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LA: Crawling to Topanga Canyon

The story of Los Angeles, like that of most cities, is a tale of changing mobility. Until the 1880s, LA was a small river town at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, fifteen miles from the Pacific shore. The few thousand European Americans who lived there had either made a harrowing transcontinental journey across mountains and deserts in wagons drawn by animals, or they’d taken extravagant detours in ships, some of them sailing twelve thousand miles around Tierra del Fuego.

When trains from the east finally reached the town, they unleashed a wave of migration. In 1888, as two competing railroads, Union Pacific and Santa Fe, battled for the nascent Southern California market, a price war erupted. A passenger in Kansas City could travel all the way to Los Angeles for as little as twenty dollars, then ten dollars, and during one spectacular promotion, a single dollar. To these first travelers, this rolling conquest of an entire continent must have seemed magical.

With the new railways, the West was tamed. Travelers simply stepped into a railroad car at Kansas City’s new Union Depot. Two or three days later, they would find themselves far beyond the Rockies, the Sonoran Desert, and the Sierra Nevada, descending into a boomtown of palm trees and rolling surf, a city of angels.

What wasn’t to like? Los Angeles grew, and a railroad heir named Henry Huntington avidly pushed it along. Huntington arrived in Southern California in the 1890s and promptly began to buy up streetcar companies. He extended tracks throughout the region. He also acquired an electricity company, which fueled his trains. Nearly a century before the word existed, Huntington was a master practitioner of synergy.

He was also a visionary. He was in fact building transit for an immense city that did not yet exist. While he ran the electricity and the trains, the biggest money, he knew, was in real estate. The history of railroads made it clear that when tracks came through, the value of nearby land soared, turning scrub lots into premium parcels. So he bought loads of acreage, from the foothills town of Glendale and Pasadena all the way to Redondo Beach, and then connected them to his train lines. People who settled in those areas could ride his Red or Yellow cars downtown for work and shopping.

It was a comfy racket for Huntington and a handful of other investors, but it was headed for a big disruption, similar in many ways to the one we’re facing now. The first automobiles showed up early in the twentieth century, and after 1908, when the affordable Model Ts started rolling off Henry Ford’s new assembly lines, Angelenos embraced them. In 1911, to meet soaring local demand, Ford even set up a Model T factory on Seventh Street, in downtown Los Angeles. By the following year, one in every eight adults in Los Angeles had a car, more than twice the rate in such established cities as New York. Some of these new automobiles began to compete directly with Huntington’s streetcars. Jitney cabs trolled the streetcar lines, snatching away their passengers and collecting the same fee, a nickel. A century later, this same pattern is repeating in hundreds of cities, as commuters abandon buses and subways for car-sharing services.

As Angelenos took to the wheel, downtown LA grew congested. The streets effectively became narrower because of the parked cars. They were also more crowded, because drivers then—just like today—roamed in search of parking. The streetcars, which still served the majority of Angelenos, were getting tied up in traffic. As Richard Longstreth describes in his study of LA, City Center to Regional Mall, the city council addressed this problem by voting in 1920 to ban streetside parking in the urban core.

This raised vivid concerns. The Los Angeles Times warned that if people couldn’t park downtown, other competing downtowns would spring up, in lots of other neighborhoods, including Hollywood and Glendale. Those competing downtowns would sprout their own theaters and department stores, and with their cheaper real estate, they’d be able to offer parking. This would hollow out LA’s downtown.

Within a decade, the new order was firmly established. Cars prevailed, and again, it was real estate that drove the change. Developers built in areas far from public transit, because now people could drive. Those who moved into those suburbs were self-selected car people. During this decade of tumultuous expansion, LA fleshed out much of the land between the bare bones of the streetcar networks. In 1927, the director of the city’s planning department, an auto buff named Gordon Whitnall, wrote: “So prevalent is the use of the automobile here that it might almost be said that Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy … that our population has become fluid.”

