PARKING MTA'S BIG SHORTFALL.

Byline: Adam Wills Local View

THE opening of the Orange Line, the MTA's San Fernando Valley east-west busway, is roughly two months away. While I was optimistic about this new line, the much-vaunted alternative to the 101 has lost a bit of its luster in my eyes even before its completion.

I'm typical of the people who have helped create the choking gridlock at the 101-405 interchange, one of the most heavily traveled corridors in the nation. My daily commute takes me from Calabasas to Koreatown, roughly 30 miles. I'm the guy politicians want to get out from behind the wheel and into public transportation.

I ride alone, having rarely carpooled. I leave for work and for home at roughly the same time as everyone else. I change lanes frequently, trying to get that 30-second edge.

So it was with some reluctance five months ago that I took my first step in trying to reduce my reliance on my car. In anticipation of the Orange Line's opening this fall, I traded in my parking card at work for an MTA pass.

Unfortunately, I've been having trouble making public transportation in the Valley work for me.

From the beginning, there have been problems, most of which involve Los Angeles' other traffic issue: parking.

If I were to leave my car at home, I would spend more than three hours transferring between buses and subways just to get to my office. So my most effective options for public transit involve the necessary evil of driving my car and parking it somewhere to catch a bus or subway.

Looking through my Thomas Guide, I found the only Park and Ride lot in the West Valley at Westfield Shoppingtown Topanga. Imagine my surprise when I found that the lot was in the middle of a construction zone. The northwest corner of Westfield Topanga shopping center's parking lot was being converted into a multifloor parking garage. The MTA had planned to fund an additional level to the structure for Park and Ride use, but Westfield's desire to lease the space back to the MTA killed the deal.

``It turned out that this did not pencil out for us economically,'' MTA transportation planning manager Kathleen Sanchez said.

Without a Park and Ride option in my area, I was forced to take the 101 to Universal City. While I saved myself an additional 10 miles of driving each way by parking and taking the subway, it also added an hour to my total commute time.

Recently, my honeymoon with the MTA came to a screeching halt when I looked up parking options for the Orange Line's West Valley leg. If the MTA was serious about offering up the Orange Line as an alternative to the 101, you'd never know it based on its parking allocation west of the 405.

The MTA has only 3,123 parking spaces for the Orange Line. And little more than one-third of the parking spaces are west of the 405, with no parking at all at the end of the line in Warner Center. The westernmost station with parking will be at Winnetka, which only features 394 spaces.

Plans exist to eventually establish parking in Warner Center at the former Boeing property on Canoga, but MTA officials said it is unlikely to be available until one year after the Orange Line opens.

Rather than playing to the pervasive car culture and establishing more parking to make commuting via public transportation easier, the MTA remains idealistic by putting more buses on the street. The agency hopes that more feeder buses on existing lines will translate to more commuters at Orange Line stations.

But what about suburban areas barely served by the MTA to begin with?

Ironically, even the MTA's Sanchez can't rely exclusively on public transportation to get to her job. ``I take the Gold Line in Pasadena, and I have to drive five miles to get to the end station, and I deal with tons of traffic just to get there,'' she said.

Unlike what the MTA did with the Gold Line, it's astounding to me that the MTA did not plan a multilevel parking structure at the end of the busway, let alone at each station along the Orange Line route. In a city where the car is king, public transportation must play to this paradigm in order to slowly shift drivers away from their cars.

Why should I bother supporting a system that features potentially challenging parking and may likely add more time to my commute than if I'd simply taken my car?

While I wish I could remain optimistic about the arrival of the Orange Line, my firsthand experience with public transportation over the last five months has left me with one pervasive thought:

Is it too late to get my parking card back?