How LA is changing, one rail line at a time

2016-05-02T13:07:00-04:00

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote in 1989, “is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” I quote this statement every chance I get; it is among the most trenchant ever written about the place. But all that is changing, or might be, if the promises implied by the Expo Line expansion can be kept.

On May 20, Los Angeles's Metro will open the expansion of its Expo Line, stretching from downtown past its current terminus in Culver City all the way to Santa Monica, blocks from the Pacific Ocean. The dream of "Broadway to the beach" by train in LA will soon become a reality, and stands to be a watershed moment in the city's transit development, as David Ulin reflects in the New York Times:

Regardless of what the Expo Line ultimately does or doesn’t do for traffic, this is, I think, the essence of what it offers: the notion of Los Angeles as a space we occupy together, collective and evolving, where in the act of getting lost, as I discovered on Venice Boulevard, we may also unexpectedly be found.

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How LA is changing, one rail line at a time