GoKawiilThe roughly 12-mile (19km) drive along Wilshire Boulevard from Los Angeles’s downtown core to its Westside region can be a soul-crushing experience. The road is among the busiest in Los Angeles, winding through Westlake, Koreatown, the famed Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills, Century City, Westwood and Santa Monica before ending at the bluffs overlooking the Pacific coast highway, a journey that can take an hour or even two at rush hour.
For decades, Angelenos accepted this time-eating crawl as fate. But this week, traversing this bustling corridor reached another level – about 50-70ft underground to be precise. How about Union Station to Beverly Hills in 21 minutes?
That’s the travel time that LA Metro, the regional transit authority, is flaunting as it unveils the city’s first new subway stations in more than a quarter century. The first section of the long-awaited D line extension opened on Friday, a project Metro officials, transportation experts and transit advocates say marks a “game changer” for the car-clogged region.
Friday’s grand opening was full of fanfare and big D energy. Like any major LA premiere, there were Hollywood celebrities, flashing news cameras and a purple carpet to walk. There was even a life-sized saber-toothed tiger puppet, made by the Jim Henson creature shop, and the entire Metro system was free to ride through the weekend.
View image in fullscreen Like any major LA premiere, Friday’s grand opening for the new subway stations was full of fanfare. Photograph: Aurelia Ventura/Courtesy of Metro Art/Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
The four fresh miles of subway service arrive as the region prepares to host marquee global events: World Cup matches this summer, then the Olympic and Paralympic games in 2028. After decades of delays and years of bad headlines about falling ridership, rising crime and service struggles, some Angelenos are ready to celebrate good transit news, donning cheeky “Ride the D” T-shirts to show their excitement.
It’s all part of a slow-moving yet potentially seismic shift to reshape car-dependent LA into the kind of a transportation ecosystem that’s readily available in other major cities around the globe. But the timeline of this rail project – plans for which can be traced back to the 1960s – offers a stark reminder for those eagerly awaiting LA’s transformation: pace yourselves.
Still, Tim Lindholm, chief program management officer for LA Metro, said “breaking this east-west divide” marks a major milestone that residents may have to experience to believe.
“[For] your average Angeleno, it hasn’t really struck them yet that you could get from Union Station to Beverly Hills in 21 minutes, or that when section three is done … you can go from downtown to UCLA in 25 minutes,” Lindholm said. “That’s a game changer.”
‘Subway to the sea’
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