Automobile city? Transport and the making of C20th Los Angeles

Automobile city?
Transport and the making of twentieth-century Los Angeles

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

copyright notice | citation information | plagiarism | notes

Introduction

IN JUNE 2003 the UK pressure group Transport 2000 released a report called The Threat of a Second M25: the South-East as the Los Angeles of Europe.[1] This publication deals with an alleged scheme to create a second orbital motorway around London, and is illustrated with a large cartoon image of the south-eastern corner of England transformed into a polluted, congested, chaotic mess by the imposition of a vast complex of intersecting motorways, crammed with stationary vehicles pumping out exhaust fumes. A reading of the report confirms the kind of place the ‘Los Angeles’ of Europe would be: ‘Congested roads … massive over-heating and over-development … car-dependent sprawl’.[2] This description draws on long-established negative images of Los Angeles as a place associated with environmental degradation, congestion, confusion, and urban decay.[3] ‘Los Angeles’ has become a piece of shorthand for a whole condition of modern civilization, a state of unplanned, disordered, sprawling, polluted, congested chaos; and it threatens to envelop us all. It is the dark smog cloud that haunts the edges of our cities and lurks at the end of every stretch of new motorway. The great mega-city of Los Angeles seems to embody the problems of the modern world on a mega-scale. But how and why did we come to see Los Angeles this way? In particular, what role has transport played in shaping the image and reality of this vast and extraordinary modern metropolis?

Los Angeles is not a new city: founded in 1781 and incorporated in 1850, it is the second-oldest city in California and one of the longest-established urban centres in the United States.[4] Yet this long-established urban centre has been described by one recent writer as ‘known throughout the world as the prototype of the late twentieth-century city’.[5] Elsewhere Los Angeles has been described as ‘a harbinger of the modern American city … a prototype for the American metropolis of the late twentieth century’,[6] an ‘exemplary, if not paradigmatic illustration of the essential and generalizable features of late-twentieth-century urbanization’.[7] In a more negative vein, the novelist Henry Miller observed in 1945 that ‘Los Angeles gives one a feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future too’,[8] and the critic Harrison Salisbury famously declared of Los Angeles in 1959 that ‘I have seen the future, and it doesn’t work’.[9] This perception of Los Angeles, for all its relative antiquity, as (for good and ill) a city of modernity and futurity reflects the overwhelmingly twentieth-century nature of its growth. The form that growth has taken has been seen (again, for good and ill) as embodying the fundamental qualities of a pattern of development ‘typical of twentieth century urbanization’.[10] This pattern of urbanism is identified particularly with North America but, partly by virtue of being American, has exercised great influence across the world: a decentralized, dispersed, suburbanized, privatized, consumerized urbanism that we now find adopted in almost every part of the globe where people have congregated in towns and cities.

Los Angeles has thus been seen by many historians and other observers as a paradigmatic city, worthy of study precisely because where Los Angeles has gone, other cities have followed. There is a paradox here however, because Los Angeles has also been seen as an anomaly, a one-off that could not – perhaps should not – be repeated anywhere else. In 1959 a Californian geographer asked ‘does Los Angeles portend a new, modern trend in urbanization, or is it simply a freak, a unique city, representative only of a transitory period in a non-typical area?’[11] The urban historian Robert Fishman has sought to overcome the tension between L.A. as anomaly and L.A. as paradigm by arguing that ‘What had appeared in the 1930s as anomalies were in fact the harbingers of the decentralized, polycentric development that would overtake all the great cities of the world’.[12] Greg Hise, one of the leading contemporary scholars of L.A., has recently characterized these positions as, respectively, the ‘exceptionalist’ and the ‘prefigurative’ theses, and has persuasively argued for a rejection of both the constrictiveness of the former and the teleology inherent in the latter. Hise has argued that we should move beyond both positions to set Los Angeles ‘within a national context’, recognizing that ‘urban development is a complex system, or, more precisely, set of interrelated and interdependent systems’ which should not be viewed in its parts but with an integrative vision.[13]

This is not to deny the significance of Los Angeles as an exemplar of twentieth-century tendencies in urbanism, but it is to place that significance in the context of the factors and influences that made the city develop the way it did: commerce, community, culture; housing, industry; technological change; landscape and resources. Such an integrative and contextualized approach is particularly illuminating and rewarding when applied to transport. Los Angeles has been shaped by topography, location, climate, resources, population; it could be argued that transport, and particularly urban transport, has been the factor that has brought all these influences together and exerted a powerful influence of its own over the ways in which they have operated and interacted. Indeed, transport has been described as the greatest shaper of Los Angeles after land and water,[14]

