LA Metro can’t yet get Angelenos to LAX, where most all of us want or need to often go, and yet it can participate in a $2 billion people-mover scheme to get affluent Rams and Taylor Swift fans to the privately owned SoFi Stadium?
Veteran local Rep. Maxine Waters is absolutely right to rail against the proposed project, which she terms “ridiculous.”
“To the degree that I can do anything to stop it, I will do it,” Waters told Rachel Uranga of the L.A. Times. “It’s a project that has turned out to be totally unnecessary and totally much too costly.”
The Inglewood Transit Connector, unlike any of the other light-rail lines that now crisscross the county, appears to be aimed at SoFi and other Inglewood sports and entertainment venues, rather than transportation for the public at large.
It would run 1.6 miles from Metro’s K Line.
In a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Waters wrote: “Shuttle buses could most likely accomplish the same goal at a fraction of the cost, but have not been seriously considered as an alternative.”
It’s true that the project has been touted as a piece of the Olympic transit puzzle aimed at people-moving for the (mostly affluent) international crowds who will come to Los Angeles for the games four summers from now.
But, surprise, surprise: “Cost projections for the project have doubled and delays have made it unclear whether it can actually be delivered ahead of the Olympic Games in 2028,” Uranga reports. After Waters’ letter went out to Buttigieg, whose agency wants to commit $1 billion in federal tax money to the project, House appropriations subcommittee Chair Rep. Steve Womack, R-Arkansas, took out $200 million — a first installment of the funding — from a draft budget bill.
So that’s progress on stopping this so-called progress.
Metro has plenty of problems as it is, given the dismal atmosphere created by its many troubled homeless and street-drug-using passengers. So in a better world, this line would be icing on the cake.
That’s not Metro’s world as it exists.
It needs to double-down on improving the whole system it already has before it can afford luxury people-movers.
