In this TL, L.A. ripped of the Streetcars, but instead built a entire new subway system. I think a good argument could be used for the construction of subway lines not only in L.A. was they act like a shelter in the event of a nuclear war (this is the 50s with the cold war and all the paranoid of a atomic holocaust)...
It never gets built. Elysian Park Heights becomes a thing ITTL. I'm not entirely sure what happens to the Dodgers themselves; I'd like to have them stay in Brooklyn somehow, but not sure it's possible - this is of course where the narrative loops right back to Robert Moses.
I don't think there is a specific one, just that the Kelker plan doesn't get completely buried after the referendum. Then along comes the Depression, the city sees a way to rid downtown of some of its congestion, and voila.
Oh yes indeed. IOTL in the late 50s, there were plans for a subway line under Wilshire Boulevard that were described to the public basically as a fallout shelter with attached rail service. It managed to get far enough that they held an actual honest-to-God groundbreaking ceremony before the funding fell through and they had to abandon work.
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Next update is going to be a while, I'm afraid, as I have RL stuff to deal with. To tide you over, have a map of the LA subway system as of circa 1960. You'll note that the original Broadway subway is starting to get a bit crowded with different services, which should give you an idea as to where the next update will kick off.
So something I was wondering based off your first map of the Los Angeles Subway. Considering the use of express services, is the initial Broadway Subway a regular two-track line with some kind of express service, a three track line with peak direction express services, or a four track line with separate express and local services akin to the NYC Subway?
Good question. To my memory the Kelker plan only recommended two tracks for the line initially, to be expanded to four as the suburban services grew in number. I think by 1940 the line will still be a two-track one, but the Hawthorne-Eagle Rock services (being the longest of the lot) and the PE through service would go through the local stations without stopping. What impact this would have in rush-hour traffic, when trains would probably be a lot closer together than on the heavy-rail lines I'm familiar with that do this, I cannot say.
The issue is that the 'express' trains would get caught behind the 'local' services and get stuck there behind them no matter what (albeit, with consists of four cars rather than the eight to eleven I am familar with on the NYC Subway, that might be better). Perhaps certain sections of the line get three tracked to allow peak direction express services, if the City of Los Angeles can afford it?
3.1.4. The New Order
In 1966, after twenty years of unprecedented growth, the world economy finally began to reel. Surprisingly, it was not the US stock market that caused the collapse, nor did the Cold War intensify creating further repercussions for the world economy. Instead it proved to be events in the Middle East that shook the world. Since its 1948 founding, the State of Israel had been left unmolested – in deed if not in word – by its Arab neighbors, but it was a fragile peace, and inevitably something would break. Tensions were rising between the Arab natives and Jewish settlers in the holy city of Jerusalem, and the armistice line that divided the city between the two sides was beginning to buckle. It was clear that war was coming, and that Israel would most likely have the initiative due to the Arab forces being divided between three different states, so the Arab alliance decided that a pre-emptive strike was in order.
On September 15, 1966, as the Jewish faith awakened to the first of its High Holy Days, the Jordanian army crossed the border in Jerusalem. Simultaneously, the Syrian army invaded Galilee and Egypt broke out of its salient in Gaza to strike up the Israeli coast. Israel, being in the midst of its largest religious holiday, was caught completely off guard, and it took them several days to mobilize their armed forces. This sneak attack strategy ensured that the moral high ground was with Israel from the beginning, and several of the great powers of the West recalled their ambassadors from Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The Arab states in OPEC responded by cutting off oil exports to these countries.
Although only a portion of the oil supply was affected by this – the Arab states' oil market share was smaller then than it is now – a widespread panic ensued across Western markets, with some Western European states going so far as to impose fuel rationing to keep stocks from running dry as consumers panic-bought as much gasoline and diesel as they could come across. The US never went as far as that, but this was far from meaning that the markets were unaffected – on the contrary, Wall Street went into a full meltdown during 1967, and the ensuing economic slump would last the better part of a decade. Moreover, the price of oil rose sharply for virtually the first time since 1946, which not only impacted car commuters severely, but also put a dent in the economic argument for bus transit, which had turned on cheap operating costs from the start. It might be speculated that if the events of the late 1960s had never happened – or even been delayed a decade or so – several of America's streetcar systems might have suffered very different fates (see the Pittsburgh and New Orleans sections of this essay for further details on this point).
