L.A.'s 20th century dream of building freeways refuses, even now, to die
If no one in 2018 would argue, as a young writer named David Brodsly did in 1981, that the "L.A. freeway is the cathedral of its time and place," or that it's the spot where Angelenos "spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives," as British architectural historian Reyner Banham put it with almost laughable enthusiasm a decade earlier, there's no doubt that both the practical and metaphorical meanings of the freeway continue to preoccupy Southern Californians.
Any sense that we've put freeway-building behind us, in fact, could be squashed by spending even a few minutes looking at recent headlines, which in the last few weeks have included items on plans to widen the 710 through Long Beach and an Orange County stretch of the 405.
Then came a report from my colleague Louis Sahagun on plans by Caltrans, the state's once-imperious road-making agency, to build a freeway linking Palmdale and Victorville. Carrying a price tag of $8 billion and part of a larger project called the High Desert Corridor, it would stretch through the Mojave Desert from the northeastern corner of L.A. County into San Bernardino County. It would be the first freeway completed in L.A. County since the controversial, much-delayed and highly litigated Century Freeway opened in 1993.
The plan suggests that Caltrans hasn't quite given up the hope of someday completing the perfect, all-encompassing freeway network, a fantasyland Banham dubbed "Autopia" in 1971. It also suggests that when we talk about growth, especially along the desert fringe of the L.A. metropolitan behemoth, we almost always talk in the next breath about freeways.
Or does it? While it's certainly true that the freeway continues to be synonymous with an expansionist, forward-looking outlook for the planners of exurban subdivisions — each new section of blacktop a tentacle stretching outward from L.A.'s metro core toward new customers and new opportunity — the Palmdale project is in most every other way a relic, a vestige of Brodsly's notion, now nearly 40 years old, that it is only through freeways that Los Angeles as a whole manages to achieve any "clear and coherent structure."
If anything, something nearer the opposite now seems true: When the 101 near Santa Barbara was overtaken by a mudslide in January, the freeway seemed to stand in for all of the ways in which Southern California's relationship with the natural world is out of whack, any sign of Brodsly's coherence buried under tons of sludge and debris.
A closer look at the politics of the High Desert Corridor proposal, which also includes a potential rail route, reflects how much things have changed since his book appeared. Preliminary funding for the freeway will come from revenue produced by the Measure M sales tax, approved in 2016. The lion's share of Measure M's gigantic total haul — an estimated $100 billion to $120 billion — will go to transit projects, including new subway and light-rail lines across L.A. County.
But tax-hike measures like M require two-thirds' approval from voters. And so those measures, though aimed in large part at boosting the region's mass-transit infrastructure, tend to include significant funding for road projects, as a sweetener for voters more concerned about crumbling concrete and traffic jams than new rail lines.