New L.A. Rail Line Can Lead to a Golden Future

The Metro Rail Gold Line is scheduled to open today. It will travel between Pasadena and Union Station (the busiest train station west of Chicago) in a little over 30 minutes.

Los Angeles was built and expanded by a rail system just a few generations ago. Land and railroad tycoon Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric Red Car system heralded development of new neighborhoods. Huntington and others never profited from the revenue from the trains’ fare boxes. They made their money by speculating on the land and housing that Los Angeles’ trolley system made possible.

During this time, cities such as New York and Chicago also had extensive trolley systems and were working to make their systems faster. New York created its subway system, and Chicago elevated its principal lines in its famous “loop.”

In 1925, Pacific Electric opened the Hollywood subway, a mile-long subway for its trolleys that operated until 1955.

For a variety of reasons, all attempts in Southern California during the 1940s and 1950s to modernize and separate the Pacific Electric rail system from traffic were shot down. The last Red and Yellow trolley cars in Los Angeles were abandoned in the 1960s. Los Angeles became the land of the freeway and the car.

If there was a golden period when Los Angeles’ freeways worked as great liberators of our time, it has long since passed. The region continues to grow, and freeway speeds continue to slow. By 2025, average rush-hour freeway speeds in Los Angeles County are expected to drop to less than 17 mph.

The age of freeway-building is clearly over. A mere five-mile extension of the Long Beach Freeway to connect it to the Foothill Freeway has been held up for decades by communities that do not want to lose nearly 1,000 homes to make way for it. In May, Caltrans’ proposal to expand the Ventura Freeway by four lanes was vigorously opposed by residents who balked at the loss of hundreds of homes -- not to mention a price tag of up to $3.4 million. A similar rebellion occurred at the same time in the working-class cities of southeast L.A. County when they were faced with the prospect of widening the Long Beach Freeway through their homes and schools.

The 60-mile Metro Rail system may finally reach a critical mass with the addition of the 13.7-mile Gold Line. Rapid trains will connect communities such as Pasadena’s Old Town shopping and entertainment district, downtown L.A. and the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, Mid-Wilshire, Long Beach, Hollywood, the South Bay and the San Fernando Valley.

More important, concepts for growth have changed. Sprawl is acknowledged as undesirable for many reasons. Continued sprawl is not possible any longer in a region that is running out of developable land. Mixed-use and high-density development -- often called “smart growth,” combining work, home, shopping and entertainment in communities that are walkable and connected by public transit -- are coming into vogue in L.A.

Downtown Los Angeles’ renaissance has not been led by more office buildings but by ordinary people moving to Los Angeles’ heart and remaking it into a 24-hour city that promises one day in the not-too-distant future to look like San Francisco or, gasp, even Manhattan.

Metro Rail leads the way in this regard with a system to connect a new high-density city and by redeveloping the land around its stations into new mixed-use developments. Metro Rail extensions to East Los Angeles and the Westside are possible in the next several years.

None of this should be surprising, as we are simply going “back” to Los Angeles’ future.