Hidden History of Transportation in Los Angeles

Los Angeles transportation's epic scale--its iconic freeways, Union Station, Los Angeles International Airport and the giant ports of its shores--has obscured many offbeat transit stories of moxie and eccentricity. Triumphs such as the Vincent Thomas Bridge and Mac Barnes's Ground Link buspool have existed alongside such flops as the Santa Monica Freeway Diamond Lane and the Oxnard-Los Angeles Caltrain commuter rail. The City of Angels lacks a propeller-driven monorail and a freeway in the paved bed of the Los Angeles River, but not for a lack of public promoters. Horace Dobbins built the elevated California Cycleway in Pasadena, and Mike Kadletz deployed the Pink Buses for Orange County kids hitchhiking to the beach. Join Charles P. Hobbs as he recalls these and other lost episodes of LA-area transportation lore.

Charles P. Hobbs is the systems librarian at El Camino College's Compton Center in Compton. He was the editor of Transit Advocate, the newsletter of the Southern California Transit Advocates, from 1992 to 2005. He edited the Transit Guide for the Southern California Transit Advocates from 1996 to 2008 and has written the More Than Red Cars historical transit blog since 2009. He has been a librarian at Irvine Valley College, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Charles Drew University.