I am quoted in article today in the Los Angeles Times. “Is a Busway the Valley Way?” writer Amanda Covarrubias asked me what I thought about the new $350-million, 14-mile bus-only line between North Hollywood and Woodland Hills lavishly planted with landscaping and bike trails.

“This is going to … join us again to greater metropolitan Los Angeles,” said Van Nuys resident Andrew Hurvitz, noting that the opening of the busway comes three years after the Valley tried to secede from Los Angeles. “It’s going to de-isolate the Valley.

“I feel like we’re at a turning point,” he added. “We are finally becoming less of a cliche than we were before. We’re a dense, urban city and must live differently than we did in the 1950s. We can’t [all] live in a single-family house with a three-car garage anymore.”

By contrast, it was dismissed with a condescending remark by Joel Kotkin, a Valley Village resident and ” Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.”

“It’s a tour of the industrial bowels of the Valley. And there’s no place to stop to get a cup of coffee.” He also thought it was a road to nowhere, adding it “doesn’t go anywhere you would want it to go.”

He also said that the Busway was designed for the lady who lives in Reseda and cleans houses in Chandler Estates. [read: Latina]

These thoughts got me thinking about where Kotkin thinks we should go. I always thought the miserable route of the Golden State Freeway led from ugly sprawling Santa Clarita to ugly sprawling Orange County and I wouldn’t want to go to either place either.

As for the undeserving underclass who Kotkin thinks will ride the Busway, I ask him to imagine a rider “Dr. Nudelman” who is an eminent Jewish-American cardiologist who graduated first in his class at Harvard Medical School and lives in a two million dollar house in the Hollywood Hills. He works at Tarzana Medical Center. His Maserati is in the repair shop and he needs to get to the Valley to perform a triple bypass on another worthy citizen, a 58 year old female producion supervisor at Dreamworks, earning $500,000 a year and who is one of David Geffen’s favorite employees.

He hops on the Red Line at Hollywood and Highland and then disembarks at the North Hollywood station. He transfers to the brand new Busway and rides it west and gets off at Reseda Boulevard and walks a half mile down to the hospital. Being a cardiologist, he understands that walking is good exercise.

He gets to the hospital on time and the operation is a success. On the way back home he meets a woman on the Busway who is on her way to clean a house in Chandler Estates. He finds out she is from Russia, from his grandmother’s town of Kiev, and she is working to put her son through medical school.

Such are the pleasures of the new Busway, bringing all sorts of people together.