mynewsla.com
How can LA build a new 4 mile subway with stations, when we can't even build the short BLX Red-Blue connector?Long Awaited Metro D Line Extension Opens - MyNewsLA.com
Metro’s long-awaited D (Purple) Line subway extension will open Friday, adding three new stations along the Mid-Wilshire corridor and expanding rail service west from Koreatown. A grand opening celebration was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Friday on the rooftop of the Petersen Automotive Museum, with...
California has an almost incomprehensibly thick web of local, county, and state-level authorities that all have the power through the state's infamously permissive ballot measure system to raise their own tax revenues for specific purposes. Such that any geographical area that really really wants something infrastructural can self-fund it without it getting blocked by far-flung other parts of the region or state. Los Angeles County passed not one but two tax measures to fund the D Line extension. Here everything is run top-down through the Legislature, with even the Governor not having much of a bully pulpit to push things along. And there isn't a whole lot of taxation mechanisms that don't hit the whole state equally, so it's incredibly hard to micro-target spending to one purpose (and thus, spending gets diluted because every special interest in every region of the state needs their piece). If suburbs far away from a core-region transit project either don't want the spending associated with said transit project...or worse, want to outright spite Greater Boston for the self-satisfying lulz...nothing ever gets done. And it's way easier here to NIMBY stuff because you don't necessarily have to answer to your immediate neighbors who support the project...you can just stealth-nuke it by having your local Legislator concern-troll behind the scenes.
To add to what @F-Line to Dudley and @EdMc have said, another distinction is that the MBTA is a state agency, whereas the LAMTA is locally controlled. Even if Boston had the local taxing authority that Los Angeles has, it would not be able to use it to fund MBTA rail expansion, or at least not as easily use it for that purpose. I am very jealous of what L.A. has been able to do over the past 30 years.
