\u201cThis is the most important corridor for rail service in L.A.,\u201d said Ethan Elkind, author of Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City<\/a>, noting Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi River. \u201cIt\u2019s been 65 years, but it\u2019s finally opening, and it will be a high ridership, high capacity line.\u201d<\/p>\n The story of why it took Los Angeles so long to build a subway beneath Wilshire involves much more than a failure to get state or federal funding.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a tale of the immense challenge of uniting this vast, sprawling metropolis of nearly 10 million people around an overarching vision of what public transit should look like and where it should go. Over the years, different iterations of the subway project have been blocked by political infighting and local opposition from some neighborhoods. In a county that includes 88 cities, all of which have overlapping and sometimes conflicting ideas, there have been few avenues for reaching consensus.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was so hard to get everybody on the same page,\u201d Elkind said, noting that so many corners of the region were competing for rail \u2014 or, in some cases, like Hancock Park and Fairfax, fighting against rail.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no one who could step in with any power or authority and just make a decision. \u2026 \u201c he said. \u201cEventually, I think we stumbled on the right thing to do, but it\u2019s come at a huge … time delay and very high costs.\u201d<\/p>\n The gated-off entrance of the Metro D Line at Wilshire and Fairfax. Three new D Line stations are scheduled to open on Friday.<\/p>\n (Kayla Bartkowski \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Dubbed the Fifth Avenue of the West and the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es of the Pacific, Wilshire has long been identified as L.A.\u2019s most serious contender for heavy rail. <\/p>\n The 15-mile corridor from downtown to the sea runs through dense pockets of Koreatown and iconic stretches of L.A. from the Miracle Mile to Beverly Hills.<\/p>\n The first phase of the D Line extension, opening Friday, will offer just 3.92 miles of new subway along Wilshire with three new underground stations at La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega. But by fall 2027, the extension will stretch nine miles to Westwood, linking up with major sites such as UCLA and West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.<\/p>\n Tim Lindholm, Metro\u2019s chief program management officer, called the new subway \u201ca historic leap\u201d for providing mobility for Angelenos and everyone visiting the city. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s always been a little bit of an East-West divide in Los Angeles,\u201d he said. \u201cThis project finally breaks it.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Metro, the new subway will significantly reduce travel time: A journey from Union Station to Wilshire\/La Cienega that would typically take up to 45 minutes off peak by car will take just 21 minutes.<\/p>\n In the short term, public transit advocates say, the D Line extension will provide Angelenos with an alternative to driving when they want to go east or west. Beyond that, it will play a pivotal role \u2014 amid a larger Southern California rail boom \u2014 in creating a viable grid of public transit that connects L.A.\u2019s sprawling communities.<\/p>\n Tunneling was held up for years because of safety concerns.<\/p>\n (Etienne Laurent \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n In March, Metro approved a northern extension for the K Line<\/a>, which would run through Mid-City and West Hollywood, crossing the D Line. It has also green-lit a multibillion-dollar plan for a 13-mile underground subway for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor<\/a> linking the San Fernando Valley to the Westside. <\/p>\n When these other projects are complete, the D Line will serve as the crucial spine of the network, said Joshua Schank, a partner with InfraStrategies, a transportation strategic advisory firm, and former chief innovation officer of Metro.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce the Sepulveda line is built that will take you from the Valley to the city, and then the North Crenshaw line connects the K Line to the subway, L.A. will have a network that will allow so many more people to get to so many more destinations,\u201d Schank said. \u201cAnd it multiplies exponentially.\u201d<\/p>\n Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. politician who served 40 years on the City Council and county Board of Supervisors, said building a subway underneath Wilshire was a \u201cmonumental\u201d achievement \u2014 one he didn\u2019t think he would live long enough to see.