At 11:47 a.m. on May 8, 2026, a southbound D Line train pulled into Wilshire/La Cienega station and the doors slid open on a piece of Los Angeles history: the first subway platform ever to exist inside the city limits of Beverly Hills. The riders who stepped off — a mix of curious locals, transit nerds who had taken the day off work, and a few commuters who looked genuinely stunned to be there — emerged onto a Wilshire Boulevard that for most of a century had defined the futility of getting anywhere in LA at rush hour. The trip from Koreatown to Beverly Hills now takes about 20 minutes. By car, in the wrong traffic, it can still take an hour.
Three new stations opened that morning — Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/La Cienega — completing Section 1 of LA Metro's D Line Extension. It is 3.9 miles of new tunnel under one of the densest transit corridors in the United States, a corridor that planners have wanted to put underground since the 1970s. The fact that it finally exists is, in its own way, a small miracle of policy reversal.
The Methane Zone: How LA Lost 22 Years
To understand why Los Angeles needed until 2026 to put a subway under Wilshire, you have to go back to March 24, 1985. A Ross Dress for Less store at Third and Fairfax — sitting atop the old Salt Lake Oil Field — filled with methane gas that had migrated up through the ground, ignited, and exploded. Twenty-three people were injured. No one died, but the political fallout was nuclear.
Representative Henry Waxman, whose district included the explosion site, pushed through a federal ban on using federal funds to tunnel west of Western Avenue. It passed in 1986 and stood for 22 years. An entire generation of Angelenos grew up assuming the subway would simply never reach the Westside, because Congress had made it illegal to build it there.
Then, in one of the stranger arcs in American transit history, Waxman reversed himself. A 2005 expert panel — convened at his request — concluded that modern earth-pressure-balance tunnel boring machines could safely navigate the methane zone. In 2007, Waxman lifted his own ban. It is rare for a politician to undo a signature piece of legislation because the engineering caught up with the fear, but that is exactly what happened. If you want a primer on how cities have wrestled with the question of building under their own streets, our look at the history of subways traces the long pattern. LA's chapter is unusually circuitous.
Three Stations, Three Neighborhoods
Wilshire/La Brea
Wilshire/La Brea anchors the eastern end of the new segment at the gateway to the Miracle Mile. From its mezzanine, riders are a short walk from Museum Row — LACMA, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. For the first time, a Metro rider in Long Beach or North Hollywood can reach the Academy Museum without touching a car or a bus.
Wilshire/Fairfax
Wilshire/Fairfax sits almost directly under the site of the 1985 explosion. The symbolism is hard to miss: the station that was effectively banned for two decades now opens its doors next to LACMA, where weekend ridership is expected to reshape how the museum thinks about parking. The station boxes were built with enhanced gas-mitigation systems — continuous methane monitoring, gas-impermeable membranes, and ventilation designed to the post-Waxman safety standard.
Wilshire/La Cienega
Wilshire/La Cienega is the headline-grabber. It is the first subway station in Beverly Hills, a city that for years was ambivalent about being connected to the regional rail network. The station sits in the eastern flatlands of Beverly Hills, blocks from the Golden Triangle shopping district. It is also the launch point for Section 2, which is where Beverly Hills's ambivalence becomes more consequential.
Elsie and Soyeon: The Machines That Did the Digging
The tunneling itself was the work of two earth-pressure-balance TBMs named Elsie and Soyeon. Elsie honors Elsie Eaves, the first woman admitted to full membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers. Soyeon honors Yi So-yeon, the first Korean astronaut — a nod to the corridor's heavily Korean American eastern end. Both machines were lowered into the Wilshire/La Brea launch box in October 2018 and chewed their way west.
The project broke ground in November 2014. From first shovel to first rider, that is 11 years for 3.9 miles. Section 2's TBMs, named Harriet and Ruth, and Section 3's, Aura and Iris, completed their drives in coordinated milestones, with all-sections tunneling finishing on April 2, 2024. That is a meaningful date for the project: once a TBM breaks through, the work shifts from civil engineering to systems — tracks, signals, power, stations — and the schedule becomes far more predictable. The cities that build subways in a decade — Madrid extended Line 9 by 40 km in roughly eight years; Seoul's 9th Line Phase 1 opened in four — tend to be the ones that keep their tunneling and systems work moving in parallel rather than in series. LA, finally, learned that lesson partway through this project.
