Los Angeles Railway In Brief

© Tom Wetzel 2003
Topics:
LARY's Seamy Side
Line-by-Line Statistics for 1940 (and Photo Tours)
Map of Streetcar Routes
Finances
The Era of Zone Fares

The Los Angeles Railway (LARY — pronounced "Larry") was the streetcar system around which central L.A. was developed. LARY used a yellow paint scheme — hence LARY was known as the "Yellow Car" system. Los Angeles area real estate and utility tycoon Henry Huntington gained control of LARY in 1898. The streetcar system grew rapidly through the first decade of the 20th century, when the population of Los Angeles more than tripled. After Huntington's death in 1927, the streetcar system was owned by the Huntington Estate (operator of the museum and library in San Marino) until its sale to National City Lines in 1944, at which time it was renamed Los Angeles Transit Lines.

The Pacific Electric "Red Car" system has become legendary in the history of Los Angeles. But in reality LARY/LATL had a much higher ridership — nearly three times as high.

Total transit boardings in 1950:

• Los Angeles Transit Lines: 320 million
• Pacific Electric Railway: 109 million

During the 1940s about a million people lived within about a half mile of the bus and streetcar lines of LARY/LATL. By 1950 some LATL bus lines penetrated as far as Beverly Hills on the westside, and the 5 streetcar line — the longest line — reached 13 miles south to Hawthorne. But for the most part LARY/LATL services were concentrated in the area that today would be called "central Los Angeles", and it covered this area fairly intensively.

From the data above, we can infer that there were 320 boardings on LATL buses or streetcars in 1950 for every man, woman, and child in LARY's service area. A "boarding" is any occasion when a person got on a bus or streetcar, irrespective of whether they used a transfer, used a token, or paid cash. About a third of all boardings on LARY/LATL in the '40s were transfers. If you got on a bus and then transfered to a streetcar to get downtown, oridinarily we'd say that was just one "trip". But, in transit lingo, that counts as two "boardings." To get a rough estimate of the actual trips, in the ordinary sense, we can look at the numbers of fares paid, and ignore transfers. In 1950, there were 223.5 million actual fares paid on LATL streetcars and buses. So that amounts to a bit more than 220 annual trips on transit for every man, woman, and child in the LART/LATL service area.

To put this in perspective, San Francisco is today one of the most transit-intensive cities in the United States, ranking with New York City. Currently the number of annual transit boardings (including transfers) per capita in San Francisco is about 270. Thus central L.A. in 1950 had a higher rate of public transit usage per capita than San Francisco does today.

LARY's Seamy Side

During the era of Huntington control (1898-1944), Los Angeles Railway had a poor reputation among ordinary Angelenos. For one thing, there was overcrowding.

When working class Angelenos compared the crowded and aging streetcars to Huntington's reputation as Mr. Moneybags, the result was often resentment. "Is he getting rich off of squishing us in?", they may have thought.

And it didn't help that Huntington's labor strategy was based on keeping wages low — and breaking unions. LARY broke union organizing efforts in 1901 and 1910. Huntington made it clear that anyone who joined a union was asking to be fired. During a major strike wave in 1919 -- telegraph operators and telephone and shipyard workers were already on strike -- the LARY and Pacific Electric workers walked out in unison. This almost became a city-wide general strike when railroad workers on the steam railroads that connected to PE started "hiding" freight cars bound for PE on isolated sidings around the region, to support the PE workers. The LARY and PE strikes were broken with massive hiring of scabs and heavy police support.

After another strike was broken by LARY management in 1934, the Amalgamated Streetcar and Bus Workers Union worked with the People's Transit Committee to put an initiative on the ballot to set up a competing city-run bus system. This probably would have driven LARY into bankruptcy. They got this on the ballot three times — in 1935, 1937 and 1939. These initiatives were all defeated. But in 1939 the union tried another tactic — they got an initiative on the ballot to require both a driver and a fare-collector on all streetcars. At that time LARY was trying to cut costs by converting to one-man operation, with the driver collecting fares. Although the voters approved this measure, the California Supreme Court threw it out. In July of 1942 the workers were able to take advantage of a wartime labor shortage in yet another strike — this one finally successful.

In the '10s LARY was notorious for the overcrowding on many of its lines. The shot at left was taken, however, during a 1919 streetcar strike. Because the Huntington management broke the strike by hiring untrained scabs, service continued to suffer from overcrowding for months afterwards. Overcrowding and strike-breaking were reasons that municipalization of LARY had strong support in the '10s and '20s. During World War II scenes like that at left returned to Los Angeles on the U line, serving Central Avenue, with reports in the press of people hanging on the bumpers and clinging to the steps.

Line-by-Line Statistics for 1940

This is an incomplete listing. Bus lines are not listed. Click on the line letter or number to see photos of that line.

Map of Streetcar Routes

The map below shows the Los Angeles Railway streetcar lines, and population density, in 1938. (To avoid making the map unreadable, I've not included LARY bus lines or lines of Pacific Electric, or bus lines of Los Angeles Motor Coach — a joint operation of PE and LARY.)

Finances

During the late 1930s LARY was generally able to generate a slight operating profit. Most of the lines listed above operated at a loss. However, the P and U lines generated enough profit to overcome the losses of the other streetcar routes. In 1944 LARY became LATL — a subsidiary of the infamous National City Lines consortium financed by motor bus suppliers (General Motors, Philips Petroleum, Mack Truck, Standard Oil of California, Goodyear). Through vigorous cost-cutting, fare hikes, and replacement of streetcars with buses after World War II, LATL was generally able to generate a return on invested capital in the vicinity of 5 percent until purchased by the state of California in 1958.

In 1958 LATL was combined with Metropolitan Coach Lines (the bus system that replaced Pacific Electric) under state ownership, forming the first MTA. The combined L.A. bus network was generally able to pay all of its operating costs from fares until the inflation of the late '60s generated operating losses.

But this "self-sufficiency" had a certain price:

• You often had to wait a long time for a bus.
• Transit workers weren't paid that well.
• The system was very bare bones. No funds for investment in improvements; not even for amenities like covered shelters, bus stop lighting, or map and schedule displays at bus stops.
• Development of the region ignored public transit and auto use continued to swell.

The first taxpayer subsidy for public transit in Los Angeles was finally instituted in 1971 when the state legislature passed the Transit Development Act, which provides a quarter-cent of the state sales tax for public transit systems. The RTD bus system expansion of the late '70s, with a growth of more than two-thirds in weekday passenger boardings, was financed through this thin sales tax support.

The Era of Zone Fares

The Los Angeles Railway and its various successors (LA Transit Lines, the first LA MTA, the RTD) charged additional amounts depending on the distance you wanted to travel. This was enforced through surcharges for crossing fare zone boundaries. For example, in 1972 the base fare for the first four miles was 35 cents and each additional four-mile zone was an additional 7 cents. The following map shows the Los Angeles Transit Lines bus and streetcar lines, with fare zone scheme, circa 1954. Riders found this system very annoying, and it slowed down operation as the driver had to examine the "zone checks" or transfers to make sure everyone had paid to go into the next zone. In 1974 RTD decided it was not worth the bother and instituted a flat fare.