LA Wants New Ideas for Mass Transit to Fix its reliance on Cars that created Urban Sprawl

L.A. Looks at Life After Cars

The city was shaped by the streetcar and was an early adopter of the automobile. What comes next? For a few days earlier this month, a stretch of downtown Los Angeles's Arts District was transformed into a circus of emerging transportation technology, with companies from around the world showcasing their newest and shiniest wares.

 Me, "It seems that LA is trying everything it can to make mass transit trips, by its residents, as easy as possible. There are still road blocks but LA's Mayor Eric Garcetti, is willing to try new technologies and listen to ideas."

From article, (America’s most car-centric metropolis is trying to prepare for life after cars. This will be hard: L.A. County is larger in size than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and more populous than 41 U.S. states. The city’s urban configuration has long existed to serve the personal automobile, as have almost a century of L.A. social mores. LA CoMotion may have been about showing off the dazzling array of new technology that might help us get there, but it was also an opportunity to measure the stubborn gap between the city’s current needs and its future shape.

Life after cars, if and when it arrives, might mean something a little different for Los Angeles. Unlike its older, denser Eastern counterparts, this was never really a compact, walking city to begin with. By the time the city reached any real size, it already had an impressive streetcar system. At the dawn of the 1880s, the same decade that saw L.A.’s first electric streetcars, there were a mere 11,093 souls living in the fledgling pueblo. The Pacific Electric and the Los Angeles Railway streetcar systems entered service in 1901 and soon offered extensive interurban coverage of the nascent metropolis.

It was this early mass transit system (for a time, the most extensive in the nation) that helped power L.A.’s sprawl and single-family character. Paid for by real estate companies, the streetcars were intended not just to connect outlying suburbs, but also sell them to prospective homeowners. The city’s growth, as transit historian Ethan Elkind put it in his book Railtown, “occurred haphazardly, driven by real estate interests rather than by good urban planning.”

[Present day:]
“We want your products, your ideas, your vehicles, your visions to come to this fertile ground,” [Mayor] Garcetti told the crowd of transit professionals during his keynote at LA CoMotion. “We’re not the kind of city that says go test it somewhere else first and come back to us when it works,” he added.

Last November, L.A. voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M, a half-cent sales tax that will fund an unprecedented $120 billion in transit projects over the next 40 years. The scope of investment may be unprecedented for the city, but the ballot-box show of faith in Metro, the nation’s second-largest transit agency, was not. In fact, Measure M was the fourth such sales tax to support transit investment voted into place by Angelenos since the 1980s.

Perhaps even further in the future: Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk just officially filed plans to dig below the city for his alternate transportation system—an elaborate system of private tunnels equipped with “electric skates” that boost vehicles (and capsules of pedestrians and cyclists) up to 130 MPH, so those with means can avoid more conventional modes entirely.

[But as the writer of the article states] I walked a supremely pedestrian-unfriendly half-mile to catch an express bus that spent 20 minutes circumnavigating downtown traffic before even beginning its westward crawl.

Without dedicated lanes, buses (which account for the vast majority of Metro trips) have to sit in traffic just like the rest of the cars on the road. That same gridlock makes for a notoriously not-entirely-reliable bus system, where riders like me would rather walk a mile than have to transfer bus lines—and risk being stranded mid-trip for an indeterminate amount of time.)

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