Los Angeles and the automobile: the making of a modern city.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of a Modern City.

Scott L. Bottles. University of California Press, $25. This past summer, motorists on the carclogged freeways of Los Angeles took to shooting each other, wounding and occasionally killing fellow commuters. Southern California's fixation on the automobile has always drawn criticism from the national (i.e. eastern) press, but this outbreak seemed to confirm that L.A.'s car culture had gone mad.

Southern Californias are hardly alone in their passion for the automobile. Nationwide, for postwar suburban boom and the more recent growth beyond the suburbs suggest that, for good or ill, most Americans prefer to live in places that can be reached only by car. But Los Angeles has led the way in urban decentralization.

How did it happen? Scott Bottles provides convincing evidence that Los Angeles became a car-oriented city not because of bad planning but in spite of good planning. Far from encouraging use of the automobile, the city's planners spent the early part of the century promoting mass transit and trying to build up Los Angeles's urban core. The city even went so far as to ban downtown parking in 1920. After a huge public outcry, the ban was repealed in less than a month. Angelenos would not be denied their cars.

Mass transit buffs who like to criticize Los Angeles's "love affair with the automobile' usually overlook the fact that it was trolleys and commuter trains, not automobiles, that initially created the city's urban sprawl. Indeed, rail transportation put Los Angeles on the map. The city was a backwater community until the Southern Pacific railroad linked it to the rest of the country in the 1880s. Rather than develop into a traditional "walking city' like Chicago, which grew up just a few decades earlier, Los Angeles used the new rail technology to evolve into a large, decentralized metropolitan area linked by inter-urban train to Long Beach, Pasadena, and other Southern California cities.

Across the country, "streetcar suburbs' were attracting families eager to escape the city...