About 20 years ago, ambitious plans were forged to create a subway and light rail system in a city defined by its freeways - the setup for another Los Angeles joke if there ever was one.
Now comes the punch line: The L.A. subway project is nearly dead.Not completely dead, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will remind you. Maybe there's a miracle cure out there. Maybe two decades of what critics call mismanagement, incompetence, political buffoonery, bad luck and hubris will yield to clear-headedness and responsibility.
Or maybe not.
In January, after spending years in denial and $5.5 billion in taxpayer funds, the MTA board voted to suspend work on three major rail projects: the Blue Line to Pasadena and two Red Line subway extensions that run a few miles east and west of downtown.
That leaves the sprawling city with half a commuter system that doesn't much go where most commuters need to go.
The MTA will try to finish another project, the 6.3-mile Red Line leg to North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley. It has already sunk $717 million - more than half federal funds - into the project, and to complete it will have to rely on what few friends it still has in Washington and Sacramento.
People do ride the thing, though not enough to calm the critics. In all, the system carried about 113,000 passengers daily at the summer peak last year, representing 1 percent of Los Angeles County's population.
Two decades and a few billion dollars ago, there were much higher hopes for the rail system. Mayor Tom Bradley dreamed of a high-tech project that would free commuters from gridlock.
The plan was to build a relatively small subway system that would be the backbone of a proposed 400-mile web of commuter trains and bus routes known collectively as the Metro System.
The voters embraced the idea and twice voted for tax increases to pay for it.
Operating under what critics called a dangerous assumption - if we build it, they will fund - transit officials finished the 22-mile, above-ground Blue Line to Long Beach and the 20-mile above-ground Green Line to Los Angeles International Airport for $1.5 billion.
They also built the 5.2-mile underground Red Line segment to the Wilshire area west of downtown. A 4.6-mile extension to Hollywood is nearly finished. Total cost: a dizzying) $3.1 billion, or $300 million a mile.
Along the way, there has been one fiasco after another, including cost overruns, fatal accidents at construction sites, scores of lawsuits, protests by merchants and management shakeups.
And the grief goes on.
In March, an insurance consultant to the MTA was sentenced to six months in jail for paying a $5,000 bribe to an agency official, and the MTA's inspector general said the MTA has lost or can't account for millions of dollars because of lousy bookkeeping. Fed-er-al investigations into MTA spending have stepped up in recent weeks.
"There's a total lack of accountability," said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member who has launched a ballot initiative campaign to cut off further local funding of MTA subway projects. "It's been a Keystone Kops operation, which is probably giving it too much credit."
If all goes well, the North Hollywood line is supposed to be finished in two years at a total cost of $1.3 billion, or more than $200 million a mile. The key word here is "if."