Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Metro Can Now Upgrade the Orange Line to Light Rail (when funding becomes available)

Horray!  Governor Brown has signed AB577 which repealed the law banning surface rail along the Chandler Right-of-Way in the San Fernando Valley.   

Now that this law has been passed, and there are no legal restrictions, the Orange Line may now be planned for a light-rail upgrade.

Of course, there is no such funding for such an upgrade, and any such upgrade will have to compete with all the other proposed rail projects competing for funding.

But the good news is that the Valley will not be condemned to BRT only transit planning while the rest of the county sees rail expansion.

And the San Fernando Valley deserves an east-west light-rail line and a north-south light-rail between Sylmar and LAX.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been following the progress of this bill & I informed Kymberleigh Richards when it was signed into law.

Anonymous said...

I know that rail has a certain cachet, but BRT is a perfectly-acceptible and capable method of providing transportation. The question really should be: is the ridership of the area served by the existing BRT strong enough that the capital investment of laying many miles of rail is justified? And the way to answer that is: does the up-front outlay reduce or eliminate future expenditures to provide transport service to the regions served?

An interesting midpoint might be providing overhead power for electric busses, when and if a new bus fleet is acquired. Of course, that's got an entire other set of does-it-make-sense questions to answer!