A historical outline of Los Angeles: transport, city and region

During the third quarter of the nineteenth century there was very little to distinguish the city of Los Angeles from dozens of other small urban settlements in the western periphery of the north American continent. The soils were fertile but the climate, particularly the rainfall, was capricious; the expanse of flat land between the mountains and the sea lent itself both to urban expansion and agriculture, but there was nothing in the location of Los Angeles, its landscape or resources that made it a natural communications hub or node of growth.[15]When the Southern Pacific Railroad was constructing the western end of the first transcontinental railway line it showed no interest in serving Los Angeles; representatives of the city literally bribed the railroad to come their way.[16] The opening of the Southern Pacific line connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco in 1876 can be said to have marked the beginning of the process through which the city would be transformed from a small marginal settlement to a great metropolis,[17] although initially Angelenos were disappointed with the relative lack of impact of the railroad on the region’s economy.[18] It was with the completion of a more direct route to the East in 1881 and the beginnings of railroad competition with the opening of the Santa Fe line in 1885 that numbers of new arrivals in the city began to soar and the economy, particularly the property market, began to boom. Agriculture – fruit-growing, vineyards, corn, dairy farming – remained the dominant force in the local economy but the beginnings of Los Angeles oil production in the 1890s marked the first stages of the region’s transformation into a major industrial centre; by the mid-1920s Los Angeles was producing one-fifth of the world’s entire oil supply.[19] The construction of the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro (the site being chosen in 1896 and absorbed into Los Angeles in 1909) created a further foundation for the city’s industrial and commercial development,[20] and that development continued, with gathering pace, into the early twentieth century:

Between 1919, when Goodyear opened its branch tire plant in Los Angeles, and the crash of 1929 (only one year after the city began to manufacture automobiles), the Los Angeles area became the center of the oil equipment and service industry, the second-largest tire manufacturing center, the headquarters of the western furniture, glass, and steel industries, as well as the regional center for the aircraft, automotive, chemical, and trucking industries.[21]

The city was one of several western urban centres that grew by extraordinary rates between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, but the consistency of its growth far outpaced such burgeoning cities as San Francisco, Denver, Portland and Seattle (table 1). Population growth in Los Angeles County was equally impressive during this period, increasing from 101,000 in 1890 to over 2 million by 1930.

**Table 1.** Population growth in US cities 1890-1930 (thousands). *Source: Fogelson, p. 78.*
City	1890	1900	1910	1920	1930
New York NY	2507	3437	4767	5620	6930
Chicago IL	1100	1699	2185	2702	3376
Philadelphia PA	1047	1204	1549	1824	1951
Los Angeles CA	50	102	319	577	1238
Boston MA	448	561	671	748	781
Detroit MI	206	286	466	994	1569
St Louis MO	452	575	687	773	822
San Francisco CA	299	343	417	507	634
Seattle WA	43	81	237	315	366
Portland OR	46	90	207	258	302
Denver CO	107	134	213	256	288

The railroad network not only allowed Los Angeles to grow, it also interacted with the topography of the region to give that growth form, acting as the first significant influence on the way in which the city expanded.[22] The railroads promoted industrial and commercial development on land they owned around the city – the Southern Pacific in the region between Glendale and Los Angeles, and the Santa Fe in East Los Angeles, for example – exerting considerable influence on the evolution of Los Angeles as an industrial and business centre.[23] The development of the main-line railroad network was followed by the development of an extensive urban and interurban rail system. The small physical size and population of Los Angeles before the boom of the 1880s meant that there was initially relatively little demand for street railway and similar urban transport systems. What brought about the establishment of urban rail transport on a large scale was the inward immigration of the 1880s and the associated property boom. A number of horse-drawn street railway systems operated in Los Angeles from 1874 (the date of opening of the Spring & Sixth Street Horse Railroad Company) and in the 1880s the first cable-operated lines appeared. The Second Street Cable Railroad (1885) and the Temple Street Cable Railway (1886) were both subsidized by the owners of land beyond the central city who realized that a horse-drawn system could not serve their new developments. Once the property boom fell away, however, the developers provided no more subsidies and the lines failed. The largest transit operation in the city, the Los Angeles Cable Railway Company, was founded in 1887 and absorbed some of the failed cable and horse lines, converting the latter to cable operation and renaming itself the Pacific Railway in 1889.[24] Meanwhile the Consolidated Electric Railway was created from failed electric lines and other transit operations by Moses H. Sherman in 1890. The division of income and competition proved fatal for the Pacific Railway, particularly when its investors refused to pay for even partial electrification, and Sherman duly acquired the Pacific system in 1893. Consolidated too got into financial difficulties and Sherman lost control in 1894; the new directors changed the name to the Los Angeles Railway Company but the network continued to falter under a mountain of debt and in 1898 it was sold to Henry E. Huntington. Sherman, meanwhile, had turned his attention from urban to interurban railways. In partnership with his brother-in-law, Eli P. Clark, he became involved in the construction of lines connecting L.A. with Pasadena and Santa Monica, merging new lines with existing interurbans into a system known as the Los Angeles & Pacific Railway. The complexities of mergers, takeovers, bond issues, capitalizations and re-capitalizations in the Los Angeles rail transit system during the 1890s and 1900s almost defy description, but by 1911 there were two players left on the field: the Los Angeles Railway (LARY), which provided mainly local transit in and around Los Angeles itself, and the Pacific Electric (PE) railway which dominated interurban transport and ran throughout the Los Angeles basin. At this date the Pacific Electric, which had been created by Huntington, became a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad; at the same time the LARY, which had originated in the lines operated by Sherman and Clark among others, fell under Huntington’s control.

