write a newspaper report about the opening of a new metro line
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The massive subway project under construction beneath the streets of downtown Los Angeles has long been seen as the linchpin in L.A. County’s ambitious rail expansion plans, a way to ease commutes and attract more riders to a rapidly growing transit system.
The twin tunnels known as the Regional Connector are designed to knit together three rail lines into two mega-routes that will allow passengers to ride from East Los Angeles to Santa Monica or from Azusa to Long Beach without changing trains.
Early progress on the project was rocky, forcing Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials to increase the budget twice, to $1.75 billion, and push back the opening date by a year, to December 2021.
Now, it appears riders may wait longer still. As the contractor grapples with labor shortages, progress has slowed, pushing the completion date to mid-March 2022, Metro said. Rail service is scheduled to begin about five months after that.
Slower progress, and damage to the historic Los Angeles Times building, are the latest wrinkles in a complicated construction project that has required nearly four miles of excavation for two 1.9-mile tunnels and three subway stations.
Still ahead is the intricate process of connecting the three lines in the tunnels that run between Little Tokyo and the financial district.
“We haven’t given up on having the contractor actually do the work faster,” said Rick Clarke, Metro’s chief program management officer. That could involve paying the contractor to work faster, he said, or just hoping that it will — something Metro can’t count on, he said, but would be “one of the nicer things that could happen.”
The estimated construction completion date has slipped about four months since December. But the contractor, a joint venture of Skanska USA and Traylor Bros., is still on track to finish before the new deadline that Metro established two years ago, officials said.
“It’s probably a little bit early to be predicting what day or week they’ll be finished,” said project manager Gary Baker. “I’m very confident that we’ll finish this as contracted.”
When construction began more than four years ago, crews almost immediately encountered problems as they worked to relocate aging water pipes and fragile utility lines buried beneath streets in the heart of the central city.
Reinforcing and moving the lines so tunneling could safely proceed added months and millions of dollars to the project’s schedule. The tunneling machine later got stuck under 2nd Street after striking a steel structure.
The project is still on track to open well before the 2023 deadline set by federal officials, who are disbursing a $670-million grant and a $130-million low-interest loan for the project.
But slower progress in recent months has eaten through some of the float in that schedule, Baker said.
The labor shortages span a wide range of jobs, he said, including management and craft labor such as concrete workers, carpenters and electricians. Without more hiring, Baker said, the project will continue to progress more slowly.
“There’s a lot of strain on the construction industry in general — large businesses, small businesses, even Metro — in attracting qualified staff,” Clarke told Metro’s directors last month. “We’re seeing more and more bottlenecks coming up.”
Those bottlenecks could pose schedule and budget challenges as Metro prepares to build nearly a dozen new rail lines across Los Angeles in the next four decades. The historic building boom will create thousands of vacant positions in construction and engineering.
Five rail segments are under construction, including the Regional Connector, the Crenshaw Line through South L.A., and the extension of the Wilshire subway to West Los Angeles, which is being built in three phases.
Labor shortages typically drive up the price of bids from contractors, Clarke said, because companies wind up raising salary offers to attract qualified workers. That could lead to Metro paying more to build each project.
The biggest crunch for Metro will come over the next decade, as the agency works to finish 28 transit and highway projects before the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, an initiative dubbed “28 by ’28.”
Twenty of the projects are slated to be finished within the decade, including the Crenshaw Line, a smaller train to Los Angeles International Airport, the Wilshire subway extension and a Van Nuys light-rail line.
Metro would need an additional $26.2 billion to build the other eight projects by then. Those include several interchange improvements, a rail line to Artesia and a Sepulveda Pass transit line.
Metro is also tracking several issues that could add costs to the Regional Connector’s budget, Bak
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