Asbury Rapid Transit System

Biography / Administrative History

Asbury Rapid Transit System (ARTS) was the inheritor of a tradition of small, privately held transit ventures that had been operating in Los Angeles since the turn of the Twentieth Century. These companies, such as Mount Wilson Stage Line, Original Stage Line, Pasadena-Ocean Park Stage Line, and Studio Stage Line, competed with and complimented rail passenger service by providing bus linkages between Pacific Electric's (PE) suburban and interurban routes and Los Angeles Railway's (LARy) local lines.

ARTS was the brainchild of two brothers, J.T. and F.H. Asbury, who had been providing trucking and carrier services in the Los Angeles area under the names of Asbury Trucking Company and Asbury Transportation Co., which still exists today. The two brothers formed Asbury Rapid Transit out of two pre-existing transit companies: Original Stage Line which had been operating in the San Fernando Valley since 1913, and Pasadena-Ocean Park Stage Line which had been in operation since 1919. The Asbury's began their passenger service acquisitions in 1930 by acquiring two-fifths shares of all the outstanding Original Stage Line stock. On June 8, 1933, the Asbury's "and their respective wives" acquired the entirety of outstanding Pasadena-Ocean Park Stage Line stock. Original Stage Line officially became Asbury Rapid Transit System on August 31, 1939. The two predecessor companies were contractually merged on September 30, 1939, leaving Asbury Rapid Transit as the surviving corporation.

Asbury spent the 1940's trying to expand its service in the suburban regions of Los Angeles by planning routes that connected with PE and LARy's rail lines. Asbury and other small companies targeted growing communities such as Torrance, Highland Park, and most notably the San Fernando Valley. The period spanning the 1920's through the 1940's was a great time of suburban growth in the San Fernando Valley. The completion of the Owens Valley aqueduct in 1913 flooded the Valley with water and new residents. The pre-water population was a mere 3,000 residents, but by the 1940's the San Fernando Valley was the fastest growing urban area in the nation and its population had grown to 400,000! Transit operations such as Pacific Electric and Asbury Transit greatly benefited from and further spurred the suburban explosion. Asbury took advantage of the wartime growth of the defense industry in the San Fernando Valley, transporting workers to the Lockheed and Vega airplane plants. Historians can literally trace the growth of the San Fernando Valley through the route applications submitted by local transit operators to the Public Utilities Commission as they attempted to follow the rapidly spreading suburbs.

By the 1950's, Asbury Transit, like many of the other independent transit providers of this era, began to feel the impact of the new automotive culture. The mostly white and upwardly mobile residents of the Valley took advantage of the new freeways meandering across the vast stretches of Los Angeles to zip quickly to and fro in the luxury of their own cars. Asbury was not able to off set the decreased ridership with increased fares or cost savings, and thus on August 3, 1954, Asbury Transit was sold to Jesse Haugh's Metropolitan Coach Lines. Asbury continued in operation as a subsidiary of MCL until 1957-1958 when the newly formed public agency, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (LAMTA), acquired both MCL and Asbury for 33 million dollars.

List of Abbreviations

From the guide to the Asbury Rapid Transit System records, 1935-1958, (Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library and Archives.)