Latest State Grant Has Regional Transit Officials Regretting Light Rail Project Delay

A subset of San Bernardino County transit officials this week expressed a combination of enthusiasm and dismay at a development that has forced their renewed recognition that the governmental collective devoted to regional transportation issues has as a body consistently squandered an eminently promising prospect of alleviating Southern California’s most vexing commuting challenge.
On Monday, July 8, the California State Transportation Agency earmarked just under $500 million to be used to extend the Gold Line, what is already the world’s longest light-rail passenger extending from its Pacific Ocean terminus in Long Beach nearly to the eastern end of Los Angeles County, into San Bernardino County. There was also indication given that another installment of $298 million from the state will be provided to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority to fund the final phase of the final 3.2-mile extension of the rail line from Pomona to Claremont and across the county line into Montclair being undertaken by that entity’s sub agency, the Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority.
While virtually all of Los Angeles County’s and a good share of San Bernardino County’s transportation officials hailed the provision of the funds, the most ardent supporters of the Gold Line in San Bernardino County bemoaned the lack of resolve among the larger collection of transportation officials in their jurisdiction which has manifested over the last five years, preventing what they said was an infusion of state and federal dollars that would have ensured the Gold Line would be extended all the way to Ontario Airport by mid-2028. Because of that lack of resolve, they say, the light rail extension will not make it to the aerodrome until the early-to-mid 2030s, if at all.
At the core of Southern California’s, and most particularly, San Bernardino County’s, transportation conundrum is the reality that the 545.6-mile public commuter rail system, known as Metrolink, that individuals among the collective of governmental officials overseeing transit issues created in the early 1990s under the aegis of the Southern California Regional Rail Authority, has, more than three decades after its inception, proven itself to be inadequate in a way that most officials, potential users of the system and the general public consider to be an utter failure.
Though the intent from the outset was to generate a user base for the system that would fill the trains to capacity, such that the ratio of fuel consumption to passenger would be less than that achieved with transporting the same number of people to their various destinations while substantially reducing the number of motorists using the freeway and road system in the region, Metrolink never came close to achieving that goal.
Significantly, the spectacular way in which Metrolink missed its goal of shifting a significant number of Southern California’s commuters of of the freeway system and onto the rail system served to poison entirely, in the minds of not only the commuters themselves but in the vast majority of their political leadership, the concept of commuter rail transportation.
Yet, unrecognized by the vast majority of the population are two fundamental flaws in the design/concept of the Metrolink network. Metrolink was designed to run on a single existing rail line previously built to accommodate freight trains, which runs between Metrolink’s various stations. Thus, the diesel-powered Metrolink must share its track with cargo trains that run at four various times per day. Moreover, the Metrolink trains themselves run in both directions on the single track, such that travel in one direction cannot take place during the same time period that travel is taking place in the opposite direction. Practically speaking with regard to that portion of the Metrolink system running between Los Angeles County to the west and San Bernardino County to the east, this has meant that Metrolink in the morning rush hour offers no eastbound service and in the late afternoon/early evening rush hour offers no westbound service. The shortest time between departures from San Bernardino into Los Angeles is no less than 20 minutes in the morning rush hour and the shortest time between departures from Los Angeles to San Bernardino in the late afternoon/early evening rush hour is no less than 20 minutes. Metro link charges $10 for a one-way ticket from San Bernardino to Union Station in Los Angeles and $20 for a round-trip ticket. Consequently, Metrolink is not heavily used, and it does little or nothing to alleviate heavy traffic on the freeways into and out of Los Angeles on a daily basis.
Indeed, San Bernardino County residents have long been inured to observing the Metrolink at multiple crossings throughout the county carrying only a handful – fewer than a dozen and as few as one or two – of passengers, despite each car having a 140-rider capacity and the engines typically pulling at least three and more commonly four five or six cars.
