On the Wrong Track

Like a train approaching, the refrain grows louder. Subway or nothing. In the 10 days since a key committee of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board recommended abandoning plans to build an east-west subway line across the San Fernando Valley, critics have been lining up with ever louder cries: Subway or nothing.

They may get their wish.

The Valley may get nothing.

Although the full MTA board last week deferred a final decision on the cross-Valley route until late April, it’s time for community activists and political leaders to drop the unrealistic dream of a subway and start discussing workable alternatives, such as a light-rail line or more bus routes. Romantic though it may be, a cross-Valley subway is simply too expensive. Failing a bureaucratic miracle, the Red Line will end in North Hollywood. To dig in and fight the inevitable only guarantees that the MTA will cross the Valley off its list for good.

Funding cuts, runaway costs and poor management of underground rail construction in other parts of the city--notably Hollywood and North Hollywood--have put a cross-Valley subway in doubt for years. So the Jan. 16 decision by the MTA’s Executive Management Committee that advised against seeking federal money for planning a Valley subway was surprising only in its timing. The committee also recommended trying to repeal a state law that requires any Valley line to be underground for a two-mile stretch west of North Hollywood--a prerequisite to any above-ground rail line.

By late March, the MTA expects to review an environmental assessment of a cross-Valley line. Waiting for that report was cited as the reason for delaying final action last week. But the exercise will be largely academic--a little like waiting for the engineer’s report on a mansion you can’t afford anyway.

The delay does, however, give supporters of mass transit an opportunity to look at the Valley’s transportation needs in a practical way. Without the distraction of a subway option, planners and officials might be better able to focus on alternatives that, although less glamorous, can be up and running faster and cheaper and serve the Valley’s mass-transit-dependent residents better.

It’s disappointing that once-grand plans are slowly falling apart. Good leaders will turn that disappointment into an opportunity. Bad leaders will use it as a political wedge and guarantee further failure. It’s now up to the Valley’s elected officials, homeowner association heads and community activists to step up and show what kind of leaders they really are.