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Southern California Transit Advocates is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion, development and improvement of public transportation in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Harold Katz comments to Metro regarding the Westside Corridor Study

I have spent 37 years working traffic and transportation as a Citizen Activist whose goal is to accomplish things and not stop things. This included membership in the mid 1980s of a 90 member blue ribbon committee of some of the heaviest hitters in the city. This included local, state and federal elected officials, representatives of the business community, etc. Our goal then was to get the subway built from downtown to the sea along Wilshire Blvd. with certain minor adjustments. Our committee's work ended when Congressman Waxman had a bill enacted that prevented that from happening.

I fully understand your requirement to study a corridor and multiple modes of transportation. However, the fact is that those who have worked for so long on this project know the alignment is along the spine of Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard, and the mode is a subway. With all due respect to those who suggest an elevated monorail, it isn’t going to work on Wilshire Blvd.

As to the cost of digging a subway, if you amortize the costs over 200 years, it isn’t that expensive. Consider that the London Tube was built in the 1860s and will be used for many years to come.

I urge you to approve a Subway line extending from Western down Wilshire Blvd. with stations at the major intersections, as well as the LA County Museum, Beverly Hills, a slight jog into Century City where some 40,000 to 50,000 people work and live, back to Wilshire Blvd with a stop at or on the property of UCLA where a major new hospital exists, 40,000 students attend and some 35,000 people are employed. Then back to Wilshire Blvd. with a stop at the Veterans Hospital, then continuing to the ocean.

This Subway should be dug in a manner so that it serves the city of Los Angeles as it will exist 50 years from now and not necessarily as it exists today. Leave room for the expansion that might be required, such as room to put tracks for express trains.

For the last 50 years government officials have continued to make the same mistake. In the interest of saving money, the criteria for what is built are made smaller. One only needs to read the Town Hall White Paper dated February 1947, 60 years ago, when they spoke of the hundreds of miles of freeways that were going to be built with room for trains to run down the center of the freeways. Of course it was cheaper to eliminate the land in the center and so the freeways were built without room for the trains. What a great investment that extra right of way would have been.

I would also remind the MTA that the Westside is some 60,000 jobs behind downtown, yet downtown has every rail head and as of today, the Westside has none. Need I say more?

I trust you will make the correct decision so that people 50 years from now do not write about how if only the elected officials in 2007 had made the correct decisions, etc.