Conversely, the Gold Line utilizes not a single but dual tracks, one track dedicated to movement in one direction – primarily west – and a second track dedicated to movement in the opposite direction – primarily west. The Gold Line runs from Union Station to Chinatown to Lincoln Heights/Citrus Park to Heritage Park/Arroyo to the Southwest Museum to Highland Park to South Pasadena to Fillmore to Del Mar to Memorial Park to Lake Street in Pasadena to Allen Street in Pasadena to Sierra Madre Villa to the Gold Line Bridge near Arcadia to Monrovia to Duarte to Irwindale to Downtown Azusa to the Azusa Pacific Campus/Citrus College entrance to Glendora to San Dimas to La Verne to Pomona and ultimately will move to Claremont and then Montclair. A Gold Line ticket costs $2.20. The Gold Line uses lighter cars and more fuel-efficient engines, with staggered departures and arrivals of as little as every eight minutes. The Gold Line is thus heavily used, and its cars near capacity on virtually every run. A deviation from this usage pattern occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic but has now ceased.
Shortly after the Gold Line achieved its initial round of success following the completion of its first 13 stations in 2003, a commitment was made to extend the line further eastward, a consensus emerged among officials with the California State Transportation Agency, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Gold Line Extension Authority and San Bernardino County Transportation Agency, then known as the /San Bernardino Associated Governments, to ultimately push the Gold Line to Ontario Airport in San Bernardino County and, conceptually, beyond that.
Deborah Barmack, who had been the director of management services with San Bernardino Associated Governments, acceded to the position of executive director in 2007. Barmack, who had been with San Bernardino Associated Governments (SanBAG) since 1990, was thoroughly familiar with transportation issues and recognized the shortcomings with the MetroLink system and the advantages that the light rail approach to incorporating trains into Southern California’s regional transportation system represented. Cognizant of the prospect that the general public and their political leaderships would interpret MetroLink’s inability to generate ridership levels significant enough to alleviate the burden on the Southland’s freeway system and therefore might give up on a commuter rails system altogether, she labored to keep the SanBAG board apprised of the incremental progress being made by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in bringing the Gold Line eastward among the Foothill Communities and the ridership levels it was achieving, which dwarfed that of MetroLink. This approach cultivated in a controlling majority of the San Bernardino Associated Governments board members not only an interest in the light rail concept but a vision that the light rail extension into San Bernardino County offered the potential to transfer, by the early 2020s, a substantial enough number of commuters from their cars traveling the freeways onto trains that the worsening gridlock would be abated and those freeways – ones in both San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County – would discontinue being virtual parking lots for two to two-and-a-half hours every weekday during the highest intensity traveling time.
In 2011, Barmack retired, and was temporarily replaced with Ty Schuiling. Ultimately, in March 2012, the SanBAG board settled upon hiring Raymond Wolfe, the California Department of Transportation Region 8 director, who oversaw all of Caltrans’ activities in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. With a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Southern California, a Master of Science degree in civil engineering from the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, and a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California, Wolfe is both a registered civil engineer and registered mechanical engineer. In his professional career he had started out as an aerospace engineer – literally a rocket scientist – with General Dynamics Corporation in Pomona and then Rancho Cucamonga designing and testing missiles. In short order, however, he became involved in more down-to-earth issues relating to transportation, such as building roads and bridges.
Upon moving into the San Bernardino Associated Governments’ executive director role overseeing what was then a $715 million budget, Wolfe was by no means hostile to the light rail concept, which at that point was something that was far enough into the future as to not be something on the SanBAG stove’s front burner. Nevertheless, the idea was one of dozens or scores of approaches toward streamlining San Bernardino County citizens’ ability to get from here to there that Wolfe was constantly holding in mind at once. It was not Wolfe who was taking the lead on exploring light rail, which was more the province of San Bernardino County’s representatives on the Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority Board of Directors. While SanBAG was both a passive and active participant in efforts to drum up funding for the eventual expansion of the Gold Line eastward, it was following the lead of the board and staff with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Gold Line Extension Authority, which did the heavy lifting in carrying out the applications for state and federal grants or infusions of money to continue with the project. There were multiple small successes achieved in this regard as well as a few major ones.
Under Wolfe, the San Bernardino Associated Governments board remained for a short time enthusiastic enough about the Gold Line extension that it had dedicated $39 million in available transportation money collected through the county’s imposition of a half-cent sales tax override on all retail establishments throughout the county toward the Gold Line project, and it did a joint application with the Los Angeles Metro Transit Agency for a State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant. That application was successful and it brought in $250 million on the Los Angeles County side, which made a significant but not complete inroad on the $850 funding deficit that jurisdiction had for extending the track all the way to the San Bernardino County border, and provided another $41 million of the then-projected $80 million cost for the San Bernardino County portion of the projected expense on the eastern side of the Los Angeles County/San Bernardino County border to get the line to Montclair.
