Riding the D in Los Angeles: city hopes new subway stations will be game changer (opens in new tab)

Some of this was covered in the article, but it’s not actually Los Angeles’ leadership’s fault (rare praise for a city I love and call home), it was shovel-ready and funded to be built in the 80s. Then there was a ballot measure due to ongoing construction problems of a separate line in the 80s that banned tunneling in Los Angeles. This wasn’t overturned until 2007! Then Beverly Hills (which is also not part of Los Angeles city government) fought this line for another 10 years, again with tunneling concerns, because they didn’t want it under them (not so fun fact, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, represented them). It went to the California Supreme Court and then the Federal Appeals Court, and finally, in 2017 was allowed to commence construction. Then Beverly Hills decided they wanted (and got) not one but TWO stops (and the only ones outside of downtown with turnstiles). Funny.

An indictment of the state legal system’s slowness, yes (see CAHSR), but the city consistently has fought many of its own nimby residents, other cities, the state, and the United States trying to claw back funding for this for those 60 years. It would not have been built without generations of support from city leadership. So there is hope!

With hundreds of miles funded and planned for or already under construction in the next two decades, the city’s rail future may be the brightest in the country.

Yeah... Kinda like how Paris used the Olympics to get the political willpower to cleanup the river.

City's trying to brand themselves and look good on a global stage does funny things.

> lolz

Well:

  "Ride the D" is a T-shirt and crop top design sold by the Los Angeles Metro ... "D" set inside a purple circle ... The slogan is a sexual innuendo, as "the D" is also slang for "the dick" ... The shirts ... have quickly gone viral ... sold out on February 27, 2026, just a day after launch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ride_the_D

Depends on the city. In LA, yes it’s very hard to live without a car. I live in Seattle and I live car free as well as many of my friends. It’s not that we can’t afford it, we’ve just built our lives around transit and biking and the city is pretty good for it. Then of course there’s NYC, which is likely better than most European cities for transit. But you’re right that the average here is far far worse when it comes to transit and living car free or car lite.

I lived in Silicon Valley without a car for 2 years. Commuted between Palo Alto and Santa Clara by Caltrain commuter rail. Took the local bus system frequently. Rented a car occasionally. It can be done but it's not easy.

Buses have a fundamental speed issue that subways do not because subways do not stop at intersections for cross traffic. At LA's vast scale you need a subway, possibly even express subways.

That's actually the official slogan by LA Metro: https://shop.metro.net/collections/ride-the-d

And someone even created a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ride_the_D

It's LA.