Public Transit in L.A. Is Growing in Leaps and Bounds but Where Are the Riders?
Oh wait, no we're not! That was the 1920s, before Christopher Lloyd destroyed the trolley cars in order to build his evil freeways.
Fine, but the Los Angeles rail network is certainly on an upswing. In November, voters passed Measure M, which uses a small sales-tax increase to fund billions of dollars of Metro transit projects. Extensions to the Expo Line and Gold Line opened last year, the former of which reconnected downtown L.A. to the Pacific Ocean. And on Wednesday, officials announced that the federal government is giving Metro $1.6 billion to accelerate construction of the Purple Line extension, which will connect downtown with the somewhat less vaunted Veterans Administration campus, on Wilshire near the 405.
“There are very few places in our country where the vision is big enough for the challenges we face,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said at a press conference, according to the Los Angeles Times.
That's all to say that pretty soon, L.A. could be living through yet another golden-ish age of public transit, or at least quite a shiny age.
Read more: http://www.laweekly.com/news/public-transit-in-la-is-growing-in-leaps-and-bounds-but-where-are-the-riders-7784449
