LA’s “Red Car” interurban system was built one line at a time by property developers who used fast interurban rail to make cheap property distant from the city center attractive to residential buyers.
Once the land was sold, developers sold the train lines to anyone fool enough to buy them, because they were inevitably a money-losing proposition - fares were regulated, but costs were not. Bad recipe for a profitable business.
By 1912, most of the lines had been bought by Henry Huntington, who merged them into a single system, standard-gauged all the track to make it heavy-rail compatible, and then sold the entire (money-losing!) system to the Southern Pacific, trading his shares in the interurban “Red Cars” for SP’s share of the local narrow-gauge streetcar system (the LARy “Yellow Cars”)
SP kept the system in business long past its “Sell By” date because, in addition to serving as (money-losing) mass transit during the day, it also provided SP with a (money-making) “last-mile” (more like “last 10 miles”, actually) freight delivery system, since electric locomotives could haul standard freight cars on the system’s standard-gauge rail.
Pacific Electric did a massive amount of freight traffic during the overnight hours in the early days, but that dropped off as roadways and delivery trucks improved.
After a brief revenue boost during the war making for a couple of rare profitable years, it eventually became entirely unprofitable, and SP closed most of it and sold its remnants to LA’s earliest public transit agency, which promptly closed the remainder.
Contrary to popular belief, mass transit in LA today is far, far superior to the heyday of the Red Cars. More of it runs on rubber tires, and less on rail, but today’s system provides more lines serving more areas during more hours more frequently and with better connectivity than the Red and Yellow Cars ever did.
The PE gets it reputation from its enormous amount of rail miles per capita, since it was built out ahead of demand - it was built to create demand, in fact.
It was what created LA’s famous sprawl - “A city that grows outward, not upward.”
But its riders didn’t love it any more than today’s riders love today’s LACMTA. Their complaints were much the same - it didn’t go enough places, it was too slow, it ran too infrequently, had limited night and weekend service, and was heavily overcrowded during peak hours.
The modern-day LA faux-nostalgia that claims the Red Cars were wonderful while simultaneously bad-mouthing today’s system is built of historical ignorance, wishful thinking, and white peoples’ aversion to buses as “only suitable for the poor.”
LA’s mass transit today is better than it’s ever been, and still improving rapidly. Don’t let uninformed stereotypes convince you otherwise.
