Beverly Hills Pulls The Plug On 2nd Wilshire/Rodeo Subway Entrance

BEVERLY HILLS, CA — When the Metro subway rolls into Beverly Hills in 2026, riders will have only one place to enter and exit the Wilshire/Rodeo station: on the south side of Wilshire Boulevard, the opposite side of the street from Beverly Hills' commercial core.

While Metro and the city previously inked a deal to construct a second portal on the north side of Wilshire — which would let riders pop right into the Golden Triangle — ballooning costs prompted the City Council this week to kill the project with near certainty.

The 2020 agreement called for Metro and the city to split the cost of the north portal: It was initially expected to cost $78.5 million total. But that estimate has ballooned nearly 70 percent over the last four years and now stands at a whopping $134.2 million, according to city documents.

That's thanks to a surge in demand for materials, increased prices due to more construction worldwide, ongoing supply chain challenges and rising labor and transportation costs. Indeed, U.S. government benchmarks for construction estimate a 53 percent increase in cost for transportation projects over the last 2.5 years, according to city staff.

The City Council's vote leaves the door open for Metro to pony up the full amount of the project. But city staff say that's unlikely, given cost overruns on the entire Purple (D Line) Subway Extension project.

Several council members said the Wilshire/Rodeo portals have been plagued by bad planning from the start. For one, they said the north portal should have been a core part of Metro's planning for Beverly Hills.

"To me this is subway construction 101. Anyone who's ever been to a subway in — whether it's Stockholm or Paris or London or New York — there are very few stations that have only one exit. You can choose, at many of them, four exits — they're usually at intersections," Councilman John Mirisch said. "The notion that we should be paying for MTA, that is a multi-billion dollar agency that sucks up billions of dollars each year, for them to do their work was always offensive to me."

Mayor Lester Friedman had similar thoughts.

"It still astounds me that when designing this they would put the main portal on the south side, when all the businesses are on the north. It just didn't make any sense," he said. "From that point forward we can all assume their design decisions are not the greatest."