The City
By Damien Goodmon
Next Thursday, the South LA community will come together at Dorsey HS auditorium at 6:30 p.m. to discuss the design of the $862 million Expo Light Rail Line through South LA.
 I’ll be presenting the community’s perspective on why we believe the
four miles of the 8.6-mile light rail line through South LA should be
redesigned in a trench or tunnel. We request a tunnel or trench
primarily because the current street-level design is unsafe and places
a substantial impact on the majority-minority residential communities.
Impacts that will not be felt in the majority-white Culver City
community just west of ours.
The reason why our serious Expo Line issues remain unaddressed may seem to be a frustrating mystery to some. But for our community, the answer is crystal clear.
THE SAFETY ISSUE-The 225-ton light rail train is proposed to operate between the speeds of 35-55 mph and cross the busy intersections of Vermont, Normandie, Western and Crenshaw without even basic crossing gates in a design that is identical to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s own Blue Line. At 90 deaths and over 815 accidents to date, the Blue Line has killed multiples more people than any other light rail system in the country. Just last month, in separate Blue Line incidents on the same day a 75-year-old motorist was killed and a 19-year-old male pedestrian was placed in critical condition.
The over 20,000 youths that live within a mile of the line and over a dozen schools and parks that are within walking distance of the tracks exacerbate our concern. Among the schools are large urban educational facilities like Dorsey High School (10 feet), where nearly 2000 students cross per day, and 3400 student Foshay Learning Center (50 feet).
The close proximity of the two schools and others has prompted legal intervention by the LAUSD Board of Education, and resolutions by the United Teachers Los Angeles and Parent Collaborative who stand with us. We all want to prevent heartbreaking tragedies like that which occurred last year when a 14-year old boy was killed walking home from school by a Blue Line train that was carrying his closest sister.
THE COMMUNITY IMPACT ISSUE-Another concern is the impact of the Expo Line on the South LA residential community. The eight permanent street closures will slice our community in half. Couple the street closures with trains scheduled to cross the intersection every two minutes during rush hour, and crossing gates that will be down up 25 minutes of every hour (at the five intersections that actually have crossing gates) and its clear that traffic will worsen. Our community can already feel the impact because the streets have been closed for a couple of weeks now, and traffic is now backed up for blocks. Additionally, with each of the 240-300 trains a day comes four train horns at the intersections with crossing gates. That’s over 1000 train horns per day in the middle of residential areas.
THE MONEY ISSUE-Some critics say that a redesign, which our engineers estimate would add $225-300 million to the construction cost of the project, is too expensive. But in just 100 days last fall, through lobbying the state and the reprogramming of their $3.3 billion dollar annual budget, MTA identified over a half billion dollars for the Expo Line project. The $532 million MTA obtained and reprogrammed is for everything EXCEPT underpasses in South LA that our group has been vocally requesting for nearly 18 months and other community members have been requesting for years. Instead the money is for an optional Exposition Park station, track and safety improvements in the downtown portion of the project, project cost overruns, and a $54 million dollar half-mile overpass in Culver City.
Nearly half of the amount ($218 million) was from the $19 billion dollar Proposition 1B measure that we’ve specifically requested MTA go after for grade separations in South LA since the day the bond was passed in November 2006. And yet, despite our professional and passionate requests, we’ve received no action and no efforts by MTA or the Expo Line Construction Authority boards. Instead project managers and politicians tell us, “There’s no money” with a straight face.
These brazen actions might appear logically and politically inexplicable. But to our community, especially the more elder members, it’s the way things have been done for far too long. We recognize that this issue, like so many others that impact South LA, is not now, nor has it ever been about access to resources. It is instead about the willingness of politicians to invest in the South LA community and our politicians to fight to such ends.
“Don’t tell me your priorities,” one elderly member says, “Show me your budget and I will tell you your priorities.”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM ISSUE-The $862 million budget for Expo Phase 1 is disturbing. More money is being spent on the one mile west of La Cienega, to the Robertson terminus in Culver City, than in the four miles between Vermont and La Brea.
The money is being spent in the one mile, which is majority Caucasian, to allow the Expo Line to operate between La Cienega and Robertson without forcing children or motorists to cross the tracks, without blowing its horn 1000 times a day, without worsening traffic, without delaying response times of emergency services, without closing streets, without cutting off park access, without posing privacy/blight impacts on the residential communities--stated simply, without placing the adverse environmental impacts of the project that will be felt in the South LA community on the Culver City community.
There’s a term for projects that place a disproportionate environmental impact on communities of color and/or poor communities and it is environmental racism. There are federal and state laws to protect our communities against the actions of the MTA, and given the failure of our elected politicians to seriously consider a redesign despite decades of requests, and the supply of mountains of data, studies and information along with myriad construction and financing options, we have no other recourse but to go to court.
To be clear, our community wants the Expo Line. But no transit project should pit a community vs. the train, and more importantly, the Expo Line does not have to. The project can actually do its duty to serve the mass transit needs of our region, without posing a safety risk, exacerbating vehicular traffic, harming community cohesion and placing inequitable environmental impacts across the Phase 1 residential communities. It’s unfortunate the board members on the Expo Line Construction Authority and MTA Board members don’t feel the same way.
(Damien Goodmon is a rail transit advocate. He has been profiled in the L.A. Times and leadsf the Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line. More information about the Fix Expo Campaign can be found on the web at www.FixExpo.org) (For MTA information on Expo Rail, click here.) _
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 40
Published: May 16, 2008
|
