Instead, Los Angeles is known as a world capital of traffic, a place of extreme mobility challenges and a pollution-choked smog-burger. Low-income communities bear much of the burden of our failures—in worse access to jobs and opportunities, more severe health impacts from pollution and long commutes, and higher rates of injuries and collisions in transportation-related accidents.

And despite strong recent efforts, including unprecedented amounts of investment in rail and other transit infrastructure, things are poised to get worse. Vehicle purchases are on the rise, continuing a pre-pandemic trend. Despite more telecommuting, traffic is back with a vengeance and transit ridership remains depressed.

How did we get here? Because over the course of our history we have chosen to provide the benefits of that massive public investment in transportation almost exclusively to private vehicles, and at almost zero cost to drivers. Those vehicles mostly carry only one person at a time, churn out dangerous pollutants, and are not available to a very large segment of the population who cannot drive, choose not to drive, or cannot afford to drive. We should not be surprised at the outcome.

Yes, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians can use roads—but buses must combat traffic while biking and walking are often dangerous. Every year in L.A. County, speeding cars strike and kill hundreds of people and injure thousands more.

These realities have been produced by the choices we made as a region, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Los Angeles has the infrastructure to support the greatest transportation system ever known. We are just completely misusing it.

Imagine a world where this fantastic infrastructure investment really works, for everyone. What if Angelenos—whether they choose to drive, walk, bike, take transit, or even stay home—could be free from traffic, pollution, and physical harm? It’s achievable if we change how we choose to use our road space.

To start, we can put exclusive bus lanes and protected bike lanes on our major thoroughfares. Then we can run more and faster bus service, expand our bike share programs, and perhaps even distribute bicycles to those who cannot afford them. We can ensure sidewalks on every street and curb cuts on every corner, plus bus shelters to protect waiting passengers from the sun. We can lower speed limits even more on city streets, enforce traffic laws, and create more pedestrian crosswalks that give people more time to cross.

Then we get to the hard part: We need to stop giving away roadway space for free.

Have you ever tried to get an ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s on free cone day? Have you noticed that there is always a line, so that even though the cone is free, you wind up paying with your time? If you don’t mind waiting in line, or if waiting in line is fun because you are with friends, it’s no big deal. But imagine you need that ice cream cone to survive, so you must wait in line for it every day.

This is what it is like to be a commuter in Los Angeles. Your roadway space is free, but because you need that space to get to work or school or wherever you have to be, you have no choice but to wait in line to use it. So, you listen to music, or books on tape, or call your mom as you sit in traffic. This is the life we have chosen for ourselves.

But what if our roads looked more like a Ben and Jerry’s the other 364 days of the year? What if we sold the product that is in high demand instead of giving it away for free? The result would be the same as with any other product—shorter lines (i.e., less traffic). The concept is known as congestion pricing and has been used for years in cities such as London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore. New York recently approved a similar concept.

Taken as a package, congestion pricing, in combination with improvements to our road network, would dramatically transform Los Angeles. Traffic would drop, pollution would drop, and the entire system would become far more equitable. The net cost of these changes would be zero, since congestion pricing revenues could likely pay for the improvements to biking, walking, and bus commuting—all of which cost much less than highway improvement and new rail projects.

So why do we insist on making every day free cone day?

Each of the above ideas faces serious obstacles. An exclusive bus lane or a new bike lane typically requires taking away a lane of existing traffic. The new lane could potentially move far more people far faster, and those people are likely to be predominantly low-income and minority. But drivers typically balk at giving up a lane—and take their concern directly to their elected officials.

Adding sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and bus shelters might seem relatively non-controversial, but many neighborhoods resist these as well on the grounds that they might slow traffic or “change the character” of a neighborhood, and they are typically not a budget priority. Reducing speed limits and enforcing them is not only unpopular, but also challenging due to state laws and limited resources.

But the largest problem is cultural. In the land of the freeway, what could be more controversial than charging people to drive?

Fortunately, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), is undertaking a traffic reduction study to examine how we might package together a combination of street improvements and congestion pricing for Los Angeles County.

Fun fact: we call them freeways because they’re supposed to be free flowing. The name has nothing to do with the cost, but rather with the operational intent. An intent we collectively have the power to fulfill.

LA Metro’s study is aiming to build support for a pilot program that could test the ideas above. Some lucky area—one with terrible traffic—will be a proving ground for whether they improve the health, safety, environment, and access for everyone equitably. If it works, perhaps more parts of L.A. will demand these changes, too. If it doesn’t, well, we can always go back to our traffic-choked ways.

