[EXPLAINER] How L.A. Fell Behind On Public Transit

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is in the process of a large scale rail expansion with the Gold Line extension to Azuza scheduled to open this month, the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica expected to open in May and work continuing on the Regional Connector downtown and the Purple Line extension along Wilshire Boulevard. Unfortunately, even when the current plans for the system are finished in 2035, areas like West Hollywood, Silver Lake and the northern parts of the San Fernando Valley will remain unserved.

While New York, Boston and San Francisco’s rail systems have all been around for over a century, Los Angeles’s current system didn’t start operating until 1990.

However, Los Angeles once had a public transportation system that was the envy of the rest of the country. How did the city fall so far behind?

The story of public transportation in Los Angeles begins in 1874 when Judge Robert M. Widney, one of the founders of USC, established the Spring and West 6th Street Railroad. Over the next decade, other railways opened around the central city. 1887 saw the opening of the Los Angeles Cable Railway, the city’s largest rail system, stretching from Westlake Park—now, MacArthur Park—to East Los Angeles.

The turn of the century brought with it the start of the two most important transit system’s in L.A.’s history: The Los Angeles Railway Yellow Cars opened in 1895, traveling to neighborhoods within a six-mile radius of downtown. At its peak in 1924, there were 642 miles of Yellow Car tracks (By comparison, the current Metro Rail system is only 87 miles in length). In 1898, railroad magnate Henry Huntington—of Huntington Library fame—purchased the Yellow Cars. While Huntington maintained work on the Yellow Cars, he also developed the famed Pacific Electric Railway Red Cars in 1901.

While the Yellow Cars primarily served the neighborhoods near downtown, the Red Cars were far more ambitious. Huntington and his business partner, banker Isaias W. Hellman, sought to connect downtown L.A. with the smaller cities that surrounded Los Angeles. They made good on this promise when the first Red Car line opened connecting downtown L.A. to Long Beach. Over the next decade, the Red Cars continued to expand, despite competition from other rail lines, until Huntington sold the line to the Southern Pacific in 1911. Huntington maintained control of the Yellow Cars.

With the acquisition of the Red Cars and other local railways, Southern Pacific began what became known as the “Great Merger,” combining eight separate rail companies into one unified Pacific Electric system. By 1920, the Red Cars traveled on over 1,000 miles of track, above and underground, and connected virtually all of Southern California. It was entirely possible to travel from Santa Monica to Redlands, or from San Fernando to Newport Beach just by using the Pacific Electric.

So, what killed the Yellow and Red Cars of Southern California? While the Red Car was popular, the system became too big to be profitable and the increased number of cars on the road created gridlock for the Red Cars that shared the road with private automobiles. The rise of the freeways also made the Red Cars to far off destinations like San Bernardino obsolete.

Through the 1940s and 50s the Pacific Electric began shutting lines down. Fittingly, the last Red Car line to close was Henry Huntington’s original Los Angeles to Long Beach line, which closed in 1961.

The smaller Los Angeles Railway Yellow Cars suffered a more sinister fate. The Yellow Cars remained in the Huntington family’s possession until they were sold to National City Lines, a company that had begun purchasing transit lines all over America.

This benign sounding company was actually funded by a cabal of General Motors, Firestone Tires, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Trucks for the express purpose of controlling surface transportation in American cities.

While the companies were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses to the National City Lines, the only punishment for the conspiracy was a $5,000 fine paid by General Motors. The currently closed Angels Flight funicular downtown is the only remaining segment of the Los Angeles Railway.

Following the end of the railways, buses became L.A.’s only form of public transportation. Over the ensuing decades a few fantastic ideas, like a monorail from the San Fernando Valley to downtown and a downtown people mover system, were proposed but never came to fruition. Interestingly, the skeleton of the people mover plan can be seen in the form of the pedestrian bridges around downtown L.A.’s financial district.

Planning for new rail systems began in 1976 with the formation of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, but it wasn’t until 1985 that railway construction began. A key portion of the subway plan was a line that would head from downtown to Santa Monica via Wilshire Boulevard. However, a methane explosion at a Ross Dress For Less on Fairfax Avenue led Congressman Henry Waxman to get a large portion of the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood designated as a “methane zone” banning all tunneling through the area. It wasn’t until 20 years later that Waxman introduced new congressional legislation to overturn the very same ban he helped create.

The Metro Blue Line began service from L.A. to Long Beach in 1990, fittingly using some of the same roadbed once used by the Pacific Electric Red Cars to bring public rail service back to Los Angeles for the first time in 39 years. Other Metro lines, some of which also used old train routes, would follow over the following decades.