If a subway would work anywhere in modern Los Angeles, conventional wisdom says, it was along Wilshire Boulevard.
In 1962, the then Governor of California, Edmund G. Brown was standing in downtown L.A. in the shadow of a rotary drilling rig to support local officials’ plans for a new “backbone route,” which would stretch west to the ocean along L.A.’s busiest route.
“Let’s start drilling!” Brown announced, pulling a handle that began drilling the first soil test hole for a subway that planners estimated could be built in just three years.
No one at the time thought that actually opening the Wilshire Subway would require 65 years of political battles, funding struggles, and worsening motor traffic.
This week, Metro is set to unveil the first section of a nine-mile subway under Wilshire, one of the most dynamic and traffic-packed parts of Los Angeles. Public transit experts say $9.7 billion d line extensionwhich will connect Koreatown to the Westside, is a landmark achievement in LA public transit history.
“This is the most important corridor for rail service in L.A.,” said Ethan Elkind, author of Railtown: Los Angeles Metro Rail and the fight for the city’s futureNote that Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi River. “It’s been 65 years, but it’s finally opening, and it will be a high passenger volume, high capacity line.”
The story of why it took Los Angeles so long to build a subway beneath Wilshire involves much more than a failure to obtain state or federal funding.
This is the story of the enormous challenge of uniting this huge, sprawling metropolis of nearly 10 million people around a comprehensive vision of what public transportation should look like and where it should go. Over the years, various iterations of the subway project have been blocked by political infighting and local opposition from some neighborhoods. In a county that includes 88 cities, all of which have overlapping and sometimes conflicting views, there are few paths to reaching consensus.
“It was very hard to get everybody on the same page,” Elkind said, noting that many corners of the area were competing for rail — or, in some cases, Hancock Park and Fairfax, fighting against rail.
“There was no one who could come forward with any power or authority and just take the decision…” he said. “Ultimately, I think we failed to do the right thing, but it took too long…time delays and very high costs.”
Get-off entrance to the Metro D Line at Wilshire and Fairfax. Three new D Line stations are scheduled to open on Friday.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Known as Fifth Avenue of the West and the Champs-Élysées of the Pacific, Wilshire has long been recognized as L.A.’s most serious contender for mass rail.
The 15-mile corridor from Downtown to the ocean runs through the dense neighborhoods of Koreatown and prestigious parts of L.A. from Miracle Mile to Beverly Hills.
The first phase of the D Line extension, scheduled to begin Friday, will offer just 3.92 miles of new subway along Wilshire along with three new underground stations in La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega. But by 2027, the extension will stretch nine miles to Westwood, connecting to major sites like UCLA and the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.
Tim Lindholm, Metro’s chief program management officer, called the new subway “a historic leap forward” in providing mobility for Angelenos and everyone visiting the city.
“There’s always been a little East-West divide in Los Angeles,” he said. “This project finally breaks it.”
According to Metro, the new subway will significantly reduce travel times: a trip from Union Station to Wilshire/La Cienega, which would normally take 45 minutes by car, will take only 21 minutes.
In the short term, public transit advocates say, the D Line extension will provide Angelenos an alternative to driving when they want to go east or west. Furthermore, it will play an important role – amid the Southern California rail boom – in creating a viable grid of public transit that connects L.A.’s vast communities.
The tunneling work was halted for years due to safety concerns.
(Etienne Laurent/Los Angeles Times)
In March, Metro approved a northern extension for the K Line, which will run through Mid-City and West Hollywood, crossing the D Line. For this, a plan worth billions of dollars has also been given the green signal. 13 miles of underground subway for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor Connecting the San Fernando Valley to the Westside.
When these other projects are completed, the D Line will serve as a critical backbone of the network, said Joshua Shank, partner at InfraStrategies, a transportation strategy consulting firm, and Metro’s former chief innovation officer.
“Once the Sepulveda Line is built that will take you from the valley to the city, and then the North Crenshaw Line connects the K Line to the subway, L.A. will have a network that will allow so many people to reach so many more destinations,” Shank said. “And it grows rapidly.”
Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. politician who served for 40 years on the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, said building a subway beneath Wilshire was a “monumental” accomplishment – one he didn’t think he would live long enough to see.
“It’s been a dream for a long time … this notion that we would get a subway to the Westside,” Yaroslavsky said. He credited a number of officials, from former L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley to Antonio Villaraigosa, for pushing the dream of a rail line from downtown to the ocean.
“Well, it’s not reaching the ocean, but it’s getting closer,” Yaroslavsky said. “Every time we build a new line in L.A., it’s not just the line that’s built. It’s the connections to all the other lines. It’s a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”
The long commute to get subway along Wilshire is a small example of how difficult it is to build rail in L.A., Elkind said.