Moving forward with congestion pricing, exclusive bus and bike lanes, better bus service, and other improvements will take greater political courage than we have seen in recent years. These changes inherently disrupt and expose the existing inequities in our society by improving services for non-drivers, who tend to be low-income and people of color, and asking drivers to pay their fair share. But isn’t this what most of our elected officials claim to stand for?

We already have the solutions to L.A.’s longstanding traffic, pollution and mobility inequities. Now we just have to decide whether to choose them.

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Jevons’ observations on coal also have something to say about the Oshiya (train pushers) who squeeze every last person onto subway cars in Tokyo, and about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent declaration of a transit emergency for New York’s famed subway system.

Jevons wrote that an increase in the efficiency of coal production would stimulate increased demand for coal. Jevons’ reasoning was that more efficient coal production would lead to lower prices. And Economics 101 tells us that lower prices lead to more consumption—perhaps, in this case, creating so much more demand that it would outstrip the capacity to produce coal.

In such a scenario, the production of coal might be increased to meet the heightened demand, but that would require marginal mines to be brought into operation. Given that these mines would be less efficient, prices necessarily would rise to cover the additional cost. Prices would not initially increase back to their old levels, but as the population grew it would generate additional demand for coal and such a rebound in prices might well occur.

These same insights about coal are applicable to mass transportation systems—particularly freeways. Last February, the Dutch firm TomTom, which produces traffic, navigation, and mapping products, drew on the brave new world of big data to release their 2016 index of traffic congestion. Our region, the Pacific Rim, was the clear “winner”—or, I should say, the clear loser. Seven of the top 10 congested cities are on the Pacific Rim and Los Angeles leads the list of American cities.

Anyone who travels the cities around the rim can attest to snarled traffic in Jakarta, Beijing, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The question “What are we going to do about traffic?” is a constant source of conversation, particularly here in L.A., and it is pervasive enough to have given rise to the parody “The Californians” on Saturday Night Live.

There would seem to be two ways to ease traffic congestion: build more capacity, or reduce the number of people who use the existing capacity. Yet, just as with Jevons’ coal demand, traffic seems to expand to meet whatever capacity exists. And this is not just a Los Angeles or Beijing problem. In 1990, British transportation analyst Martin Mogridge observed it as a more general characteristic of highways, and it is now enshrined in transportation planning circles as the “Lewis-Mogridge Position.”

Why is it that cities cannot build enough capacity to solve the problem? The answer may lie in two factors: the price of housing, and the pricing of congestion.

Let’s start with the price of housing. The purchase or rental price of a home reflects the sum value of many characteristics of that home. In this column, I have often written about how proximity to natural amenities, such as beaches and mountains, makes housing more expensive. But proximity to work also is an important consideration. The closer to work, the shorter the commute time, and the more valuable will be the home.

But it is commuting time and not linear distance that matters most. Consequently, when you increase the capacity of transportation infrastructure, you get shorter commute times—at least initially. And that makes homes close to the new infrastructure initially more attractive.

Intensifying congestion, however, will affect a home’s price. At 3 a.m., the opportunity cost of traveling the freeway to a destination is practically zero. It takes a little time, and that is a cost, but not much. But in rush hour when freeway speeds are slow, the opportunity cost increases with the additional time spent sitting in your car listening to The Grateful Dead on the radio. The more cars there are (higher demand), the more time is required to crawl through rush hour (the higher cost).

Here is where Jevons’ idea comes in. When there is not much congestion, one can live further away from work where home prices are lower, and still arrive at work on time without spending too much more time commuting. Consequently, building another lane on the freeway opens up more residential options.

So adding capacity makes two big things happen. First, there is an increased demand for the housing that is now within driving distance to work; and second, more people will use the freeways to get to work. This leads to more freeway congestion and ultimately longer commute times for everyone. Empirically we see this happening quite fast, and eventually the new lane has done nothing to ease congestion.

There are a number of solutions to this. One is to build mass transit and induce people to use it. This is the favored solution of urban planners today because mass transit is a more efficient means of transportation. It can carry many more people per dollar spent on building, maintaining, and operating the transit than the highways can.

But with mass transit, as with highways, the same principles of capacity and demand apply. When Japan began building the Tokaido Shinkansen (high-speed rail) in 1959, it was, in part, intended to ease the burden of commuting in densely packed Tokyo. Today, anyone who rides the rail line, especially in rush hour, knows what a sardine feels like when packed into a flat tin can. In this case the cost is not time, but the discomfort of cheek-to-jowl train ridership.