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a pipe dream for so long \u2026 the notion that we would get a subway to the Westside,\u201d Yaroslavsky said. He credited a string of officials, from former L.A. mayors Tom Bradley to Antonio Villaraigosa, for pushing the dream of a rail line from downtown to the sea.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, it is not getting to the sea, but it\u2019s getting close,\u201d Yaroslavsky said. \u201cEvery time we build a new line in L.A., it\u2019s not just that line that gets built. It\u2019s the connection to all the other lines. It\u2019s a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.\u201d<\/p>\n The long journey to get a subway along Wilshire, Elkind said, is a microcosm of just how difficult it is to build rail in L.A.<\/p>\n After local officials generated excitement in the 1960s with the \u201cBackbone\u201d plan for a subway along Wilshire from Westwood to downtown and elevated rail to El Monte, the project struggled to get funding.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, Bradley made the idea of investing in the city\u2019s public transit a central plank of his 1973 mayoral election campaign. He embraced building a subway that connected downtown to the sea.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t until 1980 that Bradley and others were able to get a funding measure on the ballot that could pass, Elkind said. And then it took time to decide on routes and get routes permitted.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was so much controversy and disagreement among all these local elected officials and their state counterparts,\u201d Elkind said. \u201cSo many political compromises were made around which parts of L.A. were going to get rail, and there were relatively few dollars to go around and then the projects themselves were so expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n The Wilshire project, he said, kept getting pushed down in priority.<\/p>\n A 1985 methane explosion in L.A.\u2019s Fairfax District turned a Ross Dress for Less into a disaster scene.<\/p>\n (Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n In the early 1980s, officials made headway on a plan to build a subway under Wilshire. But the Western Avenue part of the project was scuppered in 1985, when an underground methane gas explosion at a Ross Dress for Less<\/a> store in Fairfax raised concerns about tunnel safety. Longtime critics of subways used the explosion to stoke community fears that tunneling would lead to exploding homes. <\/p>\n The methane disaster led Rep. Henry Waxman, whose district included Fairfax, to push for a federal law prohibiting all federal funding for the project.<\/p>\n Waxman ultimately struck a compromise with Rep. Julian Dixon<\/a> that allowed the project to proceed but prohibited tunneling in the Fairfax area for 20 years. That meant the subway would go just five miles west from downtown to Koreatown, stopping at Western Avenue. Eventually, a new stretch of subway took the line north, up Vermont, to North Hollywood.<\/p>\n Dixon, who represented parts of west and south central L.A., also pushed for the subway to go under Pico Boulevard instead of Wilshire. But Yaroslavsky, an L.A. County supervisor, blocked that by introducing a 1998 ballot measure <\/a>to restrict local funding for Metro subway extensions.<\/p>\n Former L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky on the rooftop balcony at the County Hall of Administration in 2014.<\/p>\n (Al Seib \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n \u201cTo spend billions of dollars to build a subway under a street that has no ridership would have been a colossal mistake,\u201d Yaroslavsky told The Times.<\/p>\n Yaroslavsky, who generated huge backlash from Black and Latino politicians in the Eastside and Mid-City, said he figured Congress would eventually repeal the Waxman amendment. <\/p>\n In the late 1990s, as L.A.\u2019s transit agency was financially struggling and facing fierce scrutiny from the federal government for its spending and services. Metro made strides in cutting costs and providing more accountability. <\/p>\n By the late 2000s, the reputation of Metro became very positive, Yaroslavsky said, noting L.A. was able to produce light rail to Pasadena<\/a> and extend the subway to North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2006, Waxman introduced legislation to repeal his subway tunnel ban<\/a> after a panel of geological experts agreed that tunneling along Wilshire could be done safely. The next year, Congress repealed the amendment<\/a>. In 2008, the county put Measure R, a half-cent sales tax<\/a> to fund transportation projects including the subway extension to Westwood, on the ballot.<\/p>\n More than 20 years after the Ross explosion, plans for a subway along Wilshire resumed. <\/p>\n \u201cThen we had to build it,\u201d Lindholm said, noting that construction presented myriad engineering challenges. <\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778149996_556_.jpeg\")
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