An Alternate Future for Los Angeles Transit

Los Angeles is a city which seems distinctly unsuited to public transportation. Its massively sprawling metropolitan area covers almost 34,000 square miles, compared to, for instance, New York’s 13,000. Unlike even other sprawling cities, however, the LA metro area is not meaningfully organized into a radial system leading out from a central district. Look at Houston’s metro area, with its ring-road highway pattern, and compare it to LA’s rhizomatic, dispersed highway network. LA’s sprawl is distributed fairly evenly throughout. In any part of the city you will see commercial, residential, and business districts apportioned within, not distributed on a higher level of order. In research for this article, I had a frustrating time trying to find out what the central area of employment was in LA, because there really wasn’t any! (not that some number of areas don’t stand out relatively). This is infertile ground for a metro system, which relies upon knowing where to densify transit based on usage patterns. Commuting patterns can be established in LA in a general sense, but these patterns do not have the spatial specificity needed to serve a large enough portion of workers.

That Los Angeles does not have a robust transit system is both the cause and the effect of this kind of sprawl. Los Angeles residents, by and large, do not use the Metro system (either the subway or the bus), and, if asked, may even express surprise that a subway system exists at all! I know, because I grew up there. Despite the admirable and successful effort that Los Angeles has recently made into creating new subway lines, most LA residents don’t think that they will find them useful, and might have a hard time imagining a subway system that would be preferable to driving for them. This is not a mental bias; this is the result of an area so large that to service enough areas to be subway-walkable seems terribly prohibitive.

In essence, Los Angeles is not really a city. For the reasons already mentioned, LA is experienced moreso as a series of suburbs which just so happen to be abutting one another. The areas of business within appear like suburban office parks, and not like central business districts. One needs only to look at Century City to see the disconnected nature of Los Angeles development via the automobile. There, as in other business districts, the buildings have no relation to the street, and each one is an island unto itself. I would not blame anyone who would take their car to travel from one building to the one right next door. This is the urban soup, in which it seems that someone took the spatial functions of a normal city and hit ‘shuffle.’

In the urban soup of Los Angeles, appearances of urban order can manifest only in isolated areas: look, for example, at the Wilshire Corridor, which runs along Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. This stretch of road contains many luxury high-rises, high-value commercial properties, and cultural institutions. Stray only a half-block to the North or South, however, and you will see these high-rises bordered by single-family homes! It is these swaths of detached houses, devoid of mixed uses, which take up most space in Westwood. This is typical of what we can call a ‘linear settlement pattern’ of dense use in Los Angeles. For the driver, accessing a place on the road takes less time than accessing a place off of it, even if the place on the road is farther away; this is because of the relative efficiency of navigating only one roadway. In addition, because of the viewpoint which the car affords, storefronts aim to be most visible to busy motorways (explaining why Westwood’s density drops off immediately after leaving the driver’s sightline). The arterial nature of Los Angeles travel, via the car, ensures that this will lead to a linear pattern. It is not surprising that we see a significant break in the pattern nearby, in Westwood Village, which lies in the vicinity of UCLA. College students, getting around on foot or bicycle, are not confined to arterial paths in the same way as cars; therefore, the growth develops more evenly.

What is the negative impact of this linear pattern? What does this system not afford that a denser city does? It is the much-talked-about “walkability.” If people cannot access basic needs by walking (or cycling) from their homes, either because of distance or pedestrian-hostile environments, roadways will of course be choked with cars that have become a necessity for even the most basic tasks. Much more importantly, un-walkability is inimical to the formation of community. Un-walkable neighborhoods confine everyone to their cars, preventing them from seeing other members of their community out and about, and from being able to form connections based on this proximity. Where I grew up in LA, I never saw my neighbors, and any sense of neighborhood or proximity was entirely theoretical. Walkable areas ‘stitch’ the city together. Houses and establishments in LA are islands unto themselves, due to the need to take your car to leave them. This is both isolating and confining. Walkability connects these islands to form a coherent landmass which provides a sense of place. These factors create a stronger sense of local ownership, and make the area pleasant to live in. Needless to say, denser development also lowers housing costs.