An intimate connection between transit and real estate underlay the development of Los Angeles’s urban transport networks throughout this period. The first significant electric line in Los Angeles – the Los Angeles Electric Railway (1887) – was backed by the ‘Electric Railway Homestead Association Tract’;[25] and Huntington’s main business was land, not transport, with the ‘Huntington Land and Improvement Company’ owning vast acreages of the San Gabriel Valley, across which his Pacific Electric lines expanded in the early 1900s.[26] A syndicate led by Huntington and other transport promoters including Sherman purchased 50,000 acres of land in the San Fernando Valley in 1904 (in advance of the Los Angeles Aqueduct project,[27] which guaranteed a huge supply of water to the area and led to property values soaring), subdivided the land and laid out the transport network. Huntington’s property development activities became intensive: he was to be responsible for creating no fewer than thirteen new urban centres in the Los Angeles area between 1902 and 1917.[28] The influx of people that turned Los Angeles from a town of under 5000 in 1870 to a city of over 320,000 in 1910 provided the engine for economic expansion and property development. The horse-drawn, cable and electric railways which developed in and around the city during this period reflected, in their often frenetic growth and their frequent bankruptcies, the boom-and-bust cycle which characterized the Los Angeles economy during this period of expansion, but they also made residential development possible at some distance from the urban core and at relatively low densities. In doing so, they established a pattern of urban and suburban development that was to become typical of Los Angeles and which was to be strengthened and built upon by the rise of motor transport.

**Table 2.** Registrations of motor vehicles (in thousands) and persons per motor vehicle (PPMV) in selected regions, 1900-1920. *Source: McShane, p. 105.*
Region	1900		1910		1920
	Number	PPMV	Number	PPMV	Number	PPMV
United States	8.0	9526	458	196	8131	13
United Kingdom	no data	no data	144	252	650	58
France	6.0	6408	91	430	236	164
Germany	0.9	62633	50	1299	119	573
New York City	2.4	2457	31.2	153	213	26
Washington DC	0.1	3484	6.3	52	34	13
State of Kansas	0.2	6681	10.5	161	294	7
State of California	0.8	18955	44.1	53	583	6
State of Alabama	0.04	45725	1.7	1212	74	32

Motor transport began to make an impact on Southern California at an early date and on a large scale. The dispersed nature of the region, its prosperity, its mild climate and the propensity of its population for single-family dwellings encouraged the acquisition and use of cars from the beginnings of the motor age,[29] as a comparison of motor vehicle registrations indicates (tables 2 and 3).

**Table 3.** Residents per automobile, 1915-1940. *Source: Bottles, p. 93.*
	1915	1920	1925	1930	1935	1940
United States	43.1	13.1	6.6	5.3	5.6	4.8
Los Angeles	8.2	3.6	1.8	1.5	1.6	1.4

The low-density, dispersed nature of Los Angeles accommodated itself well to the automobile, but such were the numbers of cars in the region and so much were they used by their owners that in central areas traffic congestion became an early problem. L.A. generally set the pace nationally for instituting street improvements to accommodate the automobile, with all the city’s main thoroughfares being surfaced by 1915 and an ongoing programme of city and county road improvements in suburban areas,[30] but the problems remained. Particularly in its central, downtown areas, Los Angeles suffered from the same problems as other pre-automobile cities: a congested and problematic street-plan, with narrow and discontinuous streets and all main routes going through the centre of town. The more cars were used, the worse the problem became, and of course cars were not the only users of road space; both interurban and streetcar lines inflexibly occupied large areas of the street plan.

During the 1920s a range of potential solutions to the problem of congestion were investigated: the improvement of existing roads and the creation of new ones, bans and restrictions on on-street parking, the construction of elevated railways or subways, the creation of a rapid transit system. The issue was not simply one of facilitating the easier movement of traffic, it was also a matter of what kind of city its citizens wanted Los Angeles to be, centralized or decentralized, concentrated or dispersed. The dominant explanation of L.A. by the mid-1920s was that it was a decentralized and dispersed city, and that planning and traffic engineering solutions should recognize that fact and even celebrate and further its development as representative of a new kind of modern city. Overall, this interpretation led to rail-based forms of transport losing out to the provision of facilities for motor vehicles. By 1930 it has been argued that ‘residential dispersion and business decentralization had transformed Los Angeles not into a planned polycentric metropolis, but into an unplanned and completely fragmented one’.[31] Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, while in many respects the outcome of this process appeared to be an unplanned and fragmented city, the process itself was one that had planning at its core.[32] And at the heart of those planning processes, by city officials, engineers and planners, was an increasing accommodation to the automobile and the commercial road vehicle.

In 1987 the historian Scott Bottles characterized Angelenos as ‘freely adopt[ing] the automobile as their major means of transportation’[33] and Los Angeles as a city which, in accommodating itself to the car, had simply reflected the free choice of its inhabitants. Bottles’s arguments are in many ways overstated and heuristic, but fundamentally they accurately represent an important truth: that people in and around Los Angeles adopted (how ‘freely’ is open to debate) the car as their favoured means of transport and their city reflects the consequences of that decision. Matthew Roth has recently argued that the image of the city willingly accommodating itself to the automobile is misleading, and has argued that ‘the purchase and use of a car [did not] necessarily have direct implications for transport infrastructure’.[34] This may well be true if one is considering the purchase and use of tens or even hundreds of cars, but when the situation is one in which hundreds of thousands of cars are being purchased and used for millions of journeys by millions of people – which is the situation in Los Angeles by the 1930s – the nonsensical nature of this statement becomes apparent. Adoption of the automobile is not, as represented by Scott Bottles, simply a matter of free choice, but nor can the political and cultural factors that go towards the dominance of a particular attitude to transport in a particular place at a particular time be considered in isolation from what large numbers of people in that place and time were actually doing. In twentieth-century Los Angeles you did not have to hate the streetcars and love the automobile, but if you and hundreds of thousands of your fellow-citizens bought into the latter mode of transport and deserted the former, the consequences of that decision would inevitably make themselves felt, in the form of public debate and public works. That is what happened – through a gradual, piecemeal and contested process – in Los Angeles between the 1920s and the 1950s.

