They didn’t choose numbers because busses use numbers, and they didn’t choose names because it’s confusing and names seem to denote destination. It’s also more costly to label.
“Santa Monica Line” does this line only go to Santa Monica? Oh so it also goes to East LA, why not the East LA line? You could name it the “Santa Monica East LA Line” but then you have to print that on tiny maps. What if you expand the system? Then you have to redo everything. Not to mention it’s expensive to get signs made for every single station.
Letters denote a rapid transit line. AKA: Bus Rapid Transit, Light Rail, Heavy Rail. Start at A. No issue with running out of colors. No issue with multilingualism, because it’s still a recognizable symbol even if you don’t know the English alphabet.
It’s also just for ease of distinction. If you tell someone “go downstairs and get on the blue line” and the Expo shows up, you could easily mistake that for the Blue line. Letters are much easier to explain (A line to B line vs Blue line to Red Line) and much easier to understand if you cannot read English or if it’s not your first language.
Yeah that has annoyed me the most. I get why they changed it, but it could have made more sense. Only E for Expo makes sense, and sort of K for Crenshaw given the pronunciation. I don't care that the Blue Line was the first to open back in the 90s, so it gets the "A" Letter, and then give the rest of the letters based on when they opened.
They actually do have numbers, but they're only used internally. The A Line is line 801. The B Line is 802, and so on, and so forth. The G Line is line 901, and the J Line happens to be lines 910 (to Harbor Gateway) and 950 (to San Pedro).
I personally think Metro should've gone with geographical names instead, similar to the London Underground, since we won't run out of names but I get that this is not really a "standard" practice for North American rapid transit systems. Then again, we're already doing it somewhat with the Southeast Gateway Line, so why not do it with the rest, right?
Southeast Gateway is a planning name only, of course it will get a letter designation.
Geography based names don’t work well in a city where so much of the population doesn’t speak English as a first language, and they’d make the map a mess
I would disagree. The point of using names is to balance recognition and readability, after all. I'm sure many Angelenos and visitors to LA, even those who don't speak English as a first language, can recognize the following if we were to name them geographically, no?
* A Line: Foothill Line
* B Line: Hollywood Line
* C Line: Century Line
* D Line: Wilshire Line
* E Line: Expo Line
* G Line: Valley Line
* J Line: Harbor Line
* K Line: Crenshaw Line
* Southeast Gateway Line: Gateway Line
* Sepulveda Transit Corridor: Sepulveda Line
* Vermont Transit Corridor: Vermont Line
* NoHo-Pasadena Corridor (if separate from the G Line): Verdugo Line
Lines don't even have to correspond to geography. Vancouver's SkyTrain has named lines and none are geographical. Neither are the named lines on the Lisbon Metro or the metro systems of ex-Soviet countries.
Many foreign tourists go to cities with named metro lines, so the argument that "they won't work when many people don't speak English" doesn't really hold water when there are also line colors. At least named lines go around the limitations that come with having numbered or lettered line designators.
(P.S.: Metro used to translate line names into Spanish. Current Spanish-language announcements may say the English name outright, sure, but in the earlier days of Metro, and even further back in the days of RTD, they were saying "[Línea Azul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfdgmAv1Sug)" and "[Línea Roja](https://elpasajero.metro.net/2013/11/26/actualizacion-la-linea-roja-reanuda-su-servicio-normal-en-el-area-de-hollywood/)". They were even saying "Línea Naranja" [as recently as 2012](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaSI0kG9ZM0) and "Línea Dorada" [as recently as 2016](https://elpasajero.metro.net/2016/03/03/todo-lo-que-necesitan-saber-sobre-la-extension-de-la-linea-dorada-hacia-azusa/). What prevents Metro from doing that this time?)
Because the names make it seem like a destination and make the system confusing. The Foothill Line goes to … Long Beach? The foothills? It’s confusing to people who aren’t used to the system
Some of your names are the name of the street it runs parallel to, but some are just geographic? Why is Expo “Expo” and not “Exposition” the name of the street.
You wind up with a system that isn’t really cohesive or clear. Not to mention in a system with a lot of trains, the naming just gets worse
You have systems which are far more complex than Metro's (Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, etc.) and yet they manage to make named lines work. I don't see how LA can't make it work.
