Dreaming of a Subway to the Sea

I was so excited about Antonio Villaraigosa's recent election as Mayor of Los Angeles that I attended his inauguration (read my report here). One of the reasons I supported Mr. Villaraigosa was that during his camapign he pledged to make our city's traffic woes one of his top priorities. More specifically, Mr. Villaraigosa advocated for the expansion of our Metro Rail system, often making referrence to "a subway to the sea." Angelenos knew he was alluding to the extension of the Red Line west down Wilshire Boulevard, a long-time dream of transit planners that has been stymied by the workings of the city's complex political landscape for decades.

The current issue of the L.A. Weekly features "The Subway Mayor" on its front page; inside the paper is a thorough, well-written article by Eric Berkowitz that recounts the many attempts to build a modern rail system in L.A., the political battles that have ensued, and the obstacles our Mayor must overcome in pushing the Red Line extension forward. Read the article here.

As excellent as Mr. Berkowitz's article is, I'd like to add some of my own thoughts and observations on this subject. I do so as an urban planner, an Angeleno, and a person who has rode the existing Red Line regularly for over 3 years.

Why Wilshire?

It wasn't until 1980 that a political consensus was reached on the need for a modern rail transit system in Los Angeles. It was in that year that Los Angeles County voters passed Proposition A, entailing a half-cent sales tax to pay for a "modest" rail system. The proposal put before the voters included a subway along Wilshre Boulevard that would be the system's "spine."

While everyone who lives outside of Southern California is familiar with the L.A. freeway system, few know of the network of "boulevards" that served as the city's main transportation corridors prior to the freeway era and continue to accomodate a majority of "local" traffic to the present day. Wilshire Boulevard has long been regarded as the most important of these arteries.

Even before it was completed in 1934, Wilshire Boulevard was regarded as a a street that would shape the city's future. Consider this fanciful vision of the boulevard's destiny, published in the Los Angeles Times on April 25, 1926:

In the late 1920's, this dream was already becoming a reality. Only a few miles from Downtown, Bullock's Wilshire opened in 1929 as the first "branch" of one of Downtown L.A.'s magnificent department stores. Further west, realtor A.W. Ross had begun to assemble his "Miracle Mile," and even further out the "Golden Triangle" of Beverly Hills was quickly becoming the region's most fashionable business district. Development along Wilshire was encouraged (somewhat ironically) by the absence of a streetcar line, which allowed more space for automobiles, and the provision of (then novel) off-street parking to serve the corridor's nascent commercial nodes.

While Wilshire Boulevard never became the urbane corridor of high-rises depicted above, it continued to develop as the city's densest corridor. Office and residential clusters rose among the shopping districts, cementing the boulevard's preeminence. Although it was designed for the automobile, Wilshire Boulevard grew to become the only "strip" that seemed to contain the density and vitality to support a high-capacity transit line.

With the assistance of Google Earth, I'd like to explore the route of a Wilshire Boulevard subway, largely for the benefit of my readers who may reside outside of Southern California. While the "buildings" layer of Google Earth's GIS interface does not depict all of our city's buildings in 3-D (at least not yet), I think the images I've captured depict the many high-density clusters along Wilshire Boulevard as it moves west from Downtown L.A. to the Pacific Ocean. Click on any of these images to see a larger view.

At the current time, buses traveling Wilshire Boulevard carry more than 80,000 people daily. By comparsion, L.A.'s Blue Line carries more than 75,000 people daily and is considered the nation's most heavily used light-rail corridor. Recently, Wilshire Boulevard became the first route for "Metro Rapid," a bus network that stops only once or twice each mile and is equipped with sensors that allow red lights along its path to turn green. Wilshire's Metro Rapid line has been a success, but Eric Berkowitz points out:

With all the traffic, the Wilshire “Rapid” bus generally goes a pathetic 14 mph, which is still such an improvement over the local that bus ridership has gone up 40 percent. Considering that half of the area’s other major bus lines cross Wilshire (generating about 60,000 daily transfers), there is a huge demand for fast, high-capacity rail transit that’s being ignored.