It was during this period that the pattern of the city’s transport infrastructure took a form dictated by the car and the way it was used: the widening, straightening and improving of existing roads, the construction of new highways and the development of the high-speed limited-access freeway, the decline of public transit generally and the effective disappearance of rail-based urban transit altogether. A concentration on the development of the freeway network and other large-scale road schemes can give the impression of a hesitant and ‘highly contested’[35] process but an examination of the lower-profile but profound changes associated with the automobile at the level of street widening, intersection improvement and the provision of parking facilities during this period reveals how profound a change the adoption of the car was bringing about in the urban form of Los Angeles. Throughout the city previously nondescript routes were improved and upgraded to ‘boulevards’, synchronised traffic signals were introduced at junctions, and parking facilities became as much part of the urban landscape as electric railways had been at the beginning of the century.

Whatever the significance of these relatively undramatic changes, when people think of the effects the car has wrought on L.A. they tend to think first of the far bigger and grander freeways, ‘one of the greater works of man’, according to Reyner Banham.[36] Freeways were proposed on a large scale during the 1920s and 1930s, but economic depression and the demands of American participation in the world war meant that such projects were slow in coming to fruition. The concept of the ‘parkway’ – a limited-access, relatively high-speed, landscaped road – was brought from the east[37] and caught the imagination of a number of important elements in the economic and social life of Los Angeles: downtown business interests, who wanted to encourage traffic into a centre free of jams and congestion; subdividers and real estate developers, who wanted to open up access to new suburban areas; and the automobile lobbies, who wanted people to buy and use cars even more than they already did. In 1937 the Automobile Club of Southern California proposed a system of ‘motorways’ in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the first of these routes – the road through Cahuenga Pass, and the Arroyo Seco Parkway (later the Pasadena Freeway) – were in operation by the 1930s. However, it was not until the 1950s and 60s that freeway construction went into high gear. Post-war, the money for the new system was found through increasing state taxation on fuel and road licences, and the resulting investment produced a fourfold increase in California’s freeway mileage between 1950 and 1955 including such important routes in the Los Angeles area as the Santa Ana and San Bernadino freeways.[38] In 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act provided new funding for interstate routes which, because a number of such routes terminated in or ran through Los Angeles, made a significant contribution to the city’s freeway network.[39] By the 1970s Los Angeles as ‘the city as freeway’ had essentially arrived.

Public transport, meanwhile, withered. Ridership on the Pacific Electric and Los Angeles Railway systems declined from the early 1920s onwards; the companies were prevented from raising fares, and investment in the systems effectively ceased; congestion made travelling times worse and services less reliable, causing even more people to turn to their cars. Plans for subways, elevated railways and surface rapid transit networks foundered on the unwillingness of politicians and their constituencies to provide the money, and a perception that these forms of transport were simply not appropriate to the kind of city L.A. was. By 1940 both companies had abandoned many of their rail services, substituting buses for streetcars and interurbans. The gasoline and rubber shortages of the war years gave rail transit a brief respite, but by the late 1940s the Pacific Electric had decided to abandon its railway service altogether. In 1953 PE passenger services were bought by Metropolitan Coach Lines, who sold out to the state-owned Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1958, who in turn ended all rail services in 1961.[40] Meanwhile the LARY had been sold by the Huntington estate to American City Lines who renamed it Los Angeles Transit Lines and replaced many of the streetcars with buses. This system too came under the Metropolitan Transit Authority, who discontinued the remaining streetcar lines in 1963.

The freeway building programme, meanwhile, began to run into difficulties in the 1970s. The erosion of the value of petrol taxes by inflation, and the refusal of Californians to support any increase in highway user taxation, along with soaring construction costs and increasing concern about the human and environmental costs of freeway building brought an effective end to new road projects by the early 1970s. In 1973 the California Division of Highways was superseded by Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, and the removal of the word ‘highways’ from the name was reflected in a new emphasis on multimodal transport and on maintaining and operating the existing highways rather than extending the network. Los Angeles itself was changing; from being among the lowest-density cities in North America it became among the highest-density during the 1980s, suggesting a role for new mass transit strategies. How successful these new strategies will be in providing sustainable and appropriate transport for Los Angeles and its region, particularly in the case of the hugely expensive and geographically (and socially) restricted new MetroLink rail network, remains to be seen.

