Transit Choice: Monorail or Freeway for Buses

This Valley needs and deserves a rapid transit system. There is an easy way to decide what type of system should be built, and what route it should take.

The issue should be placed before the voters. The members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority should publicly announce the MTA’s willingness to accept as binding the results of the vote. I am confident that the voters will again choose the monorail.

It’s time for those obstructionists to quit trying to get behind closed doors what they were denied and will be denied at the ballot box.

GARY FORSCH

Sun Valley

* Why not turn the Burbank and Chandler boulevard route through the San Fernando Valley into a superhighway exclusively for high-speed buses? Pave the route and allow only rapid transit buses on it. The buses could run in caravans, stopping only where the proposed subway trains for that route would stop. They could be luxurious and powered by propane or electricity--non-polluting.

Compare this rapid transit alternative to a monorail on top of the Ventura Freeway. The bus superhighway would be much cheaper to build, would be able to move more people, would be way more quiet, and would spare the millions who regularly are on the freeway, the hassles that heavy monorail construction on top of the freeway would inevitably bring them.

Compared to a superhighway for fast, rubber-tired, non-polluting buses built on what is now abandoned land gone to weed, a monorail built on top of the most important traffic artery in the San Fernando Valley is a preposterous idea.

Yet, from what I read, the majority of the members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are ready to approve this idea at their upcoming October meeting. I would ask them to approve a bus superhighway along Burbank/Chandler instead.

GENE POMERANTZ

Woodland Hills