If even one more mile of subway is to be built in Los Angeles (a contentious idea in and of itself), it is obvious to all involved that it should be built along Wilshire Boulevard. Despite my own cynicism towards grandstanding proclamations from politicians, I believe Mr. Villaraigosa's statements (as quoted in Mr. Berkowitz's article) that "it would be the most utilized subway in the nation, maybe the world...it would also be the most cost-effective public-transportation project in America."

Transit Racism

Recently I wrote a blogicle about the Watts Riots of 1965 (read it here). I acknowledged that a lack of adequate public transit was one of the aggrevating factors that brought anger in the community to a boiling point. Mr. Berkowitz also touched upon this history:

In the 1940's, the streetcars served disadvantaged areas well enough, but they lost money and were flattened by the postwar freeway boom ... No one wanted to pay for mass transit when gas was cheap and traffic relatively light.

While L.A.'s car culture flourished, South-Central was left to rot and heat up like a backyard compost pile. In the aftermath of the Watts riots in 1965, the governor's commission pinned some of the blame on the area's poor public transportation ...

The Watts Riots created fears of an L.A. "civil war" fought along lines of race and class. Ironically, getting political support for a modern transit system that would make South L.A. less isolated became even more difficult. Mr. Berkowitz explained the ramifications of the Riots for a subsequent rail proposal:

One of the chief byproducts of the unrest was the embrace by the wealthy and white middle class of the city's de facto segregation. Whether it's called NIMBYism, racism, or neighborhood preservation, a lof of people were in no mood after the riots to make it easy to come to the Westside from East and South L.A.

The year 1968 was a rough ride for large American cities, especially L.A., where a dark-skinned man with a peculiar name killed Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. Against a backdrop of riots in 100 cities, the hapless Rapid Transit District (RTD) tried to sell a target for more culture clashes: an ambitious $2.5 billion plan for a new mass-transit system...

"The Hancock Park people were mortified that the same population that rioted in 1965 could come and have immediate access to their neighborhood," said James Watt McCormick of the Coalition for Rapid Transit, a subway advocacy group. "The imagery used at the time was the guy hopping off the subway and grabbing your TV out of your house and disappearing on the subway."

As smart as the plan was from a transit perspective, it was just what the fearful and divided region didn't want ... In the election that put Richard Nixon in office on a "law and order" platform, the county's last chance for a functional mass-transit system went down in flames.

In 1980, when voters passed Proposition A, former County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn (who represented South L.A. from 1953 to 1993) made sure that the Blue Line light-rail corridor (connecting Watts to Downtown and Long Beach) was the first project built. The Blue Line was completed in 1990 and the east-west Green Line(connecting Watts to Redondo Beach and Norwalk) was completed in 1995, giving the residents of South L.A. greater mobility. However, access to the Westside, which contains several large employment centers, has remained restricted due to race and class fears.

The Red Line, as presented to the voters in 1980, would run west down Wilshire from Downtown to Fairfax Avenue, then turn north along Fairfax Avenue before going into Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Again, residents in Hancock Park, an exclusive enclave not far from Downtown, proved to continue to be the proverbial "fly in the ointment" when it came to building a much-needed subway down Wilshire. Mr. Berkowitz describes the situation in the early 1980's:

The Fairfax Jewish community fretted about its main street being torn up. The bunkered-in homeowner groups in and around Hancock Park were also apoplectic about a subway station planned for Crenshaw and Wilshire. "They didn't want 'those people' coming into Hancock Park, low-income people," said RTD board member and Hancock Park resident George Takei. "The Hancock Park people clearly were making their opposition known to Henry Waxman."

The South Brookside Homeowners' Association (A NIMBY posse guarding the Highland-Wilshire area) was candid: "While we recognize the need for mass transportation in Los Angeles, we are unable to accept what appears to us to be an unwarranted assault on our neighborhood." The Boulevard Heights Homeowners' Association (covering the Crenshaw-Wilshire area) put it in existential terms, complaining that the subway station would "destroy the surrounding neighborhoods which are the only high-quality single-family neighborhoods close to the city center."

