The association’s brand-new Adam’s Track was supposed to promote commerce and community relations. Japanese-American cyclists arrived at the track riding the latest racing models and dressed in bold cycling uniforms. Residents of all backgrounds arrived from throughout Southern California to celebrate opening day, an event preceded by fireworks and a military band. The debut of the track, which was designed for fast-paced, exciting racing, celebrated competitive cycling among Japanese-American riders, who were moving to Riverside county in increasing numbers.

In the 1890s, cycling became a popular pastime all over the U.S., in immigrant and nonimmigrant communities. It was particularly widespread in the semirural communities of inland California, where workers used country roads that connected scenic groves to navigate the flagship citrus industry.

In the town of Riverside, where 75 percent of Riverside County’s Japanese and Japanese-American population resided, bicycling brought the community together, elevating their place in the broader local society. But within a short period of time Riverside’s bicycle friendly roads also became treacherous places where police used surveillance and racially targeted laws to limit Japanese-Americans’ movements and to enforce their separation from their white neighbors.

Riverside Wheelmen. Courtesy of the Museum of Riverside, Riverside, California.

The Adam’s Track opening represented a high point in Japanese-American relations in Riverside. Some 1,590 people had come to the town from Japan by 1910, and cycling’s rise paralleled the sport’s popularity in Japan, where business owners established sporting goods and repair shops, manufacturers developed Japanese-branded models, and the national army was newly equipped with bicycles.

Likewise, a Japanese-American bicycling culture thrived in Riverside. Recent immigrants, including the Nishida and Yoshida families established bicycle shops soon after arriving to the community. Oral histories suggest these stores serviced not only the community, but also the multiracial populations who lived nearby. As time passed, these bicycle services evolved into motorized services. The Nishida family turned their bicycle shop turned into an automotive shop and the Yoshida family established a motorcycle agency and a garage.

The Riverside Japanese Association planned the inaugural bicycle races at the Adam’s Track as part of a grand gala honoring the birthday of the Meiji emperor, who advanced capitalist industrialization and Japanese expansion across the Pacific. A highlight of the event was an invitation-only celebration at the downtown Loring Opera House, a Romanesque theater specially decorated in Japanese lanterns, flags, and flowers. Local dignitaries made speeches, and the association presented a display of Japanese arts and technology, including daytime fireworks.

As the birthday gala’s formal program concluded, organizers invited participants to head to the newly built Adam’s Track to watch the races: in individual heats of one to eight laps around the three-eighth mile oval track, which was banked on the curves to maximize speed. There were six races in total, ranging from three miles to a mile-and-a-half sprint, which spectators watched from a newly constructed clubhouse and grandstand overlooking the track. Races were restricted to Japanese-American participants, with the exception of a single two-mile race opened to “everybody, Japanese, Americans, Indians and even Russians,” as noted by the local press.

The races were much anticipated. Regional news sources followed the opening of the track closely, detailed the race schedule, and highlighted event sponsors and prizes. The press lauded the energy and high speeds of the bicyclists. The Riverside Daily Press reported before the event: “The Japanese are enthusiastic sportsmen, and particularly enthusiastic bicycle riders, and as they promise a revival of the old sport … Their first race meet will undoubtedly be attended by an interested crowd of spectators.”

Japanese laborer riding through the groves on his bicycle. Courtesy of the Riverside Public Library, Riverside, California.

Previously, cycling races in Riverside had been held in the Athletic Park downtown, but local leagues of riders with Asian surnames were never present. This reflected a color line set by the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), a membership organization, founded in Rhode Island, which oversaw national bicycle racing regulations. LAW explicitly excluded African-American cyclists beginning in 1893. Racial exclusion also took hold in the Southwest, where bicycling was so thoroughly internalized as a white sport that the exclusion of nonwhite riders did not need to be articulated in formal guidelines. Consider one invitational meet in Riverside around 1897, which drew 88 riders from across the region. Only two registrants had Spanish surnames. None had Asian surnames.

Adam’s Track races were intended as an answer to this exclusion. Judged, officiated, and featuring men from the Japanese-American community, these races showed off these riders’ skill in a forum where they alone determined the grounds of success. The event’s judges included prominent community members like Ulysses Kaneko, a successful business owner and court translator, and—in a rarity for an era that denied U.S. citizenship to Asian immigrants—a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Built four miles away from the downtown Athletic Park, the Adam’s Track was near the Japanese camp of the Arlington Heights Fruit Company, which employed hundreds of recent arrivals to tend citrus plants and pick fruit each year, many eager to race.

