All over Los Angeles, you can see this scene: old tram tracks exposed during road work, or simply from deterioration of the asphalt on our.... All over Los Angeles, you can see this scene: old tram tracks exposed during road work, or simply from deterioration of the asphalt on our over-trafficked streets. Sometimes, as in this case, in unlikely places...I photographed these at the corner of Heliotrope and Rosewood in East Hollywood, a residential corner of little houses and older apartment buildings, only a block away from Vermont to the east and Beverly to the south, both streets that would have had tram service back when Angelenos had more freedom of choice in how to travel.

These would most likely have belonged to the Los Angeles Street Railway, which ran green PCC cars all over town, not to the much more famous Red Cars of the Pacific Electric, which was more of an interurban service. I rode on the green cars a couple of times as a child; never on the Red. Now we are slowly rebuilding both systems at many thousands of times the cost that simply keeping and modernizing them would have entailed. They were extensive systems: I pass by old PE structures (often just foundations) all the time, and tram tracks are always peeking up through broken asphalt. Inches away, much of the system still exists; smothered but still shiny rails still tying Los Angeles together.

How much better our city would be if we could still ride those rails, still be free not to take a car when a car is not the best choice...which is usually.

Instead, we're condemned to metalclad ennui for a little while longer--those of us who aren't fortunate to live near good transit junctions, and who haven't yet discovered bicycles. But it's coming, as it must, if LA is to survive as anything other than an elegant slum: the Red Line extensions are back in active planning, the Expo Line is under construction, the Gold Line's growing at both ends. We need more, though. We need what we threw away half a century ago: an efficient, fast, and comprehensive electric rail transit system. We had it; we lost it. Our bad.