The LA LB ultimately makes mores stops, and even with all door, platform level, three car trains, carries more folks.... And, what with stopping, boarding and alighting time, and acceleration, in a totally urbanized environment, it is a different world, than when there were still dairies and strawberry fields in places like Paramount. This is a line with higher passenger density per line mile than BART does.

The traffic signal inter connects and pre-emption have made the line much safer (massive reduction in fatalities and accidents along LB Ave grade crossings) and somewhat faster on Washington. This should have been done in Long Beach years ago, but knowing the "traffic engineering" wars with LADOT in getting interconnect along Long Beach Avenue finally done, I understand both the local and the "American" history of the "culture clash" with the traffic engineers over transit pre-emption, for bus or rail.

I've heard that someone finally asked the MTA Board why the Expo is so slow on Flower, and that this will be seeing a new upgrade to increase speeds from downtown to USC. We never seem to bother to train our replacements anymore, and thus, our replacements often seem to have to "re-learn" this kind of "basic" stuff, over again, from scratch....