Changes

While the feelings of New Yorkers may not seem relevant to Los Angeles, it is important to note, that most Angelinos were not natives and they would have carried with them their opinions of railroads from their hometowns, such as Buffalo. Injuries on trains became so frequent through the country that during the nineteenth and early twentieth century American courts fundamentally altered tort law to force railroads to improve safety standards.

Just as PE’s and LARY’s problems began to intensify, they were faced with a new and more flexible transportation option, the automobile. At the turn of the century automobiles were rare and expansive, but that quickly changed. In 1908, the Ford Motor Company introduced the Model T. The Model T was not only solid and well-built, it was fairly cheap. Within a few years of the car’s introduction, the Model T became affordable for many middle class Americans. The Model T was especially well-suited for the growing Los Angeles sprawl. Unsurprisingly, Angelinos bought more cars per capita than anywhere else in the country. By 1915, on average there was one car for every 43.1 Americans, but in Los Angeles there was one car for every 8.2 Angelinos. Over the next ten years, car ownership grew dramatically. In 1920, there was one car per 3.6 Angelinos and five years later there was one car for every 1.8 citizens. Angelinos owned more cars per capita than any other urban area in the world. Increasingly, Angelinos were turning to automobiles to navigate Southern California growing road network.

The rapid adoption of automobiles by Angelinos strained Los Angeles city streets. The city’s central business was especially taxed by the influx of cars. Cars, trains, street cars and pedestrians competed for space on Los Angeles city streets. While most trains stopped short of the central business district, the narrow streets could not accommodate autos, streetcars and pedestrians. One report claimed that the congestion problem was “exceeded” by no other city. Even before the introduction of the car, the central business district “suffered from streetcar congestion.” Unsurprisingly, the introduction of the car made a congested downtown even more impassable. Cars not only interfered with the smooth and timely operation of streetcars by driving on their tracks, the streets of the central business district became a parking lot where Angelinos stored their cars when they were at work or shopping. In 1920, the City Council even passed a law that banned parking from downtown, but City Council quickly lifted after businesses in the central core experienced sharp declines. These three forms of transportation could not coexist on Los Angeles’s narrow city streets, but automobiles had demonstrated their critical importance during the parking ban.

In addition to exacerbating congestion in the central business district cars made downtown streets increasingly unsafe. While streetcars were clearly they were somewhat more predictable than cars and stayed on tracks, motorists were utterly capricious. Even more problematic was at this time that traffic was completely unregulated in Los Angeles. The mix of congestion and unsafe street conditions forced the city of Los Angeles to repeatedly address the problems of downtown congestion and develop plans to deal with the city’s progressively more treacherous streets. It is at this point in the story that Fishman’s, Norton’s and Bottles’s narratives began to drastically diverge. Each of the scholars began to emphasize different facts in an effort to draw significantly different conclusions.

Robert Fishman argues that the city of Los Angeles sacrificed both its mass transit system and the central business district in the 1920s to preserve the city’s suburban ideal. He believes that as congestion intensified, Los Angeles “was forced to adopt a new strategy to preserve” its suburban model. Fishman minimized the problems PE faced and claims that PE was “still strong” in 1924 and had reached “its all-time peak in passenger miles.” In an attempt to solve the congestion crisis, Fishman claims that the Los Angeles was presented with two competing proposals for solving the city’s transportation problems. PE lobbied the city and a group of influential civic leaders to finance the construction of an above and below ground electric train system. PE’s plan was designed to preserve the downtown’s preeminence and solve the city’s traffic problems by moving the trains off the streets. The Automobile Club of Southern California alternately advocated for a plan that fundamentally redesigned the city’s streets to create thoroughfares and speed automobile traffic. The traffic plan described by Fishman is the Major Traffic Street Plan (MTSP) which was designed in part by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Harland Bartholomew and Charles H. Cheney. The MTSP asked the city council “to place a $5,000,000 bond issue on the ballot” to pay for “10 to 20 percent” of the plan to alter Los Angeles streets. Fishman claims that Los Angeles did not have the money to carry out both of these plans and it was forced to decide which transportation system to promote.

