Blue Line 20-year progress report
Added on Thursday, July 15th, 2010Photo by Fred Camino in the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. Used with a Creative Commons license.
For the anniversary that marks the first generation of modern urban rail in Los Angeles, July 14, 2010, was a day like any other on the Blue Line. No fanfare, no recognition, just people going about their business. The inaugural run of the Blue Line was the talk of the town. The Militant Angeleno was there, and he provided footage. The 10th anniversary was marked with a modern train paying an homage to history.
There’s not much to celebrate this time around. Metro just raised its fares on the 1st, and the deadbeat state is again flaking on funding, and that of course means another round of service cuts. The 20th anniversary also comes full circle to the 1990 opening day. Then and now, the Los Angeles economy was mired in a deep recession — both in the wake of financial crises and real estate bubbles.
While the anniversary itself went by without fanfare, the Blue Line itself has proven to be an important backbone and setting the pace for our still-growing network with ridership well north of 70,000 on weekdays. It has also been a line that has seen the extremes of few major transformative developments and most of the communities remaining as they were in 1990.
July 14 offered a look at what is different and the same with a fully mature light rail line.