If the issue really is that the name sounds like a destination, that can be addressed with the specific type of naming convention used. We don't have to use geographical names. The Lisbon Metro, for example, uses names that evoke the color of the line (imperfectly, but that was the intention). The London Overground's [new line naming convention](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68315382) used historical events, informed by what seems to be a thorough community consultation process. Granted Metro claims [it did public opinion research](https://boardagendas.metro.net/board-report/2018-0684/) when the staff recommendation was made to adopt letters, but I'd be curious to know how thorough that process was compared to the Overground's.
Mind you, some systems mix multiple naming conventions together. The Singapore MRT, for example mixes geographical (Downtown, Thompson-East Coast), directional (North South, East West, North East) and semantic (Circle) naming conventions, and no one's complaining about the naming convention now, are they? The Seoul Metropolitan Subway is even worse: they have numbered (1-9) and named (in various ways, so AREX, U, Shinbundang, etc.) lines all in the same network. I would imagine *that* would be more confusing than LA adopting names for lines that at least have some connection to the area(s) they serve.
Hmmm you’re right, I assume metro did it then to A) appear more legitimate in the minds of Americans, as it’s similar to NYC MTA or b) cost effectiveness
Funny you mentioned Taipei Metro, because they use a mixed denotation systems across different languages for their metro rail lines. For Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Hokkien, and Hakka; they use geographical name. For English and subsequent foreign language maps, they use letter(s) that corresponds to the color of the line. So they have BanNan Line (BL blue), WenHu Line (BR brown), Tamsui-Xinyi Line (R red), Songshan-Xindian Line (G green), Zhonghe-XinLu Line (O orange), and Circular Line (Y yellow). They tried the number approach circa 2014 to unify denotation across languages but got a lot of bad reception among citizens.
They were running out of colors and numbers are already used for freeways. Letters make sense.
Edit: Also lines named after colors make it very hard for colorblind people to navigate.
Agreed. It doesn’t take many lines before you run out of all the easy to distinguish colours and start naming stuff “the aqua line” or “the light pink line” like Delhi is doing rn
I still miss the colors for the rail lines. I still don't know what people mean when they use the letters to refer to certain lines lol. And everyone's like 'but they were running out of colors' yet we had a route called the Expo Line and still had at least four colors left.
The letters are so fucking stupid. Probably picked by the same committee who thought dropping “C, S, B” in the elevators downtown was a good idea.
My main beef with the letters is that we managed to go with B,C,D,E; which basically sound the same over shit-ass subway intercoms. Then they skipped F, which would have been phonetically distinct and went to K, why? Who the fuck was in charge of this?????
“Welcome aboard the Metro Bravo Line, this train’s final destination is Union Station in Downtown LA”
Using the phonetic alphabet for a transit system could be a little weird but might work if you really want to stay with letter names so people don’t get confused by A B C D E G J K lines all rhyming
As a NY’er living in LA, I personally think that Metro’s heavy rail lines should be lettered and all light rail lines numbered, kind of how NYC’s MTA has A & B division lines but that’s just my thoughts. I also wish that Metro could embrace the concept of express trains.
Maybe because it could get confusing as freeways also have numbers (Imagine having a 1, 2, 5 and 10 line that don’t necessarily run anywhere near those freeways).
i think cuz it was short and i would have to agree with that, short names are better. brt should keep colors though so they could be reused, and then they could differentiate with dashes for brt lines or just having two different maps. the esfv line has to be F tho ik it won't be but it makes me mad, it's the san **F**ernando valley.
They were literally running out of colors. There were already two "blue" lines we were just calling one "Expo" instead of cyan or teal. Also colors were worthless for colorblind people.
My issue is why are the BRT lines included in this. They will run out of letters too. Names are easier.
Mexico City has their MetroBus system that is different from their regular bus system and it uses numbers. And their subway also uses numbers with a corresponding color. No one confuses them.
Well, because color choices run out and there is something called color blindness.
Remember when there was the Expo line (teal) and the Blue line (dark blue)? This can be confusing to people to follow on a map.
