Whether you are a resident of Los Angeles or an out-of-state or international student, you’ve almost certainly become familiar with the car-ridden nature of our city. At the same time, you’ve likely heard our public transportation heavily criticized for its lack of speed, connectivity and safety, if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. 

LA Metro knows this, and the agency has been hard at work for years not only making its existing lines safer and faster, but also planning a series of projects that will radically change the way Angelenos get around the city over the next few decades.

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One of these projects is the Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project, which aims to connect the San Fernando Valley and the Westside via a rail line by 2033-2035. The San Fernando Valley is bounded by mountains on almost every side, making it largely disconnected from the rest of the city. 

Despite being home to about 1.8 million people — almost half of L.A.’s total population — the San Fernando Valley experiences the worst commute times in the region. For decades, the primary way to travel from the San Fernando Valley to the Westside was the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass in the Santa Monica Mountains. The 405 is famous for having some of the worst congestion in the nation — by Metro’s estimates, car travel times during peak hours range from 40 to 90 minutes. 

Metro’s rail project, which will utilize funds from the Measure M transportation sales tax passed by Angeleno voters in 2016, aims to cut down on this commute significantly. But the agency hasn’t yet decided on the precise route of the line, let alone the type of rail. Metro is considering six alternatives for the project, three of which are heavy rail subway and three of which are monorail. 

At first sight, a monorail looks, well, sexy. It’s sleek and futuristic, and each of the three alternatives would wrap around the 405 Freeway, providing everyone a highly public display of efficient mass transit. And, theoretically, it would be cheaper and faster than building heavy rail because it doesn’t involve tunneling. 

But a monorail will actually have far lower capacity and significantly longer transit times than a subway. The proposed monorail alternatives would carry 64,000 to 86,000 passengers and take about 30 minutes from end-to-end, compared to 107,000 to 121,000 passengers and under 20 minutes for heavy rail — which is why transit advocates and the public have continually derided the monorail alternatives.

So why is monorail still getting so much attention? For starters, the wealthy and politically influential Bel Air and Sherman Oaks homeowners associations have been vocal in their opposition to heavy rail from the beginning of the project, emphasizing the harm of a subway tunneling underneath their homes. Yet, any subway would run deep under the mountains, and Metro notes that it has never received noise or vibration complaints from above its existing tunnels on the B and D lines.

Furthermore, while LA SkyRail Express, the private group Metro has contracted to develop the monorail concept, continues to push the lower cost and earlier completion time of a monorail as its winning points, we should be skeptical of these claims. 

The SkyRail group includes transportation company and monorail supplier BYD, which has a history of using political maneuvering to score contract bids with transit agencies in California and across the country — but then later producing defective products that delay and balloon costs for the very projects it promises to deliver on, such as the electrification of LA Metro’s bus fleet just a few years ago.

As residents of this city, we should sincerely hope that the unfounded fears of a few wealthy homeowners, let alone the potential political mechanizations of a private company, don’t determine the future of an entire region’s socioeconomic mobility. 

Yes, it is true that a heavy rail could turn out to be more costly than a monorail, but if a monorail were constructed, there would be few solutions left to rectify the sacrifices to passenger capacity and travel time. Opportunities to fund and create city-changing transit are rare — and we shouldn’t sell out the working-class riders that would benefit the most from this project for short-term political expediency. 

Metro has long emphasized its commitment to socioeconomic equity. In Metro’s fall presentation of the Sepulveda project, the agency expressed that it is “intentionally focused on eliminating racial and socioeconomic disparities and advancing sustainable practices in everything [they] do.” Metro’s site further states that “[they] believe that access to opportunity should be at the center of decision-making around investing in [their] communities through public transportation projects.” 

It’s well past time that Metro dropped the monorail alternatives and started focusing on deliberating the right heavy rail options for riders. As Metro stares down what will be a transformative transit project for the second-largest city in the nation, Metro must honor its commitments to equity by choosing heavy rail.