To the end of a more transit-accessible Los Angeles, one which can be navigated without a car (an implicitly more pedestrian-friendly goal, given the presumed walkability of stations), Los Angeles has been rapidly expanding its Metro system. I have seen a number of mock-ups of what the Los Angeles metro system will look like in the near future. Look at what Adam Paul Susaneck on Medium has created to show the planned state of the Metro in 2028, with a present-day map for comparison:

These are based on Metro’s own stated plans for near-term future transit corridors. The expansion of the Purple Line from downtown to Westwood will be of great use, as will the Sepulveda Pass railway. The LAX-Expo Line connection and the Downtown extension to Orange County will also be of great use. These lines are good in isolation. Look, however, at the long-term 2050 plan that is displayed here (with some gaps filled in by the author):

Here, with the grand vision in view, some problems start to become clear. In an absolute sense, this map is a clear improvement over the previous Metro. Indeed, unlike highways, more subways are essentially always good for the city, as long as you have the money with which to run them. So what’s the problem here? The problem is, while more Metro lines are an improvement, the way in which they are apportioned leaves a lot of urban potential unfilled. A subway system, to function ideally, needs to make possible a city in which most people can easily walk to their closest station. The distance needed to accomplish this is often cited as a half-mile, or a 10–15 minute walk. More distant stations can still provide utility via bus connections, but this is not a transportation dynamic to base an entire city off of. Bus transfers can be time-consuming, and bus schedules are inherently chaotic and unpredictable due to buses’ need to run within traffic. With constant bus transfers, the transit efficiency of a city can be massively impeded.

Therefore, the gold standard of a city network is to ensure that no passenger in a serviced area is more than a half-mile from a subway line (i.e., subway lines should be a mile apart or less). With more than that distance, subway systems begin to look more like commuter rail. Does the Metro map fulfill this quality? Let’s look at Hollywood, one of the densest areas in LA. By all accounts, a subway network should be able to make it walkable.

With Metro’s plan, however, it won’t. 2.72 miles is a cavernous distance between the B Line and the future D Line. Only the linear segments along the subway corridor will be walkable. The urban fabric will not be stitched together, and not enough people will be able to rely on the Metro system. This untenable distance is mirrored in Metro’s plans near downtown, on the Westside, in the Valley, in South LA, and everywhere else. These transit plans will be an improvement for many LA commuters, but they will be a great loss of urban potential. The city will still consist of arterial corridors; traffic will not be relieved; few will have walkable communities.

What can be done? Los Angeles is huge and sprawling, and its residents need a robust transit network to depend on. Yet, lacking infinite money, we seem to be unable to realistically service all these people, considering the comically massive tangle of subway lines that would be required to do so.

Solving this problem requires a great visionary effort for the future of Los Angeles. The transit master plan needs to transform LA, not just service it. To create a city subway for Los Angeles, we must create the city of Los Angeles, raising it out of the semi-urban soup. We cannot assume that the status quo of a uniform quasi-suburb will be the same in 50 years. The creation of a Metro network should be designed precisely to change this status quo. Yet, this new city structure cannot cover the entire Metro area, due to its colossal size. Therefore, any coherent plan for the future city of Los Angeles will need to focus in on one area of the city, and densify intensely. Only in this way will Los Angeles be able to develop its urban character; a wider approach will spread itself too thinly to make a real city possible.

This new city, of course, cannot be created from nothing. It needs to be in an area which already contains strong ‘bones’ on which to build a city. This includes transit corridors, city institutions, areas of commercial activity, and areas of relatively high density.

In Los Angeles, this theoretical area can be made by combining West and Central LA. This theoretical zone would encompass all land between Downtown and Santa Monica, and area which essentially contains all the necessary elements to constitute its own dense urban core. It contains LA’s two major universities, UCLA and USC. It contains almost all museums in the metropolitan area, including LACMA, the California Science Center, The Getty, the Broad, MOCA, The La Brea Tar Pits, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and the Hammer Museum. It contains many of the most densely populated LA neighborhoods, such as Koreatown, Westlake, Hollywood, Harvard Heights, Pico-Union, Palms, and University Park. It is host to most of the major sports teams of LA (Dodgers, Lakers, Clippers, Kings, and LAFC) via the Crypto.Com Arena, Dodger Stadium, and BMO Stadium. It is home to Hollywood, Rodeo Drive, the Hollywood Sign, the Santa Monica Pier, and Beverly Hills, LA’s premier tourist destinations. It contains LA’s premier shopping areas: Rodeo Drive, the Grove, Third Street Promenade, Melrose, and Century City (the mall). It contains many of the city’s best parks, in Echo Park, Palisades Park, Griffith Park (and observatory!), Kenneth Hahn, and others; even more notably, it is situated directly next to LA’s two primary outdoor draws: the Santa Monica/Venice Beach and the Santa Monica Mountains. It contains most of LA’s more historic areas. It is situated very proximate to LAX. It has a huge dispersed density of in-use office space. Moreover, much transit development has already happened here, or is currently going on, via the E and D lines. This is our future city, which we shall call Neo-Angeles for convenience.

