Because of its complexity and length this article is organized into two parts. Part I, which appeared in the previous issue of the Quarterly , traced attempts to improve rapid rail transit in Los Angeles from 1895 to 1925. This concluding installment traces the political, civic, and taxpayer response to the 1925 comprehensive regional rapid transit plan. The plan was eclipsed by a seemingly unrelated controversy about a union station for the steam railroads. Meanwhile, though frustrated in its plan for a crosstown subway, the rapid transit provider, the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), was not passive: it worked cooperatively with other public-sector and private-sector agencies to create viaducts that separated its trains from busy intersections, bought new rolling stock, and installed safety measures. The emerging multi-destinational, automobile-oriented city of the 1930s and 1940s led planners to include rail rapid transit in freeway medians, but the politically powerful State Division of Highways opposed it, as did various civic and commercial organizations and the Automobile Club of Southern California (ACSC). Sectional differences in how residents perceived their interests divided city council and state legislature support. PE’s management, now discouraged, gradually abandoned and finally sold its passenger service. Part II concludes with an examination of the PE’s financial condition in the 1920s in refutation of the often-made claim that the PE’s high debt and unprofitable financial account sheets precluded it from making capital investments.

Early in the twentieth century, Los Angeles’s regional interurban electric railway, the Pacific Electric (PE), developed serious operational problems because the PE had been assembled from separate railroads that hadn’t been designed to fit together, and because Los Angeles’s explosive population growth overtaxed its facilities. The PE wanted to speed its trains and unify its system with a crosstown subway, but in 1923 the Los Angeles City 1 Council blocked the PE’s plan and instead commissioned engineers and professional transit planners to devise comprehensive regional transit plans to be operated for the public good, not for private profit. These plans all focused on bringing lots of people downtown quickly, something irrelevant in a decentralizing city. Part I concludes with two seemingly propitious developments: the PE’s opening of its own mile-long but isolated Hollywood Subway, a compromise design but still impressive; and the unveiling of the most detailed and elaborate of the transit plans, as required by the new city charter. Part II, in the next issue, will describe why that comprehensive plan failed, then trace how political, economic, and demographic changes in the 1920s and 30s affected transit planning and why a plan to locate rail rapid transit in freeway medians failed. Part II will end with an examination of the PE’s financial condition as a refutation of a common explanation of the PE’s long decline.