In 2017, the concept of extending the Gold Line well into San Bernardino County received a substantial boost when the International Olympic Committee committed to holding the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles for what would be the third time, after the 1932 and 1984 Olympiads. This gave a tremendous incentive to construct the Gold Line all the way to Ontario Airport by the opening of the games, which would allow national and international attendees to travel into and out of both Los Angeles International Airport and Ontario Airport without experiencing traffic jams and other complications. It was anticipated that in the promotion of the Olympics and the effort to put on an international spectacle to match or top what is to be available in Paris this year, Tokyo in 2020, Rio De Janeiro in 2016, London in 2012, Beijing in 2008, Athens in 2004, Sydney in 2000, Atlanta in 1996, Barcelona in 1992, Seoul in 1988, Los Angeles in 1984, Montreal in 1986, Mexico City in 1968, Tokyo in 1964, Rome in in 1960, Melbourne in 1956, Helsinki in 1952, London in 1948, Berlin in 1936, Los Angeles in 1932, Amsterdam in 1928, Paris in 1924, Antwerp in 1920, Stockholm in 1912, London in 1908 and Athens in 1896. As such, it was hoped, indeed even positively indicated, state and federal funding that otherwise might not be available would be rapidly forthcoming to effectuate the acquisition of the needed right-of-way and speed the construction of the line.
The Gold Line’s move into San Bernardino County, however, was threatened by its sheer expense. Other competing transportation projects required funding, representing a drain on available revenues. As the Gold Line on the Los Angeles County side was continuing apace in its movement eastward, the time had come for preparations for the extension of the rails from the county line eastward into the first stop, the Montclair Transit Center. It was estimated the cost of that span would come to $73 million. When the project went out to bid, however, it turned out the actual cost of building the line from Claremont to Montclair would not contain itself to the $73 million projection or a later $80 million estimate, but had escalated to $96 million.
The resolve to continue with the Gold Line extension was being tested. Utilizing financial resources for the train meant that other projects – many of which represented only a fraction of the overall cost of the Gold Line – would not be funded any time soon. Virtually all of the other projects were important to the communities where they were to be located. And each of those communities was represented by two of the members of the SanBAG board or what by that point had been the SanBAG board. San Bernardino Associated Governments had by that point just undergone a rebranding. In recognition that SanBAG’s major function was serving as San Bernardino County’s transportation agency, it was given the straightforward name of the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency, thereby substituting the acronym SBCTA for SanBAG. The 29-member SBCTA governing board consisted of either a mayor or city/town council member from each of the county’s 24 municipalities along with all five members of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.
In this way, Wolfe from the outset had been and remained answerable to 29 separate political masters, each of whom had their own personal and separate jurisdictional priorities along with their collective responsibility toward maintaining the regional transportation system.
Wolfe is an impressive and formidable personage, on multiple levels. Physically, he has features that most other men can only envy. Matinee idol handsome with a manly presence and natural air of authority, he inspires confidence even before speaking and exudes seriousness that wards off frivolousness and opposition. Internally, he has cultivated a level of skill and ability that matches the responsibility he has assumed.
But as is often the case in life, what starts out as an advantage or in one sense is an overwhelming advantage, when applied across the board turns into a disadvantage.
Wolfe’s superior engineering skill and competence in solving real world practical problems, which far outruns that of his political masters on the SBCTA board, is not matched by his ability to moderate the separate, insular, conflicting and competing selfish interests of those political directors who have geographically different constituencies to answer to. As is often the case elsewhere with transportation problems throughout California, the United States and the world, the regional transportation dilemma in Southern California boils down to a commuting bottleneck in one specific area, or more appropriately described in this case, through an extended set of areas, those being the stretches of the 210, 10 and 60 freeways running east and west which convey the residential population to the east – the Inland Empire or San Bernardino and Riverside counties – to the job rich and employment intensive areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties – the central Los Angeles metropolitan area – in the morning and then allow that mobile population to leave work and return home in the late afternoon and early evening.
