In 1887, the first electric streetcar appeared on a stretch of Pico Street to Downtown’s new booming Historic Core.

A historian for the website usp100la writes: “By 1911, Southern Pacific consolidated the entire electric interurban streetcar network of Los Angeles and operated it as the Pacific Electric Railway Company, whose cars were known as ‘Red Cars. Around the same time, the Los Angeles Railway operated a local system of streetcars in central Los Angeles, known as the Yellow Cars.”

However, the efficiency of the streetcars enabled people to move out of Downtown Los Angeles and on to the suburbs.