In this saga of missed opportunities and conscious denial, some of the most progressive faces in local politics have hindered, rather than led, the charge for traffic relief. To placate his wealthy constituents' fears of "those people" riding trains into their neighborhoods, powerful Westside Congressman Henry Waxman stopped the subway at Western Avenue, blaming his lack of support for a Wilshire Boulevard subway on fears of another methane fire.

...In the aftermath of the Watts riots in 1965, the governor's commission pinned some of the blame on the area’s poor public transportation, which it said "had a major influence in creating a sense of isolation, with its resultant frustrations."

Inadequate transportation would be both a cause and an effect of the riots. One of the chief byproducts of the unrest was the embrace by the wealthy and white middle class of the city's de facto segregation. Whether it's called NIMBYism, racism or neighborhood preservation, a lot of people were in no mood after the riots to make it easy to come to the Westside from East and South L.A.

... It would take 12 years of rising gas prices and increasing congestion before voters would sign on to regional mass transit, and a much more modest plan. ... With Hahn’s passionate support, Proposition A passed in 1980, setting a half-cent sales tax to help pay for a regional transit system. The plan that accompanied the initiative showed 10 transit corridors, with the Wilshire subway line the "cornerstone" ... Nevertheless, Hahn made sure his district got the first dollars for a light-rail line on the old Long Beach Red Car route. It "was my baby," he said. "I said that line has to go first because I wrote Prop. A." The Blue Line, as it is called, is now the most heavily used light-rail line in the country, carrying more than 75,000 riders a day.

... A 1985 city task force on the explosion marked 400 square blocks straddling Wilshire in [Waxman's] district as a "methane zone." The task force didn’t address tunneling safety or the fact that much of L.A. is also a methane zone. But Waxman didn’t fuss with such details. He had enough to stop the subway, or at least keep it from coming west. ... No matter that diverting the subway meant trashing $150 million in plans and years of delay, or that the detoured subway would still run into underground gas, or that a straight shot down Wilshire made the most sense. Waxman had kept alien invasions out of his district. In what became known as the Waxman-Dixon compromise, federal funding remains barred if the subway crosses the methane zone.

... With all the traffic, the Wilshire "Rapid" bus generally goes a pathetic 14 mph, which is still such an improvement over the local that bus ridership has gone up 40 percent. Considering that half of the area's other major bus lines cross Wilshire (generating about 60,000 daily transfers), there is a huge demand for fast, high-capacity rail transit that’s being ignored.

In 1993, the public learned that more than 2,000 feet of subway tunnel wall, built by well-connected contractor Tutor-Saliba Perini, was about half the required thickness. At the same time, government investigations into construction fraud and bribery were getting a lot of public attention. So was the agency's practice of paying contractors millions of dollars to fix their own screwups, and additional millions to the consultants who oversaw the faulty work. ... Just as the mismanagement of subway construction came into stark relief, the reconstituted MTA moved into a new downtown headquarters building — nicknamed the Taj Mahal — that was so plush and overbuilt it looked like a pile of graft. Bitter rancor among MTA board members, and the giving of contracts to friends of MTA officials, didn't help the agency’s image.

If it were just a question of mismanagement or corruption, the subway wouldn't differ from any other sleazy government project. But a small group of activists calling itself the Bus Riders Union re-introduced racial politics into the transit debate in the mid-1990s. ... the BRU [was] the brainchild of '60s veteran Eric Mann — an activist who knew a lot more about Maoist theory than traffic patterns. Though the BRU's stated goal was to create a more equitable transit system that would favor lower-class bus riders over more middle-class train commuters, its founder saw the fight over transit as little more than a skirmish in his grander vision of socialist revolution.

"Few of us would do all this work . . . if the struggle was only about buses," Mann wrote when he formed the BRU, in 1993. "We quickly became excited about the positive 'objective conditions' that buses provided for organizing," Mann wrote. "Public transport is one of the few remaining public spaces over which there can be effective contestation."

When the MTA announced a bus-fare increase in 1994, the BRU filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging that the entire transit system was racist and demanding that more resources go to buses instead of rail projects.

After two years of bruising litigation and $7 million in attorneys' fees (some to Riordan's old law firm, which represented the MTA), Riordan capitulated to the BRU and signed a 10-year consent decree committing the MTA to improve bus service and reduce overcrowding.

... While the special master has ordered a one-third increase in the size of the bus fleet, "the actual number of people we carry on the bus has remained flat," said MTA CEO Roger Snoble.

Patsaouras was blunt: "Riordan is an ignoramus. Riordan fucked it up with the consent decree."

... From 2002 to 2004, Mann and his wife, Lian Hurst Mann, a project director with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, were paid an average combined salary and deferred compensation of $204,500 a year. Half of the Metro Rail riders — the ones Mann says are too well-heeled to deserve transit dollars — have family incomes of less than $25,000.

... The Red Line’s extension to the Valley was completed in 2000. Jagged as a gerrymandered congressional district, and carrying a milelong spur from Vermont to Western, the $4.7 billion line is the most expensive 17 miles of subway ever built.

Since then, the MTA has opened the light-rail Gold Line from downtown to Pasadena and is at work on a "Gold Line Extension" to East L.A. Another extension, from Pasadena out to Montclair, is being discussed. In the fall, a 14-mile “guided busway,” called the Orange Line, will start to run from the North Hollywood subway station to Woodland Hills. The MTA also recently announced the first leg of a light-rail "Expo Line" to Robertson and Venice.

The MTA also has put Rapid buses into service that are equipped with gizmos that keep traffic lights green when they approach. The service is generally considered a success, and the buses run faster as long as they don’t get stuck in the city's perennial traffic miasma.

Blame abounds for the city's sorry transit system, and the absence of a subway on Wilshire is far from the system’s only gap. Were it not for the various prohibitions that walled off the Westside, there would be a subway to Fairfax by now, and most likely also a train reaching the 405. During the campaign, Antonio Villaraigosa played to the city’s frustrations by promising large-scale traffic solutions. He’s even promised to take the subway once in a while. Now he needs to give the subway more places to go. "It can happen," the mayor says. "Everywhere I go, whenever I talk about the subway to the ocean, people start clapping."