Light Rail to Los Angeles International: A Questionable Proposition?
http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2012/12/21/light-rail-to-los-angeles-international-a-questionable-proposition/
December 21st, 2012
New proposals for light rail connections to LAX put in question whether an extension project will offer any major benefits.
Of the nation’s largest cities, Los Angeles is one of the remaining
few with no direct rail connection to its airport.* Over the past two
decades, L.A. County has expanded its Metro Rail network considerably,
but the closest it has gotten to a station at its largest airport — LAX —
is a stop about a mile away from terminals on the Green Line light rail
service, which does not reach downtown and requires customers to make a
connection to a surface bus to get to and from check-in areas.
According to current plans, that will change in the next few decades. Metro dedicated $200 million to a
light rail connector
in its Measure R spending packaged passed by voters in 2008. The agency
began studying potential direct links from its Green Line and the
future
Crenshaw Corridor,
which will offer light rail in a corridor relatively close to the
airport. In March, Metro revealed the initial results of the study,
demonstrating that
a rail connection would carry between 4,000 and 6,000 riders a day
and cost between $600 million and $1.5 billion. Metro continues to
study how best to connect the airport: With a rail branch line; with a
re-routing of the rail corridor in a tunnel under the terminals; or with
a connection to a new automated people mover or bus rapid transit line
circulating around the airport. A locally preferred alternative for the
corridor is to be selected in 2013 or 2014.
But
new documents from L.A.’s airport authority
put in question how feasible any airport-rail link would be. The agency
offers three general locations for a light rail stop, two of which
would include a branch of the Green Line or Crenshaw Corridor and
require most customers to switch to the airport’s people mover, and the
third of which would provide no additional light rail service at all.
None would offer direct service from downtown.** Is this rail connection
worth the massive investment in transit funding that
consensus suggests is necessary?
The fundamental difficulty is that the airport authority — Los
Angeles World Airports (LAWA) — seems awfully reluctant to allow trains
into the main terminal area. While Metro’s spring proposals suggest a
light rail loop, an elevated line, or an underground tunnel directly
adjacent to the central areas of the nine-terminal complex, the closest
LAWA is willing to come is an “on-airport” station at the far eastern
edge of the terminals area (see image (1) below). A station there, built
as an extension of the Crenshaw Corridor, would be more than a
half-mile from the international terminal at the western edge of the
complex. Yes, light rail would get customers closer to check in areas,
but few would be within comfortable distance walking, particularly with
heavy bags.
The same is true of LAWA’s second proposal (see (2) below), which
would extend light rail from the Crenshaw Corridor as a branch to a new
intermodal transportation facility. Customers arriving here would have
no ability to walk to any terminals.
In both cases, LAWA proposes a new people mover that would allow for
the final connection between the light rail stations and the terminals
themselves. The people mover would operate in a loop around the eight
terminals, then extend to the intermodal facility, pass by the Crenshaw
Corridor station planned for the intersection of Century and Aviation
Boulevards (about a mile from the airport entrance), and terminate at a
consolidated rental car facility.
From the airport’s perspective, there are solid reasons to support
the construction of such a people mover. It would improve the
connectivity between terminals for non-”transit”-using airport
passengers and it would decrease road congestion by eliminating rental
car and public buses from the areas in front of the terminals.
(1) Light rail branch to airport. Source: The Source.
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(2) Light rail branch to intermodal center. Source: The Source.
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But these proposals effectively duplicate light rail and people mover
services, requiring passengers to use both no matter the circumstances.
Certain of Metro’s proposals — albeit the more expensive ones — would
have allowed customers direct service to terminals on light rail, which
would have resulted in significant travel time savings due to the lack
of transfers. Here, those direct links have been eliminated from the
discussion. Why spend public funds on two similar rail services
operating in the same corridor?
If we are to take it as a given that LAWA absolutely
must
have a people mover and that it is reluctant to allow light rail into
the main terminals area, its third proposal (see (3) below) comes across
as more appealing. The light rail station at Crenshaw and Aviation, on
the main trunk of the Crenshaw Corridor, would provide a bridged
transfer to the people mover system, which would then offer a link to
all of the airport’s terminals.
(3) Proposed connection between Crenshaw Light Rail and LAX people mover.
Source: The Source.
Yet this proposal also has its downsides. LAWA’s visual description
of the proposed connection suggests that light rail customers would have
to ascend an escalator, cross a broad boulevard on an elevated bridge,
then descend an escalator, to get to the people mover. It is certainly
possible to envision a more convenient approach to making this
connection. Every step that makes using transit easier attracts an
additional customer.
Nonetheless, this approach, which would keep light rail services
within the already-funded Crenshaw Corridor, has the added benefit of
ensuring adequate frequency on the light rail line. The branch corridors
proposed by the first and second options would, in effect, split rail
service in two: Half the trains might extend to LAX, with the rest
heading in the other direction. In the case of the Green Line, assuming
that headways — currently 7.5 minutes at peak — remain the same (which
would not be surprising considering the relatively small number of
riders expected to actually use the airport connection), splitting the
service in two would reduce peak headways to just every 15 minutes. Is
that acceptable for rapid transit service? Or will such low headways
make it impossible to attract “choice” riders?
Providing people mover service from the main line light rail corridor
would guarantee that all users of the Crenshaw Corridor have
one-transfer service to all of the airport’s terminals. And indeed, the
whole concept of direct light rail service to an airport like LAX may
not make much sense. Unlike smaller airports with only one or two
terminals or very centralized airports (like Washington Dulles, with one
main entrance facility), LAX has many terminals spread across a large
area, making one or even two stops too dispersed; more stops, however,
would be too expensive to construct for a light rail line. It shares
these features with New York’s JFK and Phoenix, for example, both of
which have chosen the rail-to-people mover approach that comes across as
most reasonable in L.A.’s case.
Requiring passengers to transfer to a people mover from the trunk of
the light rail line has the added
benefit of putting the onus of
financing the rail connection in the hands of the (relatively more
wealthy) airport authority, rather than Metro. This is perhaps the most
important point of all. Though Metro has allocated $200 million to this
project, it would need far more than that to complete the branch
extensions envisioned in the first or second proposal presented above.
But the third proposal, which would build off the already funded
Crenshaw Corridor using only the airport-desired people mover, could —
and should — be funded by LAWA, perhaps with only a small contribution
from Metro. This would allow the transit authority to avoid spending
hundreds of millions of dollars on a project that would benefit few
passengers and force the airport’s users, the people who would be using
the rail-airport connection, to pay for it.
* Other than L.A., Detroit, Houston, and San Diego are the
biggest metropolitan areas with no rail connections to their respective
airports. Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston,
Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia,
Phoenix, Providence, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington
all offer rail connections of some kind to at least one of their
airports. Boston does not have a rail connection but has the BRT Silver
Line to the airport. Dallas and Salt Lake City will be adding
connections in 2014 and 2013, respectively.
** Downtown-to-airport rail service may be addressed sometime in
the future if funds can be assembled for regional rail operations on the
Harbor Subdivision, as some have proposed.