Another solution to the problem of increased capacity driving demand is to convert lanes on the freeways to toll lanes. This is a favorite of economists because people who value time more will pay a premium to avoid the costs of congestion. Consequently, the scarce resource—road space—will be rationed according to its relative value to consumers. Of course, it is not only the value of time that matters in the decision; income—the ability to pay tolls—does as well. Adding a toll lane allows rich people to drive fast and reduces the capacity on the freeway for everyone else. And that raises issues of equity for infrastructure built with tax dollars.

The other problem with toll lanes is that there is an alternative to either paying for the less congested toll lane, or driving in the now more congested free lanes: driving on surface streets. With navigation apps such as Waze, drivers can take the nearest off-ramp and motor through residential neighborhoods. When they do that, they expose residential neighborhoods to the congestion, noise, and pollution that the freeways were originally built to eliminate.

Moreover, a 2001 article by Ingo Hansen of Delft University of Technology suggests that transportation analysis of toll roads gets it all wrong. His research indicates that when fed-up freeway commuters start taking app-directed shortcuts through residential areas, the local roads quickly become clogged, hampering residents’ ability to make short trips or run errands. These residents are now competing with longer-distance drivers, and so they, too, pay a cost in congestion, safety, and pollution. Indeed, this Waze phenomenon induced L.A. City Councilman Paul Krekorian in 2015 to suggest new government regulations for local street usage.

So, toll roads don’t seem to be a complete answer either. Recognizing this, Mexico City, Beijing, and other cities have followed the example of Julius Caesar, who in 1st Century BCE Rome banned chariots from the center city during the day, except for two hours in the morning and two hours in the late afternoon. Romans responded by moving their trips to the allowable four hours each day—thereby creating epic chariot jams.

Today Singapore uses a combination of policies to limit the number of cars on the roads. First there is a quota system that limits the number of cars on the island. Second, those who have cars are charged for driving them through a sophisticated system that measures where they are and when they are driving. This system will be improved shortly with the installation of GPS monitors in each car.

These are useful alternatives. But let’s remember our friend Jevons. Policies to limit traffic might not do much, even with the best of planning, so long as the city we live in is attractive to a lot of people. An oft-heard refrain about my hometown is: “I would love to live in L.A. but couldn’t stand the traffic.” If you make traffic better, more people would move here, and traffic would get worse. Congestion costs ration limited space and this reduces the number of people moving in.

All we can do for now is stay ahead of the game in the best way possible. Provide incentives for people to use the least-used modes of transportation and plan for the increases in population that will invariably happen to cities that are attractive to people from far-flung lands. Perhaps the advent of self-driving autos will provide the bandwidth to break the traffic jam for good, but perhaps not. What will be required is to engage transportation planning with housing planning in a way that recognizes the close tie between the cost of congestion and the price of housing.

On the bright side, if you are late for something in one of the Pacific Rim’s notoriously congested cities, simply saying “Sorry, traffic!” is sufficient to get you by.

The post Why Building More Freeways Makes Traffic Worse, Not Better appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Collier-Burns Act of 1947 created the California freeway system by substantially raising the gasoline and other motor vehicle taxes and earmarking the resulting revenues for highway construction. If you drive on freeways, you are utilizing a legacy of Collier-Burns.

State Senator Randolph Collier and Assemblyman Michael Burns both played a part in enacting the law and received the titular credit for it. But the Act would never have been passed without the leadership of then-Governor Earl Warren.

Warren is well remembered, but not as the Father of the California Freeways. His career as a California state politician is largely eclipsed by his national service as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the landmark decisions of the “Warren Court” in desegregation, criminal justice, and political reform. To the extent that any governor is given credit for the California freeways nowadays, it is likely to be Pat Brown, our current governor’s dad.

But the true origins of Collier-Burns are worth knowing, as they bear on today’s difficulties with building and maintaining essential infrastructure.

The story of Collier-Burns takes us to the period immediately after World War II. California’s population had grown at a rapid pace in the 1940s, from 6.9 million in the 1940 census to 10.6 million in 1950. The state’s roads hadn’t kept up with growth, given the scarce tax receipts during the Great Depression and the diversion of public resources to the war effort.

Southern California in particular already had a reputation for heavy reliance on the automobile before World War II, but neither the north nor the south had a road system that matched their car-oriented reputation. The absence of modern roads in California in the 1940s wasn’t due to lack of planning. There were plans gathering dust in drawers for a system of limited access highways with maps that look similar to what we have today. The problem in implementing these grand plans was the cost of building roads. You could float bonds to stretch out the expense. But eventually, the bonds had to be paid off. And apart from debt service, roads, once built, needed continuous funding for maintenance and repair.

