Yaroslavsky Celebrates Valley Opening of New Orange Line Dedicated Busway

Let me start as I will end – by inviting everyone to ride on the Orange Line. And believe me when I say this – and I'm not prone to hyperbole- it sells itself. It's something you should experience, because you'll see something that may, and, I think, will set a pattern for the way we address public transportation problems in this region for years to come.

Let's set the stage for how this all started. Controversy over what would happen on the Southern Pacific right-of-way goes all the way back to the Robbins legislation. I didn't represent any part of the Valley when this discussion first started in the late '70s and early '80s. First we were talking about a subway for the Valley. There was opposition to subway. Then it was light rail. There was opposition to light rail. And there was also a lack of funding, and it became almost a dead issue.

Then in 1999 Bob Hertzberg, Dick Riordan, and a number of others went down to Curitiba, Brazil, on a fateful two-day trip to look at their transportation system. They have a revolutionary transportation system which had been the subject of cover stories in Scientific American and journals that deal with transportation. Frankly, I was skeptical. I didn't want to go down there. I had jumped to the conclusion that this was not a technology that would work here. Maybe it worked for a Third-World country, but it certainly wouldn't work for a place like the San Fernando Valley. But finally I relented and said, "Why not?"

We went down there, and within 15 minutes of seeing their bus system – which is a fixed-guideway system with an exclusive busway for their main lines – all of us looked at it and said, "This makes sense. This could work in Los Angeles." I remember pacing off the width of the street, the width of the busway, applying it to Van Nuys Boulevard, La Brea Avenue, certainly the Southern Pacific right-of-way, and I said, "this would work back home." Before I saw it with my own eyes, I never understood how functional and pleasant their system is.

So we came back, and Bob Hertzberg and I were sitting next to each other on the plane, and I took a Varig Airlines napkin, and on the back of it I drew what has now become the Orange Line. I also drew two other lines for the San Fernando Valley. One was on the Canoga Avenue railroad right-of-way, a north-south line which Metro owns. I also drew Van Nuys Boulevard, which, for most of its stretch from Sylmar down to Sherman Oaks is wider than the Champs Elysee. And if you look at Van Nuys Boulevard you'll see that the median strip that's painted down the middle in many of its stretches is more than two lanes wide. So we had an opportunity to have an east-west line, which is now the Orange Line, and two north-south lines, one that went up and down Van Nuys Boulevard which would connect to the Sylmar Metrolink station, and one on Canoga Avenue, which would connect ultimately to the Chatsworth Metrolink station.

These lines would be integrated with the Metro Red Line, which terminates at Chandler and Lankershim, and connect it with Metrolink, which has a different route into downtown. And, all of a sudden, the San Fernando Valley, which would be one of the largest metro areas in the United States if it was on its own, would be integrated into a functional public mass transit system.

And the first leg of that system is what we decided to do here on the Orange Line. We needed a solution to the east-west Valley that paralleled the 101 corridor, but the decision to go with a busway was very controversial. In fact, I can count on less than one hand the people who stood with me at the beginning. I do want to recognize those public officials who are here ­- Fran Pavley, Shelia Kuehl, Wendy Greuel, Dennis Zine, and all of the elected officials who have been constructive in helping us do this. It's been a real team effort. But originally it was a very lonely battle. I took the heat from a number of quarters. I took the heat from my friends in the Orthodox Jewish community, who thought it was going to destroy their neighborhood. I hope they have a different point of view now. I took the heat from some horse owners, where people were concerned about the impact on their way of life. I think they are more positive about it today.

We promised two things with this line. One, that we would build a line for this generation. Most of what we talk about in terms of infrastructure development is in terms of the next generation, or for our grandchildren's generation. But the mobility crisis is here now. And we were able to construct this project in a little over two years. We conceived it in February of 1999 on the back of a napkin, and in October 2005 we'll cut the ribbon on it. And there was a two-year hiatus between the time it left my napkin to the time it got any serious engineering attention and the board really went forward with it. We built a mile a year on the subway – 17 years to build 18 miles. This thing got built in a little over two years, once it got started. And we were stopped by a lawsuit, and we had the worst rains in 100 years. We wanted to build something functional for the here and now.

