Photograph by Bruce H. Cox / Los Angeles Times
I went down into the archives last night and pulled the original photo of Ralph P. Merritt, head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and our 1958 rapid transit plan. The map is labeled "Mass Rapid Transit Projection for Los Angeles Metropolitan Area."
I made a large scan of the map so everyone can try to read it. The original isn’t terribly clear (after all, this photo was only a graphic element and never meant to be used as a map) so I’ll interpret the labeling:
This map is broken down into "Major Radial Service" and "Major Circumferal Service." In other words, the entire transportation plan is seen as a wheel with spokes radiating from a central hub, which is–as you might expect for 1958–downtown Los Angeles. The circumferal route describes the rim of the wheel and the radial routes constitute the spokes. This design, by the way, is how the origin and growth of the city’s streetcar system was described in 1923: Spokes of a wheel radiating from downtown Los Angeles. The only difference then was that the "wheel" had no rim.
The radial routes are:
1. Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley
2. Pasadena, Pomona, San Bernardino and Riverside
3. Fullerton, Santa Ana and Whittier
4. Long Beach and San Pedro
5. Santa Monica
The circumferal routes are:
A. Airport, Coliseum and Beach Cities
B. Burbank and Glendale
C. Lakewood and Santa Ana
D. Santa Ana and San Bernardino
E. Downtown Los Angeles / Central Transit System
F. Fullerton and Santa Ana
Comments, insights? Let me know. Surely there must be some transportation experts who’d like to venture an opinion.
ladailymirror.com 
Have we not seen this schematic before?
Oh, yes, looks like a cross between the Pacific Electric network and the latter day Metrolink one. In other words, using pre-exisiting railroad right of ways!
Larry, when the Arroyo Seco Parkway later known as the Pasadena Freeway opened in 1941, mass transit in L.A. was condemned to a 50 year coma. The effect on commute times on that freeway and the next one built, the Hollywood freeway was nothing short of startling.
Instead of spending an average commute time of an hour riding the Big Red Pacific Electric cars to the inner suburbs, you could hop in your car and be home in 20 minutes or less.
In 1951, the scheduled running time on the Pasadena Short Line was 47 minutes. On the Hollywood/Valley line, it was 89 minutes to Van Nuys! Even before the freeway was extended to the Valley, commuters preferred driving the broad thoroughfare of Lankershim Blvd. then turning onto the cross streets that aerated the San Fernando Valley.
The freeways of the Doors’ L.A. Woman were not the clogged arteries that we have come to live with for the past 20+ years. The original Hollywood Freeway was almost pastoral in its ebb and flow. To be sure, there was a bottleneck on the early 101 (now Interstate 5) through Santa Fe Springs but for the most part the L.A. Freeway system was remarkably uncongested in the 1950’s, 1960’s, even into the 1970’s.
Therefore the 1958 mass transit plan would have been D.O.A.. Who needed it? Angelenos were enraptured as
the Freeway system was being built out. It was only in the 1960’s that the brakes were selectively applied and
work halted on Freeway 2, the proposed Beverly Hills Freeway that was left hanging below Hathaway Hill, Freeway 90, the confused Marina del Rey Freeway that became the short lived Richard M Nixon Fwy and Freeway 7, the Long Beach Fwy which ended at a dead end in Alhambra.
It was precisely due to the non building of the Beverly Hills freeway that pressure built for a cross town mass transit solution. Of course, in typical L.A. fashion, the route was perverted and there still isn’t a cross town solution! Every other rail solution implemented during the past 20 years is a sideshow to what has been mandated by economic geography.
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Mr. Fields is correct.
There was no political support because the freeways were a pleasure to drive.
For a while.
Fast forward to 2008, with 12 million people in the L.A. metroplex, and the freeways are not so much fun anymore, except maybe at 2:00 a.m.
More freeways cannot be built simply due to the excessive cost of property takings, even if we WANTED to cut up neighborhoods with more freeways, which many people don’t. The recent study showing that putting the 710 freeway underground wouldn’t be too expansive, because taking properties for a surface freeway would cost just as much, shows our dilemma at this time.
Fortunately, building subways solves that problem. They are not cheap, this is true, but they are worth the investment.
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