Our weekly “New Starts” roundup of new and newsworthy transportation projects worldwide.

L.A.’s Harriet Comes Up for Air
Bertha, the huge boring machine digging a highway tunnel under Seattle’s waterfront, may have gotten stuck for more than a year, but in Los Angeles, her cousin Harriet just finished the first half of her job in fine form and on time.

A news release from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority reports that on October 20, Harriet completed digging the first of two one-mile tunnels that will form one of three underground sections of the Crenshaw/LAX Transit Project.

Harriet started digging at the site of the Crenshaw/Expo subway station in April and reached the intermediate Martin Luther King Jr. station in August. Metro marked her arrival at Leimert Park station with a ceremony featuring remarks by local elected officials.

Metro couldn’t have chosen a better name for its tunnel boring machine. It’s named for Harriet Tubman, the African-American woman who led men and women escaping slavery in the South northward to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. The underground railroad Harriet is boring will serve the affluent African-American neighborhood of Baldwin Hills along with Inglewood and other heavily minority communities in south Los Angeles.

“After the demise of the streetcars, Los Angeles residents dreamed and fought for years for a return of rail transit to the Crenshaw corridor,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the Metro board first vice chair, said in the release. “That dream is now becoming a reality and we will soon have easy access via transit to some of our city’s oldest neighborhoods and Los Angeles International Airport.”

Harriet will now be disassembled and transported back to the Crenshaw/Expo construction site so she can begin digging the parallel second tube.

The roughly $2 billion Crenshaw/LAX project, scheduled to open in 2019, is an 8.5-mile, eight-station LRT line that will connect the Exposition and Green lines and ultimately provide better rail transit connections to Los Angeles International Airport via a future station at 96th Street that will connect with a people mover serving the airport directly. Funding for the project comes from the Measure R sales tax approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2008.

Dallas Completes 21-Year-Old Light-Rail Plan
Four days after Harriet made her breakthrough in L.A., Dallas Area Rapid Transit officially opened the last segment of the LRT network it laid out in 1995.

The International Railway Journal reports that the segment, a 4.1-km (2.55-mile) southern extension of the Blue Line, connects Ledbetter and the University of North Texas via an intermediate station at Camp Wisdom.

In a DART news release that appeared in Mass Transit, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings called the South Oak Cliff area served by the extension “our city’s greatest opportunity for growth” and a key element of the city’s plans to revitalize southern Dallas.

The extension adds to the most extensive light rail transit (or “light metro”) system in the United States, encompassing 150 km (93.21 miles) and 64 stations. The city is currently in the midst of debate over the best way to add capacity on the system’s central stretch through downtown Dallas.

Work Begins on Third Metro Line in Mumbai
Railway Gazette International reports that Mumbai broke ground on October 21 for Line 3 of the Indian city’s metro system after contracts were awarded for all seven construction packages on the line.

The 33.5-km (20.82-mile) north-south line will run from Colaba via Bandra to the Santacruz Electronics Export Processing Zone and have 27 stations, all of them underground save for the at-grade southern terminus at Aarey Depot.

The project is being promoted by the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation, a joint venture of the national and Maharashtra state governments.

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