A City Without Sidewalks

On a typical Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, a woman named Maria García wakes at 5:47 AM in her one-bedroom apartment in Boyle Heights. By 6:15, she is behind the wheel of her 2018 Honda Civic, joining the river of red and white lights that flows westward through the Eastside toward downtown. She will drive seventeen miles today to reach a job she loves—managing a boutique clothing store on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The journey will take her between forty-five minutes and two hours, depending on accidents, construction, or the mysterious phenomenon locals call "carmageddon." She will spend roughly three hours of her life in that car, navigating the concrete labyrinth of the Pomona, Santa Ana, and San Diego freeways. When she finally arrives at work, she will walk perhaps two hundred steps all day—across the parking lot, through the store, to the break room. By evening, she will make the reverse journey, another two hours in the car, arriving home as the sun sets over the San Gabriel Mountains. She has lived this way for eleven years.

Maria García is not unusual. She is, in many ways, the quintessential Angeleno: car-dependent by circumstance, not by preference; deeply attached to a city that makes her life unnecessarily difficult; and utterly unable to imagine an alternative. Los Angeles is home to thirteen million people in the greater metropolitan area, and virtually every single one of them shares Maria's daily ritual. The freeways that crisscross the region carry some sixteen million vehicle trips every day. The parking structures that punctuate the urban landscape contain more spaces than most American cities have total parking. And the sidewalks—those narrow ribbons of concrete where human beings have walked since cities existed—are, in many neighborhoods, more theoretical than practical.

This is a book about that paradox. Los Angeles is the automobile capital of the world, the city that gave us the freeway, the drive-through, and the suburban mall. It is also a place where the car, meant to liberate, has become a cage. Where the promise of freedom—the open road, the wind in your hair, the ability to go anywhere, anytime—has calcified into an architecture of compulsion. Angelenos spend an average of eighty-two minutes commuting each day, the highest rate in the nation. They own more cars per capita than residents of any other major American city. They drive more miles annually than drivers in New York, Chicago, or any of the great urban centers that once defined American city life. And yet, for all this vehicular abundance, they are trapped.

The statistics tell part of the story. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim has the highest rate of solo car commuting among the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the United States. More than 73 percent of Angelenos drive to work alone, compared to a national average of 67 percent. The figure for transit commuting is stark: just 5.7 percent of LA workers take buses or trains to their jobs, compared to 27 percent in New York City or 13 percent in San Francisco. Walking to work? That accounts for less than 3 percent of all commuter trips in the Los Angeles region. In Manhattan, 15 percent of workers walk. In Boston, 6 percent. In a city that sprawls across 4,850 square miles, the pedestrian has become an afterthought, a historical artifact from an earlier urban era that the automobile has quietly erased.

But statistics alone cannot capture the lived experience of car dependency. To understand what it means to be an Angeleno in the age of the automobile, you have to understand the physical reality of the place itself. Los Angeles is not a city in the traditional sense. It is a collection of more than eighty distinct neighborhoods, each with its own character, its own history, its own commercial district—and almost none of them connected to each other in any way that doesn't involve a car. Pacific Palisades is twenty-two miles from Watts. Venice Beach sits twelve miles inland from Malibu. To get from one to another requires traversing a network of highways, boulevards, and surface streets that can turn a short geographical distance into a journey of hours.

The geography of Los Angeles contributed to this car dependency, but it did not determine it. The city was not inevitable. There was a time, not so long ago, when Los Angeles was served by the most extensive public transportation system in the world. The Pacific Electric Railway, known colloquially as the Red Car system, connected downtown Los Angeles to every corner of the basin and beyond, with more than a thousand miles of track stretching to Santa Monica, Long Beach, San Bernardino, and the San Fernando Valley. At its peak in the 1920s, the Red Cars carried more than a hundred million passengers per year. A worker living in Glendale could take the train to downtown Los Angeles for a dollar, or ride to the beach for the price of an ice cream cone. The city was walkable, dense, and oriented around transit corridors rather than highways.

What happened to the Red Cars is one of the great cautionary tales of American urban planning. The story involves corporate chicanery, racial anxiety, political corruption, and the seductive power of a new technology. It is a story that will recur throughout this book, because it encapsulates the forces that shaped Los Angeles into Car Country—and that continue to shape it today. By the time the last Pacific Electric line ceased operation in 1961, the automobile had won. The boulevards had been widened. The freeways had been built. The parking lots had spread. And the sidewalks—those essential public spaces where democracy had once flourished—had quietly, almost imperceptibly, begun to disappear.

To walk in Los Angeles is to become acutely aware of this disappearance. In many neighborhoods, there are no sidewalks at all. In the San Fernando Valley, in the suburbs of Orange County, in the sprawling expanse of the South Bay, pedestrians are afterthoughts, intruders on territory that belongs to the car. The sidewalks that do exist are often crumbling, blocked by utility poles, overgrown with vegetation, or simply terminating without warning at driveways or parking lots. Crosswalks are worn away. Traffic signals do not include countdown timers for pedestrians. In some parts of the city, the nearest crosswalk may be a mile away, forcing residents to play a deadly game of dodge-em with speeding traffic.

This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of planning decisions, zoning codes, and infrastructure investments that have systematically prioritized the automobile at the expense of the human body. Los Angeles has more lane miles of roadway per capita than any other major American city. It has more parking spaces per capita as well. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority operates the third-largest transit system in the country, but that system carries only a fraction of the trips that the freeway system handles. Every year, the city spends billions of dollars maintaining and expanding its roads, while transit service remains underfunded and pedestrian infrastructure is treated as an afterthought.

The consequences of this car dependency are visible everywhere. They are visible in the haze that hangs over the city on hot summer days, the legacy of millions of cars pumping exhaust into the atmosphere. They are visible in the obesity rates that plague low-income communities where walking is not a choice but a necessity, yet the streets are designed for speeding traffic rather than human movement. They are visible in the hours that Angelenos spend in their cars every week, hours that could be spent with families, exercising, reading, sleeping, or simply living. They are visible in the social isolation that car dependency reinforces, the way the automobile creates bubbles of private space in a public landscape that no longer has r