The state financed major roads as one-off ventures; the Arroyo Seco Parkway, now known as the Pasadena Freeway, was partly financed by the federal government as a Depression-era jobs creation project and completed in 1940. But such financing was not enough to develop a system of roads.

Governor Warren ran for re-election to a second term in 1946. Under the state’s then-existing cross-filing system, he won the nominations of both the Republican and Democratic parties in the primary, although he was a Republican. As the nominee of the two major parties, he had only token opposition in the general election. Armed with an overwhelming victory and evident popularity, he proposed a hike in the gas tax and other vehicle fees, with the money to be placed in a trust fund and earmarked for modern road construction.

Gov. Warren faced strong opposition to his highway plan. Trucking companies wanted the revenue to come mainly from the gasoline tax, not a tax on the diesel fuel that trucks used. Utility companies wanted reimbursement for the cost of shifting the wires that were in the paths of the new roads. There was a north vs. south political split in the legislature and regional suspicion over how the proposed revenue bounty for roads would be divided. And there was a similar urban vs. rural divide.

These legislative frictions were important barriers to getting a bill passed. But the chief opposition was from oil companies that didn’t want a gasoline tax hike to be the major funding source. There were various communications from Warren supporters to oil executives trying to explain that more roads would mean more driving, more cars, and therefore more gasoline sales. But this simple and obvious proposition was strongly resisted by the oil lobby.

The result was months of conflict and jockeying in the legislature and a near-death experience for the Collier-Burns Act. Warren, rather than play a defensive game, went on the radio denouncing the oil companies as ruthless special interests. One particularly damning charge made by Warren was that California’s obsolete roads caused accidents and that those resisting passage of Collier-Burns would therefore have blood on their hands if their efforts succeeded in killing the bill.

Compromises reshaped the bill as it moved through the legislature. Warren’s proposed two-cent tax hike was reduced to 1.5 cents. One reluctant legislator was persuaded to vote for the bill in exchange for a deal on pet food labeling. In the end, Collier-Burns was enacted in late June 1947. Gov. Warren proclaimed that the new law would keep California “among the most progressive and forward-looking states in the Union.”

However, the influence of Collier-Burns ultimately extended beyond California to other states. When the Eisenhower administration took office in 1953, it envisioned a new federal road system. Originally, the administration favored toll roads as the basis of the proposed interstate system. But the California model was already influential. By the 1950s, California was the second most-populous state (behind only New York) and had a large and powerful congressional delegation. Vice President Richard Nixon was a Californian, as was William Knowland, the Republican minority leader in the U.S. Senate. As House and Senate committees considered the Eisenhower proposal, experts from California were brought in to testify.

Eventually, the toll road idea was dropped, although a provision accommodated those Eastern states that already had built toll roads. The federal bill became a larger projection of the California approach, i.e., gas tax and trust fund, and was enacted by Congress in 1956. For California, the federal bill became a matching source of money that accelerated and expanded what the state was already building or planned to build. Pat Brown was elected governor in 1958, just in time to inherit Earl Warren’s legacy in highway construction.

Of course, the same California freeways that were seen 70 years ago as a model for the nation are now heavily congested and in need of repair. Critics say the freeways encourage urban sprawl, displace public transit, and cause environmental damage. Nonetheless, Gov. Jerry Brown recently pushed a bill through the legislature to raise the gas tax and other vehicle fees for road repair and other transportation purposes. Along the way, he used some tactics to obtain the necessary votes that Earl Warren would have found familiar.

From an historical perspective, Collier-Burns was more than a state highway bill. It marked California’s entrance as a major influence in the American polity. California became seen as a model of public policy and planning. It is only natural that, after 70 years, our views regarding the freeway system that resulted from Collier-Burns would have changed. But at a time when California’s politics seem to be moving in the opposite direction from much of the rest of the country, it’s nice to look back to an era when what California was doing was what the other states hoped to emulate.

*An earlier version incorrectly referred to California State Senator Randolph Collier as Raymond Collier.

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The tawny, golden-eyed, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our backyard predator, everywhere from Miami to Toronto and San Diego to Seattle.

The stories are already piling up. During a heat wave, in broad daylight, a coyote strolls into a Quiznos sandwich shop in Chicago and hops up on a freezer to cool off. Customers and staff flee for the street, where a shocked crowd gathers to peer through the windows as the coyote commandeers the store.