Racers arrived at the track with elite U.S. racing bikes, including Pierce Cycles, a beautifully designed line based in New York that sold bicycles at $50 a piece. The cyclists earned awards for their victories, such as a $10 suitcase from Reynolds Department Store for first prize in the three-mile race, a $7 silver watch from Pollock Brothers for first place in the two-and-a half-mile race, and expensive clothing from cycling stores for sprints. In a period when sport was often used to express white racial dominance and national strength, Japanese-American boosters promoted the cyclists’ successes and lauded their athletic ability.

It is difficult to know if Japanese-American women joined in the craze; they are notably missing from public accounts of cycling activities in Riverside during this era. That is a stark departure from reports of cycling practices in Japan—where bourgeois women commonly rode bicycles in public spaces—and throughout the United States, where women cycled independently and in clubs from the 1890s onward.

Studio portrait of boy on bicycle. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

For all the potential for cooperation displayed at the Japanese emperor’s birthday gala and Adam Track’s opening race in 1905, the following years saw a distinct backlash against Japanese-American cyclists. And that backlash became part of a more general push for racial exclusion. In the city of Riverside, over half of all arrests of Japanese-Americans over the next decade were for bicycle violations.

An important turning point in cycling enforcement came in 1910, with the passage of a traffic ordinance. In the media coverage leading up to passage of the 20-page local law, public safety and police enforcement against speeding motorists were emphasized. But the ordinance itself placed heavy regulations on common cycling behaviors, including speeding, racing, riding on sidewalks, and cycling at night without a light.

The cycling ordinance also marked a new era of police enforcement and surveillance. Notably, the city equipped its police with motorcycles, “for use in running down traffic violators.” This was a significant early investment, at a time when the largest motorbike manufacturers only produced a few hundred units a year. The ordinance also extended special privileges to officers, such as requiring privately owned vehicles (including bicycles and horse-drawn carts) to surrender the right of way.

Violation of bicycle ordinances, a misdemeanor, carried heavy fees and penalties. For a first offense, cyclists could be fined up to $100 and imprisoned for up to 30 days. Three or more offenses heightened the penalties to as much as $500 and up to six months’ imprisonment. Although there is nothing in writing that explicitly targeted Japanese-Americans, police and the community clashed with great frequency in everyday enforcement.

Original arrest numbers carefully recorded by sociologist Morrison Wong reveal that Japanese-Americans were cited for cycling infractions at rates as high as 22 percent of their share of the population—a stark figure given that they had relatively lower arrest records in the county. In fact, cycling infractions accounted for 58 percent of all arrests of people with Japanese surnames. When riding bicycles in downtown spaces, where restrictions were starkest, or in multiracial neighborhoods, where a lack of infrastructure created incentives for prohibited practices, Japanese-American men were particularly vulnerable to traffic laws, which required police discretion of subjective acts like speeding.

The cycling ordinances represented just one of many ways Japanese immigrants were policed by forces of the state. Better known examples included the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement banning the immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States, and the 1913 California Alien Land Law, which prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land.

Today, more than a century later, many people still wrongly associate cycling with white middle-class hipsters—perhaps because history has buried the cycling stories of immigrants and nonwhites. But if you look hard enough, in places like Riverside, you will find rich stories of bicycling for pleasure, sport, and work—and of riding as an enduring method of resistance for people on the move.

The post When Police Clamped Down on Southern California’s Japanese-American Bicycling Craze appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Through the 1880s, spring and fall rains routinely turned dirt lanes into impassable mud pits that brought rural life to a standstill, stranding farmers at home with their produce and leaving grocers’ shelves bare. In the summer, the roads bore deep, sunbaked ruts; in the winter, treacherous ice slicks. The nearby farmers who were responsible for maintaining these roads didn’t have the means or desire to pave them, or even to post signs identifying them.

City streets weren’t much better. Though many were paved with cobblestones or wood blocks, they were also slashed through with trolley tracks and scattered with trash and horse manure. In 1892, British novelist Rudyard Kipling savaged New York’s “slatternly pavement” in a travel essay, calling the city’s uneven, stinky streets “first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore.”

But the same ravaged paths that seemed primitive to foreigners like Kipling were normal for Americans. And they might have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for bicycles, and cyclists who banded together to lobby for government funding of better roads.

