Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker
A passenger in Kansas City could travel all the way to Los Angeles for as little as twenty dollars, then ten dollars, and during one spectacular promotion, a single dollar. To these first travelers, this rolling conquest of an entire continent must have seemed magical.
With the new railways, the West was tamed. Travelers simply stepped into a railroad car at Kansas City’s new Union Depot. Two or three days later, they would find themselves far beyond the Rockies, the Sonoran Desert, and the Sierra Nevada, descending into a boomtown of palm trees and rolling surf, a city of angels.
What wasn’t to like? Los Angeles grew, and a railroad heir named Henry Huntington avidly pushed it along. Huntington arrived in Southern California in the 1890s and promptly began to buy up streetcar companies. He extended tracks throughout the region. He also acquired an electricity company, which fueled his trains. Nearly a century before the word existed, Huntington was a master practitioner of synergy.
He was also a visionary. He was in fact building transit for an immense city that did not yet exist. While he ran the electricity and the trains, the biggest money, he knew, was in real estate. The history of railroads made it clear that when tracks came through, the value of nearby land soared, turning scrub lots into premium parcels. So he bought loads of acreage, from the foothills town of Glendale and Pasadena all the way to Redondo Beach, and then connected them to his train lines. People who settled in those areas could ride his Red or Yellow cars downtown for work and shopping.
It was a comfy racket for Huntington and a handful of other investors, but it was headed for a big disruption, similar in many ways to the one we’re facing now. The first automobiles showed up early in the twentieth century, and after 1908, when the affordable Model Ts started rolling off Henry Ford’s new assembly lines, Angelenos embraced them. In 1911, to meet soaring local demand, Ford even set up a Model T factory on Seventh Street, in downtown Los Angeles. By the following year, one in every eight adults in Los Angeles had a car, more than twice the rate in such established cities as New York. Some of these new automobiles began to compete directly with Huntington’s streetcars. Jitney cabs trolled the streetcar lines, snatching away their passengers and collecting the same fee, a nickel. A century later, this same pattern is repeating in hundreds of cities, as commuters abandon buses and subways for car-sharing services.
As Angelenos took to the wheel, downtown LA grew congested. The streets effectively became narrower because of the parked cars. They were also more crowded, because drivers then—just like today—roamed in search of parking. The streetcars, which still served the majority of Angelenos, were getting tied up in traffic. As Richard Longstreth describes in his study of LA, City Center to Regional Mall, the city council addressed this problem by voting in 1920 to ban streetside parking in the urban core.
This raised vivid concerns. The Los Angeles Times warned that if people couldn’t park downtown, other competing downtowns would spring up, in lots of other neighborhoods, including Hollywood and Glendale. Those competing downtowns would sprout their own theaters and department stores, and with their cheaper real estate, they’d be able to offer parking. This would hollow out LA’s downtown.
Within a decade, the new order was firmly established. Cars prevailed, and again, it was real estate that drove the change. Developers built in areas far from public transit, because now people could drive. Those who moved into those suburbs were self-selected car people. During this decade of tumultuous expansion, LA fleshed out much of the land between the bare bones of the streetcar networks. In 1927, the director of the city’s planning department, an auto buff named Gordon Whitnall, wrote: “So prevalent is the use of the automobile here that it might almost be said that Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy … that our population has become fluid.”
The alarming point about this transition, from the perspective of Angelenos who don’t want history to repeat itself, is that it just seemed to happen. From the perspective of everyday folk in the area, the process was simple: There was this new way to move. People liked it. And it promptly overwhelmed a large piece of the planet; in this case, Southern California.
Peter Marx, a professor at USC and a former chief technology officer for Los Angeles, goes so far as to suggest that the automobile in Southern California is the dominant species, and that we human beings serve it. This is tongue in cheek, of course, but his logic has the ring of truth.
Automobiles do seem to lord over us. We pay them extravagantly, and we polish and clean them—even though they tend to be lazy. Most of them labor for only a fraction of their existence, and they snooze the rest of the time in expensive lots and garages that we build for them.
Human beings in Los Angeles spend thousands of dollars every month to park their own bodies, many of them in cramped studios and duplexes. The city has an urgent homeless problem, with more than fifty thousand of its people living without a roof over their heads. The automotive overlords, by contrast, often park for free. Each one, on average, luxuriates in more than three spaces, many of them safer and more substantial than the ramshackle shelters and tents that homeless humans occupy. Parking spaces in greater Los Angeles take up some two hundred square miles. That’s five times the entire footprint of Paris.
The whole environment has been molded to the needs of these four-wheeled beings. If aliens came to earth and studied our species, they might notice that we appear happier when at the beach, on fields, in the mountains, or surrounded by vegetation. But those beautiful environments are inhospitable to cars (though useful as backdrops to advertise them). So for a century, as Joni Mitchell sang, we’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
To underscore our subservience to these machines, one more point: if, through carelessness or pride, we venture onto their paved terrain, they can kill or maim us.
SO IN THIS book about the coming age of mobility, why include a chapter about this iconic car town? The three other cities discussed in this book clearly make sense: Helsinki has its mobility apps; Dubai is spending billions for every new piece of technology on the shelf. Of course it would be silly to ignore China, so sure, Shanghai.
LA, though, doesn’t seem to fit. LA County minted the global model for highway-connected sprawl. With its eighty-eight municipalities, the county is shaped by thousands of miles of highways, driveways, boulevards, parking lots, and culs-de-sac. This is yesterday’s infrastructure. What does it have to do with tomorrow?
That’s precisely the point. Los Angeles, more than traditional compact cities, like San Francisco or Paris, must reinvent itself. The city’s leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have vowed to do just that. LA pioneered motorized mobility one hundred years ago, they say, and it can do it again. “My goal—and the goal of this city—[is] to be the transportation technology capital of the world,” says Garcetti. The challenges, as we’ll see, are immense. But the transition, when it comes, will likely be far more dramatic—for better or for worse—than in most other cities.
Consider the mileage. Drivers in LA County travel a combined average of 221 million miles a day. That’s the equivalent, every day, of a round-trip to the sun plus a one-way jaunt to Mars. You could argue that Angelenos would travel far more than that, maybe twice or three times as much, if the road experience were less miserable. The average LA driver spends one hundred hours a year stuck in traffic. Some commuters suffer multiples of that.
So for electric bus manufacturers, designers of flying machines, ride-sharing app developers, tunneling companies—for mobility entrepreneurs of every stripe and color—LA represents an immense and ravenous market for miles. The coming transition is bound to transform the economy, the cityscape, and life itself in this sun-soaked expanse of California.
In many ways, LA’s next step could be a return to its past. Christopher Hawthorne studies this history. For fourteen years, he was the renowned architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and more recently crossed the street to city hall, where he has a brand-new title: chief design officer. His job is to think about the emerging layout of the city: where people will live, work, study, and play, and—naturally—how they’ll move from one place to another. This has led him to conclude that in the twentieth century, there were two very different LAs, and now, in this new