As for Los Angeles, however, the city had sadly already removed its entire surface streetcar network by 1966. The last of the LARy lines had closed in late 1964, and the Pacific Electric's last street-level route in downtown LA, the Venice Boulevard route that carried trains between 6th/Main and the Westside, was wound up when the Pico Subway opened the year after (this also meant the end of the PE Western District, as all its trunk routes had now been taken over by the LATC network). A number of track alignments remained in the streets by the point the crisis hit, and the LATC briefly revived two streetcar routes at the height of the crisis before finally deciding to sell its remaining cars to other cities. Having a more or less direct supply of locally-produced oil, LA weathered the crisis better than most places, and there was never serious talk of moving over to alternative fuel sources for the bus network. On the contrary, the city's fleet of diesel buses saw heavier use in the late 60s than ever before, and a number of the trunk routes that we know from the present day originated in this era.
With the opening of the Pico Subway, the entirety of the network proposed by the 1946 appropriations measure had been completed. In less than twenty years, the Los Angeles rapid transit system had gone from a single streetcar subway under Broadway to a comprehensive network providing fast travel from downtown to more or less any part of the city and back. Subway trains operated to and from Hollywood, Burbank, Van Nuys, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Culver City, Venice, Inglewood, Hawthorne, LAX, Willowbrook, Torrance, San Pedro and the Eastside – and with the Pacific Electric handling more or less everything east of the city, the network was in fact close to matching the Kelker-De Leuw report's original proposals. For the first time in the network's history, it wasn't in the suburbs that development was needed – it was downtown.
The original Broadway subway, which was built as a simple two-track line, had been expanded to four tracks in the mid-1950s, but in spite of this it struggled to cope with the increased traffic volumes brought about by the extensions. The only new lines that didn't operate through Broadway were the PE routes and the Seventh Street line, and this was quickly becoming untenable. The Kelker plan had suggested that a second north-south subway be opened in Olive Street, connecting the Pico and Hollywood lines two blocks west of Broadway with interchange only possible via the Seventh Street subway. This idea was not well-liked by the planning ethos of the 1960s, for which speed of travel and ease of transfer were the highest ideals, and in either case its implementation would've been problematic for two main reasons. Firstly, by the time the Seventh Street line had actually been built, the Olive Street station had been removed from the plans, and the line ran (and indeed runs) direct between Flower Street and Broadway. Secondly, related to the above, the focal point of downtown had moved west since the 1920s, as more and more development was focused around the Harbor Parkway and the relatively-flattened Bunker Hill [1]. Naturally, the planners wanted better transit access to these areas, and so the idea arose for the three-corridor system that we know today.
The plan essentially called for the Broadway line to be split into two, one connecting the Hollywood and Valley lines in the north to the Harbor and Hawthorne lines in the south, and the other connecting the Highland Park line in the northeast to the Pico subway in the southwest. The former line would run in a more or less straight north-south path through downtown, diverging from the Hollywood Tunnel before Bunker Hill Station and joining up with the Broadway line at Broadway Place. The latter would diverge from Broadway after City Hall, then run in Grand Avenue from 4th to Pico. The sections of the Broadway line between City Hall and Broadway Place would quite simply be abandoned.
This proposal sparked a raucous debate, which came to encompass not only transit development but the future of downtown Los Angeles as a whole. The proponents of the plan, whose main organization was called “Citizens for the Grand Avenue Subway”, argued that it would better reflect the travel patterns of future decades, as the new central station would be located very near the middle of the Financial District at Grand and 7th. They came to represent the old progress-above-all attitude to planning, and several of downtown's big employers backed them (after all, the plan would bring the subway closer to many of the skyscrapers going up to serve them). The opposing side united under the banner of the “Save Historic Downtown Committee”, whose main point was that rapid transit should direct development rather than follow it. If the old downtown core was actually dying, the subway was a great instrument for the city to keep it afloat. The committee argued that the parkway's role in focusing development westward could be negated by constructing park-and-ride facilities at subway stations at the edge of downtown, letting drivers change to the subway for the final part of their commute and perhaps taking some traffic off downtown streets in the process.
