Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker
as a traditional urban center, with a strong civic culture rooted in its downtown. That was the destination of Huntington’s streetcar lines. It was where people worked and shopped and went to the theater. You can still see vestiges of this first LA, from the grandiose Union Station, built in Spanish villa style in 1939, to the thirty-two-floor art deco tower that crowns city hall.
The second LA, as Hawthorne sees it, took shape following the Second World War. Much as the Los Angeles Times’ editorial writers had feared twenty-five years earlier, LA had extended into a policentric urban region with dozens of smaller downtowns, all of them connected by a fast-growing network of freeways. It was a vast sprawl.
For a time, it was a wildly successful one. Hollywood led the globe in entertainment. Fueled by Cold War spending, LA grew into a manufacturing giant and a world leader in aerospace. And LA’s freeway culture was central to its brand, one of freedom, sunshine, and sex. “She makes me come alive,” the Beach Boys sang, “and makes me want to drive.”
Yet as Hawthorne sees it, the civic spirit, the sense of belonging to something in common, slackened during this period. This wasn’t unique to LA, of course. But in Los Angeles, as is often the case, the change came earlier and was more extreme. People spent more time cocooned in their homes and their cars, and less of it within chatting distance of fellow Angelenos. With growing crime in the area, the most gruesome cases looped endlessly on TV, the streets themselves started to feel dangerous. In the second LA, the car was a safe space, a shield.
Now Hawthorne sees a third LA rising. In many ways, it recalls the original version, the one centered on a downtown, where people bumped into one another on electric trains and crowded sidewalks. In this process, LA doesn’t revert to a single downtown. But it does become a denser place, with more people packed into many of its empty spaces, more of them living in apartments. This more concentrated population will depend far less on cars, and fewer of its inhabitants will need to own one.
This shift is already under way. You can see it in the Arts District, a fifteen-minute walk from city hall. A neighborhood of old warehouses and small manufacturing plants, it’s now sprouting galleries, cafés, converted lofts, and new apartment buildings. People bike and scooter and stroll on sidewalks. This preview of the third LA looks and acts more like a traditional city.
For this filling-in trend to spread across greater LA, Angelenos will need a host of new mobility options. These extend from the familiar—walkable sidewalks, bike paths, new Metro lines—to technology’s cutting edge: think autonomous air taxis and high-speed pods blazing through tunnels.
MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, leaning back on a couch in his spacious city hall office, is reminiscing about his first car, a 1975 gas-guzzling Ford Torino station wagon. He reaches for his phone and does a fast image search. “Here it is,” he says, pointing to a boxy behemoth with fake wood paneling on the sides. “It was more a question of gallons per mile than miles per gallon.”
It was a couple of months after Garcetti’s sixteenth birthday, in 1987, that his father, Gil (who would later serve as LA’s district attorney), bought back the Torino from the man he’d sold it to and presented it to his son. Even with its miserable gas mileage, the Torino represented freedom, and driving in LA still seemed fun. Today, the mayor says, LA still has some “amazing drives,” up the Pacific Coast Highway, for instance, or the twists and turns of Mulholland Drive. Topanga Canyon is still gorgeous. Add it all up, and the nice drives occupy “about two percent of the time,” Garcetti says grimly. “The other ninety-eight percent you’re in traffic.” And crawling.
Driving in LA is mostly an exercise in tapping the brakes. Eastbound rush hour traffic trudges on the 10, from Santa Monica to downtown, at about nine miles per hour, no faster than a six year old on a bike. In fact, many routes in LA are slower today than they were in the 1920s, when people were still driving Model Ts.
Immobility saps the Los Angeles region of its very essence. The whole point of living and working in a city, after all, is to connect with other people. In LA, it might be to haggle over a merger in Pasadena, to play tennis on the courts at UCLA, to celebrate a quinceañera in Boyle Heights, to dream up a screenplay over drinks in Marina del Rey. People interacting with other people is akin to a city’s nervous system. For it to work, people have to be able to move. Otherwise, why pay the rent to live in LA? You might as well FaceTime from somewhere else.
For decades, the answer has been to widen the highways—which is almost always an exercise in futility. Way back in 1955, the social critic Lewis Mumford quipped that adding highway lanes to ease congestion was like loosening your belt to cure obesity. More supply simply generates greater demand. The most recent example was a $1.1 billion widening of the key north–south artery, the 405. The job, which involved hacking out a wider pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, took four years. It led angry commuters through miles of convoluted detours. Once complete, that stretch of the 405 was as slow as ever. Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, an LA resident since 2002, laments to a gathering of Bel-Air residents that the 405, even with the improvements, “varies between the seventh and eighth levels of hell.”
Absent this powerful and widespread frustration with LA’s car monoculture, local authorities would have little hope of transforming mobility in the region. But even car-loving Angelenos now see that the second LA is unsustainable. In 2016, voters were so fed up with the status quo, they approved Measure M, which hiked gas taxes to finance $120 billion over four decades in transportation spending, much of it in Metro expansion.
For a target, Garcetti focuses on the LA Olympics in 2028. His office is decorated with enormous black-and-white photos of LA’s two previous Olympics. The 1932 games, LA’s coming-out party, left the city its iconic Coliseum. The Olympics of 1984, staged at the height of the Cold War, felt like a victory parade. First, LA beat out New York City for the games, which made it sweet. Then Americans, like the sunny gymnast Mary Lou Retton and the sprinter Carl Lewis, scooped up loads of medals (thanks in part to the Soviet and Eastern Bloc boycott). In the ’84 Olympics, LA even figured out a way to make a profit—which enhanced its reputation as a can-do region, one capable of economic miracles. Time magazine named the games’ organizer, Peter Ueberroth, its 1984 Man of the Year.
By the time the 2028 Olympics roll around, in Garcetti’s vision, the third LA should be on full display, the city’s mobility largely transformed. County-controlled LA Metro plans to have twenty-eight major transit projects completed in time for the ’28 games. They include a doubling of the Metro line, the introduction of electric buses, the availability of subsidized electric ride-share services for the poor and disabled, and the expansion of bike lanes and pedestrian greenways.
The city and county are wooing mobility players big and small, whether they’re running fleets of autonomous jitneys, operating air taxis, or building electric buses. “If you think about the finance capitals of the world,” Garcetti says, “New York and London come to mind. Car cities, Detroit and Munich, Tokyo. But what city is the leader in transportation technology? That’s what I want LA to be.” He points to the city’s leadership in aerospace, the five-hundred-odd tech start-ups along the western strip (so-called Silicon Beach), the two Hyperloop companies, and an openness to experimentation. “I want everyone to come here and try stuff,” he says. “I want LA to be the kitchen where this is all cooked.”
At the same time, he sees LA’s paved roadway, the asphalt tapestry smothering much of the region, as an asset. The roads can be repurposed, he says, parts of them transformed into bike paths and walkways. “Look at the High Line,” he says, referring to a converted stretch of elevated railway in New York City that is now a world-famous park.
Of course, many of the roads will remain focused on their current job: the movement of automobiles. Even as other options emerge, the automobile isn’t deserting Los Angeles any time soon. The region has 6.4 million cars and trucks, and the average vehicle stays in operation for eleven years, many for much longer. So on the eve of the 2028 Olympics, millions of cars would be still circulating in LA even if Angelenos, en masse, stopped buying them today. And that’s not happening.
The idea is not to get rid of the car, but to end the car monoculture. It’s a matter of giving people choices.