If a subway would work anywhere in modern Los Angeles, conventional wisdom said, it was along Wilshire Boulevard.
In 1962, California’s then-governor, Edmund G. Brown, stood in downtown L.A. in the shadow of a rotary drilling rig to support local officials’ plans for a new “Backbone Route” that would stretch west along L.A.’s most bustling thoroughfare to the sea.
“Let’s start drilling!” Brown declared, pulling a handle that started drilling the first hole of soil tests for a subway that planners estimated could be built in just three years.
No one back then thought it would take 65 years of political battles, funding struggles and worsening motor traffic for the Wilshire subway to actually open.
This week, Metro is set to unveil the first part of a nine-mile subway under Wilshire, one of the most dynamic and traffic-clogged stretches of Los Angeles. Public transit experts say the $9.7-billion D Line extension, which will connect Koreatown to the Westside, is a landmark achievement in L.A. public transit history.
“This is the most important corridor for rail service in L.A.,” said Ethan Elkind, author of Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City, noting Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi River. “It’s been 65 years, but it’s finally opening, and it will be a high ridership, high capacity line.”
The story of why it took Los Angeles so long to build a subway beneath Wilshire involves much more than a failure to get state or federal funding.
It’s a tale of the immense challenge of uniting this vast, sprawling metropolis of nearly 10 million people around an overarching vision of what public transit should look like and where it should go. Over the years, different iterations of the subway project have been blocked by political infighting and local opposition from some neighborhoods. In a county that includes 88 cities, all of which have overlapping and sometimes conflicting ideas, there have been few avenues for reaching consensus.
“It was so hard to get everybody on the same page,” Elkind said, noting that so many corners of the region were competing for rail — or, in some cases, like Hancock Park and Fairfax, fighting against rail.
“There was no one who could step in with any power or authority and just make a decision. … “ he said. “Eventually, I think we stumbled on the right thing to do, but it’s come at a huge … time delay and very high costs.”
Dubbed the Fifth Avenue of the West and the Champs-Élysées of the Pacific, Wilshire has long been identified as L.A.’s most serious contender for heavy rail.
The 15-mile corridor from downtown to the sea runs through dense pockets of Koreatown and iconic stretches of L.A. from the Miracle Mile to Beverly Hills.
The first phase of the D Line extension, opening Friday, will offer just 3.92 miles of new subway along Wilshire with three new underground stations at La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega. But by fall 2027, the extension will stretch nine miles to Westwood, linking up with major sites such as UCLA and West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.
Tim Lindholm, Metro’s chief program management officer, called the new subway “a historic leap” for providing mobility for Angelenos and everyone visiting the city.
“There’s always been a little bit of an East-West divide in Los Angeles,” he said. “This project finally breaks it.”
According to Metro, the new subway will significantly reduce travel time: A journey from Union Station to Wilshire/La Cienega that would typically take up to 45 minutes off peak by car will take just 21 minutes.
In the short term, public transit advocates say, the D Line extension will provide Angelenos with an alternative to driving when they want to go east or west. Beyond that, it will play a pivotal role — amid a larger Southern California rail boom — in creating a viable grid of public transit that connects L.A.’s sprawling communities.
In March, Metro approved a northern extension for the K Line, which would run through Mid-City and West Hollywood, crossing the D Line. It has also green-lit a multibillion-dollar plan for a 13-mile underground subway for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor linking the San Fernando Valley to the Westside.
When these other projects are complete, the D Line will serve as the crucial spine of the network, said Joshua Schank, a partner with InfraStrategies, a transportation strategic advisory firm, and former chief innovation officer of Metro.
“Once the Sepulveda line is built that will take you from the Valley to the city, and then the North Crenshaw line connects the K Line to the subway, L.A. will have a network that will allow so many more people to get to so many more destinations,” Schank said. “And it multiplies exponentially.”
Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. politician who served 40 years on the City Council and county Board of Supervisors, said building a subway underneath Wilshire was a “monumental” achievement — one he didn’t think he would live long enough to see.
“It was a pipe dream for so long … the notion that we would get a subway to the Westside,” Yaroslavsky said. He credited a string of officials, from former L.A. mayors Tom Bradley to Antonio Villaraigosa, for pushing the dream of a rail line from downtown to the sea.
“Well, it is not getting to the sea, but it’s getting close,” Yaroslavsky said. “Every time we build a new line in L.A., it’s not just that line that gets built. It’s the connection to all the other lines. It’s a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.”
