Plans for a Westside subway go back — way back. On January 12, 1962, ground test drilling for the subway portion of the proposed Backbone Route between downtown and yet-to-be-built Century City got underway. Governor Pat Brown, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chairman Ernest E. [continue reading]
Saturday marks one of the more interesting anniversaries in local transportation history. Forty-nine years ago this weekend, C.M. Gilliss, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, outlined his plan for comprehensive rapid transit in L.A. at the downtown Statler-Hilton Hotel. His vision included individually-coded credit cards, “magic-eye” fare computers, [continue reading]
Transit users in the San Fernando Valley probably didn’t notice anything different last Friday when the second century of public transportation in the area got underway. December 16, 1911, was the first day of rail service from Los Angeles to Van Nuys, a development which quickly transformed the Valley from outlying area to commutable [continue reading]
Our extensive coverage of the Westside Subway Extension and Bus Rapid Transit for Wilshire Boulevard this year provides us with an opportunity to revisit Wilshire of days gone by. The Metro Library Primary Resources blog highlights several items of interest from the past, including 1920s and ’30s double-decker bus service, holiday celebrations and historic [continue reading]
Did you know that the Metro Transportation Library & Archive’s Flickr photo site has grown to more than 7,700 digital images? The collection of local area photographs dating back to the 1880s has been online for just over 3 years, and this week it surpassed 1.5 million views. That reinforces [continue reading]
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation DASH system logs 7 million passenger trips per year on five different lines downtown and another 27 throughout the city. This innovative service got its start forty years ago this week when the Southern California Rapid Transit District launched a proto-DASH service under the name [continue reading]
Metro’s Transportation Library & Archive is taking a look back at this week’s 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking for the Red Line subway. On September 29, 1986, numerous dignitaries converged on the future home of the Civic Center station to turn over the first shovels of dirt in digging our [continue reading]
The Metro Transportation Library & Archive’s collection on Flickr now contains more than 7,500 historic images and continues to grow. Numerous photographs from the Pacific Electric (“Red Car”) and Los Angeles Railway(“Yellow Car”) systems shed light on our transit history and what was once the largest streetcar system in the world. This [continue reading]
Expanding on last week’s story on why there is no Red Line station at the Hollywood Bowl, the Metro Library continues its look at transit access to one of Los Angeles’ premier entertainment venues. After plans proved a subway stop to be too challenging in terms of engineering, financing and ridership projections, [continue reading]
It’s a valid question. After all, the Red Line runs right underneath the Cahuenga Pass adjacent to the Bowl. With thousands of Angelenos and others making their way to performances throughout much of the calendar year, why wasn’t a subway stop constructed at one of Southern California’s leading attractions? The Metro Transportation Library and Archive periodically dives [continue reading]
