How happy will residents of Santa Monica be when their city is inundated with residents of South-Central?
These questions don’t get addressed in all the media coverage of LA’s light rail extension to the coast.
The 1.5-billion second leg of the Expo Line, which opened Friday from Culver City to Santa Monica, adds seven light-rail stations and more than six miles of track to the growing Los Angeles County transit network. That’s on top of the six stations and 11.5 miles that came on line when the Gold Line extension, connecting Pasadena with Azusa, opened in March.
In the immediate context of L.A.’s attempts to turn its public-transit network from national punch line to something that increasingly resembles a mature system, 13 new Metro stations in less than three months qualifies as a pretty dramatic upgrade. (New York City has added exactly one subway station over the last 25 years, the Bay Area’s BART system fewer than a dozen stations over the last four decades.) The investment county voters made in approving the Measure R sales-tax hike in 2008 is showing dividends for the first time — and suggesting some progress in chipping away at the dominance of the car.
But if you step back and take a longer historical view, one that acknowledges that Los Angeles didn’t just exist but in many ways fundamentally shaped and defined itself before the rise of the freeway system, the new rail routes begin to take on a different character. Their arrival is part of a larger restoration, an attempt to dust off and build on a long-buried transit history that makes up much of the basic DNA of L.A. urbanism. That effort, for all its incompleteness and halting progress over the last three decades, is by the standards of American urban history unprecedented in scope.