The first bicycle, called a “pedal velocipede,” was patented in 1866, and its heavy wood-spoked wheels were no match for America’s rough roadways. By the late 1870s, though, builders had started making wheels with lightweight wire spokes under tension. This technique, still seen in modern bicycle wheels, allowed makers to enlarge the front driving wheel so that the bike would go farther with each crank of the pedals.

Bikes took on the penny-farthing silhouette: a chest-high front wheel and a knee-high rear wheel. This design made cycles faster and more roadworthy, since the tall wheels’ gentle arcs rolled right over smaller holes in the road.

As soon as American cyclists began riding high-wheelers outdoors, they began kvetching about the roadways. “The majority [of Americans] do not know what a good road is,” wrote one rider in 1882, “and their horses—who do know and could explain the differences in roads—are debarred from speaking.”

Cyclists, however, could speak— and organize. Since high-wheel bicycles cost many times the average tradesman’s weekly wages, they were affordable only to the well-to-do, and the first bicycle clubs were upper-crusty fraternities for racing and socializing.

The groups quickly developed a political agenda, as cyclists had to fight for the right to ride. Police routinely stopped riders and shooed them off city streets, inspiring cyclists to join together and press for access to public thoroughfares. A national coalition of clubs called the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) came to lead these efforts.

A cover of Good Roads magazine.

Early court cases went against bikers. In 1881, three cyclists who defied a ban on riding in New York’s Central Park were jailed. But the cyclists eventually prevailed, and in 1890, the landmark Kansas case Swift v. Topeka established bicycles as vehicles with the same road rights as any other conveyance.

By then, the bicycle had undergone another transformation. Makers had discovered that, by using a chain and sprockets, they could make a wheel rotate more than once with each turn of the pedals. Wheels got smaller again, seats got closer to the ground, and the so-called “safety bicycle” — cushioned by new, air-filled tires — started selling like mad. A safety bicycle looked pretty much like a modern commuter bike, and by the early 1890s, more than a million Americans were riding them. With that many cyclists on the road, the demand for smoother roadways began to go mainstream.

Farmers weren’t on board yet, though. If better roads meant more unpaid work for them, most preferred the status quo. But then cyclists launched a full-bore PR campaign, one of the first of the modern era. Both in books and in a new monthly magazine called Good Roads, the LAW made the case to farmers in pocketbook terms.

Because pulling loaded wagons through muck or over ruts required extra horsepower, American farmers owned and fed at least two million more horses than they would need if the roads were smooth, LAW official Isaac B. Potter informed his rural reader. “A bad road is really the most expensive thing in your agricultural outfit,” he wrote. Potter argued that farmers deserved a cut of their urban countrymen’s taxes to pay for road paving. Many farmers were convinced, and began to work with cyclists to lobby state and local governments for better roads.

In mid-1892, Colonel Albert A. Pope, a leading bicycle manufacturer, printed thousands of copies of a petition demanding that Congress create a federal department to promote “knowledge in the art of constructing and maintaining roads.” He enlisted cyclists’ help to collect signatures and return signed copies, which he pasted into an enormous scroll.

Pope delivered this scroll to the U.S. Capitol in 1893, displaying it on a pair of hand-cranked oak spools that stood seven feet high. The so-called “monster petition,” now housed in the National Archives, bore 150,000 signatures. That same year, Congress authorized the creation of the Office of Road Inquiry, a two-man fact-finding operation that was a precursor to the Federal Highway Administration.

In 1896, the U.S. Postal Service further boosted rural support for good roads by launching the first rural free delivery routes. Rather than having to trek miles over iffy roads to the nearest post office to check for mail, farmers could now receive the same daily drop-off service as city residents. The catch was that the postmaster would authorize home delivery only if the local roads were passable, a strong incentive for farmers to see that they were.

As roads improved, city-dwellers increasingly used bikes to explore the flyover country of their day: the terra incognita between railroad stations. Wayside inns that had averaged one guest a week for years were suddenly overrun with wheelmen, some of whom installed signposts and created road maps to help other cyclists find their way.

This didn’t last long, though. By the end of the 1890s, the bicycle boom had collapsed, and fashionable swells had moved on to other passions. Working people in cities still used bikes for commuting or making deliveries, but the touring fad and the power of the bicycle lobby were done. Nevertheless, when automobile tourists took to the roads in large numbers in the 1910s and 1920s, they often found the way marked, mapped, and paved by cyclists who had come before.