On the other side of the country, a California couple driving at freeway speeds plows through a pack of coyotes near Las Vegas. Hundreds of miles later, while unpacking the car near Nevada City, they discover a full-grown coyote snagged like a bug in the grill of the car. Their flying coyote ornament is fully alert, has one cut on a paw and another on its muzzle. Having hitchhiked to California, it is otherwise unhurt.

Such is the life of the American continent’s native small wolf in the 21st century. Our task, because there is really no other option, is to understand them well enough to enjoy them as neighbors.

Exactly a century ago, Joseph Grinnell of the Society of American Mammalogists proposed we allow coyotes and wolves to live unmolested in the parks of the country’s new National Park Service. By the time the Park Service accepted that idea in the 1930s, wolves were already gone. But America’s parks became effective refuges for coyotes. Nonetheless, rural coyotes outside the parks are still shot and trapped—and even hunted from planes—in staggering numbers. And so coyotes came up with an even better refuge than the national parks: Cities.

Coyotes thus began an ongoing, unplanned predatory experiment. Los Angeles and Chicago are now home to thousands of coyotes, and Denver has at least a thousand in more than 125 packs. And city-dwelling coyotes, not unlike human urbanites, are living richer lives than their rural counterparts.

Coyotes have demonstrated amazing resiliency and adaptability in the presence of humans.

History is on the side of the urban coyote. For one thing, the species has a lot of experience as wild town dogs. Coyotes were living in Indian cities like the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the ceremonial Southwestern city now called Chaco Canyon a thousand years ago. They’ve been practicing in contemporary U.S. cities like Los Angeles for at least a century.

So to a coyote slipping along a rail line to enter a modern city, existing with humans in close proximity, is not a huge hurdle. Habitat for hunting and denning might be scattered because of asphalt, concrete, and structures, and coyotes must learn how to navigate around a massive number of cars. Those are challenges, to be sure, but coyote intelligence seems fully up to the task. Coyotes that are calm enough to tolerate noise, traffic, city lights, and the torrent of human sensory output tend to be the most successful at urban living. Some biologists argue that city life may be selecting for particular canid genetic strains—novelty-seeking, “super-genius” coyotes that can solve the riddles of being a predator in a modern metropolis.

Compared to rural America, where the average lifespan of a coyote is just 2.5 years, in cities the living is easy. Leash laws and municipal programs that curbed feral dog populations made city living even better for coyotes. Mice and rats, a coyote’s most dependable prey, are numerous around our houses, as are flocks of geese and ducks and exotic fruiting plants of all kinds. In the city, nobody is shooting at you, trapping you, poisoning you, or flying you down with an airplane. So town coyotes are living to 11, 12, or even 13 years old. Because urban coyote territories are also resource-rich, metropolitan coyotes often get more than 60 percent of their pups to adulthood. In the countryside that figure is commonly less than 15 percent.

The most dangerous element of modern urban life for coyotes is crossing highways teeming with cars. No Aztec coyote had to master 70 mph traffic, but modern coyotes are figuring it out. Biologists have watched them in Chicago rush hour crossing half a multi-lane interstate highway boiling with traffic, then sitting in the median until traffic thins enough for them to cross the other lanes. More than 60 percent of coyote deaths still come under the wheels of cars in Chicago. But with more generations of city experience in car-mageddon Los Angeles, coyotes have lowered that figure to about 40 percent. Angeleno coyote culture has even designated a highway they recognize as an absolute obstacle: U.S. Highway 101, running north-south through the state, is a barrier only the most intrepid California coyotes ever attempt.

The other half of the equation for city coyotes is human neighbors. When we began living in cities 5,000 years ago, we thought we’d escaped the world of predators. For us North Americans, these small wolves have changed that metric. A media out of its depth has tended to portray coyotes as invaders, as unnatural in cities, often describing them in language associated with criminals or gangs. But once we get over our shock at seeing them lope through our suburbs and accept their presence in town as normal, there are far more reasons to celebrate coyotes than to fear them.

While coyotes will guard their pups against our dogs in the spring/summer denning season, careful studies indicate the vast majority of city coyotes are upstanding citizens. Some of them see our dogs and cats as competitors in their territories, which requires some altered behavior on our parts. But fewer roaming cats also means more birdsong in town. Coyotes are not foraging from dumpsters behind fast food restaurants, though they can carry rabies. The prescription to co-existence is to keep them wild and wary of us, or at least thinking we’re too weird to trust, and never habituating them to associating humans with handouts. Then we’ll get to enjoy them as a wholly remarkable flourish of the wild and the ancient, smack in the middle of modern life.

