POMONA >> A two-car crash on the Chino Valley (71) Freeway in Pomona Saturday killed a person identified only as a male, authorities said.

The crash was reported to the California Highway Patrol at about 3:30 p.m. on the Chino Valley Freeway just south of the Pomona (60) Freeway.

The body of an “unidentified male” was taken to the coroner’s office, coroner’s Lt. Ryan Hays said.

Transit leaders dream of more than $1 billion in federal taxpayer money flowing into Los Angeles before the prospective 2024 Olympic Games and of local voters approving the fourth transit sales tax increase since 1980. But would the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority be ready to spend the cash?

One bus station at Union Station could offer a few lessons as federal officials and L.A. voters evaluate Metro’s construction record.

The expansion of the Patsaouras Transit Plaza is forecast to be 120 percent over budget and more than three years late — the most troubled of 11 construction projects listed in Metro’s last update. Conceived after a large, unexpected federal grant agreement in 2008, this station has endured miscalculations, surprises and one expensive mistake.

“This was a dream project,” Metro project manager Tim Lindholm said. The federal grant “put us in an unusual situation of setting aside money and budgets for projects we hadn’t designed.”

At an estimated $37.6 million — up from the initial $17 million budget — experts disagree on whether this bus platform will be worth the cost. Officials hope to save about five minutes each way for thousands of commuters walking daily to other buses or trains. Besides inconvenient, the current Silver Line bus stop at Union Station also is dangerous and uncomfortable, officials say.

But when they proposed the station in 2009 to fit with the federal grant, Metro leaders didn’t realize how complicated it would be. Nor did they expect an engineer to “mis-transpose” the location of a subway tunnel on the drawings — an error that could cost taxpayers more than $6 million.

“Usually, the capital funding is scarce, so we study things very thoroughly, and funding eventually becomes available,” said Juan Matute, associate director of the UCLA Lewis Center and the Institute of Transportation Studies. Now the Olympics and an extension of the Measure R sales tax “could lead to a lot of funding being available relatively quickly. It’d be good to have a better understand of costs in advance of that windfall.”

Faster, safer passage

About 3,000 people either board or disembark at the current stop near Alameda Street each weekday, according to data from Metro and Foothill Transit, which also stops there. Passengers have to walk across a 101 Freeway off-ramp or a toll lane on-ramp to wait at a narrow median with two trees, some signs and benches. If riders want to transfer, they have to cross the on-ramp and walk up to 10 minutes through Union Station.

Metro transit planners say they want to improve the experience on one of the agency’s premier rapid bus lines, the Silver Line. The Silver Line connects the South Bay and the San Gabriel Valley to downtown. Today, the bus stop is disconnected from Patsaouras Transit Plaza, Union Station’s main bus hub, which is at capacity.

Metro is planning to build a new covered platform on a busway bridge, about 1,200 feet from the island. It would sit in the middle of the roadway and would connect to Union Station through an elevated pedestrian tunnel. Hinged aluminum panels on the tunnel’s exterior would ripple with the breeze, creating a “wind bridge,” as the agency describes the public art installation.

“Is it a complicated and expensive project?” Lindholm said. “Yes. But it is seriously the only way to solve the problem.”

• PHOTOS: Bus station project at Patsaouras Plaza delayed, over budget

Two pedestrians have been injured near the current bus station since 2010, according to CalTrans data, and officials say it’s dangerous and riders say they feel at risk. Student Maria Florez takes the Silver Line bus to Cal State Los Angeles, and she worries a car will jump a concrete curb and swipe people waiting.

“I would feel safer,” said Florez, 25, who crosses the on-ramp from Union Station after riding the Gold Line from the San Gabriel Valley. “And if it makes it more efficient in the long run, it’s worth it.”

UCLA’s Matute expects the Patsaouras busway station would be well-used because of its central location at Union Station.

“When you save 3,000 people four minutes or five minutes of walking each, it really adds up,” he said. “It does seem to be a project with a whole lot of merit, independent of the cost.”

Costs climbing

But the price tag for the Patsaouras Plaza busway station is still unknown. It climbed steadily as officials hired contractors to design the project, study underground conditions, redesign the project and fix errors.

The initial cost projection of $17 million was low, Lindholm said, because officials didn’t fully understand what they would have to build. Caltrans required Metro to widen the bridge and deepen the foundations.