While retail businesses and downtown developers favored the mass transit plan, far more people benefited from the MTSP. Roads, unlike mass transit, could not only connect people to downtown, but it would also connect the growing suburbs to each other. Civic organizers railed on behalf of the MTSP and started a well-organized campaign to get the bond issues approved. While civic leaders vigorously advocated for the MTSP, a small section of the PE plan was “decisively defeated.” Fishman claims that it only then did the PE “began its rapid deterioration.”

By the early 1920s, the Automobile Club of Southern California sought to convince city police to issue citations to jaywalkers for failing to use crosswalks. Initially, police officers simply ignored jaywalkers and failed any issue citations. The Automobile Club then engaged in a public relations campaign designed stigmatize jaywalking. Instead of asking police officers to arrest jaywalkers, they advocated whistling at jaywalkers in an effort to curb their conduct. After a year of ridiculing pedestrians, police officers were finally willing to cite jaywalkers and force pedestrians to obey traffic laws. When Los Angeles approved the MTSP, it was simply demonstrating that motordom had successfully demonized pedestrians and criminalized their unfettered use of the streets. Norton does not believe that this transformation of the city streets was inevitable, but the result of a long struggle over its purpose.

By focusing on the social reconstruction of city streets, Norton ignores powerful economic factors in favor of the automobile. Even if motordom had successfully social reconstructed the street, it would have been moot if cities had not determined that cars could cheaply handle population growth. Additionally, if people had not bought automobiles then any effort by motordom to socially reconstruct the street would have quickly overturned in favor of a more economically viable paradigm. Americans ultimate acceptance of the socially reconstructed street was not based on motordom public relations campaign, but on Americans, including Angelinos, willingness to invest their money in automobiles and adopt them as their primary mode of transportation.

Scott Bottles promotes a substantially different explanation for why Angelinos adopted the MTSP and turned toward the automobile. He claims that Angelinos preferred the automobile to mass transit and simply expressed this preference at the ballot box. His argument is based on several pieces of evidence. Angelinos had become increasingly dissatisfied with their mass transit system. The streetcars and trains had been unable to keep up with Los Angeles’s rapid expansion after 1913. The local media and Angelinos had become extremely skeptical of the motives of both LARY and PE. They believed that the transit companies were sacrificing service in an attempt to squeeze larger profits. The city’s residents increasingly sought other transportation options, including jitneys and automobiles. While PE and LARY had effectively scuttled jitney service in Los Angeles, they struggled to eliminate cars from downtown streets. PE and LARY did convince the city to briefly ban parking in the central business district, but the ban probably undermined support for mass transit among Angelinos. Even more problematic was that the transit companies had limited sway in the city’s growing suburbs. Unfortunately for the transit companies, the suburbs were quickly becoming new retail and commercial options. The suburbs began to represent a very real threat to the survival of the central business district.

Bottles conclusions about why Los Angeles ultimately chose automobiles over trains are the most compelling. Bottles successfully demonstrates that Angelinos were unsatisfied with mass transit and were willing to buy cars as a potential alternative. While Bottles never explains why Angelinos bought so many cars between 1910 and 1930, it is unlikely that so many Angelinos would have invested in cars if the city mass transit system had met their growing needs. Had Angelinos been truly satisfied with LARY and PE, it is unlikely that they would have so quickly adopted such a comparably expensive alternative. Clearly something was driving the widespread demand for automobiles.

Bottles explanation for why Los Angeles chose the car over mass transit does not appear to be particularly popular. Norton charges that urban transportation did not evolve in response to consumer preferences. He clearly does not approve of the notion that people could have preferred cars to mass transit or walking. Instead, he posits that consumers were apparently duped into accepting cars because of the public relations campaign by motordom that successfully reconstructed Americans understanding of the street. Norton’s thesis suggests that car buyers did not actually want to buy their cars, but they were simply tricked into getting them. Norton completely ignores the idea that cars could have appealed to consumers because they did “celebrate individual choice.” Norton’s personal views on cars are potentially blinding him to the unlimited possibilities that the car presented for an early twentieth American. Norton’s argument reinforces the notion that academics have traditionally railed against “the social, intellectual and artistic poverty of America’s middle class suburbs” because ultimately it was middle class Americans who created the motor age.