Wolfe’s talent consists of conceiving of, then engineering and ultimately constructing the transportation infrastructure and facilities to facilitate that travel. To apply and actuate that talent requires funding – money, hard cold cash – which is not Wolfe’s forte. He is dependent on his political masters to provide him and the agency he heads with the wherewithal to carry out those programs he and his staff have designed to meet both the overarching regional and individual and isolated transportation needs of San Bernardino County’s residents. While perhaps he should be the one entrusted with prioritizing which of those needs are to be funded or funded first, that is not how the system works. That prioritization is the function of his political masters, each of whom must answer to the voters who put them in office, who must live in their own neck of the woods and drive on their own city’s or town’s streets and roads. Those residents are the ones paying the freight – who are subject to the half-cent Measure I sales tax they improved originally in 1989 and then renewed for four decades in 2004 to cover the cost of road and street improvements throughout the county.
Each local street project, to be sure, is important in its own context and will prove to be of undoubted use to those residents as they drive about their own communities. What is lost, however, by putting Wolfe in the position of having to please 29 masters with their picayune and peculiar wants and needs is that he has become so engaged in saving or enhancing the litany of smaller projects he is being asked to accommodate in so many divergent areas that the larger and more comprehensive regional traffic solutions have been put into peril. Diverting a portion of available money to this span of road here, an underpass there, a bridge somewhere else, a widening in that spot, a bypass, a grade separation, a realignment where it is needed, a freeway on-ramp and freeway off-ramp, a new freeway interchange and the like has eaten up the available funding that, if pooled and then matched with state grants and federal augmentations, would allow the county to meet, it is now clear, the goal of extending the Gold Line all the way from Claremont at the San Bernardino County border to Ontario Airport by 2028.
When faced with the choice between pleasing more than 20 of those to whom he had to answer to remain in his $528,799.32 annual total compensation position by making sure that each’s pet project came to fruition or utilizing his considerable authority and force of personality to entreat them to sacrifice what appealed to them in their individual local venues to achieve a larger and more pervasive good in a regional context, Wolfe shrunk from the task. Under his watch, dozens of minor and useful tasks and projects of varying and sometimes impressive significance have been accomplished, while what should have been his priority, the primary goal of eliminating the gridlock on the Southern California Freeway System that consumes billions of hours of Southern California residents’ lives every year, has not been achieved.
In 2019, with SBCTA faced with financial constraints, Wolfe considered how the Gold Line was not the first, second or even third most important transportation project for a majority of the agency’s board members. Calculating that the majority would not object to walking from the project and that the minority of board members who would protest would be insufficient to countermand his recommendation to do just that, Wolfe boldly announced that the county was forsaking the light rail initiative.
Toward the close of the September 4, 2019 meeting of the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority’s board, Wolfe said, “I’m going to come back to you through committee next month and hopefully to the board in November with a recommendation that we throw in the towel” on the Gold Line undertaking.
Wolfe made good on that at the authority’s October 2019 transit committee meeting. The transit committee is composed of representatives from the cities of Big Bear Lake, Chino Hills, Colton, Fontana, Highland, Montclair, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Rialto, Yucaipa and the Third Supervisorial District.
Wolfe’s proposal called for dispensing with constructing the new Gold Line Track into San Bernardino County altogether and to instead have Gold Line passengers heading eastward from Los Angeles or the San Gabriel Valley load onto another train at the Claremont Station which will run on the existing MetroLink track. That system was to use so-called diesel multiple unit trains in a what he said was a “hybrid” plan which he dubbed the “Gold Link.”
At the October 10, 2019 transit committee meeting, Wolfe laid out his game plan to put the kibosh on the Gold Line coming into Montclair. Ultimately, eight of the transit committee’s 12 members – Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe and Rancho Cucamonga Mayor Lloyd Dennis Michael, then-Big Bear Councilman Bill Jahn, then-Yucaipa Councilman David Avila, Highland Councilman Larry McCallon, Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, Colton Mayor Frank Navarro, and Rialto Mayor Deborah Robertson – voted to back Wolfe. Only Montclair Mayor John Dutrey, Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner and Chino Hills Mayor Ray Marquez opposed his plan to scrub the county’s support of the Gold Line.
The October 10, 2019 transit committee vote included a motion to have SBCTA return the $41 million State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant.
