Posted on 04/16/2018 8:33:57 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
As an innovator and early adopter of freeways, California became the symbolic capital of car culture. But the ease of movement conferred by the massive postwar freeway building boom was short-lived, turning the dream of car travel into a nightmare of congestion and long commutes.
The story of how Californians went from getting around to getting stuck behind the wheel is deeply entwined with the history of the urban freeway, an enterprise that advanced earlier and on a larger scale here than anywhere else in the country.
Half a century ago, there was reason for optimism about cars. Los Angeles native Michael Alexander remembers the days when the old saying about getting anywhere in Los Angeles in 20 minutes actually held true.
“I trusted it at least in the first decade of driving that I did,” he said.
In 1964, Alexander was a newly minted teenage driver, many freeways had just been built and he got a job as a clown in the L.A. City Traveling Circus, performing at city parks from the San Fernando Valley to the port cities.
“We were truly able to ride the speed limit at any time of the day,” he said.
Today, that 20-minute rule is absurd. His wife, Vicki Kirsch, budgets five to six times that long to drive from their home northeast of downtown to her job teaching music at UCLA about 15 miles away.
Traffic data analytics firm Inrix ranked L.A. traffic not just the worst in the country, but the worst in the world in 2017, citing drivers spent more than 100 hours a year delayed by congestion.
It was not much better in the San Francisco Bay Area, ranked fifth most congested worldwide, where drivers were stuck in traffic almost 80 hours, according to Inrix.
The limited-access highways in urban areas were conceived in the 1920s as a way to provide speedier thoroughfares for cars while excluding streetcars, pedestrians and intersections.
That history can be traced less than a mile from Alexander and Kirsch’s home on a drive they take nearly every day down the Arroyo Seco Parkway, one of the earliest freeways in the country.
Its opening in 1940 was a seminal moment, said Matthew Roth, historian for the Automobile Club of Southern California
“Once you build a piece of freeway, you have determined future actions,” he said. “Once those lines are laid down in concrete, subsequent construction is going to have to connect with them.”
In the decades that followed, California did connect them -- financing and designing a massive network of freeways that spans more than 50,000 miles across the state, a system that would become a model for the rest of the country.
“California was the right place, but it was also the right time,” said Brian Taylor, an urban planning professor who directs UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies.
The rise of the automobile was happening everywhere, but California was uniquely poised to embrace it, said Taylor, because it coincided with the state’s period of maximum growth. In the two decades after World War II, there was booming industry, plenty of land to develop and the population doubled. Car ownership was growing even faster than the population, with car registrations increasing by 10 percent a year between 1946 and 1958, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
In 1947, the state began raising the gas tax to fund the freeways with the landmark Collier-Burns Act, setting up a gas tax highway trust fund which would be copied at the federal level a decade later. Previously, most roads had been funded on an ad-hoc basis through bonds, tolls or local property taxes.
The State Division of Highways, the precursor to Caltrans, built about a hundred miles of new freeway a year between the mid-50s and mid-60s, including sections of HIghway 101 in Northern and Southern California, and much of Interstate 5, along with interstates 405 and 280.
Taylor said these roadways were designed for high speed and high capacity by an agency that had previously been responsible only for rural highways.
“We were off to the races building these big super highways that had really been designed to move people at 70 mph between cities rather than 15 mph within cities” he said.
What started as a hodge-podge of more modest facilities like Arroyo Seco Parkway, initiated and built at the local level and designed to fit the crowded urban environment, turned into a state-orchestrated effort that transformed urban landscapes with high capacity speedways cutting through the heart of cities and out to their fringes.
Yet only about half the freeways that were planned for the state were ever built. By the 1970s cities were revolting against displacement and smog. Taylor’s research shows that state spending on freeways continued to increase, even as the number of miles constructed plummeted because of cost inflation.
Almost as quickly as it began, the era of freeway building came to an end. But Taylor said its legacy can still be felt, and has only compounded as California cities have grown and densified.
“These facilities supported development very far from the city center and created an expectation that it was somehow normal and reasonable to travel very far,” he said.
The success of the freeways helped drive commerce, development and population growth across the state. The state’s population nearly tripled in the last half of the 20th century and the once-sparsley populated suburbs began merging with the big city centers.
But Taylor said it’s a mistake to view the resulting vehicle traffic as a sign of failure or dysfunction.
“Congestion is a problem that arises from all of the activity we have in cities,” he said. “Cities exist because they push lots of activities together in a place. But when you push things together, things get crowded and slowed down.”
Congestion, not free movement is the natural state of thriving cities. So what Michael Alexander experienced in 1964 -- the dream of driving across a city in 20 minutes -- was an anomaly, a blip brought on by a sudden burst of new capacity.
It’s likely the dream of a 20-minute car commute will live on only in the memories of folks like Alexander.
