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By 1920, the streets of Los Angeles’s central core were some of the most congested in the United States. Pedestrians, streetcars, trains and automobiles all competed for space on Los Angeles’s city streets and its leaders had struggled with numerous proposed solutions to relieve traffic. This paper will examine how Los Angeles reacted to its crammed streets and why they ultimately decided to depend on the automobile. Los Angeles’s response to paralyzing traffic fundamentally changed America’s streets because it served as a model for cities throughout the country. Instead of emphasizing mass transit and dense housing, other cities followed Los Angeles lead and promoted the automobile as the ultimate solution to congested urban cores.
Several scholars have questioned why Los Angeles rejected mass transit in favor of the automobile. In <i>Bourgeois Utopias</i>, Robert Fishman argues that Los Angeles deemphasized mass transit because land developers outside of the urban areas wanted to encourage growth away from transit lines. Peter Norton in “Street Walking, Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” argues that automotive interests, not necessarily real estate developers, were the primary motivators for promoting the widespread adoption of cars. While Norton does address addresses Los Angeles specifically, his argument has much broader implications, because he believes that motorists and auto advocacy groups (motordom) fought nationally to transform America’s streets into car thoroughfares. According to Norton, motordom sought to eliminate pedestrians, trains and street cars from city streets and create automobile centric roads. In Scott L. Bottles’s Los Angeles and the Automobile, he claims that widespread dissatisfaction with the companies managing the city’s mass transit encouraged the city and citizens to turn to automobiles to solve Los Angeles’s gridlock problems. Angelinos favored cars because mass transit had failed to meet their needs. While there is some overlap in these arguments, these scholars fundamentally disagree over the spark that triggered the automotive age. While each of these arguments has merit on their own, Bottles argument is ultimately the most persuasive because he presents a compelling case that Angelinos had given up on mass transit. In 1890, Los Angeles had only 11,000 citizens and was the 187th largest city in the United States. But by 1930, it had grown to 1.2 million people in Los Angeles (2.3 million in the metropolitan area) and was the largest city in the West. While Los Angeles lacked water, capital, coal and a port in 1890 by 1930 it had “an artificial river tapped from the Sierras, a federally subsidized harbor, an oil bonanza, and block after block of skyscrapers under construction.” During this time, Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the United States and much of this growth occurred between 1920 and 1930. During the Roaring Twenties, approximately 1.4 million people moved to Los Angeles and Orange County. People were attracted to jobs in the oil business, Hollywood, and construction. The continued expansion of Los Angeles fueled its own frenetic growth. Few, if any, cities could have successfully managed this type of explosive, long-term population growth.
Unlike older American cities, Los Angeles was decentralized at birth and was never particularly accessible to pedestrians. Los Angeles was established after the introduction of the horse-drawn streetcar. This innovation permitted early residents to commute by streetcar to the central business district. Electric streetcars and trains were also fairly quickly introduced to the Los Angeles street. Early mass transit permitted Angelinos to move to even more distant suburbs early in its history. Consequentially, the central business district was not as densely populated as comparable downtowns in other American cities, and it never catered to pedestrians. The invention of balloon frame house furthered suburban development because many Angelinos could afford to buy these modest suburban single-family homes by 1870.<ref>Bottles, 179.</ref> This early pattern of decentralized growth continued over the next four decades as people immigrated to suburbs such as Pasadena, Long Beach, and Hollywood and commuted into the city center by train or streetcar. Still, even though Los Angeles was decentralized “the region had a genuine center that dominated employment, shopping, culture, and government.”<ref>Fishman, 159-160</ref> ====The Development of Mass Transit====One of the prime beneficiaries of Los Angeles suburban growth was the owner of the Pacific Electric Company (PE), the operator of the Los Angeles electric train system, Henry E. Huntington. Before PE built new tracks in Los Angeles, Huntington purchased the land that adjoined before word leaked out that the train line would be extended through his new land. Huntington then laid out suburban housing developments on these properties. After the tracks were built, Huntington would then sell the properties. Huntington also solicited kickbacks from independent housing developers to ensure that the train would connect them to downtown. Huntington was one of the strongest advocates for downtown, and he played a major role in Los Angeles early growth patterns. As Los Angeles’s growth began to accelerate, Angelinos became increasingly frustrated with streetcar and train companies. Like many American cities, Los Angeles depended on private rail companies for the mass transit service. The city gave the Los Angeles Rail Company (LARY) and the Pacific Electric Company (PE) monopolies and they served as its exclusive rail providers. But as the city’s exclusive rail carriers, the companies became responsible for financing both rail service and expansion. As immigrants poured into Los Angeles, streetcars and trains became increasingly crowded. During rush hours, both men and women were forced to stand on streetcars, and they could barely accommodate the growing number of commuters. Neither LARY nor PE could keep up with demand. The growing, decentralized layout of Los Angeles and the companies’ insistence on linking all the rail lines to the central business core complicated their efforts to expand their lines to meet customer demand. The rail companies also faced exceptionally high costs to expand their rail networks. Neither company was able to effectively expand their rail lines after 1913 because they could not “attract investment capital.” Investors were unwilling to finance the companies because they were saddled with enormous debt loads. The companies were not particularly profitable, and investors were understandably concerned that PE and LARY could not service their debts. LARY’s and PE’s inability to meet passenger needs could have angered many Angelinos. Finally, railroads had alienated Americans throughout the country during the last half of the nineteenth century because freight and passenger trains had “killed and maimed people with regularity” on America’s streets. Historian David Stowell argued that the railroads in Buffalo, New York in the 1870s had become extraordinarily unpopular among the city’s middle class. Middle-class Buffaloans had become angry with the railroads because they allied with rail workers during the “Great Strike” of 1877. 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. In fact, injuries Injuries on trains became so frequent through the country that during the nineteenth and early twentieth century American courts fundamentally altered tort law in an effort 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.
