The North Hollywood Tunnel Opens. A Good Value?

The NoHo Metro tunnel finally opened this Monday touting all the positives over the negatives.

Having a more direct connection to the Orange Line is a good thing.

Saving that extra two to four minutes if you’re coming east of Lankershim sometimes gets you on the next train and that might be enough to get more people onto transit.

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 New entrance. Or exit.

For me, I have trouble just making the 7:39am train while I ready my family, so this will be a difference maker.

Some also stand behind the thought that the tunnel will make people safer since it cuts down the need to cross Lankershim.

I’m not so sure about that.

One of the first things I noticed after the tunnel’s opening is that there are still a lot of non-subway people crossing Lankershim getting to the Orange Line.

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The tunnel makes Lankershim safer to cross, unless you’re still all these people trying to cross.

People use the eastside to park their car, transfer from buses and utilize the bike lockers.

This doesn’t even count the number of residents who live nearby in a neighborhood that’s increasing density rapidly.

Even if very few crossed Lankershim, there’s no excuse for how dangerous it still is.

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I’m pretty sure we get the idea this is a station.

Drivers speed by because of the street’s wideness and the portion where people should cross is poorly laid out.

These problems should be a cheap, easy fix with bike lanes, traffic calming measures or both.

The sourest pill to swallow is the $22 million pricetag.

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Double the elevators to the street than the westside.

Try generously itemizing the excavation, two elevators, two escalators, paving and googly piece of art and you still have way too much money left over for the rest of construction.

It really makes me angry that $22 million sounds like a value for what you get against the $31 million on the Universal City Bridge(I’ve written an article about this too, but I’m too livid to post).

There are a lot of other improvements needed that could make more of an impact at a fraction of a cost.

If Metro is looking to increase ridership by improving its first mile / last mile connections, especially as NoHo fills in, then serious investment needs to be made in our streets.