His cool stuff wouldn't change maps, so I went to his website, and it still didn't but I could see his $50 PE 1926 map. It is less than half of actual scale. We did a full scale one with the Professor of Geography at CSULA for an LA Transit Show about what seems like a 100 years ago or so, back when all of this started. That map was to actual "scale", as opposed to this and most maps in PE books, and folks were truly impressed by how far away San Bernardino is....

It is no accident that I count the starting my "second career" doing this some of this "transit stuff" with a ride in 1978 along Long Beach Avenue (PE LA Long Beach line) with Supervisor Kenny Hahn.

It is no accident that the Blue Line was built on the route of the last PE line to be removed, and first to be "restored" to an "interurban" passenger service. It is no accident that the ELA Gold line route that was used, covers much of the routing in ELA of the last LARY yellow cars to operate in LA (although we took it all of the way out to Atlantic). It is not an accident that a good part of the Redline also follows the last LARY lines on 7th and up Western, and over Hollywood and under Caheunga Pass to North Hollywood following the PE.

Even the Gold Line to Pasadena, on the original route of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley RR (aka ATSR Second District), is parallel to the first electric railway, later PE's first line, up the Arroyo, to Highland Park, South Pasadena, and Pasadena, which had very high transit use until Caltrans (CA Dept. of Highways back then) refused to keep the Northern District rail connections into Downtown LA, when they built the 101, and the connection to Pasadena was cut.

Metrolink's San Gabriel Valley line even uses part of the PE and the parallels the PE using the old SP Baldwin Park line to bring back "interurban" rail service between LA and San Berdo, that existed up to 1950.

Available ROW was used for obvious practical purposes and has helped keep costs down, but these also reflect a 150 year pattern of urban "growth layers" in LA, from a "cow town" of a few thousand folks, to one of the biggest urban region in the US, in terms of settlement, the geography of urban centers and population concentrations, and the subsequent "travel patterns" which have evolved to serve those folks needs. Even much of our freeway system was built (literally in some cases), on "top" of the PE, even displacing it from places like Cahuenga Pass.