Tracks, Cracks & Political Hacks: How Sinkholes & Smog Battles Transformed L.A. Into the City of the Future

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor. And Feliz Cinco de Mayo. Cam Pardes.

Hey, I'll drink to that.

Yes.

Right here. Cheers.

Cheers or salud. Good tequila. It's got a good ta kick to it, you know?

And it's cheaper than gasoline right now.

That's right.

We have a really interesting show today. We're going to talk about the trains. We're going to talk about public transit here in Los Angeles, which is. Has remarkable history.You would think it would be easy. The traffic's terrible. We need rapid transit.

Yeah, well, you know this crazy town, if you move the letters of Los Angeles around, it spells legs on sail. Okay? And in the old days, it was like sail on legs because girls had come out here to be in the Busbey Berkeley musicals.But you can't walk around this town.When I first came out here from New York, where, of course, I could walk wherever I wanted or take the train or take the subway or be carried, but that's another story. I wanted to reach a friend of mine who lived in la, so I picked up the phone and called the operator, which is what you did in those days.

When was this? 1800S, late 60s. Did you turn a crank?

Yeah,.

It was a party line. Everybody was having fun. And the first thing she said to me was, what city, please? And I knew then I was in big trouble. I said, los Angeles.And she said, no. And I discovered there are all these cities out here, these neighborhoods, and maybe our guest today can tell us why.

Yeah, we're gonna get into the hows, the whys, the history and the future of the transit system, and more importantly, how it is revolutionizing the way this whole city is designed. Our guest is Ethan Elkind. Do I have that right? Is it Elkine?

You got it right. A lot people don't get it right, but you did.

Ethan Elkind, you're an attorney and you direct the climate program at the center for Law, Energy and Environment at UC Berkeley Law. And you have an appointment at the UCLA Law's Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

You have a musical background as well, right?

Even that's right.

Yeah.

I was working as a performing musician, songwriter before I went to law school.

You work at Interscope Geffen am.

I worked at Interscope Geffen when it moved to Santa Monica.

Yeah.

Wonderful time to be there. A lot of. I mean, it was sad for those folks of those labels that all got merged, but we had quite a dynamite roster I mean, they still do have.

Some amazing artists, but you are also very interested in land use, transportation, electric vehicles, energy storage and renewable energy.But what we're gonna talk about today is a book you wrote called the Fight for Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City, which is a really interesting read because you go back from the very beginnings of how this all happened. And of course it's LA with all the diversity.You would think that putting in a rapid transit system would be a no brainer, especially in a city that is so sprawling. Yes, megalopolis with such traffic issues. But it didn't turn out that way.There was a lot of political, territorial squabbles, financial issues, money, money, money, money. Quite a story.This isn't the first time we've had rails, and I know this is in your area of expertise, but Louisiana did have a rail system 60, 70 years ago. The Pacific Electric cars.

Yeah. In fact, the last Pacific electric car line shut down in 1961 on the same tracks where the first modern light rail line got started.That was the LA to Long beach line. So there's a kind of poetic symmetry there.

Nice continuity.

Yeah. I mean LA really got started actually as a streetcar town. It was not built around the automobile originally.You know, it's a pleasant climate and relatively flat, obviously outside of the the mountains that bisect la. And so real estate developers paid for streetcar lines to kind of radiate out from downtown la, where all the jobs were.And so LA grew up originally around those streetcar lines, kind of like spokes on a wheel. And then once the automobile came around, it was like the disruptive technology of its day, like smartphone level rates of adoption.And then that freed up people to live anywhere they wanted.And so those spokes of the wheel kind of filled in to the what you would call a horizontal density that we have now, or sprawl I guess is another way to describe it. Created the traffic and land use challenges that LA has today.

Manhattan, for example, there's geographical constraints which kept people on the island, but in LA it's wide open, so people could move far away and it sort of created the sprawl. And I guess it's a misnomer that this was a post combustion engine city. And that's why it's been difficult to go rapid transit.From what you say that we actually did start rapid transit, there would be huge numbers of people before air conditioning that would come out to the beach from the city. It looked like Atlantic City. That all changed with ac.

