Los Angeles has a new metro station closer to LAX airport, and a new north-south K line serving it. (Erik Em) Erik rides the C line from downtown Los Angeles west to Expo/Crenshaw station, and the new K line south to the airport. Here are system maps to show how the lines relate to the rest of the subway network and the region. The east-west C line with the old airport station is extended to the new station. Erik also discusses an airport peoplemover that’s under construction and will also serve the station.
This is an open thread.
The hype of the new LAX station supersedes its actual practicality. The station is located nearly 2 miles from the nearest airport terminal. The planned People Mover will definitely help. But the overall customer experience of using transit to LAX is still dampened by the fact that both Metro lines serving the airport don’t go downtown and requires a shuttle bus that gets stuck in traffic to access the terminal.
Yes, LA finally gets a “train to the airport”. But it still doesn’t go to popular destinations. Maybe give it another generation.
OMG! Having to transfer to another line to get between LAX and Downtown!
Sound Transit says it’s not bad. That’s why they’re planning DSTT2 with awful multi-level transfers! They want to take a direct connection and sever it — with a bad transfer layout to boot!
People that want to go to NE Seattle or Snohomish County or the Eastside from SeaTac on Link will experience a worsening connection — unless they start complaining now!
With the exception of NYC, I can’t think of any other city that has a rail line serving it’s airport that doesn’t go to its downtown. Visitors who are willing to opt for transit are mostly looking for a direct rail connection to a city’s downtown. If there isn’t one, then they’re Ubering instead. We transit nerds are willing to make the transfer. Most people are not. Transit needs to be marketable and competitive – not only efficient. In the case of Los Angeles, the city is so massive that riders will use the C & K lines to access the airport. But i bet it won’t come near to our ridership numbers for SeaTac.
At least for Seattle there will still be direct light rail service to part of Downtown Seattle. Los Angeles’ situation is different level of craziness that ST3 plan cannot compete. LA Metro has not just one but two light rail routes passing LAX airport, but neither runs anywhere close to Downtown LA.
I just hope that LA Metro eventually can beat the NIMBY in Bel-Air and choose heavy rail mode for Sepulveda Corridor line so there will be at least a chance for them to create direct heavy rail service between DTLA and LAX by interlining Sepulveda corridor and Metro D Line.
“NE Seattle or Snohomish County or the Eastside from SeaTac on Link will experience a worsening connection — unless they start complaining now!”
The time to complain was in 2016. There’s no chance of heading it off now unless the majority of the ST board changes its mind, or unless ST finds it flat-out can’t afford DSTT2. So far only one or two boardmembers have raised any questions about the approach.
It’s not just the train-train connection to reach downtown LA. It’s also the shuttle bus connection to reach the first train, plus additional connections after downtown to reach most of the city. Individually, each piece doesn’t seem that bad, but it adds up.
“The time to complain was in 2016. There’s no chance of heading it off now unless the majority of the ST board changes its mind, or unless ST finds it flat-out can’t afford DSTT2.”
While the broad lines were shown in ST3, the lousy, multi-level transfers were not. In fact, the current preferred alternative is not even consistent with what was promised in ST3 for Downtown Seattle. The 2016 diagram implied cross-platform transfers (or station platforms where both lines would pass).
So the board should have no qualms about not staying “consistent” either ST3. The fight does not have to be over.
@hz
They studied the direct to airport rail line a couple times using the harbor subdivision. The main problem is that most of the density is actually to the west of downtown la.
Most people would be better served by a north extension of the k line or sepulveda line extended down rather than backtracking in the expo or d line.
Secondly, while it could be 20 minutes if non stop most likely you’d need to include some infill station which would further slow it down compared to using the k or republic’s extended line.
https://la.urbanize.city/post/should-metro-build-lax-union-station-express-train
With the exception of NYC, I can’t think of any other city that has a rail line serving it’s airport that doesn’t go to its downtown.
I think you are talking about two different things. It is common to have a people mover (or spur line) to connect riders from the airport to the main line. This is the case with the Oakland Airport as well as JFK. There were plans to add something similar for LaGuardia but they fell through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_LaGuardia.
But once riders take the spur/people mover to the metro they can usually take a direct train to downtown. But that is mostly just luck. Most subway systems are radial in nature because they are strongly centered. L. A. is the opposite. It is a hugely sprawling city with demand everywhere. The rail system reflects that as it is a bit of a hybrid between a grid and a radial system (with downtown as its center). Given the nature of L. A. it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask people to transfer again if they happen to be headed downtown. It seems just as likely they would be headed to the dozens of other major destinations in L. A.