As far west as Beverly Hills, McCormick recalls, residents opposed the Wilshire subway "on the same notion - alien invasion."

In 1985, a horrific and bizarre event -- a methane explosion in the basement of the Ross Dress for Less store at Fairfax Avenue and 3rd Street -- derailed the original Red Line plan. Henry Waxman, a powerful Democrat who has represented Hancock Park and other wealthy Westside communities in the House of Representatives for more than two decades, used the explosion as "political cover" to openly oppose the Red Line. Mr. Waxman vowed to block RTD funding requests in Congress unless the subway was routed out of a "methane zone" designated by the City after the explosion, ostensibly to keep transit riders "safe."

RTD officials were mortified at the prospect of losing Federal funding and felt political pressure to get a subway out to the San Fernando Valley as soon as possible. Rather than fight Mr. Waxman, the transit agency decided to run the subway up Vermont Avenue (a few miles east of Fairfax), then west on Hollywood Boulevard before turning north into the Valley. A mile-long spur would continue west along Wilshire from Vermont to Western Avenue, stopping short of Hancock Park. Critics felt that the Red Line had become a "political football" rather than a mass-transit system and that neighborhoods along the new route weren't dense enough to support underground construction.

The issue of race served to transform the transit system a second time in the early 1990's. In those years, the Bus Riders Union (BRU) made a compelling argument that the recently formed Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which had assumed responsibility for both the Red Line and the bus system from RTD, was practicing "transit racism" by investing heavily in commuter rail while ignoring inner-city buses. When the BRU filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the MTA in 1994, the city's buses were indeed obsolete and overcrowded. In 1996, former Mayor Richard Riordan signed a 10-year consent decree committing the MTA to give priority to improving the bus system over expanding the nascent Metro Rail network.

Mr. Berkowitz discussed the dubious consequences of the 1996 consent decree and the relevance of the BRU and its stated mission:

While the special master (the lawyer who oversees the decree) has ordered a one-third increase in the size of the bus fleet, "the actual number of people we carry on the bus remained flat," said MTA CEO Roger Snoble ... "We're not taking cars off the street. In fact, we're adding buses to the streets, which is causing more traffic jams" ... Since it costs about $200,000 per year to operate a bus, and most buses are only about 30 percent full, something isn't working. Unconcerned, and despite $1 billion spent to comply with the consent decree, the BRU continues to push for even more bus purchases, doubling the size of the fleet to 4,000 buses, and a ban on all rail construction.

The consent decree has done its job of improving the bus service, and the fleet has been replaced with natural gas-burning buses. While most say it is clearly time to end the litigation and go home, the BRU continues because the lawsuit is its main reason to exst. The MTA is required to pay the BRU's attorneys' fees, which gives the BRU a further incentive to press its attack on all rail projects as racist (even though almost two-thirds of Metro Rail's riders are minorities) and keep pounding for more bus purchases, regardless of need.

The BRU is out of step with its members in one important area. From 2002 to 2004, (Eric) Mann (who runs the BRU) and his wife, Lian Hurst Mann, a project director with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, were paid an average combined salary and deferred compensation of $204,500 a year. Half of the Metro Rail riders - the ones Mann says are too well-heeled to deserve transit dollars - have family incomes of less than $25,000.

I feel that the BRU has done a disservice to the people of Los Angeles by shifting the debate over rail transit to issues of race and class instead of issues of traffic and transportation. I think the BRU is missing the point and many others agree. A few weeks ago, I was shocked to read that the BRU opposses the Metro Orange Line, which will begin operating this fall. The Orange Line isn't a rail line -- it's a dedicated busway that will travel across the San Fernando Valley and feed into the Red Line. If the Bus Riders Union won't even support a busway, why should anyone take them seriously?

