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The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece earlier this week criticizing the Westside Subway Extension for proposing to demolish buildings housing the A+D architecture museum and the Edward Cella Art+Architecture and Steve Turner Contemporary galleries. The land would be used as one of two construction staging areas for the Wilshire/Fairfax station.
On Wednesday, Metro CEO Art Leahy issued this response:
There are good reasons why you can’t stage construction for the Purple Line subway extension at “nearby sites” that are two blocks away from the Wilshire/Fairfax station.
Construction must be staged immediately adjacent to the station itself so crews can dig down and feed equipment into the station box. This allows most of the construction to be performed off-street, sparing the public from even bigger traffic nightmares on Wilshire Boulevard.
Metro is required by law to provide just compensation for properties it must acquire for construction. Building the subway in this incredibly dense urban environment is certainly not easy. Doing so without incurring any impacts to existing properties is simply unrealistic.
Once built, this critically needed subway line will have tremendous benefits for Museum Row, the Wilshire Corridor and entire L.A. region.
Some more background: Metro needs two construction staging areas at most of the proposed seven stations to have enough space to do the work. It also makes construction logistically easier and faster with two ways to get equipment in and dirt out of the underground station box. At Fairfax, there will likely be the additional challenge of dealing with gassy soils and preserving fossils (the area is just west of the La Brea tarpits).
For more information about planned construction of the Westside Subway Extension, please see Chapter 2 of the Final Environmental Impact Statement/Report, which discusses station locations, construction areas and station entrances. In addition, this construction fact sheet explains how the stations will be built.
I think those asking why can’t L.A. do things as efficiently and without too much intrusion on urban life as in other cities and other countries need to remember that when it comes to rail mass transit, Los Angeles in at least a quarter century behind where it should be and at least a half century behind where it could’ve been had it not abandoned the red car system. A LOT of development has happened in this city and county in that time. It’s not as easy to build or expand a rail system now as it would have been when L.A. was still somewhat underdeveloped compared to now.
Plus, you have to factor in the costs of waiting until the late 1980′s to build from scratch as opposed to the cost of improving, expanding and maintaining what was already in place decades earlier.
The Market Street subway in San Francisco required tearing up long stretches of the street, with great disruption to local businesses for years.