As the Aztecs discovered long ago, coyotes are a fact of urban existence. Resistance is futile. Best to do what those Americans of a thousand years ago did: Adapt your behavior and take pleasure in coyote success, survivability, and in the wonders of having these small native wolves trotting down our sidewalks and through our yards.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly stated that coyotes do not carry rabies.

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Why freeways? Why not buses, streetcars, parks, lunch counters, or other ordinary spaces that have staged historic protests against racial injustice?

Blocking freeway traffic with bodies certainly heightens the urgency of the protestors’ cause. And while their preferred target creates a hassle for a good many commuters, and might seem less relevant than city halls or police headquarters, freeways are historically appropriate venues for today’s protests. They have fractured American race relations since 1956, when Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act.

The act unleashed armies of bulldozers on American cities, gutting entire neighborhoods to superimpose raw concrete upon city landscapes. For better or for worse, freeways emerged as the centerpiece of 20th century urbanism in the United States, clearing the pedestrian bustle of streets and sidewalks in favor of garages, drive-ins, shopping malls, and parking lots.

This development contributed to the creation of “two societies, separate and unequal, one black, one white,” in the words of a 1967 presidential commission on the causes of racial unrest in cities across the nation. Mass suburbanization, enabled by the automobile’s promise of unfettered mobility, divided the nation into demographic clusters around religion, class, occupation, party affiliation, and race.

While highway construction nurtured the growth of white suburban enclaves, it devastated urban communities of color. In Southern cities like Nashville, Charlotte, Atlanta and Kansas City, highway planners were often in league with white supremacist organizations as they designated black neighborhoods for destruction. In his dual capacities as Alabama’s state highway director and executive secretary of the White Citizens’ Council, for example, Samuel Engelhardt routed interstates through the black neighborhoods of Montgomery and Birmingham.

In more “enlightened” cities, highway planners cleared neighborhoods marked by race and poverty in the name of eradicating “blight.” Yes, many white, middle class, and affluent neighborhoods were targeted for freeway construction too, but these often staged successful “freeway revolts” to block the bulldozers, thus leaving poor minority communities isolated in the path of destruction. Thus while we celebrate the celebrate the victories that blocked the freeway from wiping out Manhattan’s Soho or New Orleans’s French Quarter, we’ve forgotten the historic black neighborhoods of Miami and St. Paul that were erased from the city’s map.

Here in Los Angeles, highway construction has shaped a stark geography of racial difference. Just drive through Boyle Heights on the city’s Eastside. It’s almost impossible to venture half a mile without passing under, over, or alongside a major interstate highway. Freeways cast deep shadows over the landscape of daily life, wrapping around homes, parks, schools and churches. Although they organized in opposition to the construction of five intersecting freeways, local residents were unable to muster the wherewithal of Beverly Hills, which stopped one freeway dead in its tracks.

Where today’s protestors have decided to take a stand reminds us that urban highway construction is part of America’s “race problem.” When demonstrators overtook Interstate 580 in Oakland on the night of November 24, they stood over the ruins of what had been a prosperous black community some 50 years ago. In this way, today’s protestors are only the most recent brave Americans willing to seize control of the very spaces that enforced their second-class citizenship.

Whether or not we agree with their strategy to arrest the flow of freeway traffic, today’s protestors remind us that racial inequality has shaped not only the system that governs our society, but also the very landscape that surrounds us.

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Many people say that our embrace of freeways defines Los Angeles, and we should leave it at that. But the contrary is also true: Opposition to freeways has made Southern California what it is today. Angelenos are freeway fighters—and sometimes freeway slayers.

As an urban historian who has done more than a decade of research on this topic, I still find the details astonishing. Thanks to organized opposition and other means, Los Angeles residents were able to erase about 657 miles off the 1958 master plan of freeways, the Southland’s freeway system blueprint, including a freeway that would have gone straight through Beverly Hills. And that’s only part of the story. Every freeway in Los Angeles has inspired community opposition.

Our history of freeway fighting begins with the Arroyo Seco Parkway in the 1930s, largely recognized as the first urban freeway in the Western United States. Construction of the sinuous 6-mile freeway from L.A. to Pasadena had plenty of freeway fighters. Although the parkway respected “environmental” concerns of the era by hugging the natural waterways and maximizing the Arroyo’s scenic wilderness, many residents still did not want it. Frank Balfour, the supervising right-of-way agent responsible for acquiring $500,000 worth of real estate along the route, recalled decades later in an L.A. Times interview: “Don’t let anyone fool you. There was bitter opposition from the owners of private property in South Pasadena. They thought the freeway would wreck their homes and ruin the value of their property.”