Yeah. And people would ride the streetcars out to the beach. That was a. And you could go up to the mountains on the streetcars.I mean, the streetcar system was really extensive and yeah, absolutely, the geography, the weather plays a huge role in the development patterns. And you mentioned Manhattan.But actually the Bay Area is another example of where, you know, having the bay really constrained growth within the San Francisco Bay area. If the bay wasn't there, I think San Francisco Bay area would look a lot like Los Angeles does today. Just as another example now, depending on.

Who you speak to, they say that the rail cars were eliminated by pressure from the automotive makers or the, or.

The rubber manufacturers, saying that Ford was.

Responsible for the tire manufacturers.

Uh huh, yeah.

Who framed Roger Rabbit played into this sort of conspiracy theory idea. And there were some, there was a grand jury proceeding and some Department of Justice investigations.But the fact is, what happened in Los Angeles happened all over America, where these streetcar lines really fell out of public favor.It's nice in a way to think this was all a conspiracy foisted on the people that the entities that stood to benefit, which were the car companies and the gas companies, were involved. But the fact is, is that the streetcars really did fall out of favor.They were running down the middle of these streets that now are competing with cars. And as I said, cars were the smartphone technology of their day. People wanted a car, they wanted that mobility and freedom.They didn't see the, the negative effects that we now know about. They didn't see the smog, they didn't see the traffic.I mean, it was just an exciting, we were talking 19 teens and 20s here and people were just excited to have this technology. The streetcars got in their way. The streetcar prices would go up. The streetcars were unreliable.And because they had been subsidized originally by real estate developers to boost land values. As the real estate developers like Henry Huntington stopped subsidizing these streetcars, the public did not want to bail them out.There was no popular effort to keep them subsidized and funded. And so they got shut down. And you know, even San Francisco ripped out the cable car tracks in favor of buses.It's maybe hard for us to imagine, but for folks 100 years ago, buses were seen as the futuristic technology and cable cars and streetcars seemed like they were old fashioned and rigid forms of transit that were unreliable. So it's hard to imagine that now because we miss that streetcar system, we miss having robust public transit.But the attitudes 100 years ago were very pro car, very pro internal combustion engine technology.

And the consequences of that was, of course, air pollution. I remember in the 70s when I came out here to visit, the sky was yellow.

Yeah.

Dave Osman of Fireside Theater, when we were all writing together back in the early 70s, he actually left Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, because the smog was affecting his health. And he used to call it the Hitler.

Well, you know, not that I want you to have a different guest than me, but I have to recommend Ann Carlson, my colleague at UCLA Law. She just came out with a book called Smog and Sunshine that goes through this incredible history of how LA really cured that.This exact problem you're talking about, the smog was awful, but smog is basically, it's still an issue. Air pollution is still an issue in la, but nowhere near where it was. And it's such an important success story of the Clean Clean Air Act.But she goes through how, you know, back in the 40s and 50s, people didn't even know where smog came from. They didn't even have the science developed around it. They thought it was coming from some of the industrial sources around la.And it took some Caltech scientists to figure out, well, it's ozone and heat and sunshine and. And they had to figure it out. And then they had to push the auto industry into cleaning up their act.

It's an amazing success story because when I did finally come out here in the early 90s, the sky was blue.

Yeah.

And you see cities like Salt Lake City because of the mountains, there's a natural inversion there and it just traps. It's a libertarian state. They don't have big air pollution laws there.They explained to me in the governor's office, Salt Lake City's like a catcher's mitt with the mountain range there. So not only does it have its own air trapped, but it gets California air about three days later and it gets Chinese air seven days later.Chinese air, yes, during the winter months, during the inversion months, has the worst air sometimes in the entire world. And LA still has the worst smog in the country. Right.

It's still bad. And we still need to go through all those sources.We've done a good job cleaning up light duty vehicles, the sort of passenger cars that most of us drive. And electrics are making a huge impact actually on. On in terms of improving air quality. But we also need to clean up the truck traffic.Those need to move to battery electric. So we still have a ways to go. But it's incredible how much progress has been made in just a few decades.And it frankly, very Little cost considering that the benefits not just to public health but just to the economic value of L A. I mean, as you say, a lot of people moving away from L A, I mean real estate interests were concerned about how bad smog was getting because it was becoming a sort of an international pariah in terms of, you know, people not wanting to move to L A because of the reputation it had.