From a practical standpoint it is really not that different than flying to Newark (and better than flying to LaGuardia). From Newark you take the AirTrain Newark. From there you can take a train to Penn Station (in Manhattan). But that is the only station in downtown. The odds that you are staying right there seem pretty slim. Chances are you are transferring twice, just like you would in L. A.
It’s not just the train-train connection to reach downtown LA. It’s also the shuttle bus connection to reach the first train,
The shuttle bus will be replaced by a people mover.
plus additional connections after downtown to reach most of the city.
Except for much of the city you wouldn’t go downtown. The people-mover will directly connect to the C and K Line. From there you can access the A and E Line. That only leaves the B and D lines. Eventually the K Line will be extended north (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Line_Northern_Extension) which would connect to both of those lines as well. For now you have the bus network and that is largely hit or miss and quite complicated (https://www.metro.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/bus-rail-system-detail.pdf) since, well, we are talking about L. A.
A few airports do have short rail lines connecting the terminals to the public transit system besides NYC. They include Phoenix, DFW, Miami and Oakland — and the connections go directly to downtowns.
Boston isn’t great (Silver Line buses to rail). San Francisco Airport doesn’t directly connect to Caltrain. San Jose, Dallas Love Field and San Diego skipped their airports completely with nearby light rail lines (like NYC did with LaGuardia), and have toyed with better connections for decades. Sacramento has wanted to extend light rail to their airport but can’t get the funding together. Dulles’ new station is a further hike from the terminals than the LAX people mover is, like ours is. Charlotte is planning a rail station too far from the terminals.
The best I’ve seen in the US are Cleveland and Atlanta. Chicago, Portland, St Louis and Baltimore are reasonably good too, like ours. The access at Denver and Philly is good, but frequencies aren’t great.
The LAX People Mover construction is way behind schedule. It’s a messy, ugly saga with lawsuits and delays. It should have opened in 2023.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover
Hopefully it opens in the next year.
The K line north extension will make the airport connection much more useful. Of course, it’s not supposed to open until 2047…
Ouch. That is a long time for a good project.
It is further than 2047 and is pushed back to the 2060s or 2070s
The 2047 timeline was when the k north line extension was supposed to be elevated. The elevated alignment was rallied against for a fully underground alignment that la metro cannot afford.
@HZ: Options 4 and 5 (Automated Heavy Rail) would be an order of magnitude better. Yes, you have a forces transfer at Westwood, but it’s between two lines with sub-five minute headway. And operations issues on one line won’t screw over service on the other.
Even it is a transfer, I think that’s still better than K transfer E.
Interlining is D and Sepulveda line is probably too much of ask now when they are still struggling getting phase I of Sepulveda heavy rail built.
I got to watch one of the most interesting football matches I’ve ever seen yesterday. Urawa parked the bus for most of the match after scoring their goal early on. How did Inter Milan eventually break through? With a bicycle!
What does this mean? Parked what bus where? On the field or inside the stadium? Or are “bus” and “bicycle” technical soccer terms? Or is it metaphorical, Urawa players made an impenetrable wall until Inter Milan found a narrow gap and went through it?
Park the bus=very defensive strategy where a team has most of its players defending in their own penalty box. Urawa scored an early goal and then “parked the bus” in front of their own goal for the rest of the game hoping to win 1-0.
Bicycle kick=with their back to goal, a shooter kicks the ball over their head to take a backward shot on goal. When it works, it’s spectacular. Inter scored their first goal on a bicycle kick.
At least LA was astute enough to install down escalators.
Sam, I have a theory. Do you want to hear it? My theory is that the Comment Section doesn’t get up and read STB until 11am on weekends. I get up at 8 or 9am and check the articles and comment away, but new the weekend ones have zero comments then, unlike weekdays, and that makes me a little disappointed that nobody loves the articles. But then around 11am the Comment Section piles in, and by evening it has stacked up an impressive 40 or 60 comments. So I think STB readers get up very late on weekends. Or maybe they go to church first before doing something secular like reading transit articles.
“But Mike,” you say, “Jordan posted at 7:11am and Brent at 9:12am, so that disproves your theory. And you didn’t get here until 11:31 am so you’re the one that’s late.” Well, first off, Sam hasn’t posted anything yet, so he got up even later than I. Two, even if today is an exception, it happened yesterday, and last weekend, and several weekends before that. So I’d call that the majority trend. My theory is nice and insightful, isn’t it?
On varying weekends, I’m up qt 5a for work. It just so happens that I had some extra time this morning and saw a post about an airport I frequent. On weekends I’m not up with the sun, I’m usually waking up after 10a and doing recreational stuff. Depending what I’m doing, I’ll visit STB later in the day. But my main STB activity is during the week when I’m at work and forced to constantly be online with a large desktop, making commenting easier than on a phone.
