Freeway Fever in Los Angeles: Bending to The Will of Automobiles

No other nation has sought to accommodate urban motorization so completely or so willingly. No other nation has built metropolitan highways that have so fully erased the differences between urban and rural travel.

In the beginning, there were railways. Pacific Electric Railway was created by a financier named Henry Huntington and provided freight service as well as people transport. After some time, residential development began to follow the rail lines as it grew into the nation’s largest interurban rail network. 

Several years later, Southern Pacific acquired Pacific Electric Railway away from Huntington in 1911 and quickly terminated freight service that was occurring on Pacific, leaving the company to focus solely on passenger service. The service’s red cars would become iconic throughout the Southern California region. 

However, in the years that would follow, it would become increasingly that public transit and automobiles were on a collision course. What was at stake was the identify of the region itself and the subsequent decisions would shape the further development of the greater Los Angeles area in an untold number of ways. Although it was explicitly a zero-sum game, history does seem to suggest that every dollar invested in infrastructure for automobiles was a dollar taken away from the fight to improve upon the region’s capacity from mass transit. 

Yet, when placing the public policy debates about mass transit versus the automobile, it was clear that California generally, and Los Angeles specifically, made for ideal conditions for early vehicles. “All-weather motoring” was far easier to achieve in Southern California than it would be to achieve in Central Michigan or other regions of the country with less consistently favorable weather. Rooted in this climate-driven reality, the grips of the automobile began to take hold with some believing that travel by automobile was equal to travel by streetcar as early as 1921, the year of Lynwood’s incorporation. And with the two forms of travel competing for a finite amount of land, commute by automobile would continue to grow more attractive to the region’s residents in the 1920s.

Even with the 1920s being a time during which a tremendous amount of automotive growth was observed, the California Bureau of Highways had already come into existence back in 1895. The very first highway bond was approved by voters in 1909 valued at $18 million.

Support for freeways would continue to build after a gentleman named Lloyd Aldrich was installed as Los Angeles’ chief engineer. Aldrich began tackling ambitious programs and set his sights on solving the region’s emerging traffic issues. In addition to developing deep relationships with automobile enthusiasts, Aldrich’s team also produced plans that would guide freeway construction within the region for years to come. He was particularly effective in mobilizing his vision given his background with the WPA and his ability to advocate for funds; particularly in the period of time when the Federal government had not yet allocated massive sums of funding to regional freeway projects. Under his watch, Arroyo-seco Parkway became the state’s first “freeway” in 1940. 

Norman Bel Geddes, a famed industrial designer who dedicated a significant amount of thought to the automobile and strategies for developing roadways, made the following observation:

Tradition, true enough, calls upon the road to steer straight for the heart of town. But if the purpose of the motorway is that of being a high-speed non-stop thoroughfare, the motorway would only bungle that job if it got tangled up with a city. It would lose its integrity. The motorway should serve heavily populated areas, but it does not have business cutting a wide swath right through a town or city and destroying the values there; its place is in the country, where there is ample room for it and where its landscaping is designed to harmonize with the land around it.

As popularity continued to grow, interest groups realized the challenges that automobiles were creating the need for enhanced infrastructure to accommodate the surge. In 1937, the Automobile Club of Southern California reported that the Los Angeles region accounted for nearly 50% of all auto accidents in the state, over 1,000 deaths and thousands more injuries. This wasn’t a matter of just building roadways, but also a matter of calling for increased signage, lighting and more to support the automobile as the focal point of transportation throughout the region. But of course, chief among the group’s recommendations was the need for a “network of motorways to be constructed to serve the entire metropolitan area. 

In 1943, The Regional Planning Commission for the County of Los Angeles would issue a report called “Freeways for The Region” which reads almost as a propagandized call to arms for immediate action to be taken on building more freeways. The Commission writes, “we must not permit this interest to wane - we must not allow this potent support to disappear - we must take heroic measures to solve this increasingly important transportation problem.” The report also sets forth an explicit definition of the “freeway” concept to help contextualize the use of this transitway type relative to parkways. 

Freeway fervor throughout the region continued to build in the following years. So much so that in 1948, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Association sought approval for a rapid transit bond measure, but this push was struck down by opposition from suburban cities, developers, the Auto Club of Southern California and Southern Pacific + Pacific Electric. Even at this early stage, rapid transit was being positioned as the antithesis to highly sought after freeway development. On the heels of this skirmish, there would scarcely be opportunities for freeway proponents to work in harmony alongside rapid transit proponents. 

There wouldn’t be an easy way for local or State officials to hedge on the freeway and automobile matter. As the Los Angeles metropolitan area population ballooned from around 200,000 to roughly 2.5 million between 1900 and 1930, sprawl was already beginning to occur. And for many, freeways represented the only true way to tame this unruly sprawl which was previously aided by railways and railway stations, but was now being accelerated during the age of the automobile. This outlook continues to color the entirety of the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area to this day. 

Dwight Eisenhower’s signature on the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 further rendered the US as an automobile-crazed society. And in no state was this more true than California. With ambitions continuing to build over the coming decades, the Century Freeway would eventually receive designation that made it eligible for Federal funding.

In 1973, CalTrans formally created in order to unify transportation services. But the agency’s predecessor, the Division of Highways, would continue to serve as the backbone for an organization focused first and foremost on making commute by automobile easier. The automotive industry couldn’t have dreamed up a better partner.