Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker

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СКАЧАТЬ than three spaces, many of them safer and more substantial than the ramshackle shelters and tents that homeless humans occupy. Parking spaces in greater Los Angeles take up some two hundred square miles. That’s five times the entire footprint of Paris.

      The whole environment has been molded to the needs of these four-wheeled beings. If aliens came to earth and studied our species, they might notice that we appear happier when at the beach, on fields, in the mountains, or surrounded by vegetation. But those beautiful environments are inhospitable to cars (though useful as backdrops to advertise them). So for a century, as Joni Mitchell sang, we’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

      To underscore our subservience to these machines, one more point: if, through carelessness or pride, we venture onto their paved terrain, they can kill or maim us.

      SO IN THIS book about the coming age of mobility, why include a chapter about this iconic car town? The three other cities discussed in this book clearly make sense: Helsinki has its mobility apps; Dubai is spending billions for every new piece of technology on the shelf. Of course it would be silly to ignore China, so sure, Shanghai.

      LA, though, doesn’t seem to fit. LA County minted the global model for highway-connected sprawl. With its eighty-eight municipalities, the county is shaped by thousands of miles of highways, driveways, boulevards, parking lots, and culs-de-sac. This is yesterday’s infrastructure. What does it have to do with tomorrow?

      That’s precisely the point. Los Angeles, more than traditional compact cities, like San Francisco or Paris, must reinvent itself. The city’s leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have vowed to do just that. LA pioneered motorized mobility one hundred years ago, they say, and it can do it again. “My goal—and the goal of this city—[is] to be the transportation technology capital of the world,” says Garcetti. The challenges, as we’ll see, are immense. But the transition, when it comes, will likely be far more dramatic—for better or for worse—than in most other cities.

      Consider the mileage. Drivers in LA County travel a combined average of 221 million miles a day. That’s the equivalent, every day, of a round-trip to the sun plus a one-way jaunt to Mars. You could argue that Angelenos would travel far more than that, maybe twice or three times as much, if the road experience were less miserable. The average LA driver spends one hundred hours a year stuck in traffic. Some commuters suffer multiples of that.

      So for electric bus manufacturers, designers of flying machines, ride-sharing app developers, tunneling companies—for mobility entrepreneurs of every stripe and color—LA represents an immense and ravenous market for miles. The coming transition is bound to transform the economy, the cityscape, and life itself in this sun-soaked expanse of California.

      In many ways, LA’s next step could be a return to its past. Christopher Hawthorne studies this history. For fourteen years, he was the renowned architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and more recently crossed the street to city hall, where he has a brand-new title: chief design officer. His job is to think about the emerging layout of the city: where people will live, work, study, and play, and—naturally—how they’ll move from one place to another. This has led him to conclude that in the twentieth century, there were two very different LAs, and now, in this new century, we’re seeing a third.

      The first LA, Hawthorne says, started out as a traditional urban center, with a strong civic culture rooted in its downtown. That was the destination of Huntington’s streetcar lines. It was where people worked and shopped and went to the theater. You can still see vestiges of this first LA, from the grandiose Union Station, built in Spanish villa style in 1939, to the thirty-two-floor art deco tower that crowns city hall.

      The second LA, as Hawthorne sees it, took shape following the Second World War. Much as the Los Angeles Times’ editorial writers had feared twenty-five years earlier, LA had extended into a policentric urban region with dozens of smaller downtowns, all of them connected by a fast-growing network of freeways. It was a vast sprawl.

      For a time, it was a wildly successful one. Hollywood led the globe in entertainment. Fueled by Cold War spending, LA grew into a manufacturing giant and a world leader in aerospace. And LA’s freeway culture was central to its brand, one of freedom, sunshine, and sex. “She makes me come alive,” the Beach Boys sang, “and makes me want to drive.”

      Yet as Hawthorne sees it, the civic spirit, the sense of belonging to something in common, slackened during this period. This wasn’t unique to LA, of course. But in Los Angeles, as is often the case, the change came earlier and was more extreme. People spent more time cocooned in their homes and their cars, and less of it within chatting distance of fellow Angelenos. With growing crime in the area, the most gruesome cases looped endlessly on TV, the streets themselves started to feel dangerous. In the second LA, the car was a safe space, a shield.

      Now Hawthorne sees a third LA rising. In many ways, it recalls the original version, the one centered on a downtown, where people bumped into one another on electric trains and crowded sidewalks. In this process, LA doesn’t revert to a single downtown. But it does become a denser place, with more people packed into many of its empty spaces, more of them living in apartments. This more concentrated population will depend far less on cars, and fewer of its inhabitants will need to own one.

      This shift is already under way. You can see it in the Arts District, a fifteen-minute walk from city hall. A neighborhood of old warehouses and small manufacturing plants, it’s now sprouting galleries, cafés, converted lofts, and new apartment buildings. People bike and scooter and stroll on sidewalks. This preview of the third LA looks and acts more like a traditional city.

      For this filling-in trend to spread across greater LA, Angelenos will need a host of new mobility options. These extend from the familiar—walkable sidewalks, bike paths, new Metro lines—to technology’s cutting edge: think autonomous air taxis and high-speed pods blazing through tunnels.

      MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, leaning back on a couch in his spacious city hall office, is reminiscing about his first car, a 1975 gas-guzzling Ford Torino station wagon. He reaches for his phone and does a fast image search. “Here it is,” he says, pointing to a boxy behemoth with fake wood paneling on the sides. “It was more a question of gallons per mile than miles per gallon.”

      It was a couple of months after Garcetti’s sixteenth birthday, in 1987, that his father, Gil (who would later serve as LA’s district attorney), bought back the Torino from the man he’d sold it to and presented it to his son. Even with its miserable gas mileage, the Torino represented freedom, and driving in LA still seemed fun. Today, the mayor says, LA still has some “amazing drives,” up the Pacific Coast Highway, for instance, or the twists and turns of Mulholland Drive. Topanga Canyon is still gorgeous. Add it all up, and the nice drives occupy “about two percent of the time,” Garcetti says grimly. “The other ninety-eight percent you’re in traffic.” And crawling.

      Driving in LA is mostly an exercise in tapping the brakes. Eastbound rush hour traffic trudges on the 10, from Santa Monica to downtown, at about nine miles per hour, no faster than a six year old on a bike. In fact, many routes in LA are slower today than they were in the 1920s, when people were still driving Model Ts.

      Immobility saps the Los Angeles region of its very essence. The whole point of living and working in a city, after all, is to connect with other people. In LA, it might be to haggle over a merger in Pasadena, to play tennis on the courts at UCLA, to celebrate a quinceañera in Boyle Heights, to dream up a screenplay over drinks in Marina del Rey. People interacting with other people is akin to a city’s nervous system. For it to work, people have to be able to move. Otherwise, why pay the rent to live in LA? You might as well FaceTime from somewhere else.

      For decades, the answer has been to widen the highways—which is almost always an СКАЧАТЬ