That's right, we are making progress. I mean the biggest source of pollution is Long beach in the harbor, the ships and they disallowed ships at dock to run their engines.They had to go electric shore power. They made big strides in hydrogen. You know that big trucking lane, the 110 out of the harbor to do electric battery hydrogen vehicles.California is very progressive.

It took lawsuits to get the port to agree to clean up its act. But yeah, now they're investing in zero emission cargo handling equipment.We're seeing a lot more battery electric drayage trucks that bring all the goods from the port into the Inland empire primarily to those distribution hubs.There's a lot more work that needs to be done and there are a lot of low income communities around the ports and the freeways leaving the ports, but a lot of progress that is happening too. So I agree it's a positive story.

Ultimately the pollution in the 70s is what prompted Mayor Bradley who was arguably one of the most popular mayors. He had this vision for developing rapid transit and he said he could get it started within 18 months.I think it took 13 years before they broke ground.According to your book, you would think that the idea of mass transit in a city clogged by traffic and pollution would be a no brainer at the opportunity to have mass transit. But it didn't really go that way, did it?

No.

And he did regret that 18 month promise. He said it on the campaign trail.He later kind of walked it back and said, well I meant to say 18 months to get a ballot funding measure in front of the voters. But yeah, ultimately it took a long time, you know, so smog was a big part of it. But it was, was also about rescuing downtown la.There were a lot of downtown business interests who were seeing people fleeing downtown LA, jobs fleeing downtown LA and same dynamic actually in the San Francisco Bay area with the BART system, that it was downtown San Francisco business interests that were concerned about leaving a hollowed out downtown.So between the smog, the sort of economic concerns and then also just the traffic and quality of life and mobility and what a drag that has on people's well Being and ability to get around. It's a basic human right to get around.There was a lot of movement towards building, resurrecting really a rail system in la, but they tried multiple ballot measures. There were a lot of interests against it, a lot of anti tax sentiment.And because LA is so big, it's easy to lose sight of just how many people live in communities where they feel like they're going to get nothing out of a rail system. And it is impossible to build a rail system that would provide value to everybody.And especially when you think of a county as large as Los Angeles, I mean you can fit Delaware and Rhode island into LA County. It is a massive county. And to get these funding measures passed, you need to get a lot of these people on board.And if they don't see the rail system coming anywhere near them, why would, why do they want to increase their taxes?

All aboard.

I want to talk about the heavy rail versus light rail, which is subways versus the above ground trains.You see, like the Expo line, the light rail became more popular as years went on because it was just so much cheaper per mile to build above ground than it was underground. And yet the compromise there is that it's subject to traffic as well. And taking the Expo downtown is no time bargain at all.If you take the train to beat the traffic to go to see a show. But then at the end of the show you have to wait 20 minutes for a train to show up. And this actually happened to me.We came into Santa Monica and there was a bus I had to connect to get to my home. It was the last bus of the night. It was midnight and the bus and the train did not coordinate. And the bus left the station.Oh boy, 90 seconds before the train arrived. And so we ended up walking. It's like I could have driven home in 20 minutes. Yeah, how do you address that?And then the other big resistance to rail was about crime coming into town.And people still say that Santa Monica has been affected by increased crime because of the people's access who are interested in committing crime coming out to Santa Monica. Is that statistically true?

Not that I've ever heard of. And you did hear a lot of these concerns gonna bring criminals into our neighborhood.But you know, if you're trying to steal something from someone, why would you on a train doesn't? I mean maybe some people are, but it seems like get better getaway plan than, you know, waiting on top of a platform.

I can tell you I would never use the Expo to get away.

Yeah, Your point, your experience is maybe a good one. This is part of the issue with Los Angeles. I mean, think of, think of your example, Santa Monica to downtown LA. I mean, what is that, 12, 14 miles?You know, in many cities around the world, if you go 14 miles through that city, you have gone from like the outskirts on one side to the outskirts on the other, and there you've just scratched the surface of what urban Los Angeles is. So it's a massive distance and people are going in all different directions. That's why I described it as horizontal density.It's actually kind of the worst of all worlds because you've got a lot of density, but it's like a scrambled egg, you know, it's not like everyone's just trying to get to downtown L. A for their jobs. The jobs are spread everywhere, the destinations are spread everywhere.So it's very hard to superimpose a rail system that can function at a high efficiency that way. That said, there are a lot of trips possible to be made on transit.And the more you have transit that serves destinations, whether those are shopping or job centers or housing centers.