A promotional patch from the League of American Wheelmen.

The bicycle, meanwhile, was largely erased from America’s roadways. Painted, car-width lanes seemed to leave no space for cycles. The new practice of parking private vehicles along the edges of public roads crowded bikes out of that space. Postwar suburbs separated housing from workplaces by long distances, making bicycle commuting impractical. Late-century exurbs, with their cul-de-sacs and collector roads, maximized driving speeds within developments, which added to the danger of cycling there. Interstate highways, for which early cyclists are partly responsible, are almost all closed to cyclists.

Now comes a new call for road space for bikes. In the past 10 years, as middle-class Americans have moved back to urban cores—where shorter travel distances make cycling more practical—riders have pressed governments for safer bike routes. And governments have begun to deliver. In the 50 most populous cities, the average mileage of on-street bicycle lanes has doubled since 2007, while nationwide, the number of physically separated bike lanes has more than tripled since 2011, with many more miles in the works.

Some drivers bemoan the loss of asphalt. Much like farmers of the 1880s, they prefer the imperfect status quo to changes they perceive as serving a small, self-regarding elite at their expense. And, much like good-roads lobbyists of the 1880s, it falls upon bicycle advocates to make the case that facilities for cyclists are worth the cost, not only in construction (which tends to be cheap) but also in lost access to part of an existing roadway for driving and parking.

There are strong arguments being made here. More and better bike lanes have been shown to smooth traffic flow and diminish deadly collisions between bikes and cars. They can also help clear the air, reduce the demand for downtown parking, and improve public health by encouraging exercise. But to judge by the furious responses that usually erupt when plans for a new bike lane are announced, those arguments haven’t convinced everyone.

Bicycle advocates are already following the historical example of the League of American Wheelmen by banding together in advocacy groups such as the League of American Bicyclists, a gender-neutral revival of the old organization. Isaac Potter might advise bike lane supporters to seek common cause with their most vocal opponents, stressing the money and time saved for drivers when all road users are safely accommodated.

Another thing Potter might say is that the future is fickle. We may do our best to shape roads that work for all current users, only to find we’ve paved the way for some new mode of transport that is beyond our imagining.

The post How Bikes Helped Invent American Highways appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mind was fuzzy, but the last thing I remembered was riding my bike toward the edge of a hilltop, with the intent to gap to a patch of concrete at the hill’s base. In doing so, I would have to air over a small metal electrical box that stuck out of the hillside. I had pulled this trick off countless times, and there was no doubt in my mind that things would go off without a hitch.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Injuries are a fact of life when you ride BMX, which stands for bicycle motocross. At first BMX was strictly a racing sport, but it has since evolved into a freestyle pursuit in which riders do whatever tricks they like in any place that works—from dirt jumps to skate park ramps to 10-stair handrails. Riding BMX in the streets, a big part of the thrill is finding obstacles that weren’t designed for extreme sports, and making them work for tricks.

And therein lies the sport’s allure. As the late BMX legend Dave Mirra said, “I’d risk the fall, just to know how it feels to fly.”

While it’s true that the thrill is fundamental to the BMX appeal, for me, riding is a more complicated matter, one tied up with childhood friendship and life-changing risks.

My BMX obsession started in 10th grade, when a classmate named Van became high-school-famous for posting photos of himself doing wall-rides in his dining room. The first time I met Van he was riding his bike full-speed down a garage ramp. He boosted off of a speed bump and into the air before pedaling back around to introduce himself. We hit it off right away. I was blown away by his confidence, and I soon noticed that when I was with him that same confidence bubbled up in me. I’d watch him ride with local pros, and imagined myself pulling off the stunts that seemed to come so naturally to him. But whenever I tried to ride Van’s bike, the magic that allowed him to leave the ground seemed to dissipate as soon as I touched the handlebars. My interest stayed frozen at the level of spectacle.

High school ended, and Van and I lost touch. But a few years later, while studying in Ireland, I found a man selling a top-of-the-line BMX bike for a fraction of what it was worth. Being pretty much alone in Ireland, my bike became my closest companion. I spent the next few months practicing hops, spins, and wheelies. I could almost hear my old friend yelling advice at me, telling me to pull my front end up harder or to remember to counter-steer when my bike began to roll backwards.