Pennsylvania-headquartered engineering firm STV was hired in 2009 to create the conceptual drawings. Based on those plans, the first round of construction bids was far over budget — up to $26 million. After geotechnical surveys and downgrading some of the construction materials, STV issued a new set of plans, and Metro sent it out to bid in 2013.

Officials eventually signed a $20 million construction contract with OHL USA, a New York-headquartered construction company, in 2014. OHL, during final surveying, discovered that STV had incorrectly drawn the location of a Red Line subway tunnel. The bridge’s foundation will need to straddle subway tracks and the rights-of-way for possible future subway tracks. That design error could cost another $6 million, according to Metro’s estimate. Metro executives still are negotiating that change-order.

“You hope that everything is being done with a standard of care,” Lindholm said, “but when you go underground, all bets are off.”

After hiring OHL, Metro planned to break ground in April, but now January 2016 is the target. Officials are waiting for Caltrans to approve the revised plans and for clearances from various underground utilities. That has taken longer than expected. Below Union Station is a tangle of phone, sewer, fiber-optic, electrical and other lines. Previous schedules called for the project to be completed in 2010, then in 2014, and it’s now into 2017.

“There’s always the balance, as you build a project — how much money are you going to spend up front investigating?” Lindholm said. “The more you can know early, the better.”

Looking back, he said, “we probably would have done more.”

Meanwhile, STV’s contract was extended, even after its tunnel drawing error was discovered. Its original $789,000 contract has swelled to more than $1.4 million. The latest addition will pay STV to coordinate with OHL and Caltrans. Officials from the company, which is widely used by Metro and other public transit agencies, did not return a call seeking comment.

Engineers sometimes make costly errors when drawing plans, experts say.

“You have so many different players, so much occurring, that information can get misrepresented,” said Lonny Simonian, a construction management professor at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo.

Because the project is set up this way — with one company completing the “advanced conceptual engineering” and another finishing the design and construction — Metro bears responsibility for the error. It approved the drawings before soliciting construction bids.

A dream project

Officials always knew they needed a better Silver Line stop at Union Station, but they never had the funding. Then they got lucky.

After New York withdrew from a federal grant competition, runner-up Metro received $210 million for a broad plan to reduce congestion along the 10 and 110 freeway corridors. The grant was primarily for “ExpressLanes” toll lanes, but it included funding for surrounding roadways and bus lines. Federal money was coming, and Metro had to pitch projects that would qualify.

Normally, Metro would study the conditions at the site and make preliminary engineering plans before finalizing a budget. But they needed to commit to Patsaouras and a sister project on the Silver Line, the El Monte Station, as a condition for the federal funds. Still today, Metro has not projected ridership growth at the Patsaouras station.

At the current rate of 3,000 riders, the $37.6 million project would equate to about $12,500 per rider. The El Monte Station, opened in 2012 for roughly $60 million, cost about $2,700 per rider (at current passenger levels).

“It would be hard to justify $31 million for less than 3,000 people,” said USC professor Genevieve Giuliano, director of METRANS Transportation Center at the Sol Price School of Public Policy. “But it may have a lot of benefits. If we want a transit system that actually works, you have to make those transitions easy and time effective.”

Matute said the costs and benefits are comparable to construction of some light-rail stations.

“I think it’s a good thing that Metro is continuing to pursue the project,” he said. “It’s unfortunate they weren’t able to forecast the cost early on, but it’s not unexpected.”

Metro officials say they plan to carefully approach major construction before any Olympics.

“We are taking advantage of every possible funding opportunity out there to accelerate projects,” spokesman Rick Jager said in an email. “Yes, every step will be taken to ensure that detailed costs studies, environmental reviews and preliminary engineering are complete.”

In September, Metro CEO Phillip Washington wrote letters to the Federal Transit Administration requesting expedited grants — up to $1 billion for the Purple Line subway extension and $77 million for an LAX airport transit center. Both projects have been in planning for years.

TRIKALA, Greece >> There’ll be no arguing with the driver on this bus: the rides are free and there’s no driver anyway.

Trikala, a rural town in northern Greece, has been chosen to test a driverless bus in real traffic conditions for the first time, part of a European project to revolutionize mass transport and wean its cities off oil dependency over the next 30 years.

Trials of the French-built CityMobil2 buses started last week and will last through late February.

Over the past year, CityMobil2 has been tried out near its base in La Rochelle in western France, on a campus in Lausanne, Switzerland, and near Helsinki, Finland, all in controlled conditions that produced no accidents.

