Foothill Future

Less than three hours after the Metro Gold Line Foothill extension completed its first jam-packed day on the new route, which extends from Pasadena to Azusa, California, a big rig crashed into the median of the 210, damaging the new line, and interrupting service between Allen and newly opened Arcadia.

            Welcome aboard the LA Metro.

Sunday’s misadventure, which is frustratingly relatable to those who have ever taken public transportation in Los Angeles, stood in stark contrast to Saturday’s opening, where 30,000 rediscovered Gold Line trains for the line’s third opening day, adding six stations the original Union Station to Pasadena route, as well as the Eastside extension. The $735 million, 11.5 mile extension is expected to serve an additional 14,000 passengers each weekday by 2030. The Gold Line already carried approximately 44,000 people between East Los Angeles and Pasadena.

            One of the things about public transportation is that people think it’s not a very interesting subject. But I think that just means that they’ve never had to take it before. For 1.4 million people a day in Los Angeles County, it’s a subject not easily ignored. Each ride tells its own story, and the Gold Line is uniquely Los Angeles, linking Latino and Asian neighborhoods, with colleges and museums. While recognizing our native tribes, our cultural backbone, paying homage to the city’s past, present and future.

To many millenials who grew up at the northern end of the city, where the 110 meets the 210, the Gold Line was a lifeline to real Los Angeles just one town over. It was a way as a kid to get to Chinatown to buy illegal shit like tobacco, knives, fireworks, toxic lizards and whatever other suspicious supplies you could think of before we got our drivers licenses. I used to take it the rest of the way home, catching the bus in La Canada after school to Old Town Pasadena and taking the train from Memorial Park to Sierra Madre. And as a college student it lets me go home from my apartment in Culver City, up to the bars in Highland Park and back to my parents’ all with one route. It’s pretty too – on the train, you can truly see where the Arroyo Seco meets the San Gabriels. But for that generation, the journey started in Pasadena, and ended in Los Angeles, any further east the tracks turned into freeway.

Saturday’s extension opening understood and capitalized on that sentimentality that many in this new generation has for these trains. In fact it was that sentimentality that made it all the more exciting for what it says about what the future holds. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that Metro intends to propose a $120 billion transportation sales tax on the November ballot to fund game changing options for Los Angeles transportation, in addition to those already under construction (the Downtown Regional Connector subway, the Purple Line subway, the Crenshaw/LAX line, and the Metro Expo Line) including rail connecting Hollywood to LAX, and a subway through the mountains of the Sepulveda Pass connecting the densely populated Westside and the San Fernando Valley. This year, for the first time in over 60 years, rail will reach the beach in Santa Monica.

The city is changing, and part of the reason why the Gold Line works, and why it means so much to a certain subset of Angelenos, is because the Gold Line is allowing their communities to be embedded, connected, part of the new LA. Communities like Azusa, Irwindale and Monrovia, which before Saturday, felt like a world away.