Though I was a novice with a foreign accent, Galway’s local BMX crew was quick to take me under their wing, and I soon discovered what’s since become my favorite thing to do on my bike—gaps. The term can be used as either a verb or a noun, and describes an area that can be jumped over, or the action of jumping such an area. You could say that you’ve gapped an area once you’ve jumped from one space or object to another, without touching anything in between.

I knew I was hooked the day I gapped a set of stairs that ran down to the water in my local park. The set was larger than anything I had ever jumped before, and the wet stone walkway at the bottom made for an unreliable landing space.

For weeks, I had stared at the spot and imagined myself jumping it, but was always too afraid to actually try. Then, one day, I went for it. I must have looked inept hurling myself down those stairs as clumsily as I did, but I’ll never forget the fleeting feeling of freedom that came to me as I flew through the air.

Most everything I’d learned in my life had come to me slowly and incrementally, and I was used to messing things up a few times before I succeeded. On that day, it felt great to do something right on the first try. When I jumped off the stairs, the desire not to fall and die was so strong that it pushed the very idea of failure out of my mind. As soon as my tires reconnected with the ground, I knew I had to chase that feeling. I’ve tried to carry this state of mind into everything I do, not thinking about the multiple tries it might take to get something done. If you remove the idea of redos from your mind, you’re much more likely to succeed the first time.

When my semester abroad wrapped up, I packed my bike into a giant box that ended up weighing almost 50 pounds, and brought it home with me. I didn’t realize just how attached I’d grown to my most beloved possession until I went to collect it from baggage claim. A note from TSA alerting me that they’d opened the box triggered a pang of violated concern in my gut.

Soon after returning to the states, I packed my bike up one more time, and prepared to attempt the largest gap of my life, moving 3,500 miles from my childhood home in Baltimore to Los Angeles.

Once I arrived in L.A., it felt like I had stepped into the center of the BMX world. When I needed new parts for my bike, I took it to OSS, a store in the Fashion District that runs the biggest BMX blog on the Internet. At the store, a few of the pros regularly featured on the site were hanging out and were quick to introduce themselves to me using their first names when I walked in. And after a few months, I ran into Van, who had just moved out here, while we were on our bikes. On that day, BMX reinvigorated a friendship I thought I’d lost.

One of the best things about riding in L.A. is the group street rides. I’ve gotten the chance to ride with almost all of my idols, as nearly every pro rider makes at least one trip to Southern California each year. On a recent Saturday, several hundred riders headed out en masse from Thee Block, a BMX culture store in East Hollywood. No roads were shut down, and no police cars escorted us.

A group of BMX riders mobbing the streets of downtown L.A

Most riders—including me—go without brakes. We stop by dragging our feet against our back tires or the ground. While this can lead to high-speed accidents and ruined shoes, it makes bikes simpler to fix, more maneuverable without any pesky brake cables, and generally sleeker-looking.

Riding in such a large pack, no stopping was required.

Through some telepathic choreography, we began weaving through the gridlock on Santa Monica Boulevard in a great snaking motion that didn’t bother slowing down for red lights. At the top of a hill on West Fourth Street we attempted something equal parts reckless and fun. All 300 of us rocketed down the hill, riding straight across the bridge that runs over the 110 Freeway into downtown Los Angeles.

On the other side of the bridge, we were met with a wall of cars. Some riders saw this as more of a challenge than an inconvenience, cutting and weaving through the mesh of traffic. One boy even went so far as to jump his bike onto the hood of a stopped taxicab. To the disbelief of the cab’s passenger, the kid rode straight off the back of the car, rolling his bike right over the rooftop taxi sign.

Our final destination was a ramp made from parking barriers placed atop a concrete incline in a private lot. A security detail was there to greet us, but once the guards saw what we were doing, they didn’t make us leave. One guard commented, with, perhaps, a tinge of envy, that we had “a hell of a party” going on.

A young boy turned to his father, and asked if it would be okay for him to try riding the ramp, saying he was afraid that the other bikers would make fun of him for not being good enough. After a few words of encouragement, the boy decided to give it a shot. He pedaled hard, made it up the incline, and tapped his front tire on the base of the parking barrier. As he rode back to his dad, the riders he passed bent down to give him high-fives.

Fast-forward a couple of months to that day that found me in shock trauma, my arms tangled amidst tubes. I hadn’t quite cleared the gap, and even with a helmet, the impact of my fall was enough to knock me unconscious. My best guess was that my tires had slipped out when I landed short on the wet grass.