A ‘uniquely mobile metropolis’: some themes in L.A. transport history

It was Reyner Banham who described the ‘local language’ of Los Angeles as ‘the language of movement’ and called the city ‘the uniquely mobile metropolis’.[41] These are vivid terms of description, but tend to raise as many questions as they answer. It is not clear Los Angeles is uniquely mobile; it is highly mobile, and the forms that mobility takes are in important respects distinctive, but to see this as unique is perhaps to fall into the exceptionalist trap to which we referred at the beginning. Part of the significance of the history of urban transport in Los Angeles is precisely its relevance to the experience of other cities. By drawing out some of the arguably most important themes in that history we can illuminate what makes the experience of twentieth-century Los Angeles both distinctive and important.

Perhaps the most immediately striking characteristic of Los Angeles is that it is big. To quote Mike Davis, ‘with a built-up surface area nearly the size of Ireland and a GNP bigger than India’s – the urban galaxy dominated by Los Angeles is the fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world’.[42] The City of Los Angeles itself (ignoring the other jurisdictions that cluster around it) covers an area of over 440 square miles; the entire built-up area of greater Los Angeles is perhaps ten times that in area and stretches 70 miles along the coast of southern California and 70 miles inland. In 2000, fifteen million people lived in greater Los Angeles, 75% of the population of southern California. This, then, is ‘one of the world’s largest metropolitan agglomerations’.[43] Most of that growth has taken place during the twentieth century, and transport has played a key role both in facilitating and in shaping that process of growth. Many people are still convinced that when they look at sprawling Los Angeles they see a city shaped above all by the automobile, but Los Angeles was already spreading at low densities across a large area before the car was a significant factor in its development.

In 1885 no part of urban Los Angeles extended more than two miles from the town’s centre.[44] From the 1880s onwards, and with gathering momentum, Los Angeles and its surrounding region became urban as the city ‘Expand[ed] in every direction, the impatient metropolis’.[45] Between the 1880s and the 1930s the city had to accommodate two million new inhabitants, a billion dollars of new industry, and the buildings, services, transport and utilities this expansion demanded. There were many large cities in the United States during the same period, and many cities that experienced large-scale growth, but Los Angeles developed in a distinctive low-density manner, as the following figures show.

**Table 4.** Population ratio: central city to outlying suburbs (persons per square mile). *Source: Fogelson, p. 143.*
New York	Chicago	Cleveland	Milwaukee	Detroit
23.3	15.5	10.3	17.1	12.9
Boston	St Louis	Los Angeles	San Francisco	Pittsburgh
11.4	23.5	2.7	29.7	16.0

Many factors contributed to this low-density dispersed urban form, and clearly transport was highly significant. The unification of both the interurbans and the streetcar lines into single undertakings at the beginning of the twentieth century facilitated the growth of an extensive radial transport network. Furthermore, the relationship between the transit lines and real estate development fostered the subdivision of land for residential and business expansion.[46] Frequently the local railway routes, along with paving, electricity, water and road signs, would appear across an area before a single building had been erected. However, these factors, as Fogelson puts it, ‘were permissive not compulsory … they encouraged but did not compel subdivision’.[47] The key factor was the nature of Los Angeles’s population, and this ingredient was of fundamental importance for the way transport itself developed.

The people who flooded into Los Angeles from the end of the nineteenth century were not European immigrants, but native-born Americans from elsewhere in the United States; they were not unskilled or low-skill agricultural or industrial workers but skilled and professional workers; they were not poverty-stricken but reasonably comfortable and secure. They were ethnically ‘white’ and English-speaking. The proportion of these economically secure and confident ‘native white’ immigrants remained dominant and expanding throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In 1900 the population of Los Angeles County numbered more than 170,000; of that total, 80% were ‘native white’. By 1930 the county population had reached over 2.2 million, with a native white proportion of 75.5%.[48] Furthermore these people were not generally single men and women nor large extended families on the central and southern European model but stable small family units. Very many of them came from states which had given them space, if little else: Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado. The result of this was that when they came to Los Angeles they came with few problems of social adjustment, and their chosen mode of life reflected their desire to live in single family houses surrounded by a reasonable degree of open space:

The native Americans came to Los Angeles with a conception of the good community which was embodied in single-family houses, located on large lots, surrounded by landscaped lawns, and isolated from business activities … Their vision was epitomized by the residential suburb – spacious, affluent, clean, decent, permanent, predictable, and homogeneous – and violated by the great city – congested, impoverished, filthy, immoral, transient, uncertain, and heterogeneous.[49]

In Boston in 1930, the US Census revealed that 49.5% of dwellings were single-family; in New York, 53.8%; San Francisco, 88.3%; in Los Angeles, 93.9%.[50] The result was horizontal expansion and the spectacular growth of suburban areas: during the 1920s, for example, the population of Glendale grew by 364 percent, that of Huntington Park by 445 percent, Inglewood by 493 percent and Beverley Hills by 2485 percent.[51]