Even Mayor Villaraigosa, who supported the BRU back in the 1990's, has come to realize that the real "transit racism" in this town is not expressed by the MTA's current pursuit of a rail system, but rather by the fact that the much-needed Wilshire subway has been delayed for so long.

When I ride the Red Line, I percieve a sense of egalitarianism and democracy commuicated through the remarkable diversity of the subway's passengers. It has become a microcosm of the metropolis itself. I feel that a great public transportation system will serve to unite Angelenos, not divide them. In his inaugural address, Mayor Villaraigosa acknowledged the "darker truth" of the city, "that there is a whole world of frustration lurking in the shadows between the lights." Greater understanding and togetherness are hard to achieve when the majority of our citizens travel alone in their cars...it has become too easy for us to isolate ourselves from the greater city, a situation in which no one benefits.

Idealizing the Past

My main criticism regarding Mr. Berkowitz's article is that he idealizes the "streetcar era" in Los Angeles, implying that the old system served the metropolis adequately and that it was appreciated by its contemporaries.

The Los Angeles Railway (LARY), or "Yellow Cars," provided local service within the City of Los Angeles along surface streets, while the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), or "Red Cars," provided access to the larger region, reaching into Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties, largely on its own private right-of-ways. In its time, the PE was the largest "interurban" transit system in the world. Here is a route map of the PE at its peak (click on it for a high-resolution image):

L.A.'s electric railways encouraged the low-density sprawl that made the city distinctly different from those on the East Coast. Henry Huntington, a magnate who owned both systems for a time, made his fortune not with transit revenues, but with profits from the sale of land easily accessible to his rail lines. The urban form that developed in the streetcar era proved even better suited to automobiles, which provided access to areas far removed from the rail system.

Los Angeles was quick to adopt automobility on a large scale. Automobile registrations in L.A. County soared from 16,000 in 1910 to 430,000 in 1923. As early as 1920, one car existed for every 3.6 Angelenos, versus one for every 30 Chicagoans or one for every 13.1 people nationwide. As the city sprawled further and further, the rail lines became less relevant.

The move towards automobile transportation in L.A. was in large part a rejection of the streetcar system. Transit riders felt that the system was poorly maintained and overcrowded. While these concerns mirror those of the current Bus Riders Union, in the streetcar days transit riders did not believe they were being mistreated due to an ambiguous sense of racism, but rather due to the incompetence and greed of the railway owners. Angelenos rightly believed men like Huntington were more concerned about real estate deals than serving the public need. Buying an automobile became a liberating "progressive" act that released the yoke of an inefficient, possibly corrupt corporation on your daily life. Consider this cartoon from the May 11, 1920 edition of the Los Angeles Times:

Not only did Angelenos have no love for the railway companies, the trains themselves were regarded as obstacles for motorists. As grade crossings along the PE increased, so did accidents, and the trains were forced to slow down. In Downtown, pedestrians, automobiles, LARY cars, and PE cars all jockeyed for space, making congestion in the central district unbearable.

A City-commissioned report issued by Kelker, De Leuw & Company in April 1925 recommended a system of rapid-transit lines on elevated structures to serve the city's rapidly growing population and seperate streetcar and automobile traffic in Downtown. Angelenos opposed the construction of elevated lines, decrying the darkness, noise, and dirt they would inflict on the streets beneath them. Indeed, L.A.'s urban form was a rejection of traditional cities like New York and Chicago that had substantial elevated transit systems. Taxpayers, by and large, had little interest in funding such an ambitious scheme.

While a political consensus couldn't be reached on rail transit in the 1920's, street improvements were another matter. In 1924, L.A. voters approved a Major Traffic Street Plan and a $5 million bond issue to raise the funds necessary to implement it. Streets throughout the city were widened and extended to accomodate the growing motorist population, creating a network of "boulevards" that criss-crossed the young metropolis. The die was cast; L.A. would become the quintessential "car town."

