Here’s another piece of Los Angeles mythology that can be laid to rest: The city is not just for cars.

It’s not quite the pristine, skyscraping Los Angeles of “Her” — whose protagonist never enters an automobile — but it is equally far from the sticky stereotype of the Missing Persons lyric, “Nobody walks in L.A.” In fact, if that song, “Walking in L.A.,” maintains a curious cultural relevance here, it is precisely as a foil for planners, journalists and politicians defending the city’s peripatetic appeal. “Don’t listen to the Missing Persons,” Mayor Garcetti said in October. “People do walk in L.A.!”

Indeed, the city is in the midst of a renaissance of walking, biking and public space. Since 2010, eight CicLAvia events have shut down miles of road for cyclists, walkers and joggers — the latest drawing over 100,000 people. Two weeks ago, the city drew 25,000 revelers to its inaugural New Year’s Eve gathering in newly created Grand Park. WalkScore gives L.A. a higher rating than Portland, Pittsburgh and New Orleans. And sometime over the course of the next month, Garcetti will announce the candidates for his “Great Streets” program, intended to remodel dozens of L.A.’s thoroughfares as pedestrian destinations.

cbelt3 wrote:
We had similar exhortations here in Cleveland .

Then winter happened.

Black wrote:
Can anyone point me to a specific claim in tis article that's "overstated?"

Before I could even begin to debunk the myth of auto-centric Los Angeles, however, L.A.’s own complete streets advocates — aware of the conventions of the genre — gave me a preliminary debunking. “There’s this recycled myth that L.A. was built around the car, and pretty much everyone who ever writes anything starts with that,” explained Malcolm Carson, the policy director for environmental health at Community Health Councils, a local nonprofit. “Empirically, it’s just not true. The vast majority was built around streetcar lines, the most extensive rail system in the world.”

N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
Take this segment, for example:

Before I could even begin to debunk the myth of auto-centric Los Angeles, however, L.A.’s own complete streets advocates — aware of the conventions of the genre — gave me a preliminary debunking. “There’s this recycled myth that L.A. was built around the car, and pretty much everyone who ever writes anything starts with that,” explained Malcolm Carson, the policy director for environmental health at Community Health Councils, a local nonprofit. “Empirically, it’s just not true. The vast majority was built around streetcar lines, the most extensive rail system in the world.”

It is absolutely NOT a myth that Los Angeles was built around the car. While it is true that we used to have a light rail system here, as early as 1927 low ridership caused a shift in focus from light rail to buses for mass transit in L.A.

The following factors led to the rise of the automobile as the dominant mode of transit in L.A.:
- a population explosion that gave birth to the sprawling suburbs that today define the region
- creation of the interstate system, which gave rise to the famous L.A. freeways
- a sharp uptick in post-WWII prosperity that enabled many families to not only purchase new homes in far-flung suburbs, but also to purchase automobiles that enabled them to travel anywhere in the sprawling SoCal region quickly and conveniently
- obscenely inexpensive gas prices

By 1963 - FIFTY years ago - the final remnants of L.A.'s original light rail system had been removed from service. We've been a driver's town since then. Buses remain the primary mode of mass transit. While light rail has established a new foothold in the last 20 years or so, it will never become the dominant mode of transit for the simple reason that it is impossible to create a light rail system with a high enough station density to convince people to get out of their cars. No one wants to have to take a train AND THEN a bus to get to a destination - it is much easier to simply drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_%28Los_Angeles_County%29#History