Two things from the video. The first and only time I’ve been to LAX was for a trip to Long Beach in the early 2000s. I arrived at the airport and went out to the sidewalk to wait for an airport shuttle bus to the external transit center. The airport was so huge that when I got to the sidewalk, I first had to sit down for ten minutes just to cope with the size of the airport and city. Then I took the shuttle bus, which arrived every couple minutes.
At the transit center I switched to a county bus to Aviation station, the old airport metro station on what was then the Green line (now C line, but still green). That’s an east-west line that was infamous for having relatively low ridership. I took it to Rosa Parks station and transferred to the Blue line to Long Beach.
The Blue line was mostly surface and traveled around the same speed as the cars on the adjacent boulevard, but at several major intersections it went up over the intersection and was faster.
Yes, the trip from the airport to the metro station must have taken ten or fifteen minutes, but I didn’t think it was especially bad. Of course, I was only going to travel it a few times in my life. And I’ve had similar or longer experiences at Dallas and Denver and Newark, so it seemed not unusual for the US. So the new airport station is welcome, but I wouldn’t say the old arrangement was horrible.
You still take two trains from the airport to either downtown LA or Long Beach, so that hasn’t changed.
The issue with train-to-train transfers is how good the transfer is. It should be a short walk and no more than a 5-minute wait. The problem with ST’s proposal is the unusually wide train-to-train transfers, as if you were transferring to mainline commuter/intercity rail where logistics prevented the metro station from being any closer. That shouldn’t be the case for Link-to-Link transfers in the center of downtown on two likes the agency recently built. The whole point of a multi-line metro is that half or more of the origin-destination pairs require a transfer, so it makes the network two or three times as useful as just your home line. But some of that is lost when the transfer overhead is excessive.
The Link shuttle busses seemed to be running much more frequent than half hourly, at least yesterday before and after the game. Sound Transit staff were very good at directing people to and from the shuttle busses. It was packed, but orderly. I opted for the streetcar on the way there and the shuttle bus on the way back. The streetcar was serviceable but would have to run much more frequently to accommodate game day crowds, probably every 3 – 5 minutes as opposed to every 15. Having City Center Connector as a backup clearly would have helped ease the pressure off the shuttle busses. During future closures, it might be a good idea to have separate busses running directly “express” between SoDo and Capital Hill. Quite a few people were coming from the airport with luggage, and taking the train further north. Took up valuable space during the crushload before and after the game. And quite a few people with luggage (obviously going to the airport) were waiting for the shuttle bus SB when I got off at Cap Hill.
PS it also showed how much more capacity light rail provides versus busses, even crush loaded articulated busses running frequently. Crush loaded busses were arriving at Capitol Hill every few minutes, but the rail, which was running every 15, wasn’t very crowded at all.
There actually were some express buses from SODO to Capitol Hill. They were chartered from Bel Air as an emergency measure, but there were only four out doing the service. KCM by some miracle was able to scrounge up enough drivers to get a decent headway for the shuttle buses, so the charter buses weren’t as integral to the bridge as they might have been otherwise.
That’s what some people said yesterday, that when it actually started ST finally did the right thing and had frequent shuttle buses. So why did it have to scare people and make them scramble and worry about visitors for days before that? It was an artificial problem of ST’s making.
If the reason really was lack of drivers, why didn’t ST say that publicly at the beginning and apologize for not being able to provide frequent service? It gave the impression that ST thought more service was unimportant, or Link on weekends is unimportant.
I mean ST could only relay the number that KCM gave them. Metro was running a lot of additional service for the game which made it difficult to get people for the shuttle. If metro says they don’t have drivers then there’s not much ST can do. Publicly throwing metro under the bus is also not wise or fair as well. Given the circumstances, ST did the best that they could and were able to eek out as much of a win as possible for this one, in my opinion.
That’s speculation. We don’t know Metro didn’t have enough drivers this weekend or that that was the reason for the infrequent shuttle.
It’s not speculation, but I don’t have a source with proof to give you, so I guess you’d have to trust my word. Whether anyone does is up to them. All I’ll say is that the people I have talked to at the agency care deeply about passenger experience and try their hardest to make things go as smoothly as possible. Accusing people working around the clock to make things work for passengers of not caring is not correct, in my opinion.
That being said, communication could be better, as always, but the public got the info that ST had at the time about the headways.
“It’s not speculation, but I don’t have a source with proof to give you, so I guess you’d have to trust my word.”
