Cars are synonymous with Los Angeles, but can the city stop depending on the automobile, and start designing a landscape that prioritizes walkers, bikers, and public transit users? In the new book, Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles, a group of experts looks at how LA is developing transportation alternatives.
To understand LA today, the book’s editor James Sanders looks back at the evolution of the metropolis, which grew in three waves. During its early years, he says the city was defined by streetcars and endless boulevards in a pre-World War II era.
Then, in the 1950s and ’60s, the city was a decentralized landscape full of automobiles, freeways, and single-family homes. Los Angeles became a beacon of a new age: “[They] not only remade the region of Los Angeles, but [it] became the model of cities around the world. Every modern city really based itself on the decentralized, car-oriented, single family house-oriented model of urban development,” Sanders says.
But by the turn of the 21st century, the city embraced new forms of transportation: ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, plus electronic scooters and e-bikes.
Sanders notes, “You've got on the horizon, autonomous vehicles. You've got electric vehicles coming in. So all of these changes create a situation where we think the city is up for grabs in terms of thinking about its future.”
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The city’s density has also dramatically increased in the last 50 years, Sanders explains, with fewer single-family units and more apartments.
Over the years, parking lots have also become part of the fabric of LA, due to how much space is dedicated to them, says architecture critic Frances Anderton, who also contributed to the book. “An absolutely extraordinary amount of square footage, of square miles in this region, is given over to places to park the car, whether it's the single-family home with a large driveway, whether it's the generous amount of curb space that's given over to parking.”
Anderton says new buildings are reflecting a shift in Angeleno transportation habits. She points to multi-use developments that can be found near public transit hubs. “You go to Culver City now [and] it's completely different from its downtown from 25 years ago. However, there's still a good amount of parking that's being provided for these multifamily buildings, because we're not quite at the point where people are able to fully give up the old style.”
These developments, Anderton says, indicate urban planning goals at the political level. That, however, can conflict with neighboring residents' views of the growth. “The residents of that neighborhood get nervous about a bunch of people moving in who don't have parking. ‘But are they actually going to give up on the car? Well, no, they're probably not all going to give up on the car. So where are they going to park their cars? Well, they're going to park their cars, probably, on a side street and that could be my street.’ And so there's a lot of tension surrounding the parking issue.”
Meanwhile, some Angelenos still value the idea of owning a home, even if it requires longer commute times outside of the city center.
“The lifestyle that Los Angeles offered, which was an alternative to densely-packed, often rather polluted cities, was absolutely seductive and it remains very seductive. It also is now out of reach for most people financially, because there simply isn't the virgin land on which to create that lifestyle.”
She continues, “It also has reached the end of the road in terms of there being no more space, so it's become very jammed. And so yes, one does sit in the car for two hours getting to Santa Clarita, however, it is still a very hard dream to relinquish. It truly is. And that is why this transition has to happen because the region can't go any other way.”
All of this transition doesn’t change the fact that 6 million cars exist on the roads of Los Angeles, Sanders points out. There is also no requirement for all residents here to change the way they live.
“There is such a vast amount of space, just for example, given over to parking across the city of Los Angeles and in the region, that you could house a million and a half people at existing densities, if you were to simply build on the surface parking lots that we currently have.”
He adds, “You can develop them as you want, but no skyscrapers and single-family districts, and it would change substantially the fabric of the city. And yes, finally, it will take decades. … This is a question of transition. And this is a city building and it unfolds over decades and centuries. So we're looking at something now that may unfold over generations for our children and our grandchildren.”
