Earliest Bus Lines in Los Angeles

Start dates for the first bus lines

Buses came to Los Angeles as the result of a political fight. In the summer of 1919 there was a mass strike on the streetcar system. Workers had been organized by the Amalgamated Association of Streetcar Employees (predecessor of the presdent-day Amalgamated Transit Union). The streetcar company (Los Angeles Railway) was owned by tycoon Henry Huntington, main financial backer of the anti-union "open shop" movement in Los Angles before World War 1. Huntington's management smashed the strike by hiring permanent replacements.

After the strike was broken, the Los Angeles labor movement (through its two socialist representatives on the city council) proposed that the city set up a competing city-owned bus system. The Los Angeles labor council proposed this as a way for the strikers to be re-employed. If the city had done this, it would probably have driven Los Angeles Railway into bankruptcy. But Mayor Snyder, a "progressive" Republican, refused to go along. In 1923, sensing an opening, a group of liberal investors, led by Gibbs MacAdoo (later elected as a New Deal Democrat Senator from California) proposed to set up a "People's Bus Company" to compete with the Los Angeles Railway. The backers got an initiative on the ballot for April 1923 to permit this.

The Los Angeles Railway's public counter-arguments were very smart. They were clearly designed to appeal to a working class audience. They pointed out that the bus lines proposed by the People's Bus Co. were all on the more affluent Westside of the city. Moreover, they were proposing to charge a 10 cent fare. This was twice the fare charged by Los Angeles Railway. The streetcar company said the bus proponents were obviously not aiming to serve the whole city but a more affluent clientel on the Westside.

At that time the largest circulation newspaper in Los Angeles was a pro-labor social-democratic paper, the Los Angeles Record. For many years the Record had campaigned for city ownership of the transit system. The Record was persuaded by the streetcar company's arguments and came out against the proposal. They accused the "People's Bus Company" backers of being "greedy profiteers." Although the labor council continued their endorsement, the measure was narrowly defeated.

In the campaign fight over this issue, the streetcar companies promised a huge expansion in streetcar and bus lines, if the measure was defeated. Very few streetcar extensions were ever built, but the streetcar companies put in an order for more than 80 buses — the largest single bus order in U.S. history up to that time.

But the streetcar companies didn't quite live up to their promises. Many of the new bus lines were merely feeder lines to the streetcars. These were set up instead of building streetcar extensions. Many of the new major lines were set up on exactly the routes on the west side of the city that the People's Bus Company had proposed, and these were set up by a new company, Los Angeles Motor Coach, that charged exactly the ten cent fare that the People's Bus Company had proposed. This became a source of considerable irritation to Los Angeles transit riders in the following years.

The following photo shows a bus on the Western Avenue bus line picking up passengers at Pico Boulevard in 1926. The Western Avenue bus line had only existed for three years when this shot was taken.

Starting Dates for the First Bus Lines in Los Angeles