The alarming point about this transition, from the perspective of Angelenos who don’t want history to repeat itself, is that it just seemed to happen. From the perspective of everyday folk in the area, the process was simple: There was this new way to move. People liked it. And it promptly overwhelmed a large piece of the planet; in this case, Southern California.

Peter Marx, a professor at USC and a former chief technology officer for Los Angeles, goes so far as to suggest that the automobile in Southern California is the dominant species, and that we human beings serve it. This is tongue in cheek, of course, but his logic has the ring of truth.

Automobiles do seem to lord over us. We pay them extravagantly, and we polish and clean them—even though they tend to be lazy. Most of them labor for only a fraction of their existence, and they snooze the rest of the time in expensive lots and garages that we build for them.

Human beings in Los Angeles spend thousands of dollars every month to park their own bodies, many of them in cramped studios and duplexes. The city has an urgent homeless problem, with more than fifty thousand of its people living without a roof over their heads. The automotive overlords, by contrast, often park for free. Each one, on average, luxuriates in more than three spaces, many of them safer and more substantial than the ramshackle shelters and tents that homeless humans occupy. Parking spaces in greater Los Angeles take up some two hundred square miles. That’s five times the entire footprint of Paris.

The whole environment has been molded to the needs of these four-wheeled beings. If aliens came to earth and studied our species, they might notice that we appear happier when at the beach, on fields, in the mountains, or surrounded by vegetation. But those beautiful environments are inhospitable to cars (though useful as backdrops to advertise them). So for a century, as Joni Mitchell sang, we’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

To underscore our subservience to these machines, one more point: if, through carelessness or pride, we venture onto their paved terrain, they can kill or maim us.

SO IN THIS book about the coming age of mobility, why include a chapter about this iconic car town? The three other cities discussed in this book clearly make sense: Helsinki has its mobility apps; Dubai is spending billions for every new piece of technology on the shelf. Of course it would be silly to ignore China, so sure, Shanghai.

LA, though, doesn’t seem to fit. LA County minted the global model for highway-connected sprawl. With its eighty-eight municipalities, the county is shaped by thousands of miles of highways, driveways, boulevards, parking lots, and culs-de-sac. This is yesterday’s infrastructure. What does it have to do with tomorrow?

That’s precisely the point. Los Angeles, more than traditional compact cities, like San Francisco or Paris, must reinvent itself. The city’s leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have vowed to do just that. LA pioneered motorized mobility one hundred years ago, they say, and it can do it again. “My goal—and the goal of this city—[is] to be the transportation technology capital of the world,” says Garcetti. The challenges, as we’ll see, are immense. But the transition, when it comes, will likely be far more dramatic—for better or for worse—than in most other cities.

Consider the mileage. Drivers in LA County travel a combined average of 221 million miles a day. That’s the equivalent, every day, of a round-trip to the sun plus a one-way jaunt to Mars. You could argue that Angelenos would travel far more than that, maybe twice or three times as much, if the road experience were less miserable. The average LA driver spends one hundred hours a year stuck in traffic. Some commuters suffer multiples of that.

So for electric bus manufacturers, designers of flying machines, ride-sharing app developers, tunneling companies—for mobility entrepreneurs of every stripe and color—LA represents an immense and ravenous market for miles. The coming transition is bound to transform the economy, the cityscape, and life itself in this sun-soaked expanse of California.

In many ways, LA’s next step could be a return to its past. Christopher Hawthorne studies this history. For fourteen years, he was the renowned architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and more recently crossed the street to city hall, where he has a brand-new title: chief design officer. His job is to think about the emerging layout of the city: where people will live, work, study, and play, and—naturally—how they’ll move from one place to another. This has led him to conclude that in the twentieth century, there were two very different LAs, and now, in this new century, we’re seeing a third.

The first LA, Hawthorne says, started out as a traditional urban center, with a strong civic culture rooted in its downtown. That was the destination of Huntington’s streetcar lines. It was where people worked and shopped and went to the theater. You can still see vestiges of this first LA, from the grandiose Union Station, built in Spanish villa style in 1939, to the thirty-two-floor art deