Plan for transportation, but plan what works

Editorial Focus: Planning was the focus of the Board of Trade's symposium on the future of transportation, "Vision 2020," last week. Reality got in the way of these grandiose plans as more pressing needs surfaced that need to be taken care of now. Let's plan what works.

If short-term memory serves, during the week of the "Vision 2020" sessions in Lancaster, the Antelope Valley:

Learned Palmdale Regional Airport's last remaining scheduled airline service will go away in late April, with no replacement in sight;

Saw commuter rail service to the San Fernando Valley stopped for two straight days by flooding in a tunnel;

Witnessed marathon traffic jams on Highway 14 when already near-capacity traffic was increased by weather-related closures of the Angeles Crest and Sierra highways and Bouquet Canyon Road.

With those realities in our face today, looking ahead to transportation in the year 2020 seems quite a daunting jump.

Now Vision 2020 is a wonderful idea. Planning far in advance is especially important for public works projects, which seem to take forever and a month.

It should also be remembered that while planning is crucial, it doesn't mean a thing unless there is a will and a way to get the job done.

There are Antelope Valley people still around who remember the terrific job the L.A. Department of Airports did in "planning" the Palmdale Intercontinental Airport nearly three decades ago.

There was also a plan for this marvelous freeway tunnel under the San Gabriel Mountains, linking the Antelope Valley with Pasadena.

And the present planning for high speed rail connecting Palmdale to the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles is just the latest in a series of plans for ground commuter transit - all gathering dust somewhere in downtown L.A.

Based on our earlier experiences with transportation planning, maybe we also need a corollary to the Vision 2020 program. We could call it "Hindsight '98," a program in which participants would rewind the memory tapes to how we got into our present transportation fix, and what - if anything - was learned from the experience.

Highlight reels from the past would tell us that, among other things, the L.A. Department of Airports has absolutely no plausible motive for breaking a sweat on developing either air service capacity at Palmdale, or the high speed ground transportation system that would close the loop in the circular arguments against scheduled airline service here.

Just looking at the tapes from the past few months would be instructive. We'd see long lines of bumper-to-bumper traffic headed back and forth on two lanes of the AV Freeway, next to a perfectly useful looking third lane that is totally empty and blocked off by orange cones. What, we might ask, are the freeway-building authorities waiting for, a politician to cut the ribbon?