By Scott Sookman Los Angeles
I am writing in response to the opinion piece written by David Pisarra (SMDP, Aug. 8, page 4). Mr. Pisarra is woefully uninformed about the history of public transit in Los Angeles. Here in our great metropolis, we not only take public transit, but have a glorious history of it.
Firstly, our Blue Line is the second most-used light rail line — line, not entire system — in the entire USA, with over 70,000 daily riders. Our Red Line is one of most-used subway lines in the country with more than 130,000 riders per day.
Mr. Pisarra states that “Our development has always grown horizontally, not vertically because land was cheap and plentiful. It is only now that we are running out of land that we are looking to grow up.”
And what was it that established these development patterns? It sure wasn’t the freeway system; that didn’t exist until the middle of the 1950s. The Pasadena Freeway opened in 1940 as the Arroyo Seco Parkway.
No, it was our mass transit system, which was, at that time, privately owned, that established our horizontal growth. People could buy a home in Long Beach and commute to their office in downtown Los Angeles in less than an hour from 1902 onward. And they didn’t need to own a car, which were very unreliable at that time.
Mr. Pisarra goes on to state his most glaring error: “When fortunes were made 75 years ago the men who ran this town could have built the infrastructure, and the hearts and minds of the population would have followed, but they didn’t because they didn’t have to.”
This is completely wrong and untrue. The men who ran this town did build a mass transit system. Los Angeles had the largest light rail system in the USA, the Pacific Electric, which operated from 1902-1961. It had more than 1,000 miles of track and almost 2,000 electrically-driven, smog-free trains per day. There was also the “Yellow Cars” of the Los Angeles Railway, with another several hundred miles of streetcar routes. There were millions of dollars of private funds invested in these systems.
Believe me, Mr. Pisarra, the hearts and minds of the populace did follow. The “Red Cars” were beloved and were only removed by a Utopian mindset that thought that freeways were the answers to all our transportation ills. Now, of course, we know that is not true, and no amount of neighborhood-destroying freeways will fix our problems.
You are entitled to your opinions, but I recommend that before you pontificate about the whys and wherefores of mass transit in our city, please learn its history. Since the 1980s, hundreds of people have been working tirelessly to restore the rail-based mass transit that we so callously threw away in the 1950s. I will admit that it is tragic that Santa Monica has yet to see the fruits of that effort, but eventually this oversight will be rectified.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 18, 2006. Read the original PDF.