After generating enthusiasm from local officials in the 1960s with a “backbone” plan for a subway along Wilshire from Westwood to downtown and elevated rail to El Monte, the project struggled to obtain funding.
In the 1970s, Bradley made the idea of investing in the city’s public transportation a central issue of his 1973 mayoral election campaign. He began construction of a metro that connected the city to the sea.
But it wasn’t until 1980 that Bradley and others were able to get a funding measure on the ballot that could pass, Elkind said. And then it took time to decide the route and get permission for the route.
“There was a lot of controversy and disagreement between all these local elected officials and their state counterparts,” Elkind said. “There were a lot of political compromises made as to which parts of L.A. were going to get rail, and there were relatively few dollars to go around and then the projects themselves were so expensive.”
The Wilshire project kept slipping in priority, he said.
The 1985 methane explosion in L.A.’s Fairfax district turned Ross Dress for Lace into a disaster scene.
(Los Angeles Times)
In the early 1980s, officials made progress on plans to build a subway under Wilshire. But the Western Avenue portion of the project went underground in 1985. Methane gas explosion at Ross Dress for Lace Stores in Fairfax raised concerns about tunnel safety. Longtime critics of the subway used the explosion to instill fear in the community that building the tunnel would cause homes to explode.
The methane disaster prompted Representative Henry Waxman, whose district included Fairfax, to push for a federal law barring all federal funding for the project.
Waxman eventually reached a compromise with Representative Julian Dixon that allowed the project to move forward but prohibited tunneling in the Fairfax area for 20 years. This meant that the subway would go to Koreatown, just five miles west of downtown, and stop at Western Avenue. Eventually, a new extension of the subway took the line north, through Vermont to North Hollywood.
Dixon, who represented parts of West and South Central LA, also pushed for the subway to go under Pico Boulevard instead of Wilshire. But LA County Supervisor Yaroslavsky stopped it by starting a 1998 ballot measure Restricting local funding for Metro subway expansion.
Former LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky on the rooftop balcony at the County Hall of Administration in 2014.
(Al Seb/Los Angeles Times)
“It would have been a huge mistake to spend billions of dollars building a subway under a street where there are no riders,” Yaroslavsky told The Times.
Yaroslavsky, who generated an overwhelming response from black and Latino politicians in the Eastside and Mid-City, said he thought Congress would eventually repeal the Waxman Amendment.
In the late 1990s, LA’s transit agency was struggling financially and facing increased scrutiny from the federal government for its spending and services. Metro has made progress in cutting costs and providing greater accountability.
By the late 2000s, Metro’s reputation became very positive, Yaroslavsky said, noting that L.A. was able to produce light rail to pasadena And Extend Metro to North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.
In 2006, after a panel of geological experts agreed that tunneling along Wilshire could be done safely, Waxman introduced legislation to repeal his subway tunnel ban. Congress next year amendment repealed. In 2008, the county imposed Measure R, a half-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects including the subway extension to Westwood.
More than 20 years after the Ross explosion, planning for a subway along Wilshire began again.
“Then we had to build it,” Lindholm said, noting that construction presented myriad engineering challenges.
Building a tunnel under Wilshire, one of LA’s most congested corridors, was quite difficult. But construction workers were also building right next to the La Brea Tar Pits, an active paleontology research site. Work was repeatedly halted due to workers being exposed thousands of fossilsIncluding a 2-foot bison horn and a camel shin bone, dating back to the Ice Age.
“We had archaeological issues, archaeological discoveries and fossils,” Lindholm said. “We found oil wells… This is probably the most technically complex project undertaken by Metro.”
A destination board at the Wilshire/La Brea Metro station.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
Public transit experts agree that the D Line extension puts L.A. on the right path to building a public transit grid that connects its densely populated centers.
But some argue that the Wilshire subway saga points to the need for reforms.
To make the system less dysfunctional, Schank said, California could prevent localities from blocking transit, as it did with housing, on the grounds that it is a critical need.
Others argue that the state could make building public transit in LA less expensive and time-consuming if it took a larger role in completing major construction projects for local transit systems.
“LA is not getting the economies of scale that other parts of the world like Asia are getting,” said Jacob Wasserman, research program manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “Even European countries, which have strong unions and environmental protections…can do it cheaper because they build transit regularly and have transit agencies to do it, rather than contracting and subcontracting.”
The new Wilshire/Fairfax Metro D Line station is right next to the Peterson Automotive Museum.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
Ultimately, Elkind argued, L.A. should have more centralized decision-making authority so that Metro doesn’t have to beg smaller cities for permits for regionally significant infrastructure projects.
But he stressed that such a blow would have to come from the state.
“Local governments really enjoy their power,” Elkind said. “They wouldn’t want to give it up voluntarily.”