Moreover the vote sent a signal to the governor and the state legislature with regard to earmarking any future funding for the Gold Line extension into San Bernardino County.
Whereas feelers to see if more state or federal money for the Gold Line extension were in play and applications for further grants were in various stages of preparation or submission, the rug had been pulled out from underneath the Gold Line Construction Authority.
Some advocates for the Gold Line extension were not willing to give up the ghost so easily. Two of those were Assemblymember Chris Holden (D-41st District) and State Senator Anthony Portantino (D-25th District). They considered the SBCTA board’s transit committee vote to be downright perverse. The 2019 action, for all practical purposes, they recognized, meant the extension of the Gold Line to Ontario Airport by 2028, which had been a very real prospect, would not come about.
As early as February 2020, the two lawmakers made a concerted effort to have SBCTA reconsider its action and get the Gold Line extension to Ontario Airport back on track. Holden Portantino discussed and subsequently introduced legislation to create the West San Bernardino County Rail Construction Authority, an entity to be dedicated to designing and building the six-mile span of track linking Montclair to Ontario Airport.
In response, SBCTA’s transit committee recommended that the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority commit a token $3 million to undertake a formal and comprehensive study of transit alternatives to and from Ontario International Airport. Nevertheless, no real concerted commitment toward the Gold Line light rail project, as had been the case for nearly a decade, remanifested in San Bernardino County.
For four years, advocates of the plan to extend the Gold Line to Ontario Airport have stewed, generally silently because openly criticizing their public agency colleagues for their lack of resolve would have had little salutary effect. Occasionally, they would lament what Wolfe and the transit committee as shortsighted and wrongheaded. Some believed or hoped that the extension of a light rail system to Ontario Airport was not permanently dead and that by mid-century the project will be revived. All had no choice but to accept that the dream of having travelers to the 2028 Olympics flying into Ontario, staying in local hotels and traveling to the Colosseum by train during their stay to be dead. That dream had further represented the hope that the gridlock on the freeways to Los Angeles would be permanent erased. That hope had passed as well.
When Governor Gavin Newsom on July 8 announced that contained within the $1.9 billion 2023-24 transit recovery package approved by the California State Transportation Agency, known by its acronym CalSTA, was nearly $500 million to cover the $798 million cost of the 3.2-mile Gold Line extension from Pomona to Claremont and Montclair, the first reaction of several Gold Line aficionados was to cheer the development. Almost as quickly, however, they were lamenting that SBCTA had lost faith in the project more than four years ago. Had the project remained on track, and if work on the extension to Montclair had been initiated nearly two years ago, they said, the project would have remained on a trajectory for the line to have reached Ontario Airport by 2027 or early 2028.
The freed-up funds now mean that the construction work on the line to Montclair will begin by spring 2025. The project should take four years to complete. Habib Balian, the chief executive officer of Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority on Monday, July 8 said the project will take five years to complete.
There followed an indication that the project could begin and reach fruition prior to that. Yesterday, on Thursday July 11, the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority Board voted 4-0 to work with Kiewit Infrastructure West Co., which it tentatively selected to build the 3.2-mile extension from Pomona through Claremont to Montclair, as that company appears to be the best suited outfit locally to do the work.
Among those was Ontario Mayor Paul Leon, considered by many to be the most passionate advocate for the Gold Line east or west of the Los Angeles County/San Bernardino County boundary. Indeed, Leon proved to be such an intensive promoter of the Gold Line that the City of South Pasadena for a time designated him as its representative on the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority Board.
Leon said that in order to get anything done when dealing with bureaucracies, long-term vision, commitment and above all else patience and persistence is required. It was crucial that San Bernardino County’s transportation officials stay on task in order to bring the Gold Line far enough into San Bernardino County to make an inroad on Southern California’s gridlock and that what ended up happening is the vision and commitment for the project were compromised by the delay between conception and realization.
