Los Angeles, California, United States
Los Angeles Pedway
A set of open-air concrete pedestrian bridges on the west side of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, linking the Westin Bonaventure, the World Trade Center, Union Bank Plaza, Bank of America Plaza, City National Plaza and neighbouring towers at the second level. Built from 1975 as the first phase of planning director Calvin Hamilton's downtown people-mover scheme, it was orphaned when federal funding ended in 1981; the bridges survive, privately attached to the buildings they join, with no system-wide operator, hours or signage.
Governance
Who owns it, who runs it, what the rules are.
- Owner
- The bridges are attached to, and reached through, privately owned Bunker Hill office towers and hotels developed during the Community Redevelopment Agency's Bunker Hill project. Signs on the bridges treat them as private property where loitering is grounds for removal. No published record assigns ownership of the spans over the public streets; one 2013 account says Caltrans repairs the lighting on part of the system.
- Operator
- None system-wide. Each building's management controls its own doors and the bridge segments it opens onto; the City of Los Angeles publishes no map, hours or rules.
- Hours
- No published hours. Access depends on each connected building's doors and lobby hours; some exits are reported closed off.[03]
- Public right
- Permissive, not a right. The bridges remain open in practice, but signage asserts private control and behaviour rules, and entry points inside buildings can be locked without notice.
- Who pays
- Not published. The bridges were built with the federally supported redevelopment of Bunker Hill in the 1970s and early 1980s; maintenance now falls to the adjoining property owners, with Caltrans reported to handle lighting on one segment.
Legal instruments
- Concept Los Angeles: The Concept for the Los Angeles General Plan (1970, adopted 1974) ↗The general-plan concept under which the pedways were planned as the first phase of a downtown people mover. It gave the bridges their purpose but created no public right of passage.[02]
Governing bodies
Open issues
- No public inventory, map or hours exist for the system; LAist describes finding the bridges as a matter of knowing which floor of which building to enter.
- The pedways' legal status, private walkways open by custom rather than public right of way, has never been settled in a published instrument.
- Low use and closed-off exits raise the question of whether future Bunker Hill redevelopment will keep, remove or repurpose the bridges.
Timeline
- Calvin S. Hamilton becomes Los Angeles city planning director.[02]
- Concept Los Angeles, the city's general-plan concept, proposes dense centres linked by rapid transit; downtown pedways are its first phase, to be joined by an automated people mover.[02]
- The City adopts the Concept Los Angeles plan.[02]
- Construction of the first pedway bridges begins on Bunker Hill.[01]
- Federal funding for the people mover is eliminated; the transit spine the pedways were built to feed is abandoned and the shops and vendors envisioned along them never arrive.[01]
- Hamilton steps down as planning director.[02]
- A PBS SoCal walk of the system finds it quiet but open, used by office workers, walkers and smokers, with signs treating the bridges as private property.[02]
- LAist reports all ten bridges still accessible, with little signage, some closed-off exits and minimal foot traffic.[03]
The story
Los Angeles is the odd one out among American pedway cities: its system was never about weather. Calvin S. Hamilton, the city's planning director from 1964, laid out a region of dense centres joined by rapid transit in Concept Los Angeles, the general-plan concept published in 1970 and adopted by the City in 1974. Downtown, the centres idea became Bunker Hill's redevelopment, and its pedestrian piece was a network of second-level bridges that would feed an automated people mover running from two new parking garages on the edge of downtown into the office core.
Construction of the bridges began in 1975, threaded through the towers then rising on the west side of Bunker Hill: Union Bank Plaza and Bunker Hill Towers from 1968, Arco Plaza from 1972, Bank of America Plaza from 1974, Figueroa Courtyard from 1978, Citigroup Center and Manulife Plaza from 1982, the hotel that became the L.A. Hotel Downtown from 1983, with the Westin Bonaventure and the World Trade Center as the hub. Unlike Minneapolis or Calgary, nothing was enclosed; the bridges are open concrete decks with planters and sculpture.
The spine never came. Federal funding for the people mover was eliminated in 1981, and with it the reason for the bridges to carry crowds. The shops and vendors planned along the route were never built, and the bridges settled into their present role as a shortcut for office workers between a handful of towers and the Bonaventure. Hamilton himself stepped down in 1985.
Governance is the gap. No instrument gives the public a right to use the bridges; they are reached through private lobbies, signs declare them private and warn against loitering, and a 2013 walk found Caltrans repairing lights on one span while no agency claimed the whole. A 2023 LAist account found all ten bridges open but barely signed, with some exits closed. For an atlas of how such systems are governed, Los Angeles is the clearest case of a network that exists physically but not legally.
Questions people ask
What is the Los Angeles Pedway?
Who owns the Los Angeles pedways?
Why was the Los Angeles Pedway never finished?
Are the Los Angeles pedways open to the public?
Sources
- Los Angeles Pedway — Wikipedia (2026)
- Exploring Downtown's Calvin S. Hamilton Pedway — PBS SoCal (Eric Brightwell) (2013)
- Explore DTLA's Pedways — LAist (Cato Hernández) (2023)
- In the Pedways of Los Angeles Past, a Vision of a Pedestrian-Friendly Future — Bloomberg CityLab (2014)
- Skyway (comparison of systems) — Wikipedia (2026)
About this record
Confidence low · reviewed 2026-10-20. Built from secondary accounts (Wikipedia, PBS SoCal 2013, LAist 2023, CityLab 2014 via citation). Not found: who holds title to the spans over public streets, any encroachment permit or easement, the CRA/LA Bunker Hill agreements that required the bridges, construction costs, and whether any bridge has been removed. The Caltrans lighting detail is a single 2013 observation. Verify against CRA/LA Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project records and LADOT encroachment files.
Map geometry: 40 corridor features, © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), as of 2026-10-20. Levels come from OpenStreetMap tags and can be incomplete.
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© 2026 Open Civic Intelligence Ventures LLC. Quote with attribution and a link; terms.