It’s wrong to waste a right of way

You want to know where the thought of L.A. traffic will make you feel like crying?

Drive to Overland Avenue just north of the Santa Monica Freeway and stop when you see the sign that says:

“RR Crossing”

Don’t worry about getting hit by a train, by the way. The tracks are still there on both sides of Overland, but they haven’t carried a train in nearly 20 years, when freight service was discontinued.

Until 1953, there was passenger service too, with trains gliding along on what was known as the Santa Monica Air Line. The rail service was touted in 1920s advertisements as all the more reason to buy a new home in Cheviot Hills, where lucky Angelenos could hop aboard “the airline to the beaches.”

Cheviot Hills resident and historian Jonathan Weiss pointed this out as he led me and a neighbor, Sarah Hays, on a tour of the abandoned rail line. We walked from Overland in an easterly direction all the way to the Santa Monica Freeway with Hays’ daughter and one of her pals.

You can hear the distant whoosh of freeway traffic, but otherwise there’s not a sound along the right of way, which is roughly the size of a four-lane highway on this particular stretch and even wider west of Overland.

That’s the maddening part. The 15-mile Expo Line, which would run from Santa Monica to USC, was purchased by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1990. The plan was to run buses or light-rail cars along the route, turning north near USC and heading all the way to downtown Los Angeles. Studies suggested that it would instantly become one of the busiest passenger lines in the country.

But this is Los Angeles, and nothing got done. So you stand out there on the right of way, gritting your teeth, wondering why, at the very least, it couldn’t have been turned into a greenbelt and bikeway.

Funding concerns, politics, regional and ethnic divisions, the usual lack of imagination and leadership, and frenzied neighborhood opposition have kept an invaluable transit route idle. And even now, with the MTA finally beginning to design the phase of the project that will run from Culver City to the west, the Cheviot Hills Homeowners Assn. voted 14 to 0 on Jan. 3 to oppose use of the right of way.

People in Cheviot and nearby communities along the right of way have expressed concerns about noise and proximity to schools and houses, noting that trains would be within 50 feet of some homes and possibly reduce property values.

But don’t call them NIMBYs, homeowner association President Kevin Hughes told me.

“Cheviot Hills doesn’t need light rail as much as Venice and Sepulveda do,” he said, explaining that Cheviot homeowners would rather have the line run in a more southerly route along Venice Boulevard and then north on Sepulveda Boulevard.

Those communities are denser, he argued, and in greater need of transit options than their more affluent neighbors to the north.

Maybe so, but there’s a problem with that logic: There’s no preexisting railroad right of way along Venice Boulevard.

Hughes contacted me to compliment me on a column in which I said the city shouldn’t have approved two 47-story condo towers and other projects in Century City before having a transit plan in place to handle the increased traffic. Then why is he anti-transit a few miles away in Cheviot?

“It is a bit glib to dismiss an affluent, well-maintained neighborhood as ‘rich, selfish NIMBYs,’ ” he said in an e-mail. “Sometimes the NIMBYs have a point and sometimes the city has an interest in preserving its nice neighborhoods. Cheviot Hills is desirable because the hard-working, friendly, generous people who live there care a lot.”

What, and the residents of the communities to the south are a bunch of selfish deadbeats?

“NIMBYism is NIMBYism, regardless of the neighborhood,” argued another Cheviot resident. Bob Simon, a physician, received Hughes’ e-mail response to me because he’s a member of the homeowner association board and Hughes sent it to all 15 members.

Simon told me he favors light rail on the railroad right of way but mistakenly voted against it at the Jan. 3 meeting, thinking he was voting on whether they should vote. After receiving a copy of Hughes’ e-mail to me, he issued a stinging response in which he called the homeowner association’s position hypocritical.

“ALL COMMUNITIES in this city need light rail,” Simon wrote. “We are crammed with outrageous traffic and need alternative transportation. To say that Cheviot doesn’t need access to transportation is to negate all of the arguments we have used for years against [Century City] development.”

He went on to say that preservation of the precious neighborhood is not at stake, because the right of way runs alongside rather than through Cheviot Hills “for less than 1/4 mile.”

Hughes called Simon a cheap-shot artist and said the board represented the majority view of residents based on a recent survey. That majority view prevailed through the 1990s as well, with Cheviot residents using their considerable influence on L.A. County Supervisor and MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky, among others.

“Why punish ourselves on a route that has so many problems,” Yaroslavsky said in March 2000, when he and the MTA board voted 11 to 1 to study his proposed alternative along Venice Boulevard.

So it’ll be more than a little interesting to see Yaroslavsky’s next move. Ever since I wrote Jan. 7 that Yaroslavsky has had it with traffic, readers have lambasted him for his long opposition to subways, his approval of massive developments without adequate transit options and for now complaining about the mess they accuse him of helping to create.

We’re still several years away from seeing the Expo Line open for business, but some important decisions have to be made soon. Yaroslavsky tells me he won’t take a position on the best route for the Expo Line until the MTA completes a study of both routes -- probably a year from now.

It’s a topic worthy of full-blown public debate, and a former MTA executive and current member of the Cheviot Hills Homeowners Assn. offered his two cents’ worth in an e-mail to me.

“The population density along Palms/Culver, which includes multifamily housing, would make available low-cost transit to thousands of residents along that corridor,” wrote Anthony J. Padilla, who thinks the southerly route makes far more sense.

“This does not even consider the hundreds of businesses that would benefit from having thousands of new customers available to them, reduce the need for parking space which could be utilized to more effectively expand a business and an expanded employee pool of qualified candidates who can travel efficiently to work at a reasonable cost.”

But we also know that the southerly route would be longer by more than a mile, that it would block traffic at more crossings than would the other line, that it would take longer to get from one end to the other and that it would cost as much as $50 million to $100 million more to build because of its length.

In a perfect world, the Expo Line would have a branch along both routes. But when you walk along the old right of way, it’s maddening to think it might never be put back to use in a city choked with traffic and smog.

Shouldn’t one goal of transit be to get people out of their cars as well as to serve those who have no wheels? If so, what better place to offer rail than in a neighborhood of homes with two-car garages and an abandoned train route the taxpayers have already bought and paid for?

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.