But in Greece, a country of narrow, winding, hilly streets, stray dogs, bicycle riders and impatient drivers, the buses are up against real traffic. The Greek government had to amend its laws to allow the testing and the city had to build a dedicated bus lane that deprived residents of downtown parking spaces.

The robot buses don’t look like science fiction vehicles — more like golf cart meets ice-cream truck. Still, heads turn as the skinny, battery-powered buses hum through the streets. They seat only 10 people and are guided by GPS and supplementary sensors, including lasers and cameras, that send live data to a control center.

The buses go no faster than 20 kph (12 1/2 mph), but the trials in Trikala (pronounced TREE-kah-lah) potentially represent a major advance for automated transport.

“There were cities bidding for this project all over Europe. They offered relatively restricted urban areas. But we said we could make it happen in a downtown environment and we won,” said Odisseas Raptis, who heads the city’s digital project department, e-Trikala. “We have a 2.4-kilometer (1.5-mile) route, the bus route. It’s mixed with traffic, with pedestrians, with bicycles, with cars … That hasn’t been done before.”

Vasilis Karavidas, chief technician for the project in Greece, trained with Robosoft, the company that developed the bus, in the southwest French town of Bidart.

Although the driverless buses are fully automated with onboard navigation and obstacle detection systems, each vehicle will be monitored by a driver in the control center who can override the system, Karavidas said.

“It’s as if they are in here and they can stop the bus if they want to, if something goes wrong,” he said.

The buses are currently running without passengers, with full testing to start later this month when a fiber-optic network allowing faster data transmission is completed. Six battery-powered vehicles will eventually be used in this farming town of 80,000 that has become hooked on high-tech.

Trikala already has already tested EU-funded pilot medical programs, including schemes to relay heart test data from home to the doctor’s office and use tracker devices for Alzheimer patients. In the center of the city, a “digital tree” with solar panels allows benches to carry phone-charging outlets.

The 28-nation European Union is targeting gasoline use for city transport as one area where it wants to reduce carbon emissions. With oil prices and city populations expected to rise in the coming decades, a major shift to battery power and more shared transport could blur the line between private and public vehicles.

Senior transport analyst Philippe Crist at the International Transport Forum, an OECD think-tank based in Paris, says transport trends are hard to predict as the world moves more toward automation.

“We too often look at technological changes in isolation,” said Crist. “There is a good chance that these technologies will create entirely new uses that we can only poorly grasp today. The reality is that everything is changing around these technologies and it is plausible that society may lose interest in owning cars or using fixed-service public transport — especially if these technologies allow better alternatives to emerge.”

Models run by the think tank suggest that city transport could be made massively more efficient.

Crist said researchers looked at “shared and route-optimized on-call taxi-like services replacing all car and bus trips in a mid-sized European city. We found that these systems could deliver almost the same mobility as today but with 95 percent fewer vehicles.”

Driverless cars and buses offer an easier way to optimize traffic flow while aiming to eliminate human error. That has transport developers working at both ends: adding automatic features to conventional vehicles while raising the bar for those that will have no driver at all.

So far, the CityMobile2 has had mixed reviews on the streets of Trikala. Not everyone is happy to lose parking spots or replace human jobs with machines. Still, retiree Michalis Pantelis said he was proud that his city was selected for the testing.

“I think it’s wonderful. Think how many people will come to Trikala to see this. It’s new and innovative,” he said, moments after a driverless bus passed by. “It reminds me of the toy cars my grandchildren play with.”

SAN BERNARDINO >> Police are still searching for the driver of a truck that a Westminister woman was allegedly chasing when she lost control of her vehicle Monday night, sending it flipping and skidding into a building, killing her.

“We would like to talk to him about what happened,” said Detective Devin Peck with the San Bernardino Police Department.

Police say 38-year-old Rachel Welch had called 9-1-1 late Monday night to report a man in a truck had cut her off north of Eighth and E streets. It appears she was trying to catch up to the driver when she lost control on E Street and ended up rolling through a dirt field, across Eight Street and into a the San Bernardino City Unified School District’s Smart building, officials said. The car then burst into flames.

“She was on the phone with 9-1-1 just about through the entire thing,” Peck said.

She died at the scene and investigators say it doesn’t appear she was wearing her seat belt.

Surveillance video shows a gray pickup truck driving south on E Street and a few seconds later, Welch’s Chevrolet Lumina is seen zooming by.

Investigators estimate she was traveling at least 70 mph when she lost control.

It’s unclear what the woman was doing in San Bernardino that night, Peck said.