Entertainment.

Yeah, entertainment. You know, you, you can get a lot of ridership, but it's not going to solve everything.You have to think of rail as a sort of backbone, but then connecting rail to other destinations, you would have bus only lanes and you would have bike lanes and you would make it easy for people to get that, what we call the last mile. So when you took Expo line and got off that, you know, it would just be one bus and that when it leaves, you missed your, your opportunity.There got to be multiple ways to get where you need to go. And then also it's also about building more housing and more jobs and more entertainment and shopping areas around the existing rail network.So it's not going to work for everyone, but you can try to make it work for a lot more people.

Along the Expo line alone.The amount of development that you see now, and you can see it from the 10, when you drive into town, you look to the south, you see all these high rises going in and the density. So that is transforming the nature of the city. High density residential areas that are aligned to the rail.

Yeah, and that's Culver City, you know, that you're seeing there to the south. And it's not going to. You think it would happen automatically, but it actually doesn't.And the reason it doesn't is because the rail lines, the rail agencies, in this case LA Metro, has no land use authority whatsoever. They Just build the line. They cannot control what gets built around it. That is up to the cities that make the land use policies.And in many cases the rail is being built through cities that do not want any new development. And they will keep really restrictive land use policies, height limits, density limits, etc.But Culver City has embraced density, they've embraced transit oriented development, and that's why you see that happening there. But that is not automatic throughout Los Angeles.In some ways it's actually a bit of an outlier because I mean, on the Expo line you see it, it's serving a lot of single family neighborhoods in certain cases, not in Culver City, not necessarily in Santa Monica. But that is the big challenge for LA Metro. It doesn't control Angie's authority.It's dependent on these cities that in many cases are quite hostile to new development. You know, that people moved into those cities not wanting them to change is the opposite. They want them to keep developing out and keep people out.

It's this kind of hot mess of conflicting interests.

It's kind of the worst of all worlds in some ways, because the taxpayers are spending a huge amount of money on these systems and then these local governments are keeping the ridership from going up and keeping the system from really recouping its value.

The San Fernando Valley corridor that in the early days had the option to get rail, but they didn't want it. It was kind of a NIMBY thing.And then when they decided they did want it, the train, literally, no pun intended, left the station and they ended up getting that rapid bus corridor, which according to your book was suitable because the density of population in those single family home region didn't support a train, but it did support buses.

Yeah, this goes back to your point about the different technologies. So heavy rail, light rail, and then this sort of bus rapid transit, heavy rail is when you get the power from below. That kind of.The third rail and heavy rail systems are meant for very dense cities, talking Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, you know, very high capacity jam trains, skyscrapers everywhere, they're very expensive to build. And then light rail is when you get the sort of overhead power. The advantage of light rail is it's a lot cheaper.I mean, it could be anywhere from half the cost of heavy rail to sometimes a fifth of the cost of building heavy rail. But it's. It can't hold as many people and it can also ride on the streets because the power is coming from overhead.

And there's a lot more to the surface rail system than meets the Eye there's tremendous infrastructure involved in electric power. The wiring that's all underground. It's not a simple process yet.It's so much cheaper that it seemed like towards the end they traded expensive subways to build out, for example, the Gold Line with surface rail because the money went so much further.

That was a big part of the issue is that they raised money.So, you know, going back into the sort of original Tom Bradley days, eventually they were able to get a ballot measure passed, a sales tax measure in 1980 and that was the first of four measures that passed. So Angeles were willing to tax themselves to pay for this, but the money never went as far as they hoped.So they did start to kind of spread it out as much as they could. And so they made a lot of compromises.Even on the heavy rail they made compromises like the Wilshire line, which is now going to be extending out to the west, which it should have been done.

To the sea.

Yeah, yeah. It's not going to go all the way to the sea, but it's heading in that direction.

To the va, right?