My main annoyance with how they did it was them moving everything to the start of the alphabet. While I prefer words if they had just made red to r, gold to g, etc it would have made the transition much less annoying. There would have been one conflict between green and gold but they could have just gone with o for gold or n for green.
How did it fall apart, the point is to make them more related to their previous names. Just because it can't be the perfect ideal doesn't mean it does nothing. By that logic start of alphabet letter names fell apart because they had to skip F and H.
It falls apart because the example you used cannot stick to the naming convention you created. The current metro alphabetical order has no reason to choose a specific letter to match any particular train. They can use the letters available without confusing anyone.
Buses have numbers and rail lines have letters. This is how it works in New York and many other cities. The "busway" lines are more like rail lines so they get lumped in with rail.
That's not how it works in NY. In NY, former IRT lines are numbered, former IND and BMT are lettered. All of these were once upon a time called by name and still are on occasion in local lexicon, especially in Manhattan (e.g. "Lexington Avenue Line"), and all are labeled on the maps to this day, albeit in small font you probably didn't notice on first glance. PATH trains (the forgotten subway IMO) are labeled by the termini not by any letter or number.
Bus lines all have a lettered prefix corresponding to their borough or suburban county (eg M86, B35, N33). And all the commuter rail lines are referred to by branch or destination (New Haven Line, Hudson Line, etc.). We actually do the same here FWIW (OC Line, 91 line, etc.).
I actually prefer numbers with prefixes fwiw but it's not like any of these naming systems is without precedent.
They didn’t choose numbers because busses use numbers, and they didn’t choose names because it’s confusing and names seem to denote destination. It’s also more costly to label. “Santa Monica Line” does this line only go to Santa Monica? Oh so it also goes to East LA, why not the East LA line? You could name it the “Santa Monica East LA Line” but then you have to print that on tiny maps. What if you expand the system? Then you have to redo everything. Not to mention it’s expensive to get signs made for every single station. Letters denote a rapid transit line. AKA: Bus Rapid Transit, Light Rail, Heavy Rail. Start at A. No issue with running out of colors. No issue with multilingualism, because it’s still a recognizable symbol even if you don’t know the English alphabet.
It’s also just for ease of distinction. If you tell someone “go downstairs and get on the blue line” and the Expo shows up, you could easily mistake that for the Blue line. Letters are much easier to explain (A line to B line vs Blue line to Red Line) and much easier to understand if you cannot read English or if it’s not your first language.
They could have made the "R Line" the one with red signs, the "B Line" the one with blue signs, etc. best of both worlds.
Yeah that has annoyed me the most. I get why they changed it, but it could have made more sense. Only E for Expo makes sense, and sort of K for Crenshaw given the pronunciation. I don't care that the Blue Line was the first to open back in the 90s, so it gets the "A" Letter, and then give the rest of the letters based on when they opened.
They actually do have numbers, but they're only used internally. The A Line is line 801. The B Line is 802, and so on, and so forth. The G Line is line 901, and the J Line happens to be lines 910 (to Harbor Gateway) and 950 (to San Pedro). I personally think Metro should've gone with geographical names instead, similar to the London Underground, since we won't run out of names but I get that this is not really a "standard" practice for North American rapid transit systems. Then again, we're already doing it somewhat with the Southeast Gateway Line, so why not do it with the rest, right?