“You have to engage in planning before you have your funding lined up,” he said. “I know that sounds fiscally unsound and maybe even irresponsible, but that is how it goes when you have bureaucracies that are not merely a product of one level of government but which consist across multiple levels, to include the local agencies such as whatever city you are talking about, regional government such as the county and its various departments, sub-agencies and authorities and then the state and federal government. “You absolutely have to plan without regard for how, exactly, you are going to fund something. The funding will eventually come. You might not be able to predict exactly when, but money is being handed down from the federal and state government on a constant basis. But that money only goes to those who are ready to use it. You need to have something that is sitting on the shelf, ready to go. If you don’t have the plan, no money is coming to it. We had that plan in the form of the Gold Line all the way to Ontario Airport. But then, SBCTA gave back the funding we had already received from the state. That occurred so SBCTA didn’t have to be bound by that agreement, which called for it putting in local matching money. That was a mistake, and everyone now sees it was a mistake. More money for the project came available, and we weren’t in a position to get it and put it to work.”
SanBAG’s leadership was once sold on the light rail project, he said.
“The attitude changed with the transition from Deborah Barmack being the executive director to Ray Wolfe,” Mayor Leon said. “Ray is a very capable individual, with tremendous technical expertise. He is not a dynamic bureaucratic operative. His talents lie elsewhere. He is of the executive director mold that will only do what he is told to do by the board. He is not someone who has his own vision of what needs to be done and then patiently reeducates his bosses, the political leadership of the agency he is managing, into accepting that vision and implementing it. He is just the hound dog who gets told by his masters what to do and then does it, very well. When we were planning for the Gold Line and succeeding in getting grants, he could easily have made the decision to allow the money to pile up and then used it when there was sufficient funding and the line was reaching us from the Los Angeles County side to acquire the right-of-way and start laying down track. He didn’t do that because he does not have the stomach to fight his bosses on what policy should be. He carries out the policy they dictate to him.”
The value of light rail is greater than its geographical reach or extension, because it ultimately encourages the development of other types of transportation options, public and private, that come into being in conjunction with it.
“Look at the spiderweb of transportation modes you have in Los Angeles County,” Leon said. “What they have done is to create a synergy where the sum of everything together is more effective than any single component. We lack that vision and we lack that resolve in San Bernardino County.”
A major problem, Leon said, is that the public at large in San Bernardino County does not recognize the difference between the large type of lumbering trains used by MetroLink and the more efficient light rail cars that are part of the Gold Line. Those in the Foothill Communities in the San Gabriel region of Los Angeles County see that distinction, he said, which is why the Gold Line is packed to capacity there every morning and late afternoon/early evening rush hour.
“Diesel trains are not the same size as light rail,” he said. “If we had the Gold Line here, you could park your car at Ontario Airport and get to Downtown LA in an hur and a half. It would cost you less than six bucks for a round trip.”
Leon said some have observed that he is in favor of the extension of the Gold Line because it would be a boon to Ontario Airport and Ontario. That is only partially true, he insisted, saying that it is an accident of geography that Ontario sits toward the extreme west end of San Bernardino County. “Of course, as Ontario’s political leaders, the city council and I would love to take advantage of that,” he said. “But that advantage would benefit everyone else out her in San Bernadino County. That’s just a fact.”
Despite the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority having given up on the Gold Line extension to Ontario International Airport, Leon said, he and other Ontario officials continue to participate and cooperate with it and its membership, consisting of the political leadership of the remainder of the county’s cities and towns and the board of supervisors.
“We are working with SBCTA right now in putting in dedicated bus routes – the BRT, bus rapid transit,” he said. “That will put bus lines right down the middle of our widest streets, so cars can continue along the route on both sides. The money was available, and we are participating in the program.”
Somewhat slyly, Leon hinted that if the dedicated bus lines don’t work out, it is possible that in the future that route could be converted to accommodate the Gold Line – right down the middle of Holt Avenue- all the way to the airport.
“There is room enough for two tracks,” he said.
Leon said that it is sadly a reality that San Bernardino County Transportation officials have given up on extending the Gold Line to Ontario Airport.
“As it stands now, the Gold Line will make it across the county line to the Montclair Transit Center, but that’s it,” Leon said. The Metro Authority [in Los Angles County] has given the Gold Line its all. The Gold Line Construction Authority is different from the Metro Authority. For the Gold Line Construction Authority to have the success on the east side of the divide with Los Angeles County, there needs to be commitment in SBCTA like there was in the Metro Authority. We need another plan to continue. We have to form the political will to get the light rail Gold Line to Ontario International Airport.”
-Mark Gutglueck

Leave a Reply