Metro fields questions everyday about the agency. Many questions are routine and concern the operation of Metro’s bus and rail lines. Others, however, aim to get a deeper understanding of how the agency works. In many cases, journalists, citizens, community groups and private businesses use the state Public Records Act [continue reading]
Bus rapid transit in Los Angeles began with the El Monte Busway, which broke ground 40 years ago this week. Today BRT in L.A. has expanded to several other transportation corridors, but this is the original, the grand-daddy of them all: The first multi-modal system in California and the first [continue reading]
Plans for a Westside subway go back — way back. On January 12, 1962, ground test drilling for the subway portion of the proposed Backbone Route between downtown and yet-to-be-built Century City got underway. Governor Pat Brown, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chairman Ernest E. [continue reading]
Saturday marks one of the more interesting anniversaries in local transportation history. Forty-nine years ago this weekend, C.M. Gilliss, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, outlined his plan for comprehensive rapid transit in L.A. at the downtown Statler-Hilton Hotel. His vision included individually-coded credit cards, “magic-eye” fare computers, [continue reading]
Our extensive coverage of the Westside Subway Extension and Bus Rapid Transit for Wilshire Boulevard this year provides us with an opportunity to revisit Wilshire of days gone by. The Metro Library Primary Resources blog highlights several items of interest from the past, including 1920s and ’30s double-decker bus service, holiday celebrations and historic [continue reading]
Did you know that the Metro Transportation Library & Archive’s Flickr photo site has grown to more than 7,700 digital images? The collection of local area photographs dating back to the 1880s has been online for just over 3 years, and this week it surpassed 1.5 million views. That reinforces [continue reading]
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation DASH system logs 7 million passenger trips per year on five different lines downtown and another 27 throughout the city. This innovative service got its start forty years ago this week when the Southern California Rapid Transit District launched a proto-DASH service under the name [continue reading]
The Metro Transportation Library & Archive’s collection on Flickr now contains more than 7,500 historic images and continues to grow. Numerous photographs from the Pacific Electric (“Red Car”) and Los Angeles Railway(“Yellow Car”) systems shed light on our transit history and what was once the largest streetcar system in the world. This [continue reading]
Expanding on last week’s story on why there is no Red Line station at the Hollywood Bowl, the Metro Library continues its look at transit access to one of Los Angeles’ premier entertainment venues. After plans proved a subway stop to be too challenging in terms of engineering, financing and ridership projections, [continue reading]
This week, the Metro Transportation Library and Archive takes us back 130 years to when cable cars were the mode of choice in our (then) very small town. The cable car era lasted only about a decade, but the first transit system after horse-drawn cars is not well-known and the images from the Library’s collection are [continue reading]
