Changes

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.

Angelinos also bought huge numbers of automobiles between 1910 and 1925 and by 1925 most households had access to a car. In Los Angeles, motordom would have included most of the city’s households. The car was perfectly suited for navigating and connecting Los Angeles’s numerous suburbs. It became less important for Angelinos to preserve the urban core because jobs and shopping were migrating to the suburbs. Instead of going downtown, Angelinos in the 1920s were becoming increasingly aware that they could to commute to other suburbs for work or shopping via their cars. Industrial businesses also began to relocate to the suburbs when trucks began to take over the short haul shipping business from freight trains. Trucks permitted factories to move to cheap rural and suburban areas because they no longer needed to be next to a train line. The booming economy of the 1920s was fueled by industrials businesses building factories “on the periphery of the city.” <ref>Bottles, 198.</ref> Factories no longer had to be accessible to trains and the widespread acceptance of cars made it possible for even working class Angelinos to drive to work. After Angelinos expressed their preference for automobiles, city planners began to plan for an automotive city.

Bottles clearly believes believe that Los Angeles’s transition to a transportation system dominated by the car was inevitable. Once Angelinos widespread dislike of the mass transit was paired with an attractive alternative, the city’s residents could reject the mass transit monopolies. The decentralized nature of Los Angeles also ensured that this transition would occur much earlier there than anywhere else in the country. The Angelinos love affair with their cars convinced them to forget about mass transit.

Bottles conclusions about why Los Angeles ultimately chose automobiles over trains are the most compelling. Bottles successfully demonstrates demonstrate 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.