But the opponents of the Arroyo Seco freeway lost. Subsequent freeway-fighting efforts, while not always victorious, at least helped to modify original plans. The Century Freeway—the 105—which was designed as the major east-west corridor to Los Angeles International Airport (although it never actually reaches the airport), sparked opposition that was palpable on the Richter scale. People believed the freeway would lower property values, lower environmental health standards, and decrease mobility. This led to a 1972 lawsuit by Ralph and Esther Keith with the legal support of groups like the Center for the Law in the Public Interest, the NAACP, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Defendants contended that Caltrans had failed to comply with many urban planning procedures, notably those laid out in the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) and the California Environmental Quality Act (1970).

Ralph Keith was a senior meteorologist with the local pollution control district, and his wife, Esther, summed up their opposition to the freeway: “I shudder to think what it’s going to do to the environment.” Opposition included state officials. Adriana Gianturco, then the only female director of Caltrans (and also the only non-engineer), opposed the freeway. The California Air Resources Board, the state agency responsible for reducing air pollution from mobile sources, expressed skepticism about the 105’s promised improvement on air quality.

Ultimately, all of the opposition didn’t stop the 105, but it did make it smaller. The Century Freeway, once planned to be a 20-lane monster, was scaled down to 10 lanes. Mass transit—the Metro Green line—was placed in the middle of the freeway. Other environmental safeguards and programs were enacted locally, including the construction of sound walls.

Some parts of L.A. managed to score outright victories in their freeway fights. The 9.5-mile Beverly Hills Freeway was to have run more or less along Santa Monica Boulevard from Vermont Avenue to the San Diego Freeway (the 405). By the early 1960s, right-of-way agents had purchased homes along the proposed route. A Times reporter covering the story claimed that only a miracle could stop construction of the freeway. In 1963, Beverly Hills got its miracle.

Beverly Hills homeowners, following the practices of other freeway fighters, collected 500,000 signatures in a petition drive to oppose freeway plans. Groups like the West Hollywood homeowner association united the community against freeway encroachment. In their protests, the fighters urged governments to pass resolutions not only against the Beverly Hills Freeway but against any Westwide freeway. The crucial bit of support came when the Los Angeles City Council approved a September 1963 motion from Councilman Edmund D. Edelman opposing the freeway. The city of Beverly Hills also led a major lobbying campaign in the state legislature to kill the freeway; the arguments included saving their desirable community and protecting its residents from significant health risks. Beverly Hills won, and the the project was killed.

That was an important battle, but the biggest fight has been on the other side of town, where the freeway fight continues. Since the 1960s, a short 6.1-mile extension of the Long Beach Freeway (710) through Northeast Los Angeles, South Pasadena, and Pasadena has been the subject of numerous administrative proceedings, court actions, and legislative initiatives to halt its construction. The city of South Pasadena won an injunction blocking the project, pending an environmental impact report; it took a quarter century before multiple reports were submitted and approved by the federal highway administration. But once that happened, South Pasadena filed a federal lawsuit, and the project has still yet to go forward. Today, alternatives to the extension, including a tunnel or transit options, are being debated.

For all the concern about that short 710 extension, the biggest threat to community perservation and environmental health may be the proposal to double-deck the entire length of the 710 from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach all the way to East Los Angeles. Planners hope to facilitate more than 100,000 diesel truck trips per day, up from 47,000 per day, in addition to tens of thousands of commuter vehicles. This is already one of the most polluted regions in the state, and communities have organized not only to stop the expansion but also to implement safeguards to reduce air pollution and cancer risks.

The freeway fights continue, and the fighters are getting stronger. We know much more about the harm caused by automobiles on the freeways; mobile sources, such as those cars, account for most of our regional air pollution and 94 percent of ambient cancer risk.

We may be in the middle of a historic shift in the freeway fight. Since the 1930s, engineers, not community leaders, have been in charge of designing these massive roads. Freeway fighters have argued that engineers are too cold and impersonal to design such spaces alone.

Communities and public spaces for human interaction should be more important than concrete slabs that connect the city. During the height of highway construction nationally, some 62,000 houses a year were lost to freeway construction. In Los Angeles, those years saw an average of 3,000 residents displaced annually. Losing that many people to freeways breeds resistance to freeways. It still does.

