The Problem with Los Angeles

“City of Stars and Sprawl”

Well, I’m back in Illinois again.  In case you missed my post last week, I was in LA for the previous five days or something like that, and I gotta say, it was a great opportunity to get out of the bizarre weather that is the Midwest.  It was nice to see the sun for once, and not just an overcast blanket of sad clouds.  And it was nice to see a city I’ve never been to, too.

My family likes to travel.  My parents gave the travel bug to my brother and I from a young age, and it’s stuck since.  We’ve been all over this land of the United States, from east to west and north to south.  We’ve even been lucky enough to leave the country a few times, and not just to Canada.  I’m not entirely convinced going to Canada for an hour on a school trip counts as international travel.

Now, my family, being the outdoorsy people we are, tend to travel to more remote areas, or at least places with some more wilderness.  Yellowstone.  The Rocky Mountains.  Indiana.  You know, the usual.  But here rises a divide in our family; my brother doesn’t really like the outdoors.

No, that’s a lie.  He likes the outdoors as much as the rest of us, or at least has led me to believe as much, but he prefers cityscapes.  Places like New York, San Francisco, or Indianapolis.  And I’ll admit, he’s a natural-born city dweller.  He’s fashion-forward, up to date on the latest trends, and not overwhelmed by the Chicago public transit system, unlike myself.  He even intends to go to college in a city, and refuses to consider my corn-based University of Illinois.  It has left unchecked wounds on my kernel of pride.

But between all our hikes and backpacking and more natural activities, my family finally gave in to my brother’s desire to see the city of angels itself, Los Angeles, California.  And I went along with it because A) any chance to see a new place is one I’ll take, and B) I wasn’t paying for the trip.  We had a lot of fun; it was a great vacation and a good family bonding experience in the midst of some more interesting familial matters.  We saw the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Chinese Theater, Santa Monica Pier, Venice beach, the Sony studios, the Warner Bros. studios, that restaurant they filmed Ryan Gosling’s piano in, and my personal favorites, the La Brea Tar Pits and Topanga state park.

I think that we did a pretty good job of finding things to do LA and making use of the few days we had.  We struck a solid balance between leisurely downtime on the beach and the hustle of the LA shopping scene.  But I noticed something interesting on the trip; there was a lot of driving, and a lot of traffic.

If you’ve ever seen La La Land or heard anything about LA at all, you’ll know that the city is famous for its traffic.  The congested freeways, the busy streets, the constant stop-and-go of cars and trucks, the city is one big hive of metal bees, driving from one flower to the next.  Except instead of pollen they pick up expensive shoes and cheeseburgers.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to reach this conclusion, and I definitely won’t be the last, but I’ve deduced that the reason for this unworldly amount of traffic is the fact that Los Angeles has no reasonable public transportation system.  It is a city built for and built around driving, and it’s paying the price for it.

During the entire trip, my family and I saw, collectively, about six public buses.  Compared to the dozens of private tour buses that we saw and/or rode on, it was a shocking disparity.  We counted one subway station, and that was all we could find.  If you went to Chicago or New York or any other metropolitan area and found zero trains, you’d either be blind or in an alternate reality because most cities run on public transportation.  And that’s part of what makes cities so great from an environmental standpoint.

It may seem like an oxymoron, but green cities are a very real thing, and most cities are more eco-friendly than you’d think.  Between the use of public transportation or walking as opposed to cars, the significantly smaller use of space and resources per person, and the less energy lost in transporting goods and services shorter distances, cities are actually one of the prime means of reducing one’s carbon footprint.  Yes, cities have a resource drain on surrounding zones for miles around, and they do have other issues like smog, water pollution, and the head island effect, but in some calculations, the good outweighs the bad.

This isn’t to say that every city is perfect.  There’s plenty that can be worked on and improved.  But the other great thing about cities is that with the people condensed there, ideas flow more easily and in greater numbers, increasing the productivity and technological output of those spaces.  As problems arise, people solve them.  And this includes things like food deserts and urban decay, though there’s still quite a ways to go.

Los Angeles felt like the antithesis to all the ecological benefits that cities provide.  There was no public transportation, as I already iterated, but there was no condensing of people and materials, either.  Los Angeles is a sprawling city, and it’s constantly full of people trying to get everywhere.  It took us some forty-five minutes to get five miles across town.  Sometimes even more.  From end to end, the city takes up so much space, and because it’s full of so many wealthy individuals, it grows and grows as more people buy more space and build more houses because they can.

Sure, other cities are huge, too.  New York takes up more than an entire island.  Everything in New York or Chicago tend to be localized, and each neighborhood is generally self-sufficient, and I’m sure Los Angeles is like that, too.  But the difference in LA is that there’s no easy way to get from one place to another.  You either drive or, well, you don’t go.  There aren’t many other choices.

The city isn’t vertically condensed, which is the biggest pro that places like New York or Mumbai or Beijing have.  LA sprawls outward, like a mold growing on a piece of bread; it gets larger and larger and eats more and more while there’s less and less space for it to go outward, and the city doesn’t really have the infrastructure in place to counteract this.  It seems to encourage the rich to move in, buy a plot of land nearby, and build some more suburbs or neighborhoods.

And it shows.  There’s a reason that some of the smoggiest cities in America are all in California.  Of course, cars aren’t the only reason.  There’s a lot of physical science factors in the smog levels, including the mountains nearby and the breezes from the pacific ocean.  But the trend still stands, and Los Angeles and its surrounding urban-suburban growth, home to more then ten million people, have some of the worst air pollution records in this part of the world.  It’s nasty for human health and it’s nasty for environmental health, too.

That’s the problem with LA.  It’s the sprawl, it’s the smog, it’s the suburbs.  It’s the fact that you can’t get anywhere without idling in traffic for fifteen minutes, or that a matter of visiting a separate neighborhood in the city becomes an all-day event.  For comparison, I went to Rome over spring break on a class trip, and never once did we need a private car to get around.  And I went later with my family on a separate trip to see a whirlwind of western European cities.  We didn’t rent a car; we just took the train everywhere.  Hell, I can hop a train from my town to Chicago every half an hour.  But in LA, getting around without a rental car would have been impossible.

To be fair, LA isn’t the only city with this problem, but it is perhaps the only one in America like it.  And to be fair, I was only in the city for our five days, but in that time I never strayed more than probably fifteen or twenty miles from the airport that we landed in, which is a rarity in my family’s traveling.

And as another qualification, California is trying to fix this.  They’re hoping to move towards more electric cars and they have some of the strictest emissions policies in the nation.   As a state, California is pushing for renewable resources, better agriculture, and reducing carbon emissions, all of which will help the environment, the climate, and human health.  Plus, resident mad scientist Elon Musk has his insane train tunnels that he’s building, so I have my fingers crossed that, in the near future, this article will be obsolete and LA will have public transportation to rival the other great cities.

Look at this, an article to talk my trip to everyone has devolved into me ranting about the environment again.  Actually, no, who am I kidding, this was my plan all along.  I think I was going to end up making this point sooner or later, anyway.  The point that LA is unlike most other cities, and for the wrong, transportation-themed reasons.  But, in many other ways, LA is unlike most other cities for the right reasons.

One need only look to the mountains that sit in the middle of the metropolis to find some peace and quiet.  Therein exists a natural world smack-dab in the middle of the freeway mess of Los Angeles, and having spent a very brief amount of time there, I have to commend the city for not developing everything green into sequels of Mulholland drive.  Having those green spaces there, even next to oil fields, is impressive and ecologically fascinating.  In that regard, at least, other cities could take a page from LA’s book.  The city of angels isn’t all problems.