The Numbers
Budget
Section 1 came in at roughly $3.35 billion, up from an original budget of $2.8 billion. The funding stack is a useful snapshot of how big American transit projects actually get paid for in the 2020s: a $1.25 billion Federal Transit Administration New Starts grant, an $856 million TIFIA loan, and the rest from Measures R and M — the two half-cent LA County sales taxes that voters passed in 2008 and 2016. Without that local revenue, the federal money would not have arrived; New Starts grants reward projects that show up with serious local skin in the game. The total three-section project will land near $8.2 billion.
Ridership
The ridership response has been immediate and large. In May 2026, the D Line carried 62% more riders than in May 2025 — a six-year system high for the line and one of the sharpest single-month jumps any US heavy rail line has posted since the pandemic. Trains run every 10 minutes at peak and every 20 minutes off-peak. The frequency matters: a subway that comes every 10 minutes is one you can use without consulting a schedule, which is how subways win commuters away from cars. Our earlier analysis of LA Metro's expansion and traffic congestion flagged the Wilshire corridor as the single highest-leverage piece of the network. The early numbers suggest that read was right.
Sections 2 and 3: To Century City, to UCLA
Section 2 is projected to open in 2027, adding Wilshire/Rodeo (Beverly Drive) and Century City/Constellation across 2.6 miles. Century City is the densest job center on the Westside, and connecting it to Union Station via a one-seat ride will reshape commute patterns for tens of thousands of workers. Beverly Hills famously sued to block the alignment under Beverly Hills High School and lost — the courts sided with Metro's geotechnical findings, and the tunnels were bored exactly where the city did not want them.
Section 3, also projected for 2027, extends another 2.6 miles to Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital. The VA station includes tail tracks built to accommodate a potential future extension to Santa Monica, which would finally deliver the long-imagined "subway to the sea." When all three sections are open, the D Line Extension will add 9.1 miles of track and seven new stations to a line that, before 2026, terminated awkwardly in Koreatown.
Open Payments and the World Cup
Three weeks after the D Line opening, on May 28, 2026, LA Metro switched on system-wide contactless open-loop payment. Riders can now tap a credit card, phone, or watch directly at any faregate or validator — no TAP card required. The timing was not accidental. FIFA World Cup matches begin in Los Angeles in June 2026, and Metro wanted the payment experience to feel familiar to international visitors who are used to tapping their way through London, Sydney, and New York. We covered the broader shift in our piece on the 2026 open-loop payments wave; LA's rollout is one of the largest single-day activations in the wave.
The shift to contactless-only entry raises a real equity question: not every rider has a bank account or a smartphone. LA Metro's answer is the legacy TAP card, which remains fully functional at all faregates and can be loaded with cash at thousands of retail locations across the county. The agency has also committed to maintaining ticket vending machines that accept cash. For now, the TAP card functions as the backstop for unbanked riders — a design that mirrors how Transport for London handled the Oyster-to-contactless transition. Whether the cash backstop is adequately promoted and accessible in lower-income communities along the D Line corridor is the harder question, and one that rider advocacy groups are already raising.
For match days, Metro is selling a SoCal Day Pass at $15 ($10 reduced) that covers the regional operators a visitor is likely to string together — a D Line ride to 7th/Metro, a transfer to the K Line, and a connection toward SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Our World Cup transit scorecard ranked LA's readiness as middle-of-the-pack heading into 2026; the D Line opening and the open-loop launch have moved that ranking up noticeably.
What a Subway Under Wilshire Means
It is worth sitting with the arc here. A methane explosion in 1985 produced a federal law that froze a subway corridor for 22 years. The same congressman who wrote the ban eventually undid it because the engineering had improved. Eleven years of construction followed. And on a Friday morning in May 2026, riders in Beverly Hills walked underground and got on a train.
Other cities have built subways in a decade while Los Angeles spent three debating whether it could. That comparison is uncomfortable, and it should be. But the lesson of Section 1 is not that LA is incapable — it is that LA can do this work when the politics and the engineering align. Sections 2 and 3 will reach UCLA and the VA Hospital in 2027, putting the Westside's densest job center, its largest university, and one of its major hospitals on a frequent, grade-separated rail line. In a region defined by its car culture, that is not a small thing. It is the beginning of a different Los Angeles, one station at a time.