CAR LOVERS SMITTEN WITH METRO LINES.

Byline: Lisa Mascaro Staff Writer

A lifelong resident of the San Fernando Valley, attorney Steven L. Feldman has long had an affinity for its car culture - one that continues to this day with the 2003 Infinity G-35 parked in his garage.

But there's a new love in his life - the sleek, fast and reliable Metro Red Line subway that whisks him from Universal City to the downtown courthouse in 35 minutes.

He climbs aboard on trial days, settles in for the ride and arrives with the clear head that comes from avoiding the grinding rush-hour gridlock on the 101 Freeway.

``Relax, read the paper, let the train do the driving,'' said Feldman, 54, who lives in Encino. ``I do it for a comfort level. I go into the courtroom more relaxed.

``I felt I was a better attorney for it.''

Like the culture that drew Angelenos onto freeways a generation ago, the promise of a traffic-free commute has wooed a small but devoted cadre of so-called choice riders out of their autos and onto public transit. And it is the hope of local officials, who last month abandoned an ambitious plan to expand the Ventura Freeway because of opposition from residents, who expressed newfound interest in mass transit alternatives.

It's a noteworthy shift for a city that loves its cars the way Steve Martin's character did in ``L.A. Story'' - driving next door to pay a visit.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority reports 75 percent of its Red, Blue and Green Line train riders have access to cars but choose mass transit.

Support groups such as Friends of the Red Line have created online communities, and one downtown L.A. resident hosts a subway bar crawl - Red Line Red Eye - a quirky, occasional tour of watering holes along the route in Hollywood and downtown.

``I'm not surprised, but I don't expect them to become the majority anytime soon,'' said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, the chairwoman of UCLA's Department of Urban Planning, who has researched what it would take to get Angelenos out of their cars.

While the subway and light-rail lines won high marks, the bus system still leaves many skeptical of its reliability and safety, she said.

``I didn't find a tremendous amount of excitement about leaving the car in the garage,'' the professor said.

Still, she's cautiously optimistic Angelenos are finding that in some circumstances - if their workplace is close to a transit stop, if they don't have a string of errands that need to get done during the day - they can ride the bus or train as an alternative to fighting gridlock.

``For the people who have choice, in their minds they're weighing the alternatives: What are the costs of using the car versus the alternatives? If it takes about the same time ... you don't have to drive, you don't have to have the stress of driving, you can read your paper. Why not?'' she said.

Most Los Angeles residents know little about public transit. They marvel there's a subway under Hollywood or at the new rail line opening this summer down the middle of the freeway in Pasadena.

Warren Morse, MTA's deputy executive officer for marketing, said the Steve Martin view of Los Angeles shows what the transit agency is up against as it tries to supplant freeways jammed with solo drivers with mass transit systems.

``This is very much a place where people expect to ride from place to place - and to ride in private automobiles. The automobile is portrayed as something very glamorous,'' Morse said. ``But of course when they advertise cars, they never show you cars stuck in traffic.''

When San Fernando Valley resident Joan H. Leonard was looking for office space to rent downtown, she intentionally sought a location near a Metro subway station.

``I wanted to be on a street where there was mass transit, not just getting from home to work, but getting to City Hall,'' said Leonard, who works for the public policy group Common Cause and was recently appointed to the MTA's San Fernando Valley Sector Advisory Council because of her transit use.

``Every time I get on that freeway, I'm a wreck,'' said Leonard, who leaves her 1994 Honda Accord at home and raves about bus line 66 that regularly passes in front of her office for trips downtown. ``All those other people are crazy.''

Still, public transit use in Los Angeles County accounts for about 6.6 percent of the 3.6 million workday commutes, according to the 2000 Census, up slightly from the previous decade, but nowhere near the 70 percent of commuters who continue to drive alone.

Metrolink carries 34,700 weekday riders on trains to and from the suburbs, 65 percent of whom once drove alone. The MTA's light rail Blue Line from Long Beach is one of the busiest in the nation, but its Red Line subway carries just half the riders once promised, at 128,000 weekday boardings.

Buses, often painfully slow and notoriously crowded, carry the bulk of MTA's public transit load at 1.1 million weekday boardings across its countywide system.

Riders say there are still so many gaps in the system, it makes it difficult to get around. Valley buses sometimes leave riders waiting as much as an hour, and poor connections routinely make riders miss their transfers.

Those problems, and the fact that 68 percent of bus riders have no access at all to a car, have propelled the Bus Riders Union to try to stop all rail construction in favor of more buses for poor and minority riders.

While more than 20 percent of rail riders earn $50,000 or more annually, just as many bus riders earn $15,000 or less, according to the MTA.

But the agency insists that L.A. needs more of everything - buses; light-rail systems such as the new Gold Line to Pasadena; and cheaper busways such as the San Fernando Valley Metro Rapidway scheduled to open in 2005 - although more subways are considered too expensive and unlikely.

Feldman, the Encino attorney, had to be converted to the Red Line - in fact, he represented a client who was among the property owners who had sued and settled with the MTA over subway construction problems.

Then a few years ago, another attorney told him about taking Red Line downtown. He gave it a try, and now takes the train about six days a month.

``I know I'll get to court on time,'' said Feldman, who buys 90-cent discount tokens for the one-way ride at an Encino drugstore. ``Whereas traffic's unpredictable - you don't know if there's going to be traffic on the Hollywood going in.''

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Photo:

(color) Joan H. Leonard leaves her car behind to take a Metro train from Koreatown to Universal City. ``Every time I get on that freeway, I'm a wreck,'' she said.

John Lazar/Staff Photographer

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SOURCE: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

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