Regional Connector: A Light Rail Tunnel Through Downtown Los Angeles

Welcome to Infrastructure Spotlight, a new series on Newshacker Blog examining major U.S. infrastructure projects in-depth. After visiting New York in the first post of this series, today we’ll be heading over to the West Coast to discuss the Regional Connector project in Los Angeles.

Mass transit in Los Angeles is fairly lackluster. A car is required to get around the city efficiently, and there are still many areas not served by the city’s subway and light rail network. However, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or LA Metro, is looking to change that. The Regional Connector, a light rail tunnel project under construction in Downtown Los Angeles, is the first step of that plan.

Many rail transit systems (be that subway, light rail, or regional rail services) in the U.S. share a common problem: they are too geared toward downtown travel and operate via a hub-and-spoke model, with most trains terminating at a city’s downtown core. This isn’t a problem for most commuting trips, but it seriously discourages the use of transit outside of weekday commutes, since it becomes inconvenient to travel crosstown or between suburban areas served by the trains, as a downtown transfer is needed.

The same can be seen with LA Metro’s current light rail and subway network. The vast majority of trains branch off from downtown and serve surrounding areas.

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Currently, the A and E light rail lines, which run to Downtown Long Beach and Downtown Santa Monica respectively, terminate at the Seventh Street/Metro Center station in Downtown Los Angeles, with an interchange to the B and D subway lines. The Seventh Street station terminal is not ideal for the A and E lines, as passengers trying to get to Union Station, where Amtrak and Metrolink regional rail trains terminate, need to make a transfer. It also makes connections between the two lines and the L line needlessly complex.

This is where the Regional Connector comes in. The project will build a two-mile-long light rail tunnel downtown, connecting the current terminal of the A and E lines with L line tracks in Little Tokyo. This will allow A and E line trains to through-run onto the current L line tracks and vice versa.

As part of the Regional Connector project, the current Little Tokyo/Arts District station served by the L line has been shut down, and a new underground station will be built nearby. Two new downtown stations on the Regional Connector, Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill station and Historic Broadway station will open along with the tunnel.

With a new tunnel connecting A and E line tracks with L line tracks, the L line will be discontinued and split into two new segments. The current E train will be given a new gold color (currently used on the L line) and will take over L train service from Little Tokyo/Arts District station east to Atlantic station. The current A train will take over L train service from Little Tokyo/Arts District station north to APU/Citrus College station, via Union Station.

This new service pattern will offer passengers on the current A, E, and L lines one-seat service into the heart of the Los Angeles downtown district, and will greatly enhance crosstown travel by eliminating downtown transfers.

The change will make the A and E lines substantially longer — the new E line will be 23 miles long, while the A line will be almost 50 miles.

As of writing, the two-mile-long tunnel is expected to open in mid- to late-2022, two years behind schedule and around eight years after construction began in 2014.

Though the Regional Connector is great and will drastically improve transit in the Los Angeles area, it is less-than-ideal in one area: it is a light rail tunnel. After the tunnel opens, the new A and E lines will be exceedingly long, making rides along the whole length of the line lengthy. (It could take up to two hours to travel the entirity of the A line.)

This is a concern as light rail is not particularly well suited to long distance travel; a subway system, like that currently in use on the B and D lines would have been a much better improvement. Not only would a heavy rail subway line provide faster travel speeds, it will also expand capacity, as heavy rail carries significantly more passengers than light rail. However, upgrading the future A and E lines to heavy rail would be quite expensive.

Los Angeles is planning a lot more transit projects in preperation for hosting the Games in 2028. The K line will be a new light rail line connecting the C and E lines, provding connections to Crenshaw, Leimert Park, Inglewood, and the airport by 2022. A new people mover is also planned to connect the airport terminals and a station served by the C and K lines by 2023, while westward extension of the D line subway is under construction in phases. The A line is also currently being extended northward to Pomona, which will be operational by 2025. These will help make Los Angeles more transit friendly, but the city is still a long way away to being as walkable as cities like Boston or New York.