Los Angeles and the Great Interstate Highway Conspiracy
Why is public transportation such a joke in Los Angeles? As an LA native, it's easy for me to understand why many in the Peak Oil community consider my hometown to be a non-sustainable wasteland as we face the inevitable decline. But this wasn't always the case during the 20th century. There is a visual reminder that I have of this history in a link that my wife recently discovered. It not only shows the way transportation used to be in LA, it explores the changes that irrevocably altered the way people lived downtown:
But I think the most important factor in downtown's decline was the failure to build a rapid transit system feeding into downtown in the first half of the 20th century. Central Los Angeles was still heavily dependent on public transit as late as the 1940s, and there were numerous plans for rapid transit proposed between 1906 and 1948. (emphasis added)
The lack of accessibility became increasingly a problem after the '60s due to rising traffic congestion. Downtown Los Angeles was competing with newer office and retail centers...centers that were designed with auto accessibility in mind.
The downtown had been created by market forces in the early 1900s. The most importance force concentrating jobs and offices and stores downtown was its location at the center of the Los Angeles transit system in an era when few people had their own private vehicles. This made the small amount of land at the center highly valuable. This tended to push out residential uses...especially individual houses...and create an area built out wall-to-wall with commercial buildings. As this advantage was lost in later years, the older retail buildings with marginal ability to extract rents were knocked down for parking lots.
After 1946, and especially after 1960, the city of Los Angeles carried out a highly destructive zoning policy of requiring high amounts of off-street parking for new construction. As the amount of the downtown taken up by parking lots and parking structures expanded, much of the street frontage became barren and boring for people on foot. The various remaining buildings then become more dispersed in various clusters rather than forming a continuous wall-to-wall area of streetscape that can provide potential destinations or sites for people walking through the downtown.
http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/bunkerhill.htm
I think Tom Wetzel deserves credit for doing an excellent job compiling this historical examination. But I think there's another factor that deserves further examination regarding why there was a "failure to build a rapid transit system feeding into downtown in the first half of the 20th century". This would be the Great American streetcar scandal. Wikipedia provides a good summary:
Great American streetcar scandal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
T
he Great American streetcar scandal (also known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy and the National City Lines conspiracy) is a conspiracy[1][2] theory in which streetcar systems throughout the United States were dismantled and replaced with buses in the mid-20th century as a result of alleged illegal actions by a number of prominent companies, acting through National City Lines (NCL), Pacific City Lines (on the West Coast, starting in 1938), and American City Lines (in large cities, starting in 1943).
National, which had been in operation since 1920, was organized into a holding company, and General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack, and the Federal Engineering Corporation made investments in the City Lines companies in return for exclusive supply contracts.[3] Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities,[4] including Detroit, Cleveland, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, and replaced them with GM buses. American City Lines merged with National in 1946.
(edited for length)
In 1974, Bradford Snell, a U.S. government attorney, gave testimony before a United States Senate inquiry into the causes of the decline of the transit car systems in the U.S. that pointed to the effect of the NCL acquisitions as the primary cause.[12] This theory was then popularized in U.S. popular culture in books such as Fast Food Nation and the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which the scandal is masked and set in Los Angeles.[13]
Another element of this theory is the effect of the construction of the Interstate Highway System, which began its initial construction in California after the large-scale dismantling of that state's trolley network.[14]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
Wikipedia is more than generous referring to this scandal as a conspiracy "theory"; those court records quoted seem pretty clear that what transpired was hardly theoretical. But a 1997 article from emagazine.com provides more detail to the connection between GM and the construction of the Interstate Highway System:
The oil industry and destruction of public transport
What's Good for General Motors...
By Jim Motavalli
A federal antitrust investigation resulted in both indictment and conspiracy convictions for GM executives, but destroying a public transportation network that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to reproduce today cost the company only $5,000 in fines.
Destroying the rail lines and replacing them with buses was only the first step. If private cars were going to dominate American transportation, they needed new roads to run on. GM also stands behind creation of the National Highway Users Conference, otherwise known as the highway lobby, which became the most powerful pressure group in Washington. GM promotional films from the immediate postwar years proclaim interstate highways to be the realization of "the American dream of freedom on wheels."
GM President Charles Wilson, who became Secretary of Defense in 1953, used his position to proclaim that a new road system was vital to U.S. security needs. He was assisted by newly appointed Federal Highway Administrator Francis DuPont, whose family was then the largest GM shareholder. Acting on a bill introduced by Senator Albert Gore, Sr. (the current vice president's father), Congress approved the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. "The greatest public works program in the history of the world," as Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks called it, contained the seeds of our current gridlock.
Visionaries of 1939 might have envisioned that by 1960 there'd be a 14-lane superhighway crisscrossing the nation at 100 miles per hour (with car spacing controlled by "radio beams"), but bumper-to-bumper brake checks are more familiar to the modern driver.
1997, Earth Action Network
http://www.emagazine.com/0397feat2_sb1.html
http://www.bilderberg.org/socal.htm
I'm not sure if it's too late to fix this problem. As the above article says, reproducing a public transportation rail network would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Wait, how many billions have we spent fighting what Dick Cheney called "The War That Will Not End In Our Lifetimes"???
Sigh...
