Re:When cities treated cars as dangerous intruders
by asdff on Sunday July 31, 2022 @04:17PM
(#32298414)
It was trams and horses and people and early cars. It was pure chaos, almost like images you see from countries without strong traffic laws. Here was downtown LA:
As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested, and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl. This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so much in these early congested regions. They were also used to permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).
https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/image...
As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested, and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl. This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so much in these early congested regions. They were also used to permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).