Why Los Angeles Loves Cars More Than Any Other City

Imagine you're looking down at a busy ant hill from far, far above. You can't see individual ants anymore—just tiny dots, millions of them, moving in long organized lines. Some lines snake toward the left. Others flow toward the right. They merge together. They split apart. They crawl slowly. They speed up. They stop completely. Then they start moving again. It's like watching a living river made of millions of tiny creatures, all going somewhere important.

Now imagine if those ants were the size of cars. And imagine if that ant hill stretched from the ocean on one side to mountains on the other, covering hundreds of square miles. That's what Los Angeles looks like from an airplane window. That's what it looks like every single day, on every single highway, on every single street.

Welcome to Car Country.

Los Angeles is one of the biggest cities in the entire world. More than thirteen million people live here—that's bigger than the entire populations of many countries! But here's something really strange and really interesting: out of all those millions and millions of people, almost nobody walks to work. Can you believe that? In most cities, lots of people put on their shoes and just walk to their jobs. They say "See you later!" to their families and stroll down the sidewalk, maybe stopping to grab a coffee or saying hi to neighbors along the way.

Not in Los Angeles. In LA, walking to work is super rare. Like, really, really rare. Most people in LA have to drive—sometimes for a very, very long time—just to get to their jobs. And then they have to drive all the way back home again at the end of the day. Every single day. Doesn't that sound exhausting? It does to me! And yet, the people of Los Angeles have been doing this for almost one hundred years.

So here's our mystery, the big question we'll be trying to answer together as we read this whole book: Why? Why did Los Angeles become a city where everyone needs a car? Why didn't LA build lots of sidewalks and bike paths and train tracks like other cities did? What happened here?

Get ready, because you're about to become a detective. And the case you're solving is one of the most interesting stories in American history.

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Let's start with some numbers, because numbers tell us a lot about how special LA really is.

In most big American cities, about five to ten percent of people walk to work. In New York City, which is famous for its subway and its busy streets, more than ten percent of people walk. In Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco—lots of people put one foot in front of the other and just walk where they need to go.

But in Los Angeles? The number is less than four percent. That means out of every one hundred people you meet in LA, only about three or four of them ever walk to their jobs. The other ninety-six or ninety-seven people? They all drive. Or they ride in cars with people who are driving. Or they take buses that crawl through traffic just like cars do.

Now, here's another number that's really important: LA has about five hundred miles of freeway. Five hundred miles! If you could drive in a straight line, you could go from Los Angeles all the way to the Mexican border and still have miles left over. The freeway system in LA is one of the biggest in the entire world. It has more lanes than you can count, more ramps and exits and interchanges than you could memorize in a lifetime.

And get this—almost all of those freeways were built after 1950. That means the entire car-focused LA that we know today was really created in just a few decades. Before that, LA was a different place. A smaller place. A place where maybe, just maybe, people walked a little more and drove a little less.

How did this happen? How did a whole city change so completely, so fast?

That's our mystery. And we're going to solve it together.

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Before we dive deeper into the story, let's learn some important words that will help us understand everything better. Every good detective needs to know the vocabulary!

Suburb: A suburb is like a little town that's part of a bigger city's area. When you live in a suburb, you're not in the main downtown part of the city, but you're still close enough to be part of the city's bigger story. Suburbs usually have houses with yards, shopping centers, and schools. Lots of families live in suburbs because they're quieter than downtown and sometimes have bigger homes. But here's the tricky part: in a suburb, things are spread out far apart. That means if you want to go to the store, or to school, or to a friend's house, you usually have to drive. You can't really walk because everything is too far away.

Los Angeles has TONS of suburbs. In fact, most of LA is suburbs! Places like Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Santa Clarita, and thousands of other neighborhoods are all suburbs of Los Angeles. And because they're spread out so much, everyone needs a car to get around.

Commute: Your commute is the trip you take from home to work or school, and then back home again. In Los Angeles, commutes can be really, really long. Imagine waking up at six in the morning, getting in the car, and not arriving at school or work until eight or nine! Then you have to do the whole thing in reverse at the end of the day. That's a commute. Some people in LA spend three hours every day just sitting in their cars, going back and forth. That's like watching six entire movies every week while you're stuck in traffic!

Highway: A highway is a big road designed for lots of cars going fast. Highways in LA are different from regular streets because they have no stoplights or stop signs. Cars just keep moving and moving, merging in and out like fish in the ocean. The highways in LA are called "freeways" because you can drive on them for free—no toll booths, no fees. Just put on your turn signal, find your gap in traffic, and zoom!

The most famous highway in LA is probably the 405, also called "the 405" or just "the freeway." It goes right through the heart of the city and is famous for being incredibly crowded. People joke that it's always bumper-to-bumper, which means cars are driving so close together that their bumpers almost touch. Another famous one is the 101, which runs through Hollywood and downtown. And the 5 is one of the longest highways in the entire country—it goes all the way from the Canadian border to Mexico!

Interchange: When two or more highways cross each other, that spot is called an interchange. Interchanges in LA can be absolutely enormous, with ramps going up and down and over and under, like a giant concrete roller coaster. The biggest one is called the "East Los Angeles Interchange," and it's so complicated that traffic engineers study it for years just to understand how all the ramps and lanes work together.

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Now that we know the vocabulary, let's talk about something really important: the shape of Los Angeles.

Think about the most famous cities you know. New York is a big rectangle on the edge of the ocean. Chicago is right next to a huge lake. San Francisco is squeezed onto the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides.

Los Angeles is different. LA is spread out across a giant basin—that's like a shallow bowl shape—flanked by mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. For a long time, that meant the city could only grow in certain directions. It couldn't just sprawl in every direction forever, because the mountains and the ocean kept getting in the way.

For hundreds of years, the people who lived in what we now call Los Angeles were Native American tribes like the Tongva, the Chumash, and many others. They walked everywhere, just like people have walked for thousands of years. They had trails and paths that connected their villages, their hunting grounds, and their sacred places. Nobody needed a car because everything was close enough to reach by foot.

Then, in the 1700s, Spanish explorers came to this area. They built a place call