My girlfriend and I used to speculate as to why the Metro Red Line ran so astoundingly far underground in LA. After all, New York.... My girlfriend and I used to speculate as to why the Metro Red Line ran so astoundingly far underground in LA. After all, New York and Paris subways are usually just one flight down, as are most others I've ridden; even in Tokyo, when a line is deep, it's ony so it can cross under the two or three other lines it meets at a given station. But LA's subways are deep underground--often three flights of stairs deep, one flight being abnormally long. The Vermont-Wilshire station has two platforms, one of which is so far down that there is only mechanical access--a two-stage elevator or the longest escalator I have personally ever seen. (I have not seen the famous hillsade escalator in Hong Kong.) The shallower of the two platforms has five landings on the staircase.

Since all this digging didn't come cheap, we kinda wondered: earthquake safety? Soil stability?

And now we know: Over the last few months, machines and hardhats have been swarming the former entry plaza at that selfsame Vermont-Wilshire station and have in fact torn it up and replaced it with a sixty-foot-deep hole. (Signs warn we'll have to detour to the back entrance of the station for a couple of years.)

It turns out that there had always been plans to build right over the stations: this one will receive a high-rise complex incorporating apartments and condos, offices, retail, and a school!

Apparently many of the stations will be developed in this way...a perfect synergy: providing customers for the subway, providing easy access to services for subway riders, and providing handy rent payments (presumably) to the MTA to help keep things running smoothly.

Twenty years ago, I would never have thought that transport policy in LA could make so much sense. (Or any sense at all, for that matter.) Looks like we've grown up a little bit after all. Thank you, La-La Land!