It's Los Angeles Lakers basketball season once again, which turns my thinking towards light rail mass transportation.

The Chick Hearn Blue Line Station on Pico Boulevard is just a block away from Staples Center in downtown L.A. and if our nearest Green Line station wasn't a 20-30 minute drive from my Hollywood Riviera home I'd be taking the train to every game—despite my harrowing experience during the finals in June.

So when I heard that the MTA was holding hearings here in Redondo Beach to talk about plans to extend the line down to South Redondo and into Torrance, I wanted to be there to voice my own support for those moves. I also wanted to urge the MTA to incorporate bike lanes and infrastructure into their plans so we can safely ride our bikes to the train stations and securely park them there.

Not having followed the process very closely, I hadn't been to any of the scoping meetings in the spring.  I didn't know that there was already strong opposition in the North Redondo Ruxton neighborhood to the Green Line extension using the MTA owned right-of-way literally in the backyards of many of the residents.

This was a classic NIMBY —"Not in MY Backyard" response—and at first I wasn't too empathic.

These people had moved into homes where the freight train tracks already existed and they had to know about the right-of-way that also went with it. They already had a train a day chugging down those tracks. I wouldn't have moved there, I smugly thought to myself.

But the more I listened to the residents, the more I realized I'd feel the same way they do if I lived in that neighborhood.

After all, it was the City of Redondo Beach that had deliberately rezoned that neighborhood for residential and encouraged the building and selling of many new condos and townhouse on Ruxton Lane and the surrounding streets.

And I bet none of the Realtors selling those housing units touted the fact that this right-of-way made it the most likely place for new passenger train lines to be built and operated in the very same corridor.

So I could understand and sympathize with the residents who were worried about noise and vibration and the loss of privacy that comes with train passengers getting a bird's eye view of their backyard every time the Green Line rolled by.

But what I couldn't understand were the comments made by community members about the makeup of the MTA Board who would be deciding the issue, or their suggestions that someone else should make those decisions. That's not going to happen and it's not going to help their argument.

Neither was the general misunderstanding by the majority of those opposed to the light rail option about the right-of-way the MTA already owns and its significance in choosing the route. 

Speaker after speaker pushed Hawthorne Boulevard as their route of choice and seemed to have no clue about why the MTA—or any other transportation-planning agency—wouldn't consider Hawthorne a viable option.

Redondo Beach Councilman Pat Aust tried to calmly explain the reality of that situation to the audience during his two minutes at the podium, but it was as if he was speaking Greek based on the impact it had.

There's still a long way to go in this process. Metro only has about half the funding needed to extend the line all the way to Torrance, and unless Congress decides to loan the MTA the money to do their 30 year plan in 10 years, then nothing is going to happen till the funding becomes available in 2028 with completion of the line by 2033-2035.  If the 30 in 10 plan is approved, construction would start in 2014 and be completed by 2018.

One thing's for sure though. I don't envy Randy Lamm, the MTA's Planning Manager, or Tyler Bonstead, who are co-hosting these community hearings and working on the project's environmental impact report.  Although they're not making any of the decisions in this info-gathering exercise, they're on the front lines for all the community's emotion, frustration and complaints about the process.