Tourists can reach all key attractions easily without needing a car. David Smollar San Diego

SAN FRANCISCO -- Negotiations to avert another Bay Area Rapid Transit  strike  this year continued Thursday as a court-imposed 60-day cooling-off period was close to ending. BART warned riders to be prepared for a shutdown Friday and  hired buses to shuttle a small fraction of  commuters in and out of San Francisco in the event of a strike. A cooling-off period requested by Gov. Jerry Brown and approved by a judge will expire at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. A spokesman for the unions said both sides had been close to an agreement Wednesday night when management suddenly withdrew an offer.

Hundreds of thousands of commuters in Toronto, Canada's largest city, were forced to find alternative ways to work as a labor dispute shut down subways, buses and streetcars. About 800,000 people use Toronto's mass transit system daily. Only seven buses were operating during morning rush hour, instead of the usual 1,300. Subway and streetcar service was also crippled. Ontario's Labor Relations Board declared the strike illegal. The Amalgamated Transit Union said workers would return today.

Based on the favorable response to local shuttles operated during the previous two Christmas seasons, the city has launched a study on public opinion about starting a transit system that might combine dial-a-ride and fixed-route services. During May, the city is planning to distribute a survey to all households. Opinions will also be solicited from local businesses and organizations. An Irvine-based consultant, UMA Engineering Inc., will conduct the study.

After two months of operation, Camarillo Area Transit continues to attract an increasingly large number of riders. In February, 2,965 people took to the city's buses--565 more than in January. CAT provides access to people who would otherwise not be able to get around town, including the elderly and disabled and those with no fixed-route buses running through their neighborhoods.

Last week, I took a ride on the Green Line, the light-rail line along the 105 Freeway that connects Norwalk and Redondo Beach. Well, sort of connects them. First, the line starts a mile short of the Norwalk Metrolink station, then steers clear of LAX and ends on the edge of Redondo Beach at a station surrounded by the 405 Freeway, a Volkswagen dealership, a utility substation and a Northrop Grumman plant.

Re "3 L.A. County Rail Projects Move Ahead," Dec. 16 Finally, we have a Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority board and a City Council that understand what Los Angeles has become, not what we wished it was or actually was when many of the older homeowners arrived after World War II. A world-class arts, entertainment, business and service hub with people from all over the world should have an integrated transit system to allow us to...

A transit system using vans to link residential neighborhoods, parks, shopping areas, schools, the post office and City Hall is expected to be in operation by next spring. The Cerritos City Council has authorized a call for proposals from transit operators to develop and operate the service, which would cost an estimated $416,300 a year and would be financed with transit funds received through the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Negotiations between Bay Area Rapid Transit management and two striking unions lasted through the night failed to produce an agreement, BART officials said Wednesday morning. The two sides met until 3 a.m. Wednesday and will resume talks at 1 p.m., said BART spokesman Jim Allison. The announcement that the strike is continuing into its third day comes a day after California's controller, insurance commissioner and lieutenant governor wrote to the parties involved urging that talks resume because of the effects on the busy region, which, they noted, is “served by the fifth-busiest transit system in America, with nearly 400,000 daily riders.” The Bay Area Council on Tuesday released an estimate of the environmental cost of the transit strike, calculating that increased traffic congestion is generating almost 16 million pounds of carbon and using up almost 800,000 gallons of gas every day at a cost of almost $3.3 million.

Re "Growing pains," June 10 Transit-oriented development is one thing when you have a clean slate to work on; it is another when you are inserting a light-rail line into an existing (and thriving) community like West Los Angeles. You can't just plop a huge development like the proposed 638-unit Casden West L.A. next to the rail station, call it transit-oriented development and ignore the surrounding conditions. Casden uses its adjacency to a future Expo Line station as an excuse to overbuild.

With a county transit tax measure he backed teetering between failure and approval, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Wednesday he will go "back to the toolbox" if necessary to accelerate several projects, including a subway to the Westside. The sales tax extension proposal, Measure J, came up just short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass, with 100% of precincts reporting. The vote tally Wednesday was 1,367,357 votes or 64.72% in support and 35.28% against, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder.

As he seeks to build a legacy as a big-project transportation mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa on Thursday made gains at home and in Washington in his efforts to speed expansion of the Los Angeles region's transit system. Congress is expected as early as Friday to approve a long-awaited transportation bill that includes a measure sought by Villaraigosa during at least two years of lobbying federal officials. The bill would expand a federal loan program that could provide the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority with at least $350 million over the next two years and $3.3 billion more in the future for transit projects.

Scene : The corner of Hollywood & Vine. Clumps of young women tumble out of the Metro Red Line subway station, all sequins and sparkle, their skirts as short as their heels are high. Someone tweets that Jamie Foxx is upstairs at Drai's glassed-in nightclub. A girl crouches at Latin pop singer Shakira's sidewalk star waiting for her friend to snap a picture. "See, the night is just getting started," Javier Romero says as the escalator drops us into the subway station, beneath a ceiling preposterously lined with faux film reels and supported by pillars shaped like palm trees.

Even as city workers protested planned cuts outside, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa avoided talk of layoffs during his annual State of the City address Wednesday. He chose instead to cheerlead a proposed ballot measure that he said would allow the region to rapidly expand its transit system. The mayor devoted only five paragraphs in his seven-page speech to his proposed budget, which is due to be released Friday. He has previously said the budget will include "a large number" of layoffs.

The city will roll out its new public transportation service on Jan. 6. Camarillo Area Transit will consolidate the city's two bus lines into one fixed-route line and add dial-a-ride service for the general public. City Assistant Traffic Engineer Roc Pulido said that changes in demand spurred the changes in the service. People wanting to shop at outlying retail centers found that fixed routes didn't accommodate them, he said.

If MTA is to succeed, it must look to L.A. region's needs Los Angeles is one of the few places where people pick up a newspaper or turn to television or radio avid for the news about local mass transit. Now, the latest in a nearly unbroken string of "Oh gosh, what have they done now?" stories involves a second, stunning federal rejection of the MTA's long-range transit plans.

Bill Fulton — urban planner, urbane public speaker and mayor of Ventura — was starting to stumble. In dim meeting rooms, he had trouble reading. At the civic events he attended almost nightly, he left some people puzzled — even angered — when they extended their hands and he failed to grasp them. "I can't always see it when someone wants to shake hands with me," he said. "When you're a politician, that's not good. " Fulton, a member of Ventura's City Council since 2003, will step down from office Monday and leave town next spring, largely as an adjustment to an eye disease that is slowly robbing him of his sight.

A transportation bill rolled out Thursday by the Republican chairman of the House Transportation Committee offers a mixed bag for Los Angeles. On one hand, the proposal by Rep. John Mica of Florida would authorize $1 billion a year, up from the current $110 million, for a federal transportation loan program that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sees as critical to his efforts to speed expansion of Los Angeles' regional transportation system. Although the Republican-run House and Democratic-controlled Senate appear to be headed for a clash over the total spending level for transportation over the next few years, Mica joins Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)