“I love the advantages the car culture gave me,” he said. “But I’m the beneficiary of something that might not have been best for society in the long run.”
Californication politics is all about control of the masses and $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
https://calwatchdog.com/2013/04/26/se-diane-feinsteins-husband-wins-ca-rail-contract/
and the California Train to Nowhere even has its own anthem..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtS-KlySe4k
Thanks for that. I wasn’t aware of this travesty.
Last I heard, not a single mile of track had been laid.
Any update on that?
Well your first article said the project would be a $1 billion which was $35 million per mile.
The new estimate is $77 billion which comes out to $687.5 million per mile.
I don’t see how this project could ever pay for itself. It is time to cut your losses California.
Governor Moon Beam has been smoking too much medicinal marijuana. I think he should retire and spend the rest of his life on his own Risky Business
The dream of getting around by a personal car was ruined because OTHER people also got to have their own cars?
Your masters WON’T be giving up their stretch SUVs, yachts, private planes, or 3 mansions.
I’ve never been to LA but, I remember jokes about the terrible traffic and smog were standard fare of comics in the 60’s.
And there’s this one from ‘84:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvV3nn_de2k
“When I drive that slow, you know it’s hard to steer.
And I can’t get get my car out of second gear.
What used to take two hours now takes all day. Huh!
It took me 16 hours to get to L.A.”
>>2. California has three million illegal aliens that should not be there
I strongly doubt the number is anything like that small.
The motorcycles weave and sliver through those LA traffic jams like mice through cracks. Surprised there’s not more accidents involving them than there exists.
16 per square mile in my part of Montana. Getting too crowded for me.
I think it is estimated to be closer to 8 million.
They infest the place.
I took my family to Disneyland, and want to a supermarket nearby. Vons.
The whole area was like Tijuana, but with more open drug dealing and openly hostile nonwhite gang members.
And the only other white person besides my (scared sh\tless) family was the bag boy, who I felt vey sorry for.
It’s simply not America anymore, and will never be again unless we rise up and take it back.
Freeways - any major new transportation route - accommodate/create more than a transportation solution to any need. They become the means by which the same need they are supposedly eliminating gets worse. Why? Increased development is MORE about what follows them, than what precedes them.
Take just one area in California - the Inland Empire, and particularly the belt of cities from the edge of L.A. county all the way out to San Bernardino. Thirty years ago most development in the western San Bernardino county area was not pushing up against the foothills of the mountains. Then (ostensibly because of all the traffic on I-10) they built the I-210 freeway many miles north of I-10 and not far south of the foothills of the mountains. Ah, then driving longer distances directly from that area no longer required going down to I-10. Development then mushroomed along and north of the I-210 (pushing right into the foothills in many places), which as it continued made the I-210 (envisioned to be an escape from I-10), just as congested during rush hours as the I-10.
They say that freeways are built to ease congestion in urban and urban-to-suburban areas (southern California has no “center” and is more like mass, giant set of interconnected suburbs), but they ignore “if you build it, they will come”.
The problem can be attacked, but (a) it requires very strict near utopian development controls, to keep new development from defeating the congestion-relief ability of new roads, (b) it will manufacture housing price and property value increases where development is restricted, and (c) density will increase (more multi-family homes) along existing routes in order to accommodate population growth amidst restricted development.
I think less zoning might “help” alleviate some congestion. Zoning, by restricting where work can be located, more areas where work can take place become concentrated, forcing residences to be more distant from work for more folks than if development was less segregated and less restricted. Houston has no zoning and the fears people have about that are not realized in how development takes place there. It also ranks far below Los Angeles as far as congestion ranking. (Los Angeles is tops - in congestion - in the world).
Nearly 7,000 people per square mile in the metropolitan area.
Nothing is going to "solve" the problem.
The “car culture” is a result, not a cause.
Mass transit, to be financially viable requires population densities like found along the “northeast corridor” from Boston down to Washington D.C. (severed from Amtrak and on it’s own privately, the train system along that corridor would be profitable).
But California started with none of that density and an asset the northeast lacked anywhere near as much as California - lots of open undeveloped land. The “car” and “car culture” did not decide the course of what developed, it came from, came out of what developed. Could it have developed differently? Could mass transit, like the northeast, have developed along the train line that still runs from 70 miles east of L.A. all the way to downtown L.A.? Would it have been financially viable?
Historians will continue to argue which came first, the accommodation of the car because the car demanded it, or decisions to not do anything else, to not create any alternatives, and were alternatives financially viable not just in getting something built but operationally (keep in mind that buying rights of way, in terms of cost, is usually neutral as to whatever purpose it serves).
The LA area has more than enough density to support better mass transit. But they didn’t build it and now building it through all that density would be very expensive.
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