Three Types of Rail Transit Aren’t the Flaw in L.A. Plan

Some called it a boondoggle when the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission recently decided to go ahead and build the nation’s first fully automated driverless trolley system in the middle of the new Century Freeway. But for once the high-tech, glamorous solution appears to make economic sense and to offer promise of a higher level of service for the transit rider.

The controversy over the automated-vehicle proposal arose because this technology, recently implemented in several systems in Europe and Canada, is incompatible with the conventional light-rail technology to be used on the Long Beach-Los Angeles rail line. Automated trains on the Century Freeway line would pick up power from a third rail alongside the tracks, whereas the vehicles on the Long Beach line would use an overhead catenary to receive power. Vehicles on one line thus cannot be used on the other. As a result, transit users whose trips would require them to travel on both of these rail lines would have to transfer from one to another, and perhaps also to the Metro Rail subway, if they need to use that system to complete their trip.

Now concerns are being expressed that the county’s transit decision-makers, in their pursuit of high-tech solutions, may be about to create a countywide rail-transit system with complications that would discourage ridership.

The automated-vehicle technology proposed for the Century Freeway line is indeed incompatible with the conventional light rail technology being installed on the Long Beach line, but this has absolutely nothing to do with transfers. Even when it was planned to use identical technologies on the two lines, passengers needing to use both lines to complete a trip would have had to transfer; this was always part of the operating plan. The specific technologies, therefore, are irrelevant.

The automated vehicle proposed for the Century Freeway offers the ability to use vehicles more flexibly without increasing the cost of operating the service. By running trains more frequently, service would be improved for passengers using only the Century Freeway line, who would not have to wait as long to board the system. The chances would also increase that a transferring rider could make a convenient connection to or from the Long Beach line.

Thus the automated vehicle offers some important advantages in improving the level of service, while the greater labor flexibility permits minor operating-cost savings that essentially offset the slightly higher capital costs of the system.

What is perhaps most interesting about this current debate over appropriate transit technologies is that it reveals how little thought the county’s transit decision-makers have given to the service implications of their choices.

Alarm is now being expressed that riders would have to transfer between rail lines, and that this may deter potential users. But fairly extensive transferring by passengers is a fact of life in all large railtransit systems. Transit users in New York, Chicago, London, Paris and other cities with extensive rail systems routinely transfer between different lines to reach their destinations. Rail transit simply cannot provide a comprehensive service without passenger transfers. Naturally this means that many trips are quite inconvenient. But this is hardly news to transportation planners. It was well known that bus-based rapid transit on the Century Freeway could have provided frequent, transfer-free service directly to downtown and many other destinations.

By now, however, Los Angeles seems almost irretrievably committed to systems based on rail transit despite its high cost and service disadvantages. By purposely excluding the development of bus-based rapid transit, the authors of Proposition A, the ballot measure that mandated a higher county tax to pay for a rail-transit system, prevented any real technological choices from subsequently being made.

Arguing over which rail technology to use on the Century Freeway is somewhat akin to agonizing over the choice between a red tie and a blue tie when what you really need is a new shirt. The restriction of choices to rail transit has far more significant implications for Los Angeles County travelers than the issue of what specific type of light rail is used on the Century Freeway.