Yeah, to the VA and then hopefully it'll go under the mountains and then out to Van Nuys. But I think it's a six car train platform. It's going to be very jammed. It's going to be a very popular line.But they had to do that because of the cost concerns and that's also why they did the bus only lane and the bus rapid transit lane in the San Fernando Valley, because they just didn't have money at that point for rail. And I do think it is more appropriate and I wish LA and other cities would embrace bus only lanes more because you get so much of the value of rail.You get trains that can be high capacity, that are out of traffic, that can be reliable. Like you get buses. I should say that are that are like trains but they're so much cheaper to build and they can be built so much more quickly.The issue is that they take a lane away from drivers and so they become very politically difficult to get approved.

Well, we're going to get into some really interesting, some of the politics of all this. Not only the politics, but the technicalities of building a tunnel under an existing.

Listen, we're going through the, the throes of that right now. If you drive down Wiltshire Boulevard, you know, all the construction that's going or the destruction that's going on.

We are talking to Ethan Elkind today. We're talking about the history of the Los Angeles rail system which Is, which.

Is the history of the city in so many ways.

It really is. Ethan, you wrote the book Railtown the Fight for Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City, which is available on Amazon.It was published in 2014, I remember. Is that correct?

That's correct. Yeah.

Let's get to the nitty gritty of how you build a subway in an existing city in a major seismic area. The whole basin is basically the bottom of a sea.When they were digging out the train downtown, they were finding fossils and they were finding seashells. You don't know what you're gonna get when you dig.

Did they find any that were spelled out 86, 47?

I was thinking that, yeah, the seashell Crime division probably got its start back then. Yeah. Not only was it obviously the fossil rich history, but it also was a major oil field.It was actually the, at one time the largest oil field in the country, or at least west of the Mississippi river, that was eventually used up, abandoned and capped. And that created all sorts of challenges for building it. And, you know, people forget that LA is this oil town.I mean, Beverly Hillbillies and they're just still pump jacks around the city.

Oh, yeah. Is that what they're called? Pump jacks? Yeah, pump jacks that look like the big birds dipping their beak.

You can see it on La Cienega going down to the airport.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so there was a major oil field, basically the Fairfax area, and that created big problems for the construction.And first of all, I should just preface all this by saying cities build rail through all sorts of seismically active areas. I mean, you think of Tokyo, you think of Mexico City, this isn't a new challenge.But because rail was new to LA and because there were a lot of people who were against building the system, particularly those who were living in neighborhoods where new stations were going to come through, and they didn't want those impacts, the construction and the new people and all those things. They really seized on the topography and the geology of Los Angeles to try to raise doubts about how safe the system would be.The construction process. I mean, we saw Beverly Hills Unified School District wasted millions of dollars trying to fight the tunneling of rail.This is in the last 10, 15 years, underneath their campus, and citing a lot of pretty bogus stuff. But there was a big explosion, a methane gas explosion in 1985 at the Ross Dress for Less on Fairfax Fairfax. And it was unfortunate.There was methane leaking into a basement that wasn't being vented properly, and a worker punched A time card. And that created a spark that ignited the store. And a lot of people were pretty badly hurt.And opponents to rail at this point, rail is supposed to go down Wilshire and then north up Fairfax. They seized on that, including Henry Waxman, the long serving congressman from the area.Very politically powerful city council member, then city council members, basically all the people who are carrying water for the opponents to the system came out and said, look, this is what would happen if you start building rail down here. And so they basically put a moratorium on any subway construction in that area.And it wasn't until Antonio Villaragosa ran on the subway to Sea pledge and got elected and enough time had passed that they finally went through a kind of kabuki theater study to show that actually it is safe and we can tunnel. And so that's why today we see the Wilshire line, the Purple line, extending the D line, I should say extending down, farther down Wilshire.

Henry Waxman was kind of surprising to read how opportunistic he was using the methane as an opportunity to stop the line going through neighborhoods. People didn't want to have the train.

