Name: Why L.A.’s Trains Can Take 4x Longer Than Driving | WSJ Pro Perfected
Uploaded: 2025-06-10T22:49:39.000Z
Duration: 7 min 56 s
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All the crisscrossing solid green lines on this map show LA's transit system essentially at its peak.

Los Angeles used to have one of the best mass transit systems in the entire country.

If you're trying to get from Santa Monica to Universal City, which is actually as the crow flies not that far, by public transport you have to take the E line all the way into downtown and connect to the B line.

The route would take about an hour and 45 minutes.

Driving in traffic could take about an hour, but...

It's probably going to take you about 25 minutes if there's no traffic.

This means riding the metro can take up to four times longer than driving.

So we asked the former chief innovation officer at LA Metro how he would take the city's transit system to a new prime.

The metro rail system has six lines, 107 stations and 109 miles of service across the county.

But most of those lines end here in downtown LA.

It's what New York City's system looks like too, with most MTA and commuter lines connecting or ending in Manhattan.

A monocentric design, which is typical in the United States, is intended to carry people from either the suburbs or from the outer reaches of the city into the center city and then back again.

But Manhattan has two things downtown LA doesn't quite have.

There are over 70,000 people per square mile in Manhattan.

You do see some density along the subway corridor, but even there, it's much lower than the densities along the New York subway corridor, especially in Manhattan.

And while Manhattan has 53% of jobs in a city of over 8 million people, downtown LA has just 7% of jobs in the county of nearly 10 million.

Downtown accounts for a very small percentage of employment in the region.

So as long as you have a transit system that's primarily oriented to getting people into and out of downtown, it's going to struggle in a place like Los Angeles to really carry substantial numbers of people.

But the problem isn't just that the system is centered on downtown, it's that it's centered anywhere.

LA is much more of a multi-nodal city, meaning there are lots of different small hubs rather than just one big dense place in the middle.

Some of these hubs are already on the current rail network, like Hollywood, Pasadena, and Compton.

But the system doesn't reach plenty of others, like Venice, Torrance, and the San Fernando Valley.

As LA expands its rail system, Joshua says it should look to not only add more hubs, but also change how it connects them.

What you don't want to do is what we have in the existing system, which is we're going to connect those by drawing lines through them to downtown.

What you want to be able to do is draw lines that cross different places and get you from one place to another without having to go through downtown.

The result is a polycentric system, like in London.

London itself may be the center, but within London, there's lots of different places where you see lines intersecting and creating nodes.

It's like having a bunch of interwoven crosstown lines, so you can go from Wembley Stadium to Wimbledon without having to go into central London at all.

Tokyo also has a polycentric system, where many stations have three or four lines, creating more points of connection.

And that makes getting around much easier by mass transit.

Some of these changes are already happening.

In 2016, LA Metro committed to raise $120 billion over 40 years to improve transit infrastructure, including the mass transit system.

The new K line is the second not to go downtown, instead intersecting with the only other one, the C line, at LAX's new station.

To Joshua, creating connective tissue between the major hubs is the best use of rail in LA.

But local transit within these hubs could offer neighborhood connectivity that makes the system useful not just for commuting across the city, but for everyday life.

Just look at the county's plans to extend the D line.

The stops are all placed at points of interest or major destinations.

It is underground, which means it's free of obstruction and is going to flow very quickly.

It's in a very, very dense corridor for Los Angeles, which means there's lots of ways to walk to and from the stations.

And most of those east-west streets are clogged during peak times.

So I expect this to be a very successful and highly used line and somewhat transformative for the city.

The D line extension was first proposed in 1961, but it took more than five decades to break ground.

Now it's expected to be fully open by 2027.

This line is an example of how expensive and time-consuming it is to build really good mass transit in modern cities in the United States.

It's going to be incredibly useful when it is done, but it took billions of dollars and multiple decades.

In order for Joshua's connecting hubs to work best, all these lines would need dedicated right-of-way to travel uninterrupted by traffic, like the D line.

If you think about the types of mass transit in Los Angeles, at the top of the hierarchy, you have heavy rail, which is going to be the highest cost, but also the highest benefit.

Heavy rail typically has the right-of-way and has more capacity, so it's best suited for high-density areas.

In addition to normal ones, LA has a bus rapid transit system, where the buses are also given dedicated right-of-way.

Bus rapid transit, BRT, is going to be much lower cost, but also lower benefit compared to heavy rail.

But since the 90s, LA has been building a lot of these light rail trains, which often run on surface streets.

Light rail is in that kind of middle range where it doesn't really have quite the benefits of heavy rail because it's going to be much slower most of the time because it's operating on street level.

But it also costs more than BRT, but doesn't necessarily provide that much more benefit than BRT.

Because if you're building at street level, it's going to have to interact with all the other things at street level, which include people, cars, bikes, lots of other stuff.

Light rail now makes up four out of the six metro lines in LA.

And in a comment to the Wall Street Journal, LA Metro said it has been successful in less dense corridors.

Today, 73% of Angelinos drive alone to work, and only 6.8% utilize public transit.

To understand one reason why, just look at these two maps.

The one on the left shows the amount of jobs that are available within a 90-minute commute by mass transit.

And the one on the right shows jobs available within a 30-minute commute.

There's a distinct inherent advantage that the car has when you cannot access that many jobs within a reasonable period of time by mass transit.

Cars and declining revenue were big reasons why LA's old trolley system slid into obsolescence by the 1960s.

Because there were mixed traffic with cars, as cars became more and more ubiquitous, the efficiency and usefulness of mass transit plummeted pretty dramatically.

To make LA Metro's expansion a success, Joshua says it will need to increase ridership, which is a challenge when just 16% of respondents to a USC survey said they think the Metro is safe.

Though LA Metro said that violent crime per boarding has fallen 15% from 2023 to 2024 after several initiatives to reduce crime.

So when it comes to the future of the system...

The worst-case scenario is that a lot of these lines, they're not going to be built at all because of opposition.

The best-case scenario is that all those lines on a map have become actual mass transit lines.

Though the battle between efficacy and efficiency is constant, Joshua expects any additions will help to increase ridership.

In reality, to build that perfect map, you know, all of us would be dead by the time it was complete.

And so people are constantly trying to find out, well, what can we build within a reasonable period of time that will be useful?

And that's why you see that LA winds up with kind of a substandard system, but it's better than no system.