And the second thing was we promised the community through which it goes that whatever you're going to say about this line, it will be more of an amenity as a busway than it was when it was a freight train corridor. In the case of the transit line and the bikeway and the walking/jogging path and the lush landscaping and irrigation system that we've built all along the way I think you will see it exceeds everybody's expectations. I don't think there's ever been a public right of way that has been landscaped as carefully and with the attention to detail that this one has, and I can assure you that it was done with community input. Every neighborhood along the way had input into what was going to get planted and how it was going to get planted, and I think the work product shows.

But the most important thing about this line is something we can take beyond just the San Fernando Valley. Two lessons can be learned from this: number one, when we went down to Curitiba, Brazil, I asked the former mayor, Jaime Lerner, to what he attributed the success of the system in Curitiba. And he responded, "You have to have the courage to try simple solutions."

So often we get bogged down and try the complicated thing, and we don't trust our own judgment. We hire consultants for a million or two million dollars to tell us whether our gut is right, and then we hire another consultant to double-check your own consultant, and by the time we're done three or four years have passed by and we're no further along than we were in the first place. If we'd just gone with our gut, we'd have been better off.

This was a simple solution. But even simple solutions are not simple. They are elementary, but they are not simple, and it takes a lot of work, planning and fine-tuning to take an elementary solution and make it work. And we have worked hard to get to this point, and we will continue after it's open to fine-tune it.

The beauty of this system is that it's flexible. We can change it, we can add more buses, we can take buses off – I don't think we'll ever take buses off, but we can certainly add them if the ridership justifies it – and we'll see how it operates, and then we'll fine-tune it. One thing we've learned from Curitiba and other places is don't be afraid to say, "We didn't think of that" or "this isn't working the way we thought it would." We need to improve on our successes and junk our failures. This is going to be the genius of this system. It was an elementary solution, and we saw it through, despite tremendous opposition. It's a lesson especially to term-limited politicians, who don't have the perspective of time to know that there's life after making a controversial decision, and that you can integrate communities into the planning process; integrate their legitimate concerns into everything along the way; and have confidence at the end of the day that when they see the final product they will be satisfied that the public agency kept its word.

I've got to tell you, when I heard one of the early critics of this project quoted in the paper saying, "it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be," I said, that's a ringing endorsement. It's a lesson to all of us at the MTA and other levels of government that opposition doesn't mean you have to stop dead in your tracks and not progress. Opposition means you have to address the opposing arguments, and push forward in the interest of the long term.

This is either another busway along life's precipitous course, or it's a revolution. We'll see. If this works as well as I think it's going to work, if we get a ridership that exceeds our expectations, as I believe we will, then we'd be foolhardy not to look to replicate this in other parts of the county. In fact, I think people in other parts of the county will be demanding it. We do not necessarily have to be building heavy rail or light rail in every community. We can't even afford to. This project cost us $330 million. That is what it would cost to build about one mile of subway. And for every mile of light rail, we could build about 2.5 miles of busway, including the acquisition costs if we don't already own the right of way.

If any politician tells you they're going to solve the traffic problem, then watch his or her nose grow. We have too many cars and not enough capacity, and that's not going to change for the foreseeable future. But what we can do is offer people an alternative to getting stuck in that parking lot we call the 405, or the 101, or the 10. And the only way you can get people out of their cars and into public transportation is to send the price of gasoline up above $3 per gallon – which is not what I would recommend as a public policy initiative – or give people a better mousetrap. If you can get from point A to point B faster, more comfortably, then in a single-occupant vehicle you are likely to be attracted to use public transportation. We've offered a better alternative. And we may have fallen into something that is considerably more compelling than we ever thought it would be.