How the car came to Los Angeles

From the article:

Unlike East Coast cities, Los Angeles was never a true “walking city." It grew hand in hand with the electric railway, and by 1910 boasted both an extensive local streetcar system (which operated within the city) and the largest interurban electric rail system in the world. The Pacific Electric Railway’s (PE) 1,000+ miles of track connected Los Angeles to other communities across four counties.

Because Los Angeles had grown up with mechanized transportation, it never developed the density of east coast cities. Rather than growing upwards with skyscrapers, Los Angeles spread outwards, building an “unparalleled number” of single family homes. This sprawl and low density was touted as a positive feature of living in Los Angeles:

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Because of this sprawl, LA residents were highly dependent on the streetcar for transportation. In 1911, residents averaged twice as many streetcar rides as residents of other large US cities.

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The largest number of complaints targeted crowded car conditions. Especially in morning and evening rush hour, cars were frequently full, to the point that passengers were forced to stand crowded together or even hang off the side, conditions which one newspaper described as “little short of disgraceful."

Streetcar movement was also often slow, and cars would get congested along LA’s narrow roads, particularly during rush hours. Because both local streetcars and interurban trains shared the same tracks, streetcar movement was often blocked, and there would be “long lines of streetcars backed up on downtown streets." An expert investigation of LA’s traction companies found that “fully 40,000 riders on both systems are delayed from five to forty minutes during the rush hours each day, and as many more are inconvenienced during the non-rush hours due to the fundamental defects of the transportation arrangements along Main Street.”

Many problems with the electric railways ultimately stemmed from the owners’ use of them for real estate speculation. Instead of building “efficient, rational transportation systems," traction companies would often buy large tracts of land on the outskirts of the city, and then build rail lines to connect them to the central business district, making the land more valuable. […]

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Because of their poor financial performance, electric rail companies were unable to finance expansion of their systems. Between 1913 and 1925, the LA Railway Company (the city’s main streetcar operator) built only 24 miles of track, a period during which the city doubled in population. This made it nearly impossible for the electric rail companies to improve their service.

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[E]ven though city streets were being improved, they were still being shared by many different classes of vehicle, with “integration of streetcars, interurban trains, automobiles, and trucks result[ing] in frequent delays and extensive congestion."

The consultant’s report ultimately recommended segregating different kinds of transit, removing streetcars from roads and replacing them with elevated trains or subways, and extending rail lines to areas where they didn’t currently reach. Altogether, the improvements were estimated to cost $130 million ($2.3 billion in 2023 dollars).

But while there had been widespread agreement about the necessity of improving LA’s streets, there was no such agreement on how to implement mass transit improvements.

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Critics noted that “New York City…had spent about $1 billion on its underground system. Yet it continually lost money and required substantial public subsidies to operate." Because of the traction companies’ financial struggles, it was impossible for them to finance the construction of an underground system themselves, and residents widely opposed either subsidizing their operations or being forced to pay for the improvements themselves.

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Ultimately, the coalitions that had come together to make LA’s street improvements possible did not exist for mass transit. Disagreement over the form it would take and who would pay for it assured that “the city would not build a rapid-transit system during the next forty years."

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[P]lanners proposed another road expansion program. But rather than enlarging existing city streets, this time they proposed a system of expressways, roads where traffic would flow continuously, unencumbered by intersections, stoplights, or cars entering and leaving at any point. Such a system would be expensive, but it would cost half as much as expanding a rail network ($2 million a mile vs $4 million a mile). And whereas a rail system always faced the specter of who would pay for it, the expressways could be financed via gasoline taxes. The fact that streetcar companies were increasingly converting their cars to diesel buses also suggested the expressway system had merit.