Once I recovered from my concussion and climbed back on the BMX saddle, the lasting pain was one of embarrassment. After riding away from countless close calls, my “big crash” was a slip-and-fall less than two feet, into a grassy hill.

Still, you could trip and break your neck right outside your front door, no bike required. My fall that day—unimpressive as it seems—could have been fatal. I often ride alone, but fortunately for me, on that day, Van was with me. BMX nearly did me in, but Van made sure I lived to ride again.

The post Why BMX Bike Riding Is a Matter of Life and Death appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Seleta Reynolds, who became general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation earlier this year, agreed. But she said that myths about L.A.’s identity persist, and if we want to become a truly 21st-century city, we’ve got to bust those myths and offer more transportation choices.

Where do you start this myth-busting, asked the evening’s moderator, Los Angeles News Group deputy opinion editor Jessica Keating.

Put downtown Los Angeles in the center of a circle that’s the size of the cities of Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., said Reynolds. The city you’ll find in that radius looks very much like those other cities, with people walking, biking, taking taxis, and riding mass transit. Thanks to new technology (like Uber), a burgeoning economy, and even traffic, Angelenos want to use streets in a different way, said Reynolds.

Paley agreed, although he said that in some ways, Los Angeles today is two co-existing cities. In one, people drive everywhere. In the other, people are embracing different kinds of transportation.

The latter city is not made up of just millennials, said Reynolds. Baby boomers are increasingly turning their backs on driving. And Angelenos collectively may love their cars, but they also hate traffic.

Architect and UCLA cityLAB co-director Roger Sherman pointed to a more fundamental shift in Southern California. For a long time, “the freeway was considered to be the source of L.A’s exceptionalism,” said Sherman. “We knew mobility like nobody else did.” And mobility in Los Angeles was about desire as much as it was convenience. Angelenos wanted to drive, they liked driving, and they chose a lifestyle that required it. But the good news, he said, is that Los Angeles can still be exceptional—because this is a city that still believes “mobility is about experience, not just convenience.”

Reynolds concurred, adding that transportation should be fun, and that designing the city’s future should be about more than getting people from point A to point B.

But, said Keating, as great as an “experience” sounds, the idea of riding a bike to a bus and then switching to a train doesn’t seem all that appealing to most people. How do you change the perspectives of people who just want to get in their cars and drive to their destination?

Paley said it’s about starting small: Give people an enjoyable pedestrian experience on the walk from their house to the grocery store.

But even that isn’t easy. Sherman said that transportation planners have neglected the last mile or half-mile of people’s trips, and he doesn’t see the public sector filling that gap any time soon. He does, however, think that tech entrepreneurs and private sector innovators just might be able to enact more change. He pointed to Tokyo, where Japanese department stores built a train system to bring in shoppers, as an example of what such change could look like.

Paley cautioned against the creation of a city that’s not affordable for the people who live here already. He said what he doesn’t want to see is a Los Angeles where the single-passenger automobiles we drive are replaced by single-passenger driverless cars. The future of transportation in L.A. has got to be about enjoying the “pleasures of urban space and interaction”—which wasn’t the original dream of driving down the freeway at 90 mph, he said.

Sherman said that a “dirty little secret” of transportation in Los Angeles is the class differences associated with different ways of getting around.

But that is changing, too, said Paley. When he went carless by choice in the early 1980s, people thought that “a white, Jewish, middle-class kid from the Valley” without a car was insane. The task ahead, he said, is to make transit compelling for everyone.

How big of an investment are L.A.’s elected officials willing to make in such a system?

Reynolds said that transportation funding is less siloed than it used to be—for decades, it was easy to get money in California for bicycle projects but not pedestrian improvements, for example—and that public-private partnerships are going to be key.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked for their “nutshell utopia” vision for L.A’s cityscape.

Paley said his is “multi-modal,” without the “tyranny of the car.”

Reynolds said that hers has zero traffic deaths by 2025. She’s more interested in the journey than the destination—in creating open dialogues among communities and multi-disciplinary experts about the future of our streets, and creating a culture of constant tinkering and innovation.

Sherman said his is “a form of retro-medievalization” where organizations (like neighborhood associations or local nonprofits) are given latitude to undertake creative projects. Los Angeles is becoming more generic than it needs to be, said Sherman. Why, he asked, has the Grove become a sensation? Why do people prefer an ersatz environment over a real street? Because it was created holistically, around one guy’s vision. And perhaps the rest of L.A. could learn something from its success.

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