It was ultimately a compromise proposal that won through. The Grand Avenue subway became a white elephant after the economic crash, and the city was eager to find a cheaper way to take pressure off the Broadway line. At some point in the process, someone whose identity is lost to history suggested shortening the new lines so that no actual stations need be abandoned on the Broadway line, simply shifting Downtown Crossing a block or so westward and constructing the shortest possible new alignments to connect it to both Broadway and the two Westside lines. Ironically, this plan didn't actually differ too much from the Kelker plan, aside from stops being less frequent and the two lines crossing over one another rather than running parallel. After some revision, the proposal was put to the voters in 1969, and it was passed by a healthy 56-to-44 majority of LA voters.
Construction on the “Downtown Connection Project” or DCP, as it was dubbed, began rather ignominiously in the spring of 1971, already six months behind schedule – for the first time, the cut-and-cover method that had been used for the previous lines was abandoned in favor of a modern tunnel boring machine, delivery of which was significantly delayed. This was a rather appropriate start for what was to be one of the longest-running construction projects in Los Angeles history, taking eight years to complete and running over its initial projected cost by almost 200%. A pierced groundwater vein under Bunker Hill proved the first challenge to overcome, and Governor Reagan considered withdrawing funding in 1974 after the project had failed to even reach the halfway point by the scheduled completion date. Meanwhile, Broadway trains were prevented from running between Broadway Place and 3rd Street, forcing the city to run a large fleet of replacement buses and causing utter mayhem in downtown traffic.
Although public discontent rose throughout the period, and even the city authorities that had launched the project were beginning to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to just leave the Broadway line as it was, the project ultimately wasn't defunded, and in 1979, the new Downtown Crossing station was finally opened by Mayor Lindsay and Governor Moretti to great fanfare. The economy was finally recovering, and thanks to the social reforms of the Muskie administration (the “Three M's” as they're often known), the growth came to benefit more Americans than ever before. Things were finally looking up for the United States again.
[1] This shift is less pronounced than IOTL, where LA's Financial District is more or less entirely centered on Flower and Figueroa Streets and the former center of downtown was more or less a decaying slum from the 60s until recent gentrification, but it still occurs.
Hehe, no. I'm not quite that crazy. It's Gilbert Lindsay, the OTL longtime councilman for downtown and south-central LA. I'm more or less swapping him and Tom Bradley around for the purposes of TTL.
3.1.5. Red Car to the Future
After the relative prosperity of the late 70s, the economy began to dip again around 1980, fueled by the overproduction crisis in the steel industry that began to grow in impact in the period, as well as the usual boom-and-bust cycle. The new recession wasn't as deep as that of the late 60s, but it was problematic, and many of the remaining private transit operators found themselves in financial trouble after their auxiliary business ventures began to lose buoyancy. The Pacific Electric was no exception – not only was property development never an especially lucrative prospect, by this point the LA Basin was fast running out of property to be developed. The company tried to stay afloat as it had done during previous crises, but eventually events overtook them, and in early 1982 the Pacific Electric filed for bankruptcy. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, after some debate, voted 3-2 to buy out the company. The Red Cars would stay in operation, now as a subsidiary of the county government, much as the LATC ran its transit operations under the aegis of the city.
The reconstituted PE immediately entered negotiations with the municipalities in its service area to coordinate transit operations into more of a unified network. As part of this, the trolley routes in Pasadena were taken over by that city, which had already subsidized their operations for well over a decade in order to keep them afloat, and the Whittier and Corona lines were connected over the former Santa Fe heavy rail alignment to provide a more commuter rail-type service between 6th & Main and the Inland Empire. Moreover, local buses were brought to the PE's backyard as bus terminals were set up in connection to a number of its main stations. The LATC, too, connected a number of its bus routes to PE stations, although some degree of reciprocity had existed there previously. There was discussion of moving the PE Pasadena line north of South Pasadena over to LATC control as part of the Yellow Line, but this was ultimately rebuffed and the line continued in regular operation.