Throughout the 1930's, transit ridership fell and both LARY and PE incurred heavy losses. The trains were outdated and poorly maintained and service was cut back. In time, entire lines were eliminated. The streetcar system couldn't meet the needs of modern Los Angeles, allowing for its slow but certain death.

After a brief spike in ridership and revenues during World War II, the streetcar system continued its decline. In the postwar era, Angelenos again built a consensus around a solution to the never-ending problem of automobile traffic: a system of limited-access "freeways" that would zip motorists around the metropolis. However, no such consensus could be reached on public transit. Some far-sighted planners felt that the freeway corridors could also be used by interurban trains -- sadly, the PE wasn't in a financial position to build lines in the freeway medians (beyond a modest 2-mile section along the Hollywood Freeway through Cahuenga Pass), and the taxpayers seemed unwilling to pay for transit.

By the early 1950's, the entire system was a relic -- obsolete and inefficient. Both LARY and PE continued to shed train routes and replace them with buses. The situation became so dire that both systems were brought into public ownership under the aegis of the original Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the late 1950's -- private companies simply couldn't make a profit on providing transit service in Los Angeles.

I especially take issue with a statement made in "Highs and Lows of L.A. Rail," a sidebar to the article consisting of a timeline of the city's transit battles. The statement is that "They (the streetcars) died after they were bought up by some dummy companies tied to the automotive industry" and it is patently false.

The idea that the streetcar system was "stolen" from appreciative Angelenos through a "conspiracy" led by General Motors -- perhaps best expressed in the plot line of the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" -- remains popular. A number of historians have debunked this conspiracy theory. It is true that LARY (but not PE) was operated for a time by National City Lines, a company partially controlled by GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil that replaced several streetcar lines with buses. It is also true that GM was forced to sell its interests in transit systems throughout the nation as a result of an anti-trust action, but the issue involved was that GM was attempting to corner the market for transit buses, not that it was systematically dismantling streetcar networks to encourage car ownership. The fact of the matter is that the streetcars began their decline long before National City Lines came along, and that it was the original LACMTA, a government agency, that "killed" the few streetcar lines still in operation after 1955.

The statement in the article's sidebar should have been "They (the streetcars) died after they were bought up by the government." I will say, though, that I really like one of the graphics included in the timeline:

The streetcar era may be somewhat instructive when looking at the issue of traffic in L.A. today, but we cannot idealize that system...it was built in a far different time for a far different city. The system was ultimately rejected by the people of Los Angeles, who consistently preferred automobiles.

An Impossible Dream?

In his inaugural address, Mayor Villaraigosa repeatedly called upon Angelenos to "dream with me." There may be no bigger dream today than getting a subway built down Wilshire Boulevard.

There are many signs that the political climate may be changing enough for a consensus to occur on the Red Line extension. Henry Waxman, who still claims his main concern has always been safety, is willing to let the City re-study the methane gas issue, opening the possibility he may change his position and support tunneling along Wilshire. His constituency in Hancock Park has become more concerned about gridlock than a minority "invasion." Indeed, traffic on the Westside remains the city's worst and the city as a whole has grown more diverse and less segregated since 1985.

The construction of the Red Line from Downtown to the San Fernando Valley during the early 1990's was fraught with political bickering and legitimate scandal: kickbacks, shoddy construction, and a gigantic sinkhole on Hollywood Boulevard. The new MTA's image suffered further when the agency completed construction of a palatial headquarters tower at Union Station that critics derided as a "Taj Mahal." Incompetence at the MTA garnered little public support for the agency's rail endeavors and placed the agency in a weak position to negotiate with the Bus Riders Union once it was sued. Memories of this era have faded but are not wholly forgotten, casting doubt on whether there will ever be enough political support for a second subway endeavor.

