It’s official! D Line Extension Section 1 to open on May 8

In a significant leap forward for public transit in our region, the first section of the D (Purple) Line Extension will open on May 8, Metro Board Chair Fernando Dutra announced today. 

Service along the 3.9-mile Section 1 corridor includes three new stations: Wilshire/La Brea and Wilshire/Fairfax — which bookend Los Angeles’ famed Miracle Mile — and Wilshire/La Cienega in Beverly Hills. Each station will have a landscaped plaza at street level, elevators and escalators, wide platforms and are fully ADA accessible. There will be bike parking and easy connections to local bus lines. 

The three new stations also have integrated artworks that were commissioned by Metro Art. The museum-quality artworks are prominent, bold and are found at the street, concourse and platform levels of each station. The idea is to transform infrastructure into welcoming, thoughtfully designed spaces, delivering our riders to the doorstep of some of LA’s most iconic arts and cultural destinations. More on our Metro Art program here. 

Todd Gray’s, Mining the Archive: S. Charles Lee, Architect, Wilshire/La Cienega Station

Karl Haendel’s Hands and Things, Wilshire/Fairfax Station 

Wilshire Boulevard finally gets a train

The D Line Extension is history-making, literally. Wilshire Boulevard is one of our region’s most iconic and bustling thoroughfares and this will be the first time that rail transit has ever served the street west of Western Avenue, the current end station of the D Line. Our region’s fabled streetcars never ran on Wilshire due to opposition from the original developers of the land in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Sections 2 and 3 of the D Line Extension are currently forecast to begin service in 2027. Section 2 will bring the subway to downtown Beverly Hills and Century City while Section 3 extends the subway to a station serving Westwood Village (with access to UCLA) and a station next to the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, which serves more than 84,000 of our nation’s military veterans each year. 

With the Santa Monica Freeway and other Westside roads chronically congested, the debut of Section 1 provides immediate benefits to commuters. Travel times between Wilshire/La Cienega and Union Station in downtown L.A. will be about 20 minutes with no transfers required. That same trip today typically takes double that time on the bus and D Line. Many other transit trips in the D Line corridor will see similar and dramatic time savings. 

Destinations

Section 1 will connect riders to a long list of destinations that includes jobs (the Westside is the region’s second-largest job center after downtown L.A.), schools, healthcare and culture. 

• Wilshire/La Brea is home to the western edge of Koreatown and Hancock Park. The station is near the El Rey Theater and the Marciano Art Foundation. 

• Wilshire/Fairfax is steps from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Petersen Automotive Museum, Craft Contemporary and is a short walk or bus ride to the Holocaust Museum LA (reopening in 2026), The Grove LA, the Original Farmer’s Market and Pan Pacific Park. 

• Wilshire/LaCienega is the entry toBeverly Hills and “Restaurant Row” — including Lawry’s — and is less than a mile from the Beverly Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

While the D Line Extension delivers immediate benefits to current riders, it will also make it easier for future generations of Angelenos to get around — as well as visitors from across the globe as Southern California prepares to host the World Cup in 2026, the Super Bowl in 2027 and the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028.

The D Line Extension is the latest project to be completed in Metro’s Twenty-Eight by ’28 initiative to enhance the region’s transit infrastructure in time for the 2028 Games.  

Public Safety 

It’s not enough to just build good transit — customers need to feel and be safe when on trains and at stations. Toward that end, Metro continues to make public safety improvements including:

•The three new stations and plaza have enhanced lighting and have been designed with clear sight lines to improve visibility and safety.

•The stations will be well staffed with our Metro Ambassadors and Transit Security Officers to help riders get where they’re going and ensure stations are safe at all hours. Our contract law enforcement will also be present at the station, as well as members of our Care-Based Division to help those in need. 

•Cell phone service will be available in each of the new stations. 

•The stations will have taller faregates that improve fare compliance and help ensure our system is used for its intended purpose — traveling in our region. 

History

Plans for improved or new rail transit to the Westside have been discussed for more than a century. Many of those plans came and went, failing to gain political traction and/or the needed funding. 

The original D Line opened to Wilshire/Western Station in 1996. Plans to continue the line further west were scuttled due to two big hurdles: the challenge of tunneling through a methane gas zone and bans on local and federal funding due largely to concerns about the agency’s ability to safely build the project. 

Above, scenes from construction of Section 1. Top: installing the street decking at Wilshire/Fairfax in 2017. Middle: A peek inside one of the tunnel boring machines at Wilshire/La Brea in 2018. Bottom: A wider view of station excavation at Wilshire/La Brea in 2018. 

Momentum shifted in the early 2000s. First, Metro convened tunneling safety experts who determined advances in tunneling made it safe to excavate subway stations and tunnels. 

Then, in 2008, more than two-thirds of L.A. County voters approved the Measure R sales tax measure to provide local funding for the project. In 2016, 71 percent of county voters approved the Measure M sales tax measure to accelerate Section 3 of the D Line Extension.

Local funds, in turn, were used to attract $1.25 billion in a New Starts grant from the Federal Transit Administration, $66.4 million in supplemental New Starts funds and a $749.3 million loan from the federal TIFIA program in 2014.

Preparing for the opening

We’ll be sharing much more info on this project as we get closer to the opening — how to ride, new schedules, connections to the many bus lines that intersect Wilshire Boulevard, destinations, project history and the grand opening celebrations. 

Please stay tuned to the blog and our social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X (Twitter) and Bluesky.