History of Los Angeles Metro Rail and Busway

Tunnels would connect Downtown in two directions: north to Glendale and Burbank, Hollywood, and the San Fernando Valley; and west to Vineyard Junction from where trains continued to Santa Monica on one line, and to Venice and Redondo Beach on the other.

Facing financial difficulties, the Los Angeles Railway was sold off to a subsidiary of National City Lines, a holding company that was purchasing transit systems across the country.

At the same time, across Southern California, privately owned bus companies were failing amid declining ridership; however, as part of the Great Society, on July 9th, 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Urban Mass Transportation Act, offering federal funding of up to 2/3 of rail project costs.

[2]: 31 These forces helped fuel a growing movement to build some sort of rapid transit system for the Los Angeles area, but the efforts would be slowed by the political realities of the region.

[2]: 32 The RTD, under the leadership of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, came up with an ambitious proposal to get buy-in from all of the county: bus improvements across the region along with a sprawling system of 145 miles of rail transit.

Bradley would later say the proposal was a victim of "bad timing", an eight-day RTD bus driver strike crippled the county's transit system in 1974 and property tax bills arrived the weekend before the election.

The most glaring omission from the initial plan due to the pullback in federal support was and is the future Sepulveda line connecting the Valley to the Westside and eventually LAX and the South Bay.

[30] The route was controversial, with many residents and business owners in the Fairfax District publicly worried about gentrification, traffic congestion, and parking, but observers believed that the real fear revolved around minorities using the subway to travel into more affluent neighborhoods.

Construction was challenging, with crews discovering artifacts under Union Station, 15.5 million year old fossils, and old fuel oil tanks, all which needed to be delicately removed before proceeding with tunnel boring machines.

By then, new rounds of Federal money were available, and then-SCRTD CEO, Allen Pegg, announced that the transit agency was very confident that sufficient funding for an entirely underground line, now proposed to travel under Hollywood Boulevard to avoid conflicts with the studios on Sunset, could be secured.

Under the direction of Coronado Communications' Fernando Oaxaca[38] and Pangea's Cheryl Ann Wong, the campaign reached the target audience months before the Metro opened by utilizing traditional media and hosting special minority community events.

[43] Ridership on the short line was slow at first, basically serving as a lunch-time shuttle for downtown workers, and connecting them with Metrolink trains at the beginning and end of the work day.

Furthermore, during the 1980s, the bedroom communities in the Gateway Cities region of southeastern Los Angeles County were rapidly losing their population of middle-class aerospace workers (primarily whites and blacks), a process that radically accelerated in the early 1990s.

This rationale for Green Line construction was a principal argument cited by the Bus Riders Union when it contended that the MTA was focusing its efforts on serving middle-class whites and not working-class minorities.

The City of Norwalk also sued to stop the construction of the Century Freeway beyond Interstate 605, meaning the Green Line was never extended to the Metrolink Santa Fe Springs station, as initially planned.

[50] During construction, 2,000 fossils were discovered, including 64 extinct species of fish, the tusk of an Ice Age elephant and the bones of an ancient longhorn bison, a report funded by the MTA found.

Fossil evidence showed that tens of thousands of years ago, ground sloths, horses, elephants and camels roamed among redwood trees in what is now Los Angeles, according to an MTA summary of the 300-page report.

They found wood and pollen of land plants including incense cedar and coast redwood trees, and bones of birds, shrews, cottontail rabbits, gophers, mice and kangaroo rats.

[54] The initial route largely followed the former right-of-way of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (the Pasadena Subdivision),[55] along which inter-city passenger trains like the Southwest Chief and the Desert Wind had operated until Amtrak service was re-routed along the Southern Transcon to San Bernardino via Fullerton in the early 1990s.

[56] Initial plans were to tunnel the Blue Line north and east from its terminus at 7th Street/Metro Center through Downtown Los Angeles to Union Station, from where it would continue onward to Pasadena.

L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan suggested converting the right of way to an open trench — "Some way to get it out of the ground" — to save costs compared to the use of deep-burrow tunnel boring machines (TBM) while still addressing neighborhood objections to an elevated line.

[62][63] In response, California state Senator Alan Robbins introduced legislation which prohibited the use of the corridor for "any form of rail transit other than a deep bore subway located at least 25 feet below ground."

[73] The initiative provided sales tax revenue for transportation projects, including subway tunnelling, and will result in the construction or expansion of a dozen rail lines in the county.

Existing express routes that traveled on the two facilities would be truncated to end at one of two hubs (El Monte station and the Harbor Gateway Transit Center) where passengers would transfer to a bus that would take them the rest of the way to Downtown LA.

Because most of the freeway express buses traveling on the El Monte Busway and Harbor Transitway served the needs of commuters, service was frequent along the corridors during the weekday peak hours, but infrequent during other times.

Advocacy groups including Friends 4 Expo Transit[92] supported the successful passage of Proposition C in 1990, which allowed the purchase of the entire right-of-way from Southern Pacific by Metro (LACTC).

[96] Including the new track and stations, the project also constructed a maintenance facility (Division 14) for Expo light rail vehicles on a site that was a parking lot owned by Santa Monica College.

During construction, Metro had an agreement with the Los Angeles Music Center to use the most advanced state-of-the-art noise-suppression measures underneath 2nd Street where it passes Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Colburn School.

This commits Metro to use procedures to ensure that the rumble of trains does not intrude on the sound quality of recordings made in the venues or mar audiences' musical experience within this sensitive stretch of the tunnel.

[166] Starting April 9, 2023, the A, E, and L Line trains ran through the newly built tunnel from Long Beach to Azusa and Santa Monica to East Los Angeles for final testing.