The Sepulveda Transit Corridor project would connect the Westside to the San Fernando Valley in less than 30 minutes and ideally eliminate traffic congestion along one of the nation’s busiest corridors by offering an alternative to the snarling 405 over the Santa Monica Mountains.
The multibillion-dollar Metro plan is considered one of the most significant transit projects in the country — and it may finally move forward after years of debate. But billions of dollars have yet to be secured, raising questions over its timeline.
Metro’s planning and programming committee approved an underground heavy-rail option last week that would go from Van Nuys to Sherman Oaks, pass under the mountains and Bel Air, stop at UCLA and ultimately end at the E Line/Expo Sepulveda station. The option eliminates a controversial monorail proposal through the Sepulveda Pass and bypasses a stop at the Getty Center, which had once been under consideration.
“The Sepulveda Corridor is a vital link for the communities of Los Angeles,” Cecily Way, senior executive officer of countywide planning for Metro, said last week. “The project would add a critical regional connection to the transportation network.”
The plan goes before the full Metro board of directors Thursday.
The project has been the subject of multiple Metro community meetings and has elicited thousands of public comments for and against various proposals. Some routes faced extensive pushback from local residents concerned about neighborhood disruptions and environmental risks.
The current route would travel under Van Nuys Boulevard. It pulls from two other proposals and was developed after residents voiced concerns over a route that would drill near a high-pressure water main along Sepulveda Boulevard.
Bob Anderson, the vice president of the Sherman Oaks Home Owners Assn. and a retired aerospace engineer, was “pleasantly surprised” that Metro took residents’ concerns into consideration with the proposal.
The group has been a vocal critic of some of the proposed routes and still has questions about the current proposal, such as how it will affect parts of Sherman Oaks and Bel Air. Anderson said that although the association supports the current recommendation, he still has concerns over funding.
“We still have not heard from Metro how they’re going to pay for this thing,” he said. “We don’t need to know every financial detail, but we do need to know where they’re going to get the funding stream that feeds it and how much the financing is going to cost us.
The estimated cost of the project has ballooned since 2016, when voters approved transit improvements between the Valley and the Westside under Measure M.
At the time, the project was slated as $6 billion, then grew to an estimate of $9.4 billion to $13.8 billion with a completion goal of 2033. Metro does not have an estimate for the current modified proposal. A previous version estimated a price tag of about $24.2 billion, but Metro said that wasn’t accurate for the new model.
“A shorter, or initial operating segment, more direct alignment and fewer stations could reduce costs,” the agency said.
Roughly $3.5 billion has so far been secured through Measure M and Measure R.
The transit agency cited the need for reliance on state, local and federal funding to fix the shortfall and has raised the idea of private-public partnerships — similar to proposals for the state’s underfunded High Speed Rail project. But it did not have a specific plan for how that money would be obtained or how it would affect the project’s schedule.
“With existing voter-approved funds, Metro can continue to advance environmental clearance and engineering; however, additional funds will be needed to advance substantial construction,” the agency said. The opening date for a previous route was slated for mid-2038, but Metro said there isn’t an updated schedule yet for the new version.
The busy corridor and solutions to improve it have been under discussion for decades. Ethan Elkind, a rail expert and director of the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said that a variety of political and logistical factors slowed attention to it: a focus on downtown transit; opposition to high-capacity transit in the San Fernando Valley; and geological challenges in the Sepulveda Pass.
“It’s a lot of land. And the more land you have to go through, the more expensive it is, the more logistically challenging it is,” Elkind said.
L.A. County leaders have largely been supportive of the project.
L.A. County Supervisor and Metro board member Lindsay Horvath said last week that the project would be a historic development for the Los Angeles region, affecting drivers who commute through the Sepulveda Pass along the 405.
“What we have before us is the potential to take more than a quarter of those 400,000 daily commuters out of their cars, off the 405 and onto public transit. This represents a mode shift for hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors,” she said. “More people choosing to use transit instead of personal vehicles creates a commuting culture — a culture of ridership — and brings along all of the social and economic benefits that come with it.”
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman said construction for the project would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and revenue from ridership would help local businesses.
“We don’t have to accept sitting in traffic as our only choice, and this is our pathway forward,” she said.
Raman pressed the board to complete the full line “aggressively,” and not just prioritize the initial segment, which would connect the Metro G Line at Victory Boulevard to the Metro D Line at Wilshire Boulevard, leaving out connections to the Van Nuys Metrolink station and the Metro E Line Expo/Sepulveda station.
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