Yeah, I think it's a black mark on his record. I interviewed him about it and he was never sold on the system. He thought the whole system was kind of ridiculous and a waste of money.And he didn't really understand why the political decisions had been made to site route the train routes in different directions. So he never was in love with it.And then he had these Fairfax constituents who were very opposed and he didn't even understand why it was going up Fairfax. And to some extent he did have a point.You know, it was only going up Fairfax because they needed to get it to the San Fernando Valley for political reasons, they couldn't leave the San Fernando Valley out of it. But so he just was never in love with it. And then he did really seize on this sort of phony science around scaring people around tunneling.And I think it's very unfortunate because he set back the rail system going down Wilshire where it always should have gone. It's a very densely populated route. He set back decades. And I think it's. I think it's really unfortunate.It wasn't just him, but he almost killed the entire system.He was willing to go to Congress or use his power in Congress and actually kill all federal funding, which would have killed rail completely in la or at least the downtown LA portion of rail.

That's wild. But then Fairfax's loss was Vermont Avenue corridor's Gain because it was a far more commercially dense area and they welcomed having it.

They should have changed the names to Axman. What is your opinion about the high speed rail project that's been so controversial and stalled for so many years?

Well, I think high speed rail is very appropriate for California. We've got cities, LA San Francisco and San Diego that really are well suited for a lot of high speed train trips.So people would make a lot of use of that system. So in concept it's. I think it'd be really important to get it built in California and particularly an LA to San Diego route.I mean, that would just print money because that is a route that you're obviously not going to fly unless you've got a private plane.

I actually went down to San Diego two weeks ago to visit my cat, which is in the care of my late wife's little sister in Imperial Beach. It was a delightful ride, but took four hours.

It's a stroll.

Well, and if you, if that was high speed rail, you could get down there in 40 minutes. It would be transformative. Now my opinion on it though is that it's not being executed very well. I don't think that's breaking news to anybody.But I don't totally blame the state. It's hard to build anything of that scale in California.I mean, transmission lines in California take five to 10 years longer than in most other states. And we can't build housing. We have trouble building rail just within la.So high speed rail is caught up in the same governance dysfunction that all of these big infrastructure projects are now caught up in. And a lot of it honestly boils down to having too many local governments. We have too many cities.

Yeah.

And they all have veto authority. And I've talked to the high speed rail authority about. They've got to negotiate with this little. Great point.

The power grid is a good example of that too. We need a new generation power grid 2.0, but we can't get the easements to do it.

You have counties that are banning renewable energy development. You have counties that have put moratorium on wind development, for example. They won't let transmission lines in.I mean, it's really hard to build anything of any scale now in California. And high speed rail, like I say, it's just another symptom of that.So we've just wasted a huge amount of time and money on a project that the statewide, the voters want it. But then it just gets gummed up in the same way that LA Metro Rail got gummed up. LA Voters voted for Metro Rail. They wanted to see it.But then some little utility district and city of Beverly Hills and this other city and this politician all conspired to veto, you know, all the routes that we needed. And when the routes did go through, they were compromised and sued.And so we're disempowering these agencies from building the projects that the voters are funding. And that is really the dysfunction in the state.

So, Ethan, when are you running for office?

No immediate plans. It's more fun to take potshots on the side.

There's two things we should cover while we have time. One, the Green Line and why we don't have a connection to lax. What was that all about?That's a fascinating history, but before we were getting into the constraints, the nitty gritty of building the tunnels, Marc Brunel, a Frenchman who came up with modern tunneling in 1824 and that technique is still used. But what's interesting is that you had the challenge here in LA of having to build under these huge buildings in soft soil.And the techniques they used, they had an umbrella design of drilling holes over where the tunnel was going to be dug, where they then pumped in what they called grout, which was a combination of concrete and other materials that would dry and then exp. Compressed the soil which made the earth more stable for the boring machines to come through. Do I have that right?

Yeah, it's a really fascinating engineering story. And it started under the Thames river with the original London Tube with coal powered trains.I mean, the air quality was probably just poisoning people right and left in there before electric trains were invented. But yeah, they basically have these tunnel boring machines. They're digging and putting in these sort of concrete sheet so it doesn't collapse.And that's kind of how the original technology is built now. It's automated and it's a lot faster. But the other problem is that they're always guessing, right?They do soil samples as to what's down there, but they don't really know what they're going to hit when they start tunneling. And in some cases there are these old utility lines that were never mapped.You know, there are, there are weird foundations to buildings that they didn't know were there.So the rule of thumb is if you're in politics and you green light a big construction project, it's try to get out of office overseeing it before construction starts because it's nothing but horror stories. I mean, anyone who's done a home remodel project, nothing ever goes the way they say it will. There's always something weird.And this is like a home remodel project on a massive scale.

