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Along with beaches, palm trees, and movie studios, the freeway is one of Southern California's trademarks. Perhaps no other urban areas in the world have embraced the automobile as passionately as have Greater Los Angeles (including Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties and the "Inland Empire") and San Diego. Extensive freeway networks criss-cross the still fast-growing region, connecting urban centers with their suburbs and exurbs, as well as the areas of urban sprawl between them. The popular Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?", contains a line that for many sums up the status of automobile transit in the City of Angels: "L.A. is a great big freeway". Despite the recent construction of high-profile mass transit projects in the region, this line is just about as apt today as it was in the mid-1960s.

A note on freeway names

As in many American cities, Southern California freeways have names that are often distinct from the state or federal highway number that they are assigned. While Southern California residents idiomatically refer to freeways with the definite article, as "the number" (e.g., the Santa Monica and San Bernardino freeways are known as "the 10", (or in recent years the I-10) as they are segments of Interstate 10), traffic reporters, highway signs, and transportation planners usually refer to a freeway by its full, descriptive name. The above example illustrates that a numbered route might have two or more names, each describing a different part of the freeway. Conversely, a named freeway might include portions of two or more differently numbered routes; for example, the Ventura Freeway consists of portions of U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 134.

History

Origins

Southern California's romance with the automobile owes in large part to resentment of the Southern Pacific Railroad's tight control over the region's commerce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During his successful campaign for governor in 1910, anti-Southern Pacific candidate Hiram Johnson traveled the state by car (no small feat at that time). In the minds of Southlanders, this associated the automobile with clean, progressive government, in stark contrast to the railroads' control over the corrupt governments of the Midwest and Northeast. While the Southern Pacific-owned Pacific Electric Railway's famous "Red Car" streetcar lines were the axes of urbanization in Los Angeles during its period of spectacular growth in the 1910s and 1920s, they were unprofitable and increasingly unattractive compared to automobiles. As cars became cheaper and began to fill the region's roads in the 1920s, the Pacific Electric both lost ridership and slowed to a crawl; traffic congestion soon threatened to choke off the region's development altogether. At the same time, a number of influential urban planners were advocating the construction of a network of what one widely-read book dubbed "Magic Motorways," as the backbone of suburban development. These "greenbelt" advocates called for decentralized, automobile-oriented development as a means of remedying both urban overcrowding and declining rates of home ownership.

Planning and construction

During World War II, transportation bottlenecks on Southern California roads and railways convinced many that if Southern California were to accommodate a large population, it needed a completely new transportation system. The city of Los Angeles favored an upgraded rail transit system focused on its central city. However, the success of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, built between Los Angeles and Pasadena in 1940, convinced many that a freeway system could solve the region's transportation problems. Leaders of surrounding cities, such as Whittier, South Gate, Long Beach, and Pasadena, accordingly called for a web of freeways to connect the whole region, rather than funneling their residents out of their own downtowns and into that of Los Angeles. Pro-freeway sentiments prevailed, and by 1949 a comprehensive freeway plan for Los Angeles had been drawn up by the California Department of Public Works (now "Caltrans"). San Diego soon followed suit, and by the early 1950s construction had begun on much of the region's freeway system.

Discontent

The devastation of the disproportionately black and Latino communities through which freeways had been routed (which stood in stark contrast to the prosperity of areas developed around the new routes) combined with the growing problem of air pollution to dampen enthusiasm for freeways in the 1960s, and the economic havoc wrought by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo further reduced freeways' attractiveness. By the 1970s, Caltrans had abandoned many planned freeways in the face of significant political opposition. Growing enthusiasm for mass transit siphoned tax dollars away from freeway construction, and the California tax revolt of that same decade significantly reduced the resources available for infrastructure development. By 2004, only 61% of the freeway miles proposed in the 1954 master plan had been built. While many of these routes were geographically improbable (e.g. the Angeles Crest and Decker Freeways), some would have been quite useful. Combined with Caltrans' failure to complete routes such as the Long Beach and Glendale Freeways, the abandonment of routes such as the Laurel Canyon and Beverly Hills Freeways resulted in gaps and bottlenecks in the freeway system that caused ripple effects of congestion throughout the entire network. In response to the drying-up of funds from state government that followed in the wake of Proposition 13, Orange County--perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the freeway system--embarked on its own program of tollway construction in the 1980s using local funds, and began to apply local financing to freeway construction as well after the turn of the 21st century. The Century Freeway, belatedly opened in 1993 after bruising fights over its construction, is generally thought to be the last new freeway built with traditional funding methods.

The future

After a deep recession in the early 1990s caused by the collapse of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, Southern California began to grow again in the latter part of the decade. As in the region's population surge in the 1920s and 1930s, most of the new arrivals were impoverished ex-farmers (albeit from Mexico this time around instead of Kansas and Oklahoma), and as in that period of growth, the region's infrastructure has had difficulty in keeping up. Traffic congestion that was already the nation's worst in the late 1980s got steadily worse throughout the 1990s, and by 2000 many routes (primarily freeways going through narrow mountain passes, such as the San Diego Freeway between the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles Basin) were clogged to the point of near-uselessness. However, even in the face of the state budget crisis of the early 2000s, plans have been drawn up to radically expand the region's transportation network to accommodate population growth that has already swelled the region's population to 17 million (as of the U.S. Census of 2000) and may see it grow to 25 or even 30 million in the coming decades. Environmentalist sentiments, high fuel prices, and the dearth of available land within a short drive of the region's urban centers will likely result in future development taking a pattern along the mass transit-oriented lines of the "smart growth" school's recommendations. It is clear, though, that freeways will continue to play an important role in Southern California's transportation throughout the 21st century.

Proposed/future freeways

Despite the previously-mentioned impediments to freeway construction, and the pressing need to rebuild many freeways designed for far lower volumes of traffic than their current usage, Caltrans' portfolio of new freeway projects remains sizable. Notable projects (some of which may never come to pass) include:

Southern California freeway firsts

List of freeways

Major intercity freeways

Unnamed freeways

San Diego area

Unnamed freeways

Los Angeles area

Unnamed freeways

References

  • Carney, Steve. "From Superhighways To Sigalerts: Freeways Have Become Part Of Southland's Identity." Los Angeles Daily News, 21 September 1999, p. N4.
  • Hise, Greg (1999). Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-6255-8.
  • Taylor, Brian (2004). "The Geography of Urban Transportation Finance," pp 294-331 in Hanson and Giuliano eds., The Geography of Urban Transportation, 3rd Edition. The Guilford Press. ISBN 1-5938-5055-7.

External links

Southern California freeways

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Southern California freeways".

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