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I battle Caltrans (local-speak for the California Department of Transportation) each morning and evening. Caltrans and Kiewit, the contractor tasked with expanding the 405, are cunning foes. Each day I test their battle lines looking for weakness. Each night I retreat home, defeated. A commute that once took 45 minutes now lasts an hour and a half or more.

Prior to construction beginning in earnest a couple of years ago, I’d reached a comfortable equilibrium. I had a primary route that allowed me to escape traffic on the 405 by taking Sepulveda Boulevard, which parallels the freeway. If Sepulveda was slow, I could stay on the 405 or take an alternate route. I knew what to expect, how to avoid entanglements, and how to get to my destination in less than an hour. Those were my halcyon days.

Caltrans/Kiewit declared war a couple of years ago. It was a sneak attack, masterfully executed. One morning my commute seemed managed; the next, chaos ruled. No longer could I rely on Sepulveda; it crawled. The freeway was no better; it was choked with my fellow victims. Side streets buzzed with impatient commuters. My under-an-hour trip grew 50 percent longer overnight. I detected no diplomatic efforts. Peace turned to commuting war in an instant.

I quickly recognized that mornings are worst. Leave too late and lane closures render Sepulveda impassable. Leave early, and you get caught in a bottleneck as the lanes close, leaving no escape apart from illegal U-turns or other maneuvers not covered by insurance.

The first few weeks were especially awful. Naïvely, I sought out breaches in the enemy’s line, but each seeming victory was merely a trap. What saved me five minutes one day cost me 10 the next. Many of my fellow combatants employed similar strategies, rendering Monday’s best side streets impassable during Tuesday’s commute. I’ve come to believe that Caltrans/Kiewit monitors social media, looking for reports of commuting success and cracking down on anything that works.

For six weeks, I clung to my pre-commuting-war Sepulveda route, refusing to shrink from the enemy. Maybe it was nostalgia; possibly pigheadedness. For a while, I tried a hybrid approach, combining some travel on Sepulveda with some on the freeway. This saved me about 15 minutes.

Until I was discovered. I don’t know who gave me away, but Caltrans/Kiewit clamped down. Hard. First, they closed my preferred exit at Sunset. Then, when I coped by getting off at Wilshire, they reduced my favored freeway on-ramp to one lane from two. My hybrid strategy in ruins, I surrendered.

So I began avoiding the 405 and Sepulveda altogether. Driving through hilly neighborhoods worked during the summer. This time, though, Caltrans simply waited me out. Once school started, school buses and school-related traffic forced another surrender. Eventually I learned to take a different route nearly every day. By analyzing the enemy’s patterns, and keeping him confused about my own, I discovered which routes work on which days. Equilibrium seemed tantalizingly possible.

But the struggle continued. Incensed by my small victory, Caltrans/Kiewit took aim at my evening commute. It reduced northbound Sepulveda to one lane at Moraga. This left Sepulveda impassable and prevented my entering the freeway at Getty Center (my pre-construction favorite). I tried Wilshire, but Caltrans/Kiewit struck back with the Rampture. Now side streets are my only evening option to get to a point where I can get on the freeway, but everyone else uses side streets, too. Some nights half my commute is spent on the first five of my approximately 35 miles just trying to get on the 405.

Caltrans/Kiewit obstructed my evening commute in other ways. There used to be a sign on the uphill side of the Sepulveda pass announcing the number of minutes a typical freeway driver would take to reach the 118 Freeway based on traffic conditions. If the sign said less than 20 minutes to the 118, I stayed on the 405. More than 20 minutes and I chose the 101. It was helpful. So the enemy destroyed the sign. Now there is a temporary sign announcing the drive time to the much-closer 101–but, since there are currently no exits between that sign and the 101, the information is useless, which is how Caltrans/Kiewit likes it. The enemy is increasingly depraved.

Worse, Caltrans/Kiewit has allies. One of my evening routes involved getting off near Griffith Park and taking side streets to avoid a nasty interchange involving the eastbound 134 and the southbound 5. Somehow Caltrans/Kiewit got word of my success and obtained help from the city of Los Angeles, which closed down a lane on those side streets, rendering them gridlocked. I don’t even try that route anymore.

It’s not all gloom. Our commuting forces have won small victories. Recently, I tried southbound Sepulveda again on my morning commute and discovered that lanes were no longer closed on an important stretch. Has the enemy become complacent? Maybe victory will come after all. In the meantime, call it Carmageddon, call it Rampture–it’s my personal hell.

Keith R. Thorell is an attorney with a lamentable commute. He lives in Altadena with his wife and three children.

*Photo courtesy of Paul Stevenson.

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