I've just returned from a 9 day road trip that included stops in California, Nevada, and Arizona. The most time was spent in the Los Angeles area.
When planning the trip I thought there was a pretty good chance I would end up disliking Los Angeles, but our trip included two other friends who had a lot of family in the area, and I knew there would be some good museums and was generally curious about the geography of the place, so we went anyway.
TLDR is I hated being in Los Angeles, and for exactly the reason I expected to. It is a pain in the ass to get anywhere. It's interesting to think that California is somehow the epicenter of car culture. Going through Los Angeles in 2019, it seems like the place where the car, the whole idea of the car as it is today, goes to die.
The LA area has about ~18,000,000 people in it and is so sprawled over such a huge area that the thought of comprehensive, effective public transit is laughable. One of the main things I noticed as a 'car person' in LA is that the city is actually overpopulated with cars. This was the first time in my life that I ever thought of cars as pollution even when they were parked and turned off! Cars are blight in LA. There are cars parked everywhere, lining nearly every block, shoved into any car-sized space making almost every road unpleasant to navigate and every parking lot a battleground. I suspect that the main reason for this is California's housing problems. The cost of housing is so much that housing ends up being very dense and also densely populated, so that there are relatively few houses that actually have enough parking for the number of people living in them and this overdensity infects every old area that can't grow its parking infrastructure to accommodate. In fact, it seems like you can basically pinpoint someone's level of 'parking privilege' by the amount of damage on their bumpers. Nearly every car i saw street parked in LA had bumper corner damage related to parking mishaps. By extension, you could tell that pretty much anyone with clean bumpers was one of the ones who actually had a privately owned space to keep their privately owned things in. What a concept.
Parking lots are... interesting in LA. You see valets working tiny, terrible little lots that as a Texan I am semi-offended that anyone would think to try and charge me money for the 'privilege' of parking in. There are nice parking lots too. Those ones have ticket booths so you can at least financially incentivize the lack of adequate infrastructure without the indignity of handing that money directly to a human being. There is also a strange (to me) density of laundromats. I guess having your own washer and drier is a part of 1st world living that has not penetrated fully into the 2nd-largest city in one of the richest nations of the world. Need to do laundry? No problem, let's just get into our car and become traffic on the way to the parking lot we have to pay to get into and pay to wash so that the illusion of not living in squalor at least extends slightly past our clothing. And when we get back let's try not to mark up the cars in front and behind as we parallel park into a spot 1 ft longer than our car that's 2 blocks from the building we live in.
The highways are clogged, even on Sunday nights. You realize while 'driving' around that the only reason you have to go so far through the morass of people is that the morass of people needing to be housed dictates the great distances. When you need to get across town you are basically needing to get across many millions of people. Traffic on surface streets here makes me understand why electric scooter rentals were born in California. This is the bleeding edge of what excessive population and density do to our notions of car-based travel. This is the kind of driving that makes you want autonomy, or to just not be in a car. I wouldn't have been a car enthusiast in LA. It's great that SoCal has so many neat places to escape to within a couple hours' travel, but fundamentally I would prefer a lot less need to escape from my daily conditions.
I live in what is merely the 7th largest city in the US and I learned to drive at the dawn of the 21st century with the basic expectation that you could travel roughly 1 mile per minute by car. LA car travel is so laughably far below that that car travel feels forced and inefficient to the point that I feel dirty about it. That i've concentrated so much material and skilled labor and personal earnings into this expensive wheeled contraption that converts sequestered carbon into de-sequestered carbon, for this? Just so i can do this? Crawl along at jogging speed? It feels almost immoral. It breaks my personal thought-model of why cars are ok in spite of everything that's wrong with them. Here, they just feel like a necessary evil, not a necessary evil with so many upsides that they're my favorite thing in the world. Just grindingly, tediously necessary because we've broken the system in which they worked well but failed to come up with anything better.
It's interesting that from afar California is known for heavy-handed government, because driving through LA I got the exact opposite impression. Every 50 feet you see something built with no regard to whatever is 50 feet to its left or right. It really seems like there was almost no urban planning or zoning involved in the growth of LA, which begs the mind to create clever allusions to cancer. It's like the government just didn't say no to anything. On the other hand, you see strange glimpses of government intrusion in daily life, like having to pay money for the bag you put the things you already paid money for into when leaving a store. Paying extra fees to use a card? Allowing motorcycles to legally pass within inches of you at unsafe speed delta (lane splitting) and then putting a sign on the side of the road that says I need to give 3 feet of courtesy when i pass a bicycle when the safety problem in both cases is nearly identical and you might as well let me pass within inches of them at unsafe speed delta too. Limiting the use of lanes in a city with a huge dearth of highway infrastructure to those with multiple passengers or certain classes of vehicle. As if California needed to bring more attention to the fact that it is one giant stratified class-based system of privilege where the many suffer, although to be honest it does seem like road traffic is one way in which the rich still live in undignified conditions here.
When you crest big hills around the edge of the city and look over the landscape you can simultaneously understand why it filled up with people, and why it shouldn't have. It looks like it was a nice place before 18,000,000 people moved in. In the present day it seems like it serves mostly as a warning of what the general trend of people moving from the country to the city could eventually do to the way we live. What limits do we put in place to prevent this? Is it even right for government to do any such thing? California is full of well-meaning policy that exacerbates its own problems, but what are we learning from its policy failures? With the types of housing and modes of transport that we have now, I just don't see that it's possible to put 18m people in close confines without giving up on a lot of our stereotypical american ideas of standard of living and freedom. I guess a lot of the people living there don't feel that way, but given that California is simultaneously the state with the biggest influx of people and also has net negative population growth (more people leaving than coming), obviously a lot of people do.
My hometown of San Antonio has been the victim of huge growth, substantially of California ex-pats (and half of California's population is just LA). Having now been to LA, i can absolutely see the appeal. Low housing costs, a modicum of space, a SINGLE-family dwelling. Even the traffic created here, while bad by San Antonio standards, is a dream compared to run of the mill LA traffic. But they still created all that traffic, gentrified neighborhoods and drove up housing costs. Everything moved in an LA direction. I want to see LA people happier (there is a whole other rant about how I've correlated the conditions of LA to the stereotypical personality traits of Californians who moved to Texas), but not by transplanting those problems into other areas.
Ultimately we would have to change the incentive structure of governance to make population growth ever not suck. Governments love density, but they never cough up enough infrastructure investment to make it not suck to live in. If that never changes, the growth of cities will always be a slow slide to ruin. Not financial ruin of elites who profit from density and can largely pay for the privilege of not suffering their fellow man as they go around exercising their greater freedom, but ruin of the rest of us who will be packed in ever closer and closer together while taking longer and longer to get anywhere and paying higher prices competing for resources that have not grown in pace with population.
I know this is a post about cars, but cars are what made modern cities possible and as a car lover I hate the idea that the unchecked city will also be the death of the car as i know it. But, maybe it is inevitable. I did go to the Petersen Automotive Museum and while I liked it, I found it fitting that it is right next to the La Brea Tar Pits. The idea of cars mounted up as immobile remembrances of the past just like the fossils across the street bore new foreboding. The LA conditions are the sticking, sinking pit that that the car falls into and, by becoming nearly immobile, dies in. LA may be a historical epicenter of car culture, but if we love the car as we know it, we have to prevent LA from ever happening again!
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