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Zac Estrada @zacestrada.com · 07/05/2026

Cost aside, here's pretty much the reason it took an extra 40 years to put a subway under one of the worst stretches of road in LA, and that's saying something. Looking forward to being on Wilshire in the middle of a Friday is something no one has ever said www.latimes.com/california/s...

In the early 1980s, officials made headway on a plan to build a subway under Wilshire. But the Western Avenue part of the project was scuppered in 1985, when an underground methane gas explosion at a Ross Dress for Less store in Fairfax raised concerns about tunnel safety. Longtime critics of subways used the explosion to stoke community fears that tunneling would lead to exploding homes.

The methane disaster led Rep. Henry Waxman, whose district included Fairfax, to push for a federal law prohibiting all federal funding for the project.

Waxman ultimately struck a compromise with Rep. Julian Dixon that allowed the project to proceed but prohibited tunneling in the Fairfax area for 20 years. That meant the subway would go just five miles west from downtown to Koreatown, stopping at Western Avenue. Eventually, a new stretch of subway took the line north, up Vermont, to North Hollywood.

Dixon, who represented parts of west and south central L.A., also pushed for the subway to go under Pico Boulevard instead of Wilshire. But Yaroslavsky, an L.A. County supervisor, blocked that by introducing a 1998 ballot measure to restrict local funding for Metro subway extensions.

In 2006, Waxman introduced legislation to repeal his subway tunnel ban after a panel of geological experts agreed that tunneling along Wilshire could be done safely. The next year, Congress repealed the amendment. In 2008, the county put Measure R, a half-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects including the subway extension to Westwood, on the ballot.

More than 20 years after the Ross explosion, plans for a subway along Wilshire resumed.

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Zac Estrada @zacestrada.com · 07/05/2026

And in LA, a train stops next to an automotive museum. I don't have a lot of dreams but that's one of them www.latimes.com/california/s...

The new Wilshire/Fairfax Metro D Line station is right next to the Petersen Automotive Museum. (Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

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