Neo-Angeles occupies an area slightly larger than Boston (96 square miles). It is bordered on the north by the Santa Monica Mountains; on the West, by the Pacific Ocean; on the East, by the Los Angeles River; and on the South, in parts, by Ballona Creek, and Baldwin Hills. Except in its southeast corner, Neo-Angeles has strong geographic borders that give it a physical identity and containment. This is why some close neighborhoods on the western edge of Downtown, such as Boyle Heights, were not included, though they may incidentally be served well by the new Metro. It is the same for the nearby southern neighborhoods; despite their density, to include them would deform Neo-Angeles’ oblong shape, convenient for transit planning, and would open the door to a Neo-Angeles so geographically inclusive as to lose its purpose.

The purpose of the Neo-Angeles zone is this: everywhere in the zone, or nearly everywhere, should be no more than a half-mile from the nearest subway line (I use “lines” here instead of “stations” because, with adequately spaced stations, the distances do not increase much, and because it saves a lot of tedious station-planning). This task, which would have been inconceivable with the whole metropolitan area in scope, is now achievable, if still massive. Forward-thinking subway planning can turn this Boston-sized area into a true metropolis. This zone, it is true, has much of the most expensive real-estate in the city. By developing it we do not mean to make a wealthy place richer; quite the opposite. If the Metro plan is to be a plan for an entire new city, it must come along with legislation to provide for dense, mixed-use apartment zoning in Neo-Angeles, with walkable streets. In doing so, we open up the land for developers to create incredible quantities of new housing, obliterating the housing shortage and turning Neo-Angeles into a place which all LA residents can afford (and without needing to afford a car!). Areas outside the Neo-Angeles zone should be regarded as commuter suburbs, like Hoboken is to New York. These areas would not experience as much transit growth, but they too would receive the great benefit of lowered housing costs due to the glut of development in Neo-Angeles.

Without further ado, let’s look at the transit map (made by your’s truly) of Neo-Angeles, in 20XX A.D.:

I’ve done it up in geographical form, as I was never a big fan of those distorted subway maps. That said, clearly downtown is incomprehensible in this mode. It could do with an inset map. And so we shall:

It is here that I should mention that I’m an amateur urban planner. If a real transit planner reads this, feel free to send me a message advising me as to why these lines are incredibly sub-optimal. Nevertheless, in broad terms, I believe that this forms a coherent Downtown strategy. Essentially, in my plan, there are two anchor points of the city: Downtown and Santa Monica. At both of these points, every transit line should meet up to form a connective nexus around which the rest of the system can radiate. Downtown, with its central location, is the greater of these two anchors. If you reference the 2020 map above, you will see that the B, D, E, and A lines are all already operational in Downtown. My additions are the self-named Santa Monica Line (grey), Pico Line (black), Beverly Line (brown), and Adams Line (green). The planned Dodger Stadium Gondola is included as well, even though it isn’t a subway. I haven’t included commuter rail lines here because they distract from the primary function under study here, that of an intra-city Metro system. Everywhere in Downtown is within a half-mile of a subway line(!). In the core downtown areas around the financial district, the average is closer to a fifth of a mile. I consider this a very well-functioning downtown subway system. To accomplish this, (a) the Pico line was drawn to jog between the Fashion District and Skid Row and continue east along 7th Street; (b) the Santa Monica line was made to run from the northwest through Chinatown, the historic core, Skid Row, and the Fashion District, following San Pedro Street, and continuing south beyond; © the Adams Line was routed to serve Historic South Central before heading North along Alameda Street and terminating at Union Station; and (d) the Beverly line was made to bisect the 4 existing lines and terminate at the regional connector. In addition to Downtown, these lines are also very dense in Westlake and University Park. Much of the area encompassed is currently industrial, warehousing, run-down, or some combination of the three. However, in transit, unlike in farming, rain does follow the plow. Creating this dense transit network will create a boom in land value and utility, facilitating the creation of a vibrant downtown. DUMBO, too, was once this kind of area.

