Get over the Green Line gap at LAX

Los Angeles airport chief Lydia Kennard today described $1.2 billion worth of coming improvements to LAX: an expanded Bradley International Terminal, realignment of the southernmost runway to improve safety and automated screening of all checked baggage. What's not going to happen anytime soon—maybe never, if she has anything to say about it—is extending the Green Line into the airport itself. Connecting the MTA's light rail line with the terminals would cost more than a half-billion dollars, she told the Current Affairs Forum today. If LAX had that kind of money for transportation projects, she said, "there's a lot of other things we should do" instead. The slow, convoluted route that riders need to take from downtown—the Red Line to the Blue Line to the Green Line to the airport—means that passengers would always be more likely to take the new and apparently popular (and faster) Flyaway bus from Union Station, Kennard said. Less than half of 1% of LAX visitors take the Green Line today, she added.