With the Los Angeles Times and the Daily News both being in favor of the subway, in my opinion, the problems must become extremely bad for either paper to report them. This means to me that there are hundreds if not thousands of problems which go unreported to the public.
The MTA has misspent the money allotted for public transportation. By perpetuating a poor philosophy started by the oil companies, tire companies, insurance companies and the auto giants which falsely states that the public in Los Angeles does not want good surface rail transportation, the MTA is denying the public in Los Angeles the right to have our money spent on the least expensive mode of transportation. By wasting money on subway construction, the most expensive type of public transportation, there is little likelihood that the system will ever serve the majority of the population.
All school children are told that they must study history so that they will grow up with the knowledge to allow them to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past. When are our public officials going to practice what they preach and look at the giant mistake that was made in the 1950’s when the massive transportation system of the time was intentionally destroyed with false information and corruption. Most major closings of the former Pacific Electric lines were met with public protest by those who used and needed this efficient public transportation.
Now in the 1990’s the people are being told that we must have subways and that there is no other choice. We do have a choice. We could utilize the right of way’s for several of the former Pacific Electric lines and put these in operation in a few years, not twenty, at a fraction of the cost. I feel that when given the choice between a transportation system which continues to rely on smog producing busses for the majority of the routes because the MTA ran out of money to complete the proposed system, or a between surface rail system which actually gets people around Los Angeles with a decrease in busses, the people will choose the surface rail system.
Electric Powered Light Rail systems produce almost no smog and can move many more persons per horsepower.
The subways aren’t working for Los Angeles. Stop wasting the money now, and use it for something that was shown to work here for over fifty years