The NY Times has published another piece celebrating the extension of the Los Angeles Expo Line (which will take place on May 20th). I am really excited about this because the extension of the train will now pass through Westwood and this will mean that I no longer need to Uber to Culver City. The NY Times hints that this train will change LA. It won't. It will increase the menu of transit options in the city and poor people and middle class people will benefit but this train is not a subway. It is a slow moving light rail system with limited capacity.
The article ignores that land use regulations near the stations must change. Zoning rules will need to be changed along its route to allow for high rise buildings in walking distance to the train. For example, near the Bundy Station there are many low rise buildings in walking distance that could be knocked down and the land could be redeveloped for 20 storey buildings. This would be progress. LA zoning laws are the reason that the city has a strange combination of single family homes and high rise buildings.
LA is a great city to live in if you are rich. This Expo line investment will make it a better city for the poor and lower middle class. This type of redistribution (the train extension's billion dollar price tag is paid for using an increase in the sales tax) will make the city a little bit more like Boston rather than a full fledged subway city such as New York City. When I ride the LA Subway's purple line to Koreatown on Wilshire, there are very few people on the train relative to the counts who ride in Beijing and NYC and Singapore.