The aspirations of such groups underlay a constant social and physical mobility as people moved from one suburb to another, driven away from one area by the expansion of commerce and industry or an influx of Coloured or Hispanic people and attracted to another by location and exclusivity. Such mobility could take place to a limited extent in a city served by rail-based transit, but only if suburban development stayed close to the lines. The rail transit city was radial, based on movement into and out of the centre, with development clustered along the transit lines. Early twentieth-century Los Angeles was developing in a different way. By 1917 the city authorities were noting that the dispersal of homes and of workplaces in and around the city made the automobile a peculiarly suitable form of transport: ‘As the city grows our work becomes further away. It can no longer be handled efficiently by the streetcars. An automobile is a necessity for work in much of the outlying districts’.[52] The City of Los Angeles Engineering Department, who made this assessment, were reflecting the needs of increasingly dispersed suburban dwellers in their programme of road improvement and resurfacing which, in partnership with L.A. County authorities, had extended the paving of roads throughout the district by 1920.[53] During the inter-war years, Los Angeles came to depend more and more socially and commercially on the motor vehicle, and the form of the city reflected that dependency. By 1938 the City Planning Department could assert that ‘Surface trams, gasoline buses, and interurban electrics have not proven adequate as to speed, comfort or convenience. Hence the typical resident of Los Angeles has his own car’[54] (or her own car; by 1914 there were already more female drivers and car-owners in Los Angeles and in southern California generally as a proportion than anywhere else in the United States[55]).

It was during the 1920s that new roads, rather than new transit lines, became the established pattern around which new suburbs developed. The dispersed pattern of development which already typified southern California provided nodes of residence and employment that were linked by electric railways; development spread outwards from those centres away from the rail lines as growing car-ownership made the intervening areas accessible. The focusing of economic and commercial life in downtown Los Angeles led, as we have seen, to congestion, and department stores, shops and manufacturing began to relocate to suburban areas, creating what were literally ‘sub-urban’ centres, remote from downtown. This in turn further encouraged the dispersed, radial pattern of movement which the Engineering Department had noted in 1917. This pattern of development and mobility not only damaged the urban railway companies by depriving them of riders and fares, it also reinforced the economic arguments against investing in rapid transit, subway, elevated railway or other such systems. The population of the Los Angeles area was simply not sufficiently densely packed, and nor were the origins and destinations of their journeys sufficiently rationally disposed, to ensure viable patronage of streetcars, trams or commuter rail services. Had the political (and public) will been available to challenge this pattern it is possible the outcome could have been different in Los Angeles and other increasingly ‘auto-oriented’ cities,[56] but the fact remains that this did not happen. Public funding through taxation for roads and automobile facilities was seen as a socially and economically beneficial investment; mass transit was required to pay for itself.[57] But it should also be recognized that these priorities to a large degree reflected what many people in Los Angeles and elsewhere were sure they wanted: cars, cheap fuel, good roads, and the freedom these things brought.

Today, when sprawling, car-dependent Los Angeles is often seen – as in the Transport 2000 example with which I began – as an illustration of everything that is wrong with the twentieth-century city and its transport, it is important to remember that for much of the century the development of the suburbanised, dispersed city form was widely perceived as a positive phenomenon. It was the highly centralized, densely-packed type of city exemplified by New York, Chicago, London or Berlin that was seen as undesirable, as ugly, unhealthy, congested and squalid. The motor car and the infrastructure it required formed an integral part of the vision of L.A. as a new kind of low-density garden-city. In 1930 the Chicago-based urban planning consultant Frederick Olmsted described Los Angeles ‘grow[ing] as a metropolis of automobile users, living pleasantly in detached houses with plenty of room’ but went on to observe that this could only happen if the city ‘provides motorways … on a truly modern scale undreamed of’.[58] New roads, new suburbs, new cars and trucks, were the symbols of the future; antiquated fixed rail lines and slow streetcars were ‘symbols of urban blight, too primitive for the new image of Los Angeles’.[59] In Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, published in 1940, Philip Marlowe remarks of a character allegedly seen taking public transport, ‘He wouldn’t ride a street car. He had money’.[60] In general terms, this is the ideology that prevailed in Los Angeles urban transport planning and provision from the 1920s to the 1990s. It took a complex cultural change to bring about the resurgence of rail transit in the greater Los Angeles area.[61]

Not least among the factors contributing to that change was the perception that the triumph of the motor vehicle had had a deleterious effect on Los Angeles as a community, an environment, an experience. For Reyner Banham, writing in 1971, ‘autopia’ was one of Los Angeles’s fundamental ‘four ecologies’: ‘the freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life, the fourth ecology of the Angeleno’. In addition to ‘working uncommonly well’, for Banham the ‘private car and the public freeway together provide an ideal – not to say idealized – version of democratic urban transportation: door-to-door movement on demand at high average speeds over a very large area’.[62] Yet at the very time Banham was writing his paean to the freeways of Los Angeles, increasing concern was being expressed at the damage they were doing to the urban environment, their effects upon communities, and the consequences of the freeway mindset for those inhabitants of the city who were excluded from the idealized democratic mobility of the automobile.

The largest freeway projects were cut through the poorer east and south of Los Angeles, through areas inhabited by Latino and Coloured communities, rather than through the affluent north and west; large-scale expulsions and demolitions were followed by the creation of huge physical barriers each with its accompanying shadow of urban blight.[63] The decline of public transit brought its own penalties for the poor and marginalized: late-night and early-morning services, essential for many low-wage workers, withered away, many districts became inaccessible for non-car-owning groups as public transport was withdrawn. The social geography of transit has class and race dimensions that are often invisible to the wider community, concerned on questions of the availability or denial of access and mobility. Thus an African American lawyer who grew up in a middle-class family in Los Angeles in the 1940s recounts that as a teenager he could go anywhere on the streetcars, but if he or his friends drove into one of the wealthier parts of the city the police would stop them: ‘you would just be out, with your hands on top of the car’.[64] The privatization of transport reflects individual choice and the achievement of a greater degree of mobility for many, but by denying that choice and freedom to those excluded by financial and social disadvantage it can reinforce division and fragmentation.[65] As in so many other respects, Los Angeles provides a particularly dramatic example of this process.