If you said somebody in ST told you it intended to have more frequency but Metro just didn’t have the drivers, I’d be inclined to believe it. But without that or a public announcement or a quote by an ST staff in the newspaper, we don’t know what ST intended. I’m sure there are staff who care deeply about passenger experience, but a general concern doesn’t necessarily mean a decision for 10-15 minute shuttle service this weekend, or that that person has the authority to make it happen. Part of the problem with ST is it’s often not transparent about why things happen, so we’re left in the dark. In some of the single-trackings downtown in the past two years, frequency was 20-40 minutes without any explanation why.
If the majority of the ST board cares deeply about passenger experience, why are they pursuing a DSTT2 with 8-minute and 9-escalator transfers? Can’t they see that prevents a subway from fulfilling its mission of connecting any station pair reasonably conveniently? If logistics really prevent ST from making the tunnel shallower and moving it closer to the existing stations — things that weren’t known before the 2016 vote — why doesn’t go back to square one and say we can’t have a tunnel with these kinds of limitations, and think of what else it can do to keep transfers acceptable and avoid making Link a laughingstock among subway cities?
Definitely agree with Brandon that there should be express shuttle service. Slogging through downtown and Cap Hill, especially now with that all roads in and out of the Hill are single lanes, is a poor experience for customers.
Re the Spanish Solution: I met a friend of a friend from Spain at the No Kings Rally. We took the monorail from downtown to Seattle Center. At the end I mentioned how the station design is Spanish solution (with people exiting to the right platform and entering from the left platform). He didn’t recognize the term or know of any stations in Spain with this kind of layout.
I told him my other friend from Granada told me the entire city of Granada is walkable. He said the entire country of Spain is walkable.
I don’t think it is that common, even in Spain. The Madrid Metro has 276 stations. Only 12 of them use the Spanish Solution (although they tend to be very busy). I don’t know how many of the stations in the Barcelona Metro have them even though it was the first with one.
I’ve wondered if the Spanish solution could work for SODO transfers between the 1 line and 3 Line. If all trains had platforms in between (think four trains and three platforms as proposed), then all four trains could meet at the same time and give all the riders enough time to walk through trains to get to the one that they want (no level changes). It sounds like a logistical timing challenge though.
Two center platforms would probably work better there — or one center platform if ST wanted to save money.
I’d suggest it for CID except it would be only ultimately advantageous to go between West Seattle and the Eastside. That number is likely very small. Of course, it would be much higher if it was the 1 and 2 Lines for Eastside/ SeaTac trips.
I live in L.A. & if you want to go to Downtown L.A. you have 3 Ways from the LAX Metro Transit Center…
Take the K Line from the Metro Transit Center to the End at the E Line Expo Station & Walk Upstairs & Cross Crenshaw Blvd to to E/B Platform & Catch the E Line to Downtown L.A., if you have to go to Union Station, Transfer to the A Line at Pico Station, you have 5 Chances to Connect between Pico & Little Tokyo Stations, also at the 7th & Metro Station you can Transfer to the B&D Lines Downstairs that Run Under Hill Street towards Union Station also.
The Second way is to Take the C Line which Runs along the Middle of the 105 Freeway & Transfer to the J Line at Harbor Station, Take Elevator Downstairs to Freeway & Connect with the G Line, or 460 Bus which Takes you also to Downtown L.A., the 460 also Takes you to Disneyland going Southbound & also the J Line takes you past the Union Station.
The Last Option is take the C Line Farther East to the Rosa Parks Transit Center & Transfer Downstairs to the A Line through Downtown L.A. & Runs with the E Line on the Same Track through Downtown L.A. & Splits Off after Little Tokyo Station through Union Station & on to Azusa.
Yep. The last option can get you to Pasadena and Long Beach too!
I’ve not done it but I’ve sensed that the K-Expo transfer (first option) is a bit of a hassle with luggage.
And none compare to the 3D transfers being planned for Downtown Seattle.
You forgot the Flyaway bus, which is going to truncate at the LAX transit center once the people mover opens.
https://piercetransit.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Pierce-Transit-Destination-2045-LRP-2nd-Draft.pdf
Asking for comments on Pierce Transit Long Range Plan.
Stop pretending Runner scales in an urban environment, and realize it’s a money pit.
Start negotiating with SDOT, which has a complete streets mandate, to take a lane rather than build new infrastructure for BRT.
Another Link reduction this Saturday, June 28, but just from 4-9am, to inspect the I-90 bridge. (What does the downtown tunnel have to do with inspecting a bridge three miles away?) Shuttle buses Westlake-SODO every 7-10 minutes; Link beyond that every 12 minutes.