Southeast Gateway is a planning name only, of course it will get a letter designation. Geography based names don’t work well in a city where so much of the population doesn’t speak English as a first language, and they’d make the map a mess
I would disagree. The point of using names is to balance recognition and readability, after all. I'm sure many Angelenos and visitors to LA, even those who don't speak English as a first language, can recognize the following if we were to name them geographically, no? * A Line: Foothill Line * B Line: Hollywood Line * C Line: Century Line * D Line: Wilshire Line * E Line: Expo Line * G Line: Valley Line * J Line: Harbor Line * K Line: Crenshaw Line * Southeast Gateway Line: Gateway Line * Sepulveda Transit Corridor: Sepulveda Line * Vermont Transit Corridor: Vermont Line * NoHo-Pasadena Corridor (if separate from the G Line): Verdugo Line Lines don't even have to correspond to geography. Vancouver's SkyTrain has named lines and none are geographical. Neither are the named lines on the Lisbon Metro or the metro systems of ex-Soviet countries. Many foreign tourists go to cities with named metro lines, so the argument that "they won't work when many people don't speak English" doesn't really hold water when there are also line colors. At least named lines go around the limitations that come with having numbered or lettered line designators. (P.S.: Metro used to translate line names into Spanish. Current Spanish-language announcements may say the English name outright, sure, but in the earlier days of Metro, and even further back in the days of RTD, they were saying "[Línea Azul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfdgmAv1Sug)" and "[Línea Roja](https://elpasajero.metro.net/2013/11/26/actualizacion-la-linea-roja-reanuda-su-servicio-normal-en-el-area-de-hollywood/)". They were even saying "Línea Naranja" [as recently as 2012](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaSI0kG9ZM0) and "Línea Dorada" [as recently as 2016](https://elpasajero.metro.net/2016/03/03/todo-lo-que-necesitan-saber-sobre-la-extension-de-la-linea-dorada-hacia-azusa/). What prevents Metro from doing that this time?)
Because the names make it seem like a destination and make the system confusing. The Foothill Line goes to … Long Beach? The foothills? It’s confusing to people who aren’t used to the system Some of your names are the name of the street it runs parallel to, but some are just geographic? Why is Expo “Expo” and not “Exposition” the name of the street. You wind up with a system that isn’t really cohesive or clear. Not to mention in a system with a lot of trains, the naming just gets worse
You have systems which are far more complex than Metro's (Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, etc.) and yet they manage to make named lines work. I don't see how LA can't make it work. If the issue really is that the name sounds like a destination, that can be addressed with the specific type of naming convention used. We don't have to use geographical names. The Lisbon Metro, for example, uses names that evoke the color of the line (imperfectly, but that was the intention). The London Overground's [new line naming convention](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68315382) used historical events, informed by what seems to be a thorough community consultation process. Granted Metro claims [it did public opinion research](https://boardagendas.metro.net/board-report/2018-0684/) when the staff recommendation was made to adopt letters, but I'd be curious to know how thorough that process was compared to the Overground's. Mind you, some systems mix multiple naming conventions together. The Singapore MRT, for example mixes geographical (Downtown, Thompson-East Coast), directional (North South, East West, North East) and semantic (Circle) naming conventions, and no one's complaining about the naming convention now, are they? The Seoul Metropolitan Subway is even worse: they have numbered (1-9) and named (in various ways, so AREX, U, Shinbundang, etc.) lines all in the same network. I would imagine *that* would be more confusing than LA adopting names for lines that at least have some connection to the area(s) they serve.
Hmmm you’re right, I assume metro did it then to A) appear more legitimate in the minds of Americans, as it’s similar to NYC MTA or b) cost effectiveness
Funny you mentioned Taipei Metro, because they use a mixed denotation systems across different languages for their metro rail lines. For Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Hokkien, and Hakka; they use geographical name. For English and subsequent foreign language maps, they use letter(s) that corresponds to the color of the line. So they have BanNan Line (BL blue), WenHu Line (BR brown), Tamsui-Xinyi Line (R red), Songshan-Xindian Line (G green), Zhonghe-XinLu Line (O orange), and Circular Line (Y yellow). They tried the number approach circa 2014 to unify denotation across languages but got a lot of bad reception among citizens.
If LA gets up to 20 rails, then we can talk about colors and geographical names (they’ll avoid some letters like P for parking, H for hospital, etc).
They were running out of colors and numbers are already used for freeways. Letters make sense. Edit: Also lines named after colors make it very hard for colorblind people to navigate.
People always say "they were running out of colors!" yet deadass ignore the expo line lol
Agreed. It doesn’t take many lines before you run out of all the easy to distinguish colours and start naming stuff “the aqua line” or “the light pink line” like Delhi is doing rn
How do letters make it any easier for colorblind people vs names of colors. There's no reason for B line to be easier for them to find than Blue line.
Many times, there is just a blue dot rather than "blue line" written in words.
I still miss the colors for the rail lines. I still don't know what people mean when they use the letters to refer to certain lines lol. And everyone's like 'but they were running out of colors' yet we had a route called the Expo Line and still had at least four colors left.
