Los Angeles as Setting (Speed) Speed
Speed could not have been made at any time but 1993. The film captured Los Angeles at the exact moment of its most dramatic infrastructure transformation -- freeways still being completed, a subway system half-built, and a city transitioning from its car-dependent suburban identity into something denser and more urban. The film's three set pieces map onto three layers of LA transit infrastructure: the high-rise elevator, the surface freeway, and the underground subway.
Colin Marshall identified Speed as the standout Los Angeles action movie
Writing for PBS SoCal, Marshall argued that Speed uses the city's infrastructure more fully than any other action film:
"Speed" is "the standout Los Angeles action movie, one that makes fuller use of the city's distinctive size, shape, and built environment than any other." -- Colin Marshall, PBS SoCal (2024)
The argument is not that Speed depicts Los Angeles beautifully -- it does not -- but that it uses the city's infrastructure as the film's structural spine. The bus routes, the freeway interchanges, the airport tarmac, and the subway tunnels are not background; they are the plot.
The I-105 freeway had been planned since the 1950s and was still unfinished
The Century Freeway (I-105 / Glenn Anderson Freeway) was one of the most contentious freeway projects in American history. Planned in the 1950s, delayed by litigation, community opposition, and environmental reviews, it was still unfinished when Speed filmed in late 1993. The freeway opened to the public on October 14, 1993 -- during the film's production.
The filmmakers spent six weeks shooting on the empty, unopened freeway. The production helped pay for certain parts of the freeway's infrastructure in exchange for access -- a uniquely LA arrangement in which a film studio subsidized public works to create a film set. (collider, mentalfloss)
The road markings and highway signs visible in the film were painted by the production crew to make the incomplete road look operational. The gap in the freeway that the bus jumps was added in post-production by Sony Pictures Imageworks -- but the empty, car-free highway beneath the bus was real. (mentalfloss)
The Metro Red Line was under construction and already being used as a set
The subway sequence uses the real Pershing Square station, which had opened earlier in 1993 as part of the Metro Red Line's initial segment. Marshall notes that the station map visible in the film displays "HOLLYWOOD STATION UNDER CONSTRUCTION" -- an accurate snapshot of the Red Line's incomplete state. The subway tunnels in the film were captured on VistaVision plates while the system was still being built, then composited with 1/8th-scale miniature trains. (pbssocal)
The film's subway finale -- a train crashing out of the ground onto Hollywood Boulevard -- is a literalization of the city's relationship with its own transit system. The subway was supposed to move beneath the city invisibly; Speed drags it into daylight.
Speed inadvertently captures LA's transition from suburban to urban
Marshall argues that the film documents a transformation the filmmakers were not consciously recording:
"Speed inadvertently captures the moment of transition between a suburban city and an urban one." -- Colin Marshall, PBS SoCal (2024)
The bus moves through Venice, surface streets in midtown, the 105 freeway, and LAX -- a cross-section of Los Angeles neighborhoods connected by infrastructure that is itself the subject of the film. The passengers on Bus 2525 are a cross-section of the city's demographics: diverse by race, class, and temperament, forced into a community by shared danger. The bus is a civic space, and the film's treatment of it as such anticipates the LA Metro system's eventual transformation of the city's public-transit culture.
The bus fleet itself documents a vanishing era of LA transit
The production used eleven GM New Look buses and three Grumman 870 buses -- models that were being phased out of service in the early 1990s. Multiple buses were needed because the practical effects destroyed them. The bus fleet that Speed burned through on camera was the same generation of vehicles that LA's actual bus system was retiring. The film preserves them in their final act: not carrying passengers but carrying a bomb. (wikipedia)
The three set pieces map onto three eras of LA infrastructure
The elevator represents the high-rise office tower -- the 1970s and 1980s dream of a vertical, corporate Los Angeles. The bus represents the freeway -- the mid-century vision of a horizontal, car-dependent city. The subway represents the future -- the 1990s attempt to build a transit system that could compete with the car. Speed moves through all three, and in each case the infrastructure becomes the trap.