The Los Angeles’ Times "Emerald City" blog recently ran a great post illustrating how Southern California turned from sunny citrus paradise to car-choked hell. Cassandra Davis mixes an historical account of the evolution of car culture in SoCal with her own firsthand experiences growing up as a Valley Girl.
The Ventura Freeway was completed by 1960, and by 1965 there were already novels written about The Valley’s car culture. City planning, including transportation, was dictated primarily by housing developers.
While housing developments spread, businesses were shaped by the needs of drivers, starting with Valley Plaza in 1951, the first shopping center nationwide designed for the freeway commuter. Shopping shifted to center around busy intersections and thoroughfares so workers could pick up what they needed on their way home.
It is no surprise that high school for my generation revolved around driving a car.
We didn’t carpool because our parents didn’t. The majority of us didn’t take the bus either (again, neither did our parents). The bus was unreliable, dirty, unsafe, and for people who couldn’t afford a car. In fact, very few of us knew how to take a bus.
The horizontal development hasn’t improved with time. "In the four years between when ‘Clueless‘ was released (1995) and when I left The Valley (1999), ‘everything in The Valley’ went from 20 minutes away to 40 minutes away," says Davis.
Mix auto and oil industry lobbyists with a warped sense of modernity, a bursting housing market, and short-sighted greed, and you wind up with the Valley.
But all is not lost in La-La land. In fact, Los Angeles is doing more than most cities to reverse their car-cum-congestion culture. Earth Day featured a temporary carectomy around the Wilshire Center; MetroLink has just introduced some new, super-green trains; mayor Villaraigosa is supporting mass transit and taking on congestion; and their are statewide incentives for commuters to leave cars at home.
Photos via flickr by Mastery of Maps & jovike.
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