Conclusion: image and reality in Los Angeles

Every city is the product of its history, and Los Angeles at the beginning of the twenty-first century embodies the outcomes of a complex interplay of social, economic, political and technological factors over a century and more of development. It is far from being simply ‘automobile city’; in many ways the car simply gave the fullest and most successful expression to tendencies in Los Angeles’s development that were already present in its topography and climate, social make-up and economic character before the motor age. From the beginning of the century Los Angeles expected to grow, and built for growth, using the resources and technologies that were available: water supply and irrigation, rapid building construction, rail transit, motor transport. Perhaps the most important corrective to the Transport 2000 view of Los Angeles is the role of planning: Los Angeles ‘is a result of long-term conscious planning decisions’[66] and transport has always had a prominent place in those decisions. Nor was that planning process always as irrational and short-term as has sometimes been suggested. In the key period of the early twentieth century, planners and engineers in Los Angeles believed that their city was different from other, older cities, and required a different strategy. Los Angeles did not embody the core-city problems of New York, Boston, or even relatively congested western cities such as San Francisco and could plan for its expansion, seeking to avoid the mistakes made in older urban centres. The streetcars and interurbans laid the foundations of this new form of city; the automobile built upon those foundations, expanding and elaborating what was already present rather than creating the city anew.

In that sense the role of the automobile in Los Angeles’s history and development can be said to represent far more of a continuity than does the recent resurrection of mass rail transit in the city. Many people believe the ills of transport in modern L.A. can be traced back to the destruction of the rail-based transport network of the red and yellow cars by an alliance of oil, rubber, motor and property interests. According to the conspiracy theory of L.A. history it was General Motors that tore up the rails in the 1950s and 60s so that anyone who wanted to go anywhere in Los Angeles would have to go by car. The resurrection of light rail, then, not only represents urban transport modernity, it is also an expiation of Los Angeles’s sins. One of the critics of Metro Rail, John Kain of Harvard University, argues that in building a new light rail system Los Angeles’s transportation planners were ‘trying to impose a nineteenth-century technology on a twentieth or twenty-first-century city’.[67] That may be a little harsh, for there are strong arguments in terms of efficiency and environmental benefits for light rail; but it is certainly the case that the new network is inflexible and expensive, and has sucked investment out of the unglamorous workhorse of L.A. urban transport, the bus network. Many more people use buses than could ever use Metro Rail; the buses serve a much wider constituency ethnically and economically than the rail networks which are largely located in affluent Anglo areas; the buses are far easier to adapt to changing patterns of urban life, and cost a great deal less to purchase and operate. But they are not glamorous, tend not to be high-tech, and are not the ‘must-have’ urban transport gadgets of the age, as light rail systems are. In investing so heavily in Metro Rail, to the detriment of its bus network, L.A. is perhaps doing what its critics like to say it does best – buying into the image rather than investing in reality.

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Notes

1. The Threat of a Second M25: the South-East as the Los Angeles of Europe (London: Transport 2000, 2003): http://www.transport2000.org.uk/news/OuterM25Final.htm [visited 8 June 2003].

2. Threat of a Second M25, excerpts from ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’.

3. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998; pbk. edn. London: Picador, 2000); Norman H. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997).

4. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 5, 7; Winstan W. Crouch & Beatrice Dinerman, Southern California Metropolis: A Study in Development of Government for a Metropolitan Area (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1963), p. 3.

5. Genevieve Guiliano, ‘Transporting Los Angeles’, in Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman & Greg Hise (eds.), Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), p. 231.

6. Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. xv.

7. Edward Soja & Allen J. Scott, ‘Introduction to Los Angeles: city and region’, in Edward Soja & Allen J. Scott (eds.), The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 1.

8. Henry Miller, ‘Soirée in Hollywood’ (1945), in Leslie Fiedler (ed.), The Art of the Essay (New York: Crowell, 1958), p. 122.

9. Quoted in John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 20.

10. Barbara Rubin, ‘A chronology of architecture in Los Angeles’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,, vol. 67, no. 4 (December 1977), p. 522.

11. Howard J. Nelson, ‘The spread of an artificial landscape over Southern California’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 49, no. 3, part 2, ‘Man, time and space in Southern California: a symposium’ (September 1950), p. 92.

12. Robert Fishman, ‘Re-imagining Los Angeles’, in Dear, Schockman & Hise (eds.), Rethinking Los Angeles, p. 259.

13. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 9, 10, 11.

14. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane, 1971), p. 31.

15. Carol A. O’Connor, ‘A region of cities’, in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor & Martha A. Sandweiss (eds.), The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 549.

16. William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad 1850-1910 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 45-7.

17. Martin Wachs, ‘The evolution of transportation policy in Los Angeles: images of past policies and future prospects’, in Scott & Soja (eds.), The City, p. 107.