It'll always cost more.

The two major safety issues, methane and earthquakes, are mitigated by, as you described in the book, there is a polyliner between two concrete layers which supposedly seal out the gas from the tunnel from all this methane that has accumulated from the oil drilling. And there was some talk that they found that a lot of this liner was punctured.But there's ventilation systems, and that's pretty much a safety risk that's been mitigated. The other thing, of course, is earthquakes. For people who are saying, I'm not going to take a subway in an earthquake.I don't want to be under the mountain when that happens. But those are designed to work like worms and be flexible.

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, it's safer to be underground than above ground in an earthquake, so things won't fall on you.You know, up in a skyscraper, that's where things start collapsing bridges. Those are much more dangerous than a subway. It's actually fairly safe in the subway. And they are designed to move.And with the methane, you just vent it. Anybody who has a gas burner at home and you're cooking in your kitchen, you should open a window, you just vent the gas. And that takes care of it.

In this diverse topography, you have to keep the tunnels relatively even because the trains would have to slow down if there were ups and downs. Right. So there's another challenge. The people that build these things, they're known as tunnel stiffs.

Yes.

What's that about?

Well, there's a different name if you're west, east of the Mississippi. Out in the west, there are tunnel stiffs, and they, you know, they just, they have a kind of identity. By the way, this is all back in the 80s.I'm not. I haven't kept tabs on the construction industry. They may have a new name for themselves, but that's what they call themselves back then.And there was a real point of pride in being someone who could go down into these tunnels and work underground. And, you know, it's not just rail tunnels. I mean, we have to build new pipelines, water pipelines, telecommunications.So they're actually, there's a lot of tunneling that happens, but nothing got quite the scale as a rail tunnel. I mean, those are very large, and they're traversing densely built urban environments. So it's a really specialized kind of work. And it's.It's dangerous work. There were accidents for sure.

Let's not forget the day Hollywood Boulevard caved in.

Yeah, a big giant sinkhole. A few elected officials.

I think I saw that movie.

Yeah, LA loves their disaster stories. And this was a real life one where, yeah, they hit a sinkhole, the soil wasn't as strong as they thought and it shut down. That was in Hollywood.There was later a fire and that was under the Hollywood Freeway. And then they had to shut the freeway down because it melted a bunch of the mint in the tunnel and they didn't know if that was going to collapse.These are high profile things.I remember I got to interview Mr. Sulu, George Takei, you know, from Star Trek fame, because he actually was Tom Bradley, appointee to the transit district. I think Bradley was trying to capitalize on the futuristic Star Trek nature of building a rail line.And I remember he told me that he wanted off the board once construction started because he knew there were going to be problems. Not because he didn't have confidence in the agency, but just because that's the way these things go and they're just so much higher profile.I mean, Hollywood sinkholes, shutting the Hollywood Freeway down. I mean, these are national stories where if there's an incident in Tulsa, I don't think it's going to make the news in New York.

Good point.

And what kept people honest was we had a very robust newspaper business in this town during the building when the LA Times was still prominent. The LA Times had several investigative reports and whistleblowers and there was a lot of controversy. But it's bound to be on a project of this scope.

Not to say that there wasn't incompetence and mistakes. I mean, these things for sure happen. Louisiana Times, a number of reporters won some Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage.And I also want to just say I've done a fair amount of scholarships since then on just California's rail building program. And LA Metro really has recognition around the state as one of the premier agencies for building railroad because that was.Those were the early days in the 1980s and you know, there wasn't really any institutional knowledge or expertise at this point. Now LA has steadily been building rail for 40, almost 50 years. And so there's real expertise built up and they really know what they're doing.So again, not to say that there aren't mistakes being made, but LA in so many ways is a real kind of gold standard for building up that institutional knowledge and expertise about how to build rail because they have steady business. It's not a stop and start. Thing, there's always a rail line under construction because the voters have funded it so continuous.