The long journey to get a subway along Wilshire, Elkind said, is a microcosm of just how difficult it is to build rail in L.A.
After local officials generated excitement in the 1960s with the “Backbone” plan for a subway along Wilshire from Westwood to downtown and elevated rail to El Monte, the project struggled to get funding.
In the 1970s, Bradley made the idea of investing in the city’s public transit a central plank of his 1973 mayoral election campaign. He embraced building a subway that connected downtown to the sea.
But it wasn’t until 1980 that Bradley and others were able to get a funding measure on the ballot that could pass, Elkind said. And then it took time to decide on routes and get routes permitted.
“There was so much controversy and disagreement among all these local elected officials and their state counterparts,” Elkind said. “So many political compromises were made around which parts of L.A. were going to get rail, and there were relatively few dollars to go around and then the projects themselves were so expensive.”
The Wilshire project, he said, kept getting pushed down in priority.
In the early 1980s, officials made headway on a plan to build a subway under Wilshire. But the Western Avenue part of the project was scuppered in 1985, when an underground methane gas explosion at a Ross Dress for Less store in Fairfax raised concerns about tunnel safety. Longtime critics of subways used the explosion to stoke community fears that tunneling would lead to exploding homes.
The methane disaster led Rep. Henry Waxman, whose district included Fairfax, to push for a federal law prohibiting all federal funding for the project.
Waxman ultimately struck a compromise with Rep. Julian Dixon that allowed the project to proceed but prohibited tunneling in the Fairfax area for 20 years. That meant the subway would go just five miles west from downtown to Koreatown, stopping at Western Avenue. Eventually, a new stretch of subway took the line north, up Vermont, to North Hollywood.
Dixon, who represented parts of west and south central L.A., also pushed for the subway to go under Pico Boulevard instead of Wilshire. But Yaroslavsky, an L.A. County supervisor, blocked that by introducing a 1998 ballot measureto restrict local funding for Metro subway extensions.
“To spend billions of dollars to build a subway under a street that has no ridership would have been a colossal mistake,” Yaroslavsky told The Times.
Yaroslavsky, who generated huge backlash from Black and Latino politicians in the Eastside and Mid-City, said he figured Congress would eventually repeal the Waxman amendment.
In the late 1990s, as L.A.’s transit agency was financially struggling and facing fierce scrutiny from the federal government for its spending and services. Metro made strides in cutting costs and providing more accountability.
By the late 2000s, the reputation of Metro became very positive, Yaroslavsky said, noting L.A. was able to produce light rail to Pasadena and extend the subway to North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.
In 2006, Waxman introduced legislation to repeal his subway tunnel ban after a panel of geological experts agreed that tunneling along Wilshire could be done safely. The next year, Congress repealed the amendment. In 2008, the county put Measure R, a half-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects including the subway extension to Westwood, on the ballot.
More than 20 years after the Ross explosion, plans for a subway along Wilshire resumed.
“Then we had to build it,” Lindholm said, noting that construction presented myriad engineering challenges.
Building a tunnel underneath Wilshire, one of L.A.’s most congested corridors, was difficult enough. But construction workers were also building right next to the La Brea Tar Pits, an active paleontological research site. Work paused frequently as workers uncovered thousands of fossils, including a 2-foot bison horn and camel shin bone, dating back to the Ice Age.
“We had archeological issues, paleontological finds and fossils,” Lindholm said. “We found oil wells. … This is probably the most technically complex project Metro will ever undertake.”
Public transit experts agree that the D Line extension puts L.A. on the right path of building a public transit grid that connects more of its densely populated hubs.
But the Wilshire subway saga, some argue, points to the need for reforms.
To make the system less dysfunctional, California could restrict localities from blocking transit, just like it did with housing, Schank said, on the basis it is a critical need.
The state could also make building public transit in L.A. less costly and time consuming, others argue, if it played a bigger role in carrying out major construction projects for local transit systems.
“L.A. is not getting its economies of scale that other parts of the world, like Asia, are hitting,” said Jacob Wasserman, research program manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “Even European countries, which have strong unions and environmental protections … can do it cheaper because they build transit regularly and have transit agencies to do it, as opposed to contracting and subcontracting it out.”
Ultimately, Elkind argued, L.A. should have a more centralized decision-making authority so Metro would not have to beg small cities for permits for regionally important infrastructure projects.
But such a shake-up, he stressed, would have to come from the state.
“Local governments really enjoy their power,” Elkind said. “They’re not going to want to give it up voluntarily.”
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