Monday night’s fatal crash marks the fourth traffic fatality in the city since Thursday, according to police officials. It’s also the 30th traffic fatality this year.

“Last year we had 34,” Peck said. “We could be on pace to surpass that this year.”

A 48-year-old man was killed Thursday night at Rialto and Rancho avenues as he pushed a shopping cart across the roadway. A man driving a Nissan Eterra didn’t see the pedestrian and struck the man. The driver remained at the scene and is cooperating with the investigation. The following evening, Mia Serrato, 18, of Rialto was killed when the vehilce she was riding in was broadsided on I and Mills streets, officials said. Only a few hours later on Saturday morning, a head-on crash at Third Street and Sterling Avenue resulted in the death of 23-year-old Gilbert Tarin of San Bernardino.

A second crash early Saturday left a 63-year-old woman hospitalized after she was struck by a pickup truck at Waterman Avenue and Norman Road. That driver did not remain at the scene.

San Bernardino police are still working to determine the cause of Monday’s crash. Anyone with information about Monday night’s crash can contact the San Bernardino Police Department at 909-384-5664.

POMONA >> Rain may have contributed to a FedEx truck crashing into the center divider of the 60 Freeway on Monday morning in Pomona, completely shutting down the westbound lanes as well as one lane on the eastbound side and sending debris across both sides.

Officials say it was raining around 1:45 a.m. when the tractor trailer struck the divider on the eastbound side of the freeway near Reservoir Street. No major injuries were reported.

The tractor and trailers were removed from the freeway as of 5:30 a.m., but crews continued to work on the damaged divider.

After nearly five hours, crews reopened the westbound lanes of the freeway. But traffic was slow as cars that were backed up for about 10 miles got moving again.

The crash sent commuters scrambling to find alternate routes, which may have led to heavy traffic on the westbound 10 and 210 freeways.

The wet weather also may have contributed to a mudslide early Monday morning that shut down the transition road from the northbound 215 Freeway to the southbound 15 Freeway.

The slide was reported about 4:30 a.m., according to CHP reports.

Crews waited for daylight to assess the situation and clear the roadway, according to CHP reports. Authorities reopened the transition road later that morning.

DYESS AIR FORCE BASE, Texas >> The Department of Defense has identified the six American airmen killed when a U.S. Air Force military transport plane crashed in eastern Afghanistan.

The airmen were identified Saturday as: Capt. Jonathan Golden, 33, of Camarillo, California; Capt. Jordan Pierson, 28, of Abilene, Texas; Staff Sgt. Ryan Hammond, 26, of Moundsville, West Virginia; Senior Airman Quinn Johnson-Harris, 21, of Milwaukee; Senior Airman Nathan Sartain, 29, of Pensacola, Florida; and Airman 1st Class Kcey Ruiz, 21, of McDonough, Georgia.

Golden, Pierson, Hammond and Johnson-Harris were based at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene. Sartain and Ruiz were based at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts.

Also killed: five civilian passengers and an unknown number of people on the ground.

The cause of the early Friday crash remains under investigation.

DIAMOND BAR — A motorcyclist died Friday morning on the eastbound 60 Freeway when he hit a curb and was thrown off the motorcycle.

Two eastbound lanes were closed due to the 5:27 a.m. fatal crash which occurred near the Diamond Bar Boulevard.

The California Highway Patrol described the rider as a 49-year-old Hacienda Heights man. His name wasn’t released because his family has not been notified.

CHP Officer Rodrigo Jimenez said the motorcyclist was traveling over 70 mph while eastbound in the car pool lane and approaching the 57 northbound transition road. He said the motorcyclist passed the entrance to the transition road and tried to enter the transition road by leaving the car pool lane .

Jimenez said the Harley Davidson Road King went across all four lanes, entered the right shoulder portion and struck the raised curb that separates the eastbound 60 Freeway and the transition road. The motorcycle went down and the rider was thrown off. Jimenez said the man died at the scene.

The CHP issued a SigAlert for the No. 3 and 4 lanes of the eastbound 60 Freeway at 6:29 a.m. The lanes reopened about three hours later.

POMONA >> Members of the Pomona Police Department are in the area of Fairplex and Arroyo conducting a search for the driver of a car that officers had been pursuing.

Police tried to stop the driver for a Vehicle Code violation in the southern end of the city, said police Lt. Christian Hsu. Instead of stopping the driver sped off.

The chase ended when the driver abandoned the car in the area where the search is taking place.

Police are also trying to determine why the driver tried to flee from officers, Hsu said.

More to come