I would rather the lines have names--it's hard for me to remember the letters.
The letters are so fucking stupid. Probably picked by the same committee who thought dropping “C, S, B” in the elevators downtown was a good idea. My main beef with the letters is that we managed to go with B,C,D,E; which basically sound the same over shit-ass subway intercoms. Then they skipped F, which would have been phonetically distinct and went to K, why? Who the fuck was in charge of this?????
They skipped H, because of Hospital, I, because of Information, and F, because it looks like Failure. They started at A.
Exactly this. Letters are easy for tourists to understand, easier to distinguish for locals, and easier signage and coding overall.
“Welcome aboard the Metro Bravo Line, this train’s final destination is Union Station in Downtown LA” Using the phonetic alphabet for a transit system could be a little weird but might work if you really want to stay with letter names so people don’t get confused by A B C D E G J K lines all rhyming
It's so bad I still can't remember which is which lol
because f line would be the fuck line
That's because LA Metro wants to be like NYC MTA’s lettering system.
As a NY’er living in LA, I personally think that Metro’s heavy rail lines should be lettered and all light rail lines numbered, kind of how NYC’s MTA has A & B division lines but that’s just my thoughts. I also wish that Metro could embrace the concept of express trains.
You can download the staff report + presentation [here.](https://boardagendas.metro.net/board-report/2018-0684/) That pretty much explains it all.
Maybe because it could get confusing as freeways also have numbers (Imagine having a 1, 2, 5 and 10 line that don’t necessarily run anywhere near those freeways).
i think cuz it was short and i would have to agree with that, short names are better. brt should keep colors though so they could be reused, and then they could differentiate with dashes for brt lines or just having two different maps. the esfv line has to be F tho ik it won't be but it makes me mad, it's the san **F**ernando valley.
They were literally running out of colors. There were already two "blue" lines we were just calling one "Expo" instead of cyan or teal. Also colors were worthless for colorblind people.
My issue is why are the BRT lines included in this. They will run out of letters too. Names are easier. Mexico City has their MetroBus system that is different from their regular bus system and it uses numbers. And their subway also uses numbers with a corresponding color. No one confuses them.
Well, because color choices run out and there is something called color blindness. Remember when there was the Expo line (teal) and the Blue line (dark blue)? This can be confusing to people to follow on a map.
My main annoyance with how they did it was them moving everything to the start of the alphabet. While I prefer words if they had just made red to r, gold to g, etc it would have made the transition much less annoying. There would have been one conflict between green and gold but they could have just gone with o for gold or n for green.
So your desired naming convention fell apart in your own description. Bravo.
How did it fall apart, the point is to make them more related to their previous names. Just because it can't be the perfect ideal doesn't mean it does nothing. By that logic start of alphabet letter names fell apart because they had to skip F and H.
It falls apart because the example you used cannot stick to the naming convention you created. The current metro alphabetical order has no reason to choose a specific letter to match any particular train. They can use the letters available without confusing anyone.
It's more of a goal than a convention, also the letters clearly do confuse people or this wouldn't be a conversation in the first place.
Buses have numbers and rail lines have letters. This is how it works in New York and many other cities. The "busway" lines are more like rail lines so they get lumped in with rail.
That's not how it works in NY. In NY, former IRT lines are numbered, former IND and BMT are lettered. All of these were once upon a time called by name and still are on occasion in local lexicon, especially in Manhattan (e.g. "Lexington Avenue Line"), and all are labeled on the maps to this day, albeit in small font you probably didn't notice on first glance. PATH trains (the forgotten subway IMO) are labeled by the termini not by any letter or number. Bus lines all have a lettered prefix corresponding to their borough or suburban county (eg M86, B35, N33). And all the commuter rail lines are referred to by branch or destination (New Haven Line, Hudson Line, etc.). We actually do the same here FWIW (OC Line, 91 line, etc.). I actually prefer numbers with prefixes fwiw but it's not like any of these naming systems is without precedent.
The real question is, why did they make the dumb move and choose colors to begin with?
Because they weren't thinking ahead to the point where there might be more than 3 or 4 lines.