Let's talk about the Green Line, which is the line that goes in the middle of the 105, the Century Freeway, which is an interesting story because that was the last freeway built. And they had the opportunity to lay the groundwork and foundation for the train system while they were building the freeway.So they saved a lot of money doing that by having the train go through the middle of the freeway there. Why did it not go to lax?There was an argument back in the day because there was a robust aerospace industry in El Segundo, as I understand it in your book. There was an argument like where would the riders go?The riders would be interested in commuting to their work jobs in aerospace, not the handful of people taking a train because no one's going to take a train to the airport anyway because they're lugging luggage and they would take a cab. So they had to go one way or the other. And they opted to go to El Segundo to the aerospace industry, which then collapsed.

Yeah, it was kind of a face palm moment for LA Metro at that point. I mean, you laid it out very well. First of all, airports are a very sexy destination for rail to serve.But as you just laid out, most passengers are not taking rail to the airport. They're getting a ride, an Uber, you know, relatives or friends are driving them.Actually, the real ridership to airports are often from the airport employees, because airports are major employees, employment centers.

That's right.

But at the time, as you say that with the Cold War going, the defense industry, the aerospace industry, all to the south of lax. But there were a lot of political arguments about where the rail line would go.There were complications because the FAA didn't want surface rail because it would interfere with the runways, and there was disagreement about where to take it. North of lax, wasn't there also like an electromagnetism because the tracks were going.

To go right by the airport runways and they were concerned that the electromagnetism of the overhead power lines would interfere with avionics of the planes. Is there going to be a rail connection to the airport? What's the future of the rail system that we don't know about yet because it's still underway?

Yeah, well, the Crenshaw Line is basically right there at the airport now. And then it's going to connect to an automated people mover which is supposed to open soon.And then basically you'll be able to, if you can get to the Crenshaw line and then you transfer to the people mover and you can get to the airport that way. So that is the plan and you know it's happening. And then Crenshaw takes you up north into the Expo line.I think, you know the next phase of rail to look forward to and it's happening this week is the D line opening.And so having the D line open farther down Wilshire and then eventually to Westwood and then under the Sepulveda Pass and out to Van Nuys and connect to the Valley that way you also will have the K line or the Crenshaw line going further north into West Hollywood. That's a very densely populated.

That was just determined, wasn't it?

There was some political debates around that. The mayor was involved, Mayor of LA was involved. West Hollywood is obviously a separate city, but yeah, a lot of negotiations going on.But that really to my mind, once you get those lines all finished up, that really kind of gives you the grid pattern, the backbone rail system.And I mean you can always keep building lines but I really think the region should be pivoting to building more bus only lanes and more bike lanes, but finding much cheaper, quicker ways to get people where they need to go quickly and then building true transit oriented neighborhoods where people can walk and bike and take transit. They don't have to buy a vehicle, they can hop on a rapid bus or use the protected bike lanes on an electric bike, electric scooter.You know that is really the future mobility in LA.And ironically that's the vision that LA's one of their original planning directors, Cal Hamilton had in the early 70s had this centers concept where each center around where now essentially the rail stations would be these sort of self contained villages or cities and then you could rapidly go between them with rapid transit.

10, 20 Years in the future we're going to have a different city, won't we as a result of this transit system?

It's up to the city. It's not a guarantee, but yes, there's going to be a lot more mobility options. Like I say, the Wilshire line will be transformative.That we know there's already a lot of transit riders on that quarter because the buses are packed and there's a lot of destinations to get to. So that alone will be transformative.And then it's just, it's up to the local leaders how much they're going to encourage development to happen around those stationaries and how much they're willing to dedicate more of the public right of way the streets over to people who want a bike or ride a rapid bus. That's a tough political battle, but that's the real decision point, I think.

Well, the last question I have for you is, are you going to be in the Merrill debate this evening on cnn.

Ethan Elkine, thank you so much for.

Watching. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Take care. Ethan's book is the Fight for Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City.It's an interesting read just because of the political machinations of how this all happened. And when you really think about bringing a transit system to a city, the scope of la, it's an amazing, great pyramid type project.

Yeah.

Kudos to LA for getting it done. We have some fantastic shows coming up in the next few weeks.

I know I always learn something from this show and I'm proud to be a part of it. And hopefully it's also entertaining.

You can hear all of our shows@SexyBoomershow.com I'm Ted Bonnet.

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