Signal Staff Writer
bcharles@the-signal.com
Posted: Oct. 3, 2009 8:01 p.m.
Lisa Vernier has been a loyal Metrolink rider since the commuter train's early days.
"I started riding the train to work in October of 1992," she said.
Her conversion from a car commuter to a disciple of mass transit wasn't driven by concerns about her carbon footprint or hastily hatched scheme to save time by beating traffic.
"It takes me an hour and a half door-to-door, she said. "It's probably quicker to drive."
No, the 49-year-old Valencia resident just hates driving.
"It usually makes me agitated," she said.
The Southern California native who has spent nearly two decades living in the Santa Clarita Valley developed a healthy hatred toward highway commuting when she worked in Beverly Hills. Her commute carried her across some notoriously congested roadways.
She crawled through the Newhall Pass, down Interstate 405 and through the Sepulveda Pass on her way to work.
Vernier's commuting nightmare ended when she landed a job in downtown Los Angeles working for the Department of Justice. The decision was partially fueled by her anti-traffic stance.
"I took the job partially because I knew Metrolink was going to become available."
In a league of its own
Metrolink began service in 1991 as an effort to uncork bottleneck traffic on Southern California roadways, said James Moore, professor of urban transportation at the University of Southern California. The history of the transit system dates back much farther.
"It had existed as a plan for a long time," he said.
Going back as far as the early 1980s, regional transit planners in Los Angeles County wanted to construct a commuter rail system to alleviate what was already a torturous commute for those living in the suburbs into Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission partnered with transit agencies from Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties to form Metrolink, said Francisco Oaxaca, Metrolink spokesman.
The challenge was building such a system, Moore said. Instead of building a dedicated commuter rail system like those in New York and San Francisco, which would have been prohibitively expensive, Metrolink uses a patchwork of existing freight lines to weave together its transit network.
"It would be hard to name any other place in the world that has more intensive use of freight line than Los Angeles," Moore said.
While building a system using freight lines was unheard of at the time, it did mean the system could be put together quickly.
"We were able to build the system in 18 months," Moore said.
Politics and government muscling also allowed for the quick turnaround on the system, he said.
"The LACTC (the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission), threatened eminent domain to acquire access to the rights of way on the rails," Moore said.
Impacting wallets and educations
Tony Distel, 58, of Saugus, has calculated he saves $160 each month by riding the train instead of driving his car to work.
"It saves me a 30-mile commute each way," he said.
Distel works in Burbank in television post production.
"I don't miss my car at all," he said smiling as the train weaved its way through the Newhall Pass.
Distel occasionally transforms time spent on the train into productive work time or time to catch up on the news.
"Sometime I bring work on the train with me or I read The Signal," he said.
Metrolink made Laura Bishop's choice of which law school to attend much easier.
"It was between Pepperdine and Southwestern Law School," she said. "I chose Southwestern because I could commute without driving."
Bishop, 41, of Newhall, studies on train, while at the same time balancing herself as she stands during her commute.
"I don't sit on the train because I have back issues," she said. "That's one of the first things I had to learn - how to stand while the train was moving."
Target audience
"Metrolink wasn't designed as a cure-all for Southern California's commuters," Oaxaca said.
The commuter rail service doesn't provide the point-to-point service like a bus that can carry passengers deep into a neighborhood or a city.
Metrolink is designed to carry passengers over long distances from transit center to transit center with the idea that those passengers will board other types of transportation to complete their trips, Oaxaca said.
"We are targeting the drive-alone commuter," he said.
Those single-car commuters often make trips of more than 30 miles each way to work, a distance rarely covered by bus transit, Oaxaca added.
But limitations in funding hinder the system's ability to expand service by adding more trains and more hours of operation.
For example, the Metrolink line running from Ventura County and the 91 line don't operate on weekends.
"The thing we found is the more service we can add, the more passengers we can attract," he said. "But that takes resources and how many resources can we add to attract those riders."
Running more trains would be at the top of Deborah Hopkins wish list.
"This isn't like BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit," she said. "It doesn't run every 15 minutes."
Deborah Hopkins, 62, of Valencia, is a Bay Area transplant who is addicted to mass transit and dislikes sitting in traffic.
"I would never drive into Los Angeles," she said.
But Metrolink and its ability to get her out of her car and out of traffic leaves much to be desired.
BART is a commuter rail system that moves commuters around the Bay Area on a series of rail lines solely dedicated to commuter trains.
Stuck in traffic
Oaxaca frowns at comparisons between Metrolink and systems like BART.
"A dedicated commuter rail system is a very different animal," he said.
With miles of single-track rail in its system, Metrolink has limitations that don't hinder other commuter systems.
"If you found yourself driving on a highway with one lane for traffic in both directions, that would be much more difficult than driving on a two-lane highway," he said.
Metrolink's single-track operation and the fact that it shares its rail lines with freight haulers makes comparisons to other commuter systems incongruent, Oaxaca said.
Those single ribbons of track designed to accommodate traffic in both directions effectively choke the traffic on the rails.
"Each one of those sections acts as a bottleneck in our system," Oaxaca said. "We don't have a place to allow trains to go past slower trains or go around trains travelling in the opposite direction."
One of these bottlenecks in Chatsworth saw the agency's deadliest crash ever last year, when a commuter train collided head-on with a freight train, apparently due to operator error.
Rail line capacity impacts the number of trains Metrolink can operate, which is about 300 per day, Oaxaca said.
Metrolink is hamstrung in what it can do to remedy its capacity issue.
With five counties' transit agencies funding Metrolink and miles of the systems track owned by freight haulers, it would take the consensus of different governmental agencies and private industry to make major upgrades, he said.
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