By this time, the 6th & Main terminal was getting badly overcrowded. Its original five tracks had been expanded to eight in 1957, and been extended to allow six-car trains in 1966, but even so, it was beginning to burst at the seams with the traffic levels brought on by serving as the end point of nearly all the PE's lines. The Kelker report had proposed the construction of a U-shaped subway through downtown as a replacement, allowing trains to run through from north to south instead of having to stop at 6th & Main and forcing passengers to switch trains. This would also reap the additional benefit of allowing the rapid transit network to connect to Union Station, one of its biggest remaining holes, and providing much-needed rejuvenation to the eastern part of the downtown area. The proposal was presented in the Times of February 21, 1984, and finding it to their approval, the Board of Supervisors announced their intention of putting it on the ballot concurrent with that year's presidential election.
This was one of the more interesting elections in recent American history, and while I won't go into detail in a paper that's supposed to be on transit (and lord knows it's running long enough as it is), suffice it to say that the political climate was rather different from that of the preceding decade. The old dogma of Keynesian economic stimulus and government interventionism was seen as having caused the 1966-67 crash and the ensuing hard times, and as the economy improved, many believed that the way to keep it going was to let the free market work its wonders without assistance from the public sector. The neoliberal wave may not have gone as far as certain figures had wanted it to (notably Governor Reagan, whose recently released diaries indicate that he considered a second run for the GOP nomination in 1980 – one can only speculate on what this country would look like if he'd been at its helm for four or God forbid eight years), but nonetheless, LA County voters were not in the mood for large-scale public works. Nor did the media attention given to the presidential race help shed light on local ballot measures – a large number of voters probably read as far as “tax increase” and checked No immediately.
The measure ended up defeated by a 61-to-39 margin, larger than even the pessimists in County Hall expected, and the plans for a PE subway were once again shelved. The year after, a second ballot measure succeeded in giving the PE the means to upgrade 6th & Main to twelve platforms, demolishing the buildings along 6th Street to make room, and build a moving walkway tunnel connecting it to the 7th Street subway's nearest station. The time-honored Pacific Electric Building would survive – and indeed, still survives.
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Next update is a bit of a downer, but that was inevitably going to happen - I'm trying to create a US that's more like Western Europe in how it treats transit, not a world that's more transit-friendly on the whole.
On the upside, I'm going to have a map out pretty soon of the network in 1990 - the entire (LATC) thing.
On the upside, I'm going to have a map out pretty soon of the network in 1990 - the entire (LATC) thing.
This will be interesting. One question, is this US is more densely populated?
Not as a whole. This US has about the same population as OTL. It's differently distributed between different regions though.
3.1.6. The End of the Century
The 1990s are not usually ranked among the great transit decades in this country, or anywhere else in the West for that matter, and that's not without reason. A fairly strong economy meant that anyone who was anyone – and anyone who voted, more to the point – could afford a car, which was very frequently American as the carmakers were beginning to shape up and get in line with the market after the slump of the 70s and early 80s. What's more, the conservative fiscal ethos that dominated federal politics at the time made no allowances for public works of any kind, and transit was no exception – bereft of funding, it languished in largely the same state from 1980 through 1996.
So too in LA, where all things considered, the transit system had done very well for itself in the past decades. Most of the Pacific Electric's trunk routes had been converted to rapid transit, the ones that hadn't had largely been replaced with buses, which operated in close connection with rapid transit schedules ever since most non-LATC services (Pasadena and Santa Monica being the main exceptions) were consolidated under county control. Like in America's other major cities, a large number of Angelenos – disproportionately poor and non-white, as ever – subsisted without a car and were able to do so thanks to the extensive transit system. Visitors benefitted from the transit connection to LAX, as well as downtown, Hollywood and a number of other sights.
As the years went on, however, more and more of them were reluctant to make use of this option. LA's rapid transit vehicles had largely not been replaced since the system was built – the rapid expansion of the network in the 50s and 60s meant that every train was needed to serve the growing number of lines, and while a brief effort was mounted to replace the original 1000 series Broadway subway cars in 1981-82, all the other rolling stock remained in place as of 1993. Much of the stock was getting on in age, and all of it was in severe disrepair, made all the worse by the system's declining reputation. Cars were increasingly covered with graffiti, seat upholstery (on the stock that had it) was deteriorating, handles were broken, stations smelled like latrines, and to make bad worse, budget cuts forced the closure of manned ticket booths at a large number of stations. In short, the system was in abysmal shape.