18. Deverell, Railroad Crossing, p. 47; Gregory L. Thompson, The Passenger Train in the Motor Age: California’s Rail and Bus Industries 1910-1941 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1993), p. 14.

19. Janet Abu Leghod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 151.

20. Crouch & Dinerman, Southern California Metropolis, pp. 28-30; Deverell, Railroad Crossing, pp. 43ff; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, pp. 108ff.

21. Abu-Leghod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, p. 151.

22. John H. Kemler, ‘Railway entrances and exits to Los Angeles’, Economic Geography, vol. 16, no. 3 (July 1940), pp. 312-14.

23. Crouch & Dinerman, Southern California Metropolis, pp. 22-3.

24. For a line-by-line history of Los Angeles electric railways see the web pages of the Electric Railway Historical Association of Southern California: http://www.ehra.org/railwayhis.htm [visited 8 June 2003].

25. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, p. 86; Banham, Los Angeles, p. 79.

26. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, p. 89.

27. Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1990; rev. edn. London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 52ff, 75-6; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, pp. 95ff.

28. Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 17.

29. Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 92; Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, p. 14.

30. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, pp. 58-9

31. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Innovation and Urban Order (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 823; after Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, p. 163.

32. Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, pp. 11, 214.

33. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, p. 21.

34. Matthew W. Roth, ‘Mulholland Highway and the engineering culture of Los Angeles in the 1920s’, in Tom Sutton & WIlliam Deverell (eds.), Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 50.

35. Roth, ‘Mulholland Highway’, p. 50.

36. Banham, Los Angeles, pp. 88-9.

37. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 166-7.

38. Hall, Cities in Civilization, pp. 830-1.

39. Hall, Cities in Civilization, p. 831.

40. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, pp. 238-9.

41. Banham, Los Angeles, p. 23.

42. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990; pbk. edn. London: Pimlico, 1998), p. 6.

43. Soja & Scott, ‘Introduction’, in Soja & Scott (eds.), The City, p. 1.

44. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, p. 137.

45. Robert Judson Clark, ‘Romanticism and integration 1880-1930’, in Robert Judson Clark & Thomas S. Hines, Los Angeles Transfer: Architecture in Southern California 1880-1980 (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1983), p. 3.

46. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 121-2.

47. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, p. 144.

48. Abu-Leghod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, p. 141. Not until the 1980s did these proportions change to a marked degree.

49. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, pp. 144-5.

50. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, p. 146.

51. Foster, Streetcar to Superhighway, pp. 48-9.

52. City of Los Angeles Engineering Department, Annual Report 1916-1917, p. 68; quoted in Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, pp. 58-9.

53. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, p. 58.

54. City of Los Angeles Planning Department, 1938; quoted in Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, p. 170.

55. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: the Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 151, 260.

56. Peter Hall, ‘Squaring the circle: can we resolve the Clarkian paradox?’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 21 (1994), pp. s79-s94.

57. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 166-7.

58. Olmsted Brothers, Bartholomew, & Associates, Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region (City of Los Angeles, 1930), p. 21; quoted in Foster, Streetcar to Superhighway, p. 109.

59. Klein, History of Forgetting, p. 38.

60. Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), in Three Novels (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 190.

61. Robert C. Post, ‘Urban railways redivivus: image and ideology in Los Angeles, California’, in Winstan Bond & Colin Divall (eds.), Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 187-209.

62. Banham, Los Angeles, pp. 213, 215, 217.

63. Wachs, ‘Evolution of transport policy’, p. 131; Hall, Cities in Civilization, p. 828.

64. Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 23.

65. Wachs, ‘Evolution of transportation policy’, pp. 146ff.

66. Peter J. Larkham, ‘Learning from Los Angeles’, Urban History, vol. 28, no. 3 (2001), p. 428.

67. Quoted in Hall, Cities in Civilization, p. 841.

Bibliography

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Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: the Architecture of the Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane, 1971)

Winstan Bond & Colin Divall (eds.), Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)

Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: the Making of the Modern City (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987)

Raymond Chandler, Three Novels (London: Penguin, 1993)

Robert Judson Clark & Thomas S. Hines, Los Angeles Transfer: Architecture in Southern California 1880-1980 (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1983)

Winstan W. Crouch & Beatrice Dinerman, Southern California Metropolis: A Study in Development of Government for a Metropolitan Area (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1963)

Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998; pbk. edn. London: Picador, 2000)

Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman & Greg Hise (eds.), Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996)

William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad 1850-1910 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994)

John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992)

Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)

Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1981)

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Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)

Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)

John H. Kemler, ‘Railway entrances and exits to Los Angeles’, Economic Geography, vol. 16, no. 3 (July 1940)

Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997)

Peter J. Larkham, ‘Learning from Los Angeles’, Urban History, vol. 28, no. 3 (2001)

Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)

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Howard J. Nelson, ‘The spread of an artificial landscape over Southern California’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 49, no. 3, part 2, ‘Man, time and space in Southern California: a symposium’ (September 1959)

Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: the American West and its Disappearing Water (1990; rev. edn. London: Penguin, 1993)

Barbara Rubin, ‘A chronology of architecture in Los Angeles’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 67, no. 4 (December 1977)

Edward Soja & Allen J. Scott (eds.), The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996)

Tom Sutton & William Deverell (eds.), Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001)

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