[Wright Concept]

Originally Posted by Westsidelife

Trains on the Wilshire/Western and North Hollywood branches themselves, NOT the actual trunk, have 10-minute headways. Therefore, don't branches only benefit the trunk?

Simple answer, Yes.

Originally Posted by Westsidelife

I agree. Instead of focusing so much on a county-wide system, we should channel our efforts into bringing rail lines to places where the people would actually use them. This is why I think we could use a municipal transit agency to develop rail lines in LA's core area. I'd like to reference my Santa Monica and Beverly Line proposals, which are based on the premise of needing a denser network in the core urban area:

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=137422

You're not alone in that endevour.

I made these posts close to three years ago when Get LA Moving was on the radar to explain this precise dichotomy.
Part 1: 11/28/2006
Part 2: 12/1/2006
Part 3: 12/3/2006
Part 4: 1/25/2007

I think back to what certain County Supervisor (Antonovich) says about funding the Wilshire Subway or any other subway in Los Angeles. "If it's (their) the city's will let them do it"

The more I think about it the more it makes sense.

If the City of LA were to float a bond let's say $ 2.5 Billion dollars (folks they tried to push originally $2 billion in bonds this past election, but only prop H got to the ballot) and they were to only build within the city limits of LA, lets say the Wilshire Corridor until Cedars Sinai/Beverly Center. Maybe one down the Vermont Corridor from Wilshire until King Blvd or Slauson to serve the transit dependant and the BRU zealots would have no leg to stand on, since it would allow the current 58,000+ bus riders better service. Or even on the Whittier Corridor from Lorena to Downtown. Extentions that are just enough to make a dent and gain a lot of riders, but not deep enough that it requires them to purchase more trains cause now they'll be directly dealing with MTA. This also serves a dual function to help with LA re-zoning efforts to make transit oriented development and strengthening neighborhood fabrics...

See Westside Extension...

This could be a northern extension of the Crenshaw Corridor...

This could also be a northern extension of the Crenshaw Corridor...

Already a subway down Vermont north of Wilshire. An extension farther south is planned...

Necessary, IMO, but Wright would argue that it's too close to Vermont.

And you'd be right. Western is not only too close to Vermont, it's too close to possible North extension of Crenshaw Corridor at this moment. However with many of these busy lines I do see the immediate need of instituting a network of bus only lanes. On the really busy bus lines string up some trolley wire and run trolleybuses along those routes on those special bus only lanes. With Western much like Pico-Venice east of Mid City I'd go for these corridors when the two parallel corridors adjacent to them go over capacity;
* Western would make a wonderful subway corridor once Crenshaw and or Vermont goes over capacity.
* Pico-Venice once Expo and or Wilshire corridor goes over capacity.

I agree. Instead of this being a branch of Crenshaw, extend it east along Pico to DTLA where it would then run along Broadway or Main to serve South Park, Fashion District, Historic Core, Toy District, and Civic Center.

By Wright Concept

That sketch was more of a quick iteration to one I did previously in High School (c.1998) as an idea of what is the absolute bare minimum of infrastructure network needed to serve mostly the heart of the Westside without too much subway construction.

I was thinking of the Muni Metro and this was during the Zev's law fury where we had the Expo Right of way and thought originally why not have these branches (Santa Monica, Westwood, Venice and LAX/South LA) feed a main trunk along the existing right-of-way.


Original hypothesis with updated info. Grey areas are not built due to funding that would've been taken away to build the Expo four track corridor.

Problems with that is Expo right-of-way would need to be 4 tracks to make this work and then the costs would balloon out of control because that would require an additional tunnel and alignment in Downtown or a rebuilding of the existing Blue Line tunnel for Four tracks. The cost of that would have meant a very short Wilshire subway extension miss out on key destinations of Century City and Beverly Hills and the Mid-City and Larchmont areas would be left out completely.

As I grew in age, information about Federal Funding Grants and historical information like the proposed Vineyard Subway that would have linked the Pacific Electric Venice Line to through a subway to Mid-Wilshire and Downtown, it came to my attention that the Venice and Crenshaw corridors are dependent on Mid-City stations for successful ridership levels as rail. And linking this up to Hollywood would create a well-utilized transit corridor with no parallel freeway to compete with so why not put two and two together.

However I said all of that to say going East on Pico-Venice isn't entirely ruled out.

The trick with extending the Pico-Venice line east is where to place the stations, the current bus ridership on Pico is heavily utilized for short travel distances, so maybe a shorter stop spacing between stations will be needed? That was the busiest and heavily utilized boarding per passenger mile streetcar corridor when it was the old LA Yellow Cars, I wouldn't be surprised if reinstitued it would be a successful streetcar line again, to start.

Too close to Wilshire. Maybe a BRT?

Third Street from Cedars Sinai/Beverly Center to Downtown would make an excellent trolleybus corridor or streetcar line.