Things could've gotten even worse, if the decay had been allowed to continue unabated. However, there are times when the course of history is altered by the efforts of a single individual, and in this case that individual was Zev Yaroslavsky, the maverick city councilman who had made a name for supporting cleanup measures and slow-growth politics in his Westside district. In the 1993 election, the first held since the death of longtime Mayor Gilbert Lindsay, Yaroslavsky announced he was running for the city's highest office, and mounted an insurgent campaign which promised to “clean up LA”, gaining the support of an unusual coalition of the affluent and the bohemian, as well as those minority groups that were disinclined to throw their weight behind Acting Mayor Robert Farrell. One of Yaroslavsky's main policy proposals was to allocate additional funding to refurbish the LATC's stations and rolling stock, an idea that ran somewhat counter to his usual emphasis on fiscal responsibility, but which he believed was necessary to prevent the system becoming actively dangerous for travelers.
In the primary, Yaroslavsky placed first by a fairly large margin, but not sufficiently large to avoid a runoff, and he and Farrell moved on to the general election. The general campaign was as spirited as the primary, with Yaroslavsky carrying on his tactic of basically ignoring Farrell and campaigning against the establishment. Farrell tried to use Yaroslavsky's outsider image against him, painting him as unqualified for the mayor's office, but this was a fairly shallow strategy to use against a serving city councilman of eighteen years standing, especially when Farrell himself had only one more year of council experience. Yaroslavsky managed to win the general election by a comfortable 57-to-43 margin, becoming the city's first Jewish mayor, and set about implementing his agenda.
An inspection of the LATC's infrastructure conducted over the summer of 1994 showed that some two thirds of the stations were in dire enough of a state that closure would be necessary to carry out the refurbishment – these were about evenly distributed between the three lines, as the Blue and Yellow Lines were older, but the Green Line had not benefitted from the improvements that came with the Downtown Connection. It was decided that the Blue Line, the most heavily-used one, would be refurbished first, with the sections south of Washington Boulevard closing during the early summer of 1995 and the northern sections following. The LATC repainted a number of its buses in a blue livery for the replacement service, which was unofficially nicknamed the “Blue Arrows” as a result – this name stuck long enough that the LATC would later use it for its rapid bus services in high-density corridors which began service in 2004. The stations, meanwhile, had their tilework replaced, in some cases with new patterns created by artists and in some cases mimicking the original patterns, and the more heavily used stations saw their entrances rebuilt to comply with the Universal Access Act of 1993. The ticket halls were cleaned up and the machinery modernized, and when the line reopened, all of its stations were manned once again, which made for a significant improvement in both service quality and overall safety in the subway system.
The Green Line followed in 1996, and finally the Yellow Line in 1997, at which point the Pacific Electric conducted similar works on its rapid-transit stations - 6th & Main had of course been rebuilt to high standards just a few years prior. The refurbishment wasn't limited to the stations either – the 2000 and 3000 series cars, which were nearing forty years of age, were all gradually replaced over the three-year period, with each reopened line generally corresponding to a new series of rolling stock. The tenders for the new subway cars were among the largest such orders ever conducted in the United States, and though the LATC initially leaned toward Italian manufacturer Breda for its new cars, pressure from the state and federal government eventually meant that the Budd Company, the makers of the 3000 and 4000 series cars, was contracted to deliver the new 5000 series, which comprised the entire run of new cars for the LATC's network – the Pacific Electric, for its part, contracted Northern California-based Rohr Industries to build its new stock, which was a natural choice given their experience with the Key System's similar needs.
By the end of Yaroslavsky's first term as mayor in 1998, the refurbishment of the Los Angeles subway system was more or less complete, and the LATC was able to boast one of the most modern services in the nation. The commission unveiled its “Transit 2000” program in the same year, which included the reorganization and consolidation of Metro LA's bus network under a single network. To this end, negotiations were conducted between the LATC and the independent cities in LA County, which up to this point had largely run their own transit systems, and one way or another, all of them agreed to the consolidation, either as a full-blown LATC takeover or as a simple rebrand of their municipal transit authorities. At the turn of the millennium, LA County's transit system became a fully integrated operation, with a zonal fare system that made it possible to go anywhere between Malibu, Pomona, Lancaster and Long Beach on the same ticket, and to change between LATC subway, LATC bus, local bus and Pacific Electric as many times as desired along the route. The new millennium clearly had bright things in store for the West Coast's biggest city. Then, something happened...