Changes

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, but it was also 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. <ref>Bottles, 92.</ref> Angelinos owned more cars per capita than any other urban area in the world. <ref>Fishman, 162.</ref> 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 streetcars 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. <ref>Fishman, 162.</ref> 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<ref>Bottles, but City Council quickly lifted after businesses in the central core experienced sharp declines. 15<ref> 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.

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, but the streets of the central business district also 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.<ref>Fishman, 74-88.</ref> 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.