It’s a beautiful thing when Southern Californians take pride in their fascinating and diverse history. This past weekend the Metro Transportation Library & Archive logged its 3,000,000th view on our online Flickr photo gallery (yes, three million in less than five years). Over here at The Source, the reaction to “then [continue reading]
A little known incident occurred in Los Angeles’ Mid-City area on the evening of July 13, 1913. When all was said and done, Pacific Electric’s rail network replaced all of its wooden streetcars and implemented automatic train control (a topic still in the news today). If you had any doubt [continue reading]
The Metro Transportation Library & Archive is participating in a landmark joint exhibit of the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute. Overdrive: L.A. Constructs The Future, 1940-1990, which runs from April 9 through July 21, 2013, is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture In L.A. The exhibit is the [continue reading]
Very few people likely remember when “The Big One” struck the Los Angeles area. Not an earthquake, but a storm against which all others are measured. In the first week of March, 1938, an already wet winter was capped off by a deluge previously unseen in the area. More than [continue reading]
The Metro Transportation Library & Archive have been hard at work producing two new tools that explain Los Angeles transit history dating back to 1874. This week, the Library unveils an interactive timeline allowing users to better understand the 140-year evolution of local transit from numerous private street railroads into publicly-governed agencies. [continue reading]
Today is the 50th anniversary of one of the most important speeches in local transit history. It involved a 1963 vision for the future of local transportation that even included TAP-like “magic eye” machine-readable fare media…and a subway to Westwood by 1968 by the Executive Director of Los Angeles’ first MTA. [continue reading]
Transit and transportation planning, construction and operations must take into account numerous interdisciplinary fields. These include urban planning, geology, law, sociology, demographics, engineering, hydrology, sustainability, cartography, history and other disciplines. Metro’s Library & Archive collects, preserves and provides access to a wealth of information related to these subjects. Perhaps surprising [continue reading]
The Olympics may be coming to a close in London, but the Metro Library’s Primary Resources Blog is serving up a local double-header of Olympics history. Back in 1932, Los Angeles welcomed the world to a much smaller affair during the Great Depression. (Only 1,500 athletes from 37 nations took part, with the [continue reading]
This past weekend, the Metro Transportation Library & Archive logged its 2,000,000th view of its online Flickr photo collection. Since launching less than four years ago, the Library has become a national leader in the early adoption of social media, including resource sharing such as Flickr. The collection now numbers [continue reading]
Bus rapid transit in Los Angeles began with the El Monte Busway, which broke ground 40 years ago this week. Today BRT in L.A. has expanded to several other transportation corridors, but this is the original, the grand-daddy of them all: The first multi-modal system in California and the first [continue reading]