Powerful Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a long-time MTA critic, seized upon the public's frustration by sponsoring a 1998 initiative that banned the use of County sales tax money for subway construction. When voters passed the initiative, MTA dropped the proposed Red Line extensions into the Mid-City area and East L.A. Today, Mr. Yaroslavsky is willing to concede that a Wilshire subway may help address his Westside constituents' concerns about traffic, but he stands behind his position that the County's money shouldn't be spent on it. Of course, building a modern subway would likely be impossible without local funding -- the existing 17-mile Red Line cost $4.7 billion -- especially if Republicans continue to control Congress.

Mr. Berkowitz's article tends to look at a Wilshire subway as a kind of "panacea" for the city's traffic woes, but it isn't. However, the article's support of the Mayor's dream is a welcome antidote to the rhetoric of the Bus Riders Union and anti-rail libertarians such as USC professor James Moore who blast mass transit as an antiquated technology unsuited to L.A.'s urban form and favor the more "flexible" transportation offered by buses and/or removing the government from the transit business altogether.

The problem with buses as a solution to traffic in Los Angeles is that they share the same freeways and boulevards that automobiles do and sit in the same traffic. Business owners have fought every attempt to create "bus-only" lanes during rush hours because curbside parking would be sacrificed. It's obvious that an effective transit system needs its own right-of-ways. The Orange Line busway will be closely watched; if successful, additional busways should be considered as lower-cost alternatives to light-rail and/or subways. However, a busway that has operated along the Harbor Freeway, complete with rail-like station platforms, has proven to be a resounding failure.

Automobile traffic along Wilshire Boulevard prevents buses from moving quickly, and the creation of "bus-only" lanes, even if they're only utilized during rush hours, is an idea unlikely to garner much support. The issue of decreasing automobile capacity on the boulevard also makes a light-rail line along the street an unattractive option. A dedicated right-of-way along Wilshire can only go above or below the boulevard, and Angelenos remain as opposed to elevated lines today as they were in 1925. Therefore, building a subway remains the only logical choice for a high-capacity transit line into the Westside.

The Metro Rail network has continued to expand but must include a line into the Westside to adequately serve the city's needs. The Red Line was completed in 2000, and the light-rail Gold Line (connecting Downtown to Pasadena) began operating in 2003. Construction has begun on an extension of the Gold Line from Downtown into East L.A. that should be in operation by 2010. Currently, the MTA's top transit priority (which the Mayor shares) is obtaining funding to build the first phase of the light-rail Expo Line, which will connect Downtown to Culver City by way of Exposition Boulevard. The Expo Line will bring the system west, but along a corridor several miles south of Wilshire that does not provide access to many key employment centers.

The Mayor doesn't have any authority over the MTA, but he wields much influence, as he controls four seats on the agency's board and has the option of assuming its chairmanship (which he has). Our former Mayor, James K. Hahn (Kenneth Hahn's son), wasn't very aggressive in traffic matters and didn't intervene much in MTA affairs; Mr. Villaraigosa is taking an entirely different approach. Mr. Villaraigosa can also use his position as Mayor as a "bully pullpit" to drum up public support for his subway ambitions. He may be the only person in this city who can attempt to jump the political hurdles involved in finally getting the Wilshire subway underway.

Mr. Berkowitz quoted the Mayor as recently saying:

"This isn't going to happen in four years...We've got to start building a consensus around a plan for the next 20 years...To me it's just common sense. As things get worse, people realize we can't put our heads in the sand. We have to be open to doing what other great cities in the world have done."

If Mr. Villaraigosa proves successful in cultivating the political will to get the idea of a Wilshire subway moving again, future generations of Angelenos will be eternally grateful.

I fully support Mr. Villaraigosa in this endeavor -- while I agree with the expansion of public transit in L.A. "in theory," it's more important that "I practice what I preach" by using the Red Line and other forms of public transit in my own life. I would encourage all Angelenos to support a Wilshire subway, but in the meantime, each of us has a responsibility to reduce traffic by being part of the solution: avoid unnecessary driving, carpool, and use transit when possible. Los Angeles continues to grow and change, and it's become obvious we can't sustain a lifestyle of driving everywhere alone. We must change too.