Question: Will the proposed West Santa Ana Branch rail line go to Santa Ana or Orange County?
Answer: Absolutely not.
That’s why the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) has launched a contest asking the public to submit new, shall we say more accurate names for the train line that will run from downtown Los Angeles to Artesia through southeast LA County.
The agency could get as many as 10,000 name suggestions, but most likely a lot less, said Mark Dierking, Metro’s director of community relations assigned to the area cities within the proposed train’s corridor.
“We are looking for something that represents the corridor and the cities there, but in a more personal way,” he said on Monday, Aug. 21. Basically, all reasonable and publicly appropriate names will be considered as long as they don’t have “Santa Ana” in the name.
This is the first time LA Metro is asking the public to rename a project, Dierking said.
The LA Metro Board approved the 19.3-mile WSAB light-rail line on Jan. 27, 2022 that would take riders from Artesia to downtown Los Angeles, a first-of-its-kind transit project serving southeast LA County.
It is planned to run through the cities of Artesia, Cerritos, Bellflower, Paramount, Downey, South Gate, Cudahy, Bell, Huntington Park, Vernon, unincorporated Florence-Graham and eventually, into Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. The route roughly flows between the 110 and 5 freeways.
At a maximum estimated cost of $9 billion to construct, the line would serve majority-minority, lower-income communities in which 44% of the residents along the route live below the poverty line. Of the 1.4 million people who live along the corridor, 18% of households do not have access to a car, Metro reported.
The project would follow an old right-of-way bought by Metro but once used by the Pacific Electric rail car line to take passengers from DTLA to a terminal station in the city of Santa Ana in Orange County…
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