1.

Streetcars used to run through Beverly Hills for decades and freight trains used to run down the tracks just off Santa Monica blvd. until at least the late 70s. They're wise to reverse their former opposition, as everyone else is. Without the subway, city traffic will become more and more paralyzed, eventually losing businesses, lowering tax revenue and on and on.

2.

Go Purple Line Go!

(Why not also bring back the streetcars while they're at it...they are much cheaper than the subway; so cheap that the city of Beverly Hills could probably pay for them all by itself. About 10-20% the cost of a subway.)

3.

Streetcars have nowhere near the capacity of a subway train, which can carry thousands of people an hour. In the days of streetcars, the traffic they carried was relatively small.

Why is "cheap" the operating assumption when it comes to public transportation? Don't we deserve a quality transportation system? $5 billion to extend the Red Line is not an absurd amount of money, we continue to spend tens of billions on roads and look where it has gotten us.

4.

subways are just more fun. that should be the "pro" argument for any purple line extension debate.

5.

Streetcars didn't have the capacity that subways do, but they were used by an enormous chunk of the population. The reason they're not practical is because they were only efficient so long as they had a right of way advantage over automobiles. Otherwise they're just buses with the word "rapid" attached to the front that have to sit in traffic with everyone else.

6.

Have the developer of the old Robinson's May site pay for the Beverly Hills section of the subway line. You want to see clusterf**k at Wilshire and Santa Monica, just wait until construction starts.

7.

oh my god the construction! remember when h'wood blvd was being done? remember the sidewalk and street started sinking?? but go back a few years and remember when it was a quarter to ride (yea i know it only went from macauthur park into downtown - but hey, it was the first time i got to ride on a subway!) thems was the good old days.

8.

There were only a couple of sinkholes on Hollywood.

Many of the subways in New York were built via cut-and-cover, not by tunneling. You want to talk about disruption?

9.

Oh, and while I'm at it, the disruption caused by the construction of light rail lines along existing street sections (as opposed to derelict freight rail or Red Car ROW) is far, far in excess of that caused by subway construction. First and Third streets in Boyle Heights and ELA have been nightmarish the past couple of years and will continue to be such as utilities are relocated and sidewalks taken in. By contrast, you don't have to move any of the pipes or underground cables that run beneath streets when you build a subway by tunneling, because the subway tunnel is 40+ feet below the surface while the utilities are usually at a depth of 6 feet or less.

10.

Well, I was one of those residents that was initially opposed to construction of the subway through BH. Back in the say when the economy was in the toilet and I saw the effect on businesses in mid-Wilshire and on Hollywood Blvd (not only a sinkhole, but a building cracking up the middle) I didn't think businesses along Wilshire could survive. Frankly, I don't think a lot of them still could except for the big department stores if we end up with Wilshire blvd running one story above ground level as it was in mid-Wilshire back in the day. Which is why I think the line should turn north onto San Vicente and follow Burton Way into BH. There's a wide street with a disused median that can take the construction (and there can be a Beverly Center station) and the next station can be at Santa Monica and Canon where the old Post office is, and continue under Beverly Gardens park. The next stop is apparently in Century City, so why not take the line of least resistance?

11.

I agree. The train needs to go via Beverly Center and Cedars Sinai. Else you are just disenfranchising a lot of potential riders there.

12.

Wilshire blvd running one story above ground level as it was in mid-Wilshire back in the day

Huh? Wilshire was elevated at some point? I have never heard anything about that.

Tunneling under Wilshire shouldn't have to disrupt any businesses, or any street traffic for that matter, if it's done properly.

13.

to Hank and Tmp00, you have to remember that this is not the only subway or rail line that will be built for the westside. we cant have one line doing everything because it wont make sense and will take away from the line. There will be more, we just need the will to build them.

14.

I live in Hollywood, and work basically at the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire. I would KILL for a Subway that would get me here so I didn't have to sit in traffice for an hour to get 5 miles. Yay subway!!!

15.

Maybe many years from now, we'll see something real on this front. But this is still a good sign. Clusterf**k is putting it quite mildly for the intersection of Wilshire & Santa Monica. Combined with the ill-conceived mess that is the new stretch of Santa Monica Blvd. going through Century City (or the Transit Parkway or whatever they're calling it), and westside traffic is in seriously sad shape. Yikes.

16.

Pete wrote:
Huh? Wilshire was elevated at some point? I have never heard anything about that.

Pete, tmp00 is right.

I moved in to Koreatown in the middle of Red Line construction. It looked like Flint, Michigan from "Roger & Me."

I also have a side job in Boyle Heights, and I would have given anything if the Red Line was built the way the underground parts of the Eastside Gold Line are built now. This extension is nowhere near as bad as the Red Line was.

Wilshire Boulevard was elevated nearly a story high for about a quarter-mile to a third-mile near where the stations were. The street was a big, ugly pier of loose asphalt, wood and those metal plates DWP uses to close holes. The traffic was noisy, asphalt was noisy and Wilshire was closed for long stretches of time randomly.

The storefront businesses all but died. The office buildings actually tipped across 50 percent vacancy at times. Wilshire looked like a downtown in a Rust Belt city.

It was like this for about 6 years.

The upside, though, is that the subway has revitalized every community it served. Not in the sense that all the communities were Disneyfied, but without the trains the neighborhoods would have slowly and continually declined a la Detroit.

17.

Jesus, I had no idea about Wilshire, although I did know that Lankershim was done cut-and-cover. One wonders what genius decided to build the Wilshire segment that way, given that the machines used for the Gold Line tunnels use technology that's been around a good 20+ years.

I do know that the parts of the Eastside Gold Line that are at grade are actually causing way more disruption during their construction than are those below ground. Third Street in ELA is going to be completely dead in a year, while First between Boyle and Lorena is doing fine.