Lawmaker Tours L.A. Transit Grid--by Helicopter

An influential congressman visited Los Angeles on Monday to assess the region’s traffic problems.

But because the lawmaker’s time is valuable and L.A.’s chronically congested streets and freeways make scheduling problematic, his survey was conducted from a helicopter, high above the immobile lines of bright red taillights.

Like car salesmen descending on a customer with cash in hand, local transportation officials--including Mayor Richard Riordan--lobbied Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), whose House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will recommend how billions of federal transportation dollars should be spent well into the next century.

Riordan, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, was among half a dozen officials--not including the pilots--who crammed into the city helicopter for the tour of the Los Angeles subway route and other current and planned transit projects.

But Shuster, who has been visiting other cities, delivered a sales pitch of his own--in support of higher transportation spending in the federal budget.

While funds are available for transit projects, they are locked up in the highway trust fund in a “shell game” to hide the true size of the federal budget deficit, said Shuster, chairman of the House transit panel.

Under a practice begun by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969 to mask the cost of the Vietnam War, Congress has allowed a surplus to build up in the highway fund and then use it to offset the deficit. The money--raised by federal fuel taxes and expected to exceed $30 billion next year--is not spent on transportation projects, but instead sits as a reserve fund. “We need to spend more money on infrastructure,” Shuster said. “The money is there. But it’s locked up.”

Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson), a member of the transportation panel, also took the helicopter tour.

Competition is fierce for the federal transportation funds to be distributed over the next several years. The MTA is seeking $723 million for:

* Purchase of 650 low-polluting buses to replace aging vehicles in the MTA fleet, one of the oldest in the country, and to help the agency comply with a court order mandating bus improvements at a cost of $250 million.

* Speeding up construction of a 2.3-mile subway extension to the Mid-City section of Los Angeles, $100 million; defraying the design and engineering costs of a San Fernando Valley rail line extending from the subway terminus in North Hollywood to Warner Center, $58 million; and covering design and engineering expenses for a second subway extension on the city’s Eastside, from 1st and Lorena streets to Atlantic and Whittier boulevards, $44 million.

* Extension of the El Monte busway and carpool lane on the San Bernardino Freeway by 20 miles from Baldwin Avenue to the San Bernardino County line, $154 million.

* Construction of railroad crossings in the San Gabriel Valley to reduce congestion and safety risks from freight train traffic, expected to double by the year 2020 because of construction of the Alameda Corridor, a rail and truck route between the ports and the downtown area, $97 million.

* Building the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway, a consolidation of the boulevard’s two roadways into a single divided boulevard with a landscaped center median on Los Angeles’ Westside, $20 million.