pdf for download here

The Metro Board of Directors meets for its regular monthly meeting on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. at Metro headquarters, located adjacent to Union Station in DTLA. As always, the public is welcome to attend or you can watch/listen on the webstream. A link will appear here shortly before the meeting begins.

A few items of interestingness the Board will consider:

•Advancing a mostly street-running route for the North Hollywood-to-Pasadena bus rapid transit project into environmental review. Here’s the staff report and here’s a recent Source post. The route, shown below, will be finalized during the environmental review.

Click map to see larger.

•Advancing two Metro staff-recommended concepts for the Vermont Bus Rapid Transit project into the next study phase, the formal environmental review. One concept would buses running on the side of the street and the other would be a combo of side-running and down the middle of the street.

Metro staff also recommend using a technical study to look at a more robust center-running option — the idea being this would be a higher form of BRT. The one condition: the project must fit within the Measure M expenditure plan, which allocates $522 million for this project.

A Board motion also asks Metro to advance technically-feasible rail options into environmental review and to develop a public-private partnership business case to fund a rail option. The big challenge here is money — the rail options could cost multiple billions of dollars. Staff report and executive summary of the rail feasibility study.

A rendering of the median running concept.

Rendering of the side-running concept.

•Increasing the design life-of-budget for the I-210 Barrier Replacement Project from $11.4 million to $22.5 million. This is the project that will raise the barriers between the Gold Line and the 210 freeway.

There have been 10 accidents on the freeway since 2003 that have resulted in cars or trucks ending up on the Gold Line tracks and/or damaging rail equipment. The staff report has some good info on the challenges of this very important safety project. This item was going to be heard by the Board last month but got pushed to April because of absences and conflicts-of-interest involving the contractor.

•Approving this update on the Congestion Pricing Feasibility Study, with the attachments explaining the scope of work for the contractors who will compete to do the study.

•UPDATE, APRIL 24: This item has been withdrawn from the agenda. Approving a motion asking Metro to send a letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority requesting funding be prioritized for Southern California rail projects that would support running the bullet train and regional rail together. Some context: the bullet train project is currently under construction for 119 miles in the San Joaquin Valley between north of Bakersfield and Madera (here’s a map) and both Northern California and Southern California want to be next in line.