Let us turn our attention to the vast expanse of Central LA. Here, the grand plan of the Neo-Angeles Metro becomes clear. The city’s grid system gives us a very simple job in route planning; even an idiot could do it. As you can see, I’ve taken the 3-line east-west system and expanded it to 7 whole lines. The B, D, and E lines (red, purple, and yellow, respectively) currently service this area, but they all run approximately 3 miles apart from each other. In order to create a true urban ‘net’ of subways, I’ve aimed to space these new lines 1 mile apart or less. To the south of the B line is the Santa Monica Line, running along Santa Monica Boulevard (which makes the name make more sense, as you’ll see with the others too). It is approximately 3/4 of a mile south of the B. To its south is the Beverly Line, running along Beverly Boulevard, which, thanks to the wonders of the grid, is exactly 1 mile apart from the Santa Monica. The D Line on Wilshire Boulevard is slightly offset from the grid, but still runs fairly parallel at almost exactly 1 mile in all of Central LA. The Pico Line (on Pico Boulevard) follows Wilshire’s curvature at 1 mile or less for the whole distance as well. The Adams Line on Adams Boulevard, however, is slightly less optimal. The 1-mile distance holds until Pico-Robertson, where it becomes ~1.3 miles. There, Adams Boulevard ends, and I have opted to route the rest of the line along Venice Boulevard, in the absence of another suitable street to continue the line. To route the subway through Cheviot Hills would require many time-wasting turns due to the area’s unfriendly street layout; moreover, the area is self-admittedly hilly, and thus less ideal for Metro construction. The gap in some places comes to almost 2 miles, which is regrettable, but I will allow it considering that the area is likely unfit for dense development anyway. The existing E line to the south never exceeds 1 mile in distance from the Adams Line; near Baldwin Hills it narrows to a half-mile.

There are a few other gaps worth mentioning. When the B Line turns north to go to the Valley, the area north of Sunset Boulevard becomes underserved. This I consider a minor and acceptable lapse. Additionally, about half of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Elysian Heights are underserved in this map due to the lack of an extra line to cover the other side of the neighborhood. Creating another line for this sole purpose would, I fear, be excessive, and there’s no street which would be useful to route it on. Riverside Drive could be done, but it would not really service enough people. These neighborhoods, like Cheviot Hills, would not be convenient or useful to service further, despite their proximity to Downtown.

Finally, the North-South Lines. I call these the “crosstown” lines because, in my head, I’m planning with a sort of Manhattan mindset, in which we are dealing with a 16-mile by 6-mile island instead of a 12-mile by 2-mile one. These lines span the narrower end of Neo-Angeles, and so they are meant to be the connective glue which makes the dense subway network able to connect any one point to any other with minimum circuitousness. That is, someone in Hollywood would not have to go through Downtown to get to La Brea. This is especially important in a dispersed city like LA. New York and Chicago do this very poorly, but they are aided by their center-periphery hierarchy. Both Central LA lines here are actually already planned by Metro. The extant K Line (pink), which currently exists south of the E Line, is planned to extend north as pictured here to meet up with the B Line. The Vermont Transit Corridor (dark teal) has been planned to go North-South on Vermont Avenue, also as pictured. Here I’ve extended it for a potential connection with Glendale, as well as to service a bit more of Los Feliz (it also provides convenient access to Griffith Park). These two crosstown lines make it easy if you need to go from West Hollywood to Koreatown, Larchmont to Silver Lake, or really, to any point on the map.

This is West LA, the final piece of Neo-Angeles. Here there is a strange dynamic which takes place within the Metro system. The E Line, which in Central LA was the southmost line, now becomes the central line in the stack. Because we included Venice in Neo-Angeles, we cannot just ‘squeeze’ two lines into a very narrow area between Colorado and Wilshire; we must service the area to the south. So, the Pico and Adams lines must cross the E Line. I tend to think that this is a very good thing, as it provides extra connectivity between ‘parallel’ lines. The Adams Line crosses the E Line in Culver City, and the Pico Line does so near the 405 (I consider that 3-way crossing with the north-south line to be one consolidated station). Additionally, the D Line and Beverly Line come together on Wilshire, providing more connectivity. This reduces transfers in some areas. It should also be noted that the Santa Monica Line dovetails with the Beverly Line in Beverly Hills. Whether this is a terminus or whether the lines run together is up to future planners. This leaves some of northern Beverly Hills underserved, but I don’t really consider that area part of Neo-Angeles anyway.

The Beverly Line here services the entire Wilshire Corridor, which the D Line cannot do because metro has (wisely) decided to route it through Century City. The 4 lines converging in Westwood/Century City offer a golden opportunity for development of a dense district. Save for a sliver of land in the Sawtelle area and one in ‘North of Montana,’ basically all areas of Santa Monica are well served. I’ve chosen to take the Beverly Line north on San Vicente for a bit to avoid overcrowding Wilshire and because this area has a bit of commercial activity and more land available for expanding it (mostly, however, land north of San Vicente is not included in Neo-Angeles). Once it is convenient, though, the line jogs south onto Montana, where it can service that larger commercial area. Downtown Santa Monica is incredibly well-serviced, with the 3 east-west lines there being only ~1/2 mile from each other. The second ‘anchor’ is functioning well. The Pico Line is only a mile south of the E. South of the Pico Line, however, things get a little dicey. The Adams line is a full 1.5 miles south of the Pico Line, which is not terrible, but not ideal for such a central area. Taking into account the crosstown lines, that leaves a ~1 square mile area underserved. This will have to be lived with, considering that Ocean Park and Venice Boulevard are very convenient subway routes, and there aren’t any convenient routes between them. South of the Adams Line, some areas of Del Rey are underserved, but I consider these areas marginal to Neo-Angeles anyway, so I’m not too upset.

The two crosstown lines here are very important. The eastern one is the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, currently being planned by Metro. The purpose of this new line is to connect the Valley with the West Side. This will undoubtedly be very helpful, and relieve some of the traffic on the 405. Here I’ve selected one of the possible plans, the one which routes through UCLA and Westwood Village instead of directly along Sepulveda. This hits some prime areas in Westwood (as opposed to the less-useful 405 frontage road route), though it does sadly eliminate the possibility of a Getty Center station. From UCLA the line jogs to track along Sepulveda. This provides great connectivity options, as otherwise someone trying to get from Westwood to Culver City would have to route through La Brea. The other crosstown line is the self-created Lincoln Line, which runs along 4th Street in Santa Monica before jogging over to Lincoln, and following it through Marina Del Rey. This line ties together all of the east-west lines in a neat bow, and provides convenient Metro access to all of downtown Santa Monica and Venice. I initially considered running it along Ocean Avenue, but opted for 4th Street instead because Ocean would provide utility only on its east side due to its seaside nature. Alas, I cannot have my dream of riding an aboveground subway while looking out over the beautiful Pacific Ocean. If you want, you can imagine that I actually did put that line on Ocean Avenue. Most lines terminate on the Lincoln, except for the Adams Line, which continues on to Venice Beach. Despite some gaps, this Metro setup provides for a robust Santa Monica/Venice network ideal for commuting and beachgoing LA residents.

This brings us to our final leg of the journey, outside Neo-Angeles. Even if LAX is outside the new city, that doesn’t mean it can’t be well-served by public transit. As it so happens, the current Metro plans call for two separate Metro lines to terminate at LAX (the K Line and the Sepulveda Corridor). I’ve only added a third with the Lincoln Line. The Lincoln Line here extends past the Ballona Wetlands and adds a connection to Loyola-Marymount University (in Playa Vista). It then connects to the LAX consolidated Rent-A-Car facility, from which the under-construction LAX people-mover departs (not pictured). This rail line connects metro passengers to the airport directly to ease congestion. I’ve elected to extend the Sepulveda Corridor along to SoFi Stadium, considering the huge attendance the stadium draws and the utility that the line will get as a result. I leave open the possibility that any of these lines may connect with the nearby Metro C Line (not pictured).

This plan, if implemented, will not just improve LA, it will revolutionize it. No longer will LA be a city destined to be constantly choked by cars; instead, the Metro network will provide rapid travel no matter the amount of commuters. Neo-Angeles residents will be able to live car-free without fear of being stranded or inconvenienced; outside commuters may still need cars, but they can leave them in their home neighborhoods as they traverse the city proper. Development will be able to occur not in isolated patches but in broad swaths across the city; the far-fetched goal of ‘knitting together’ the city becomes a reality. How this new form of development will occur specifically is a question for another time. Yet, we know that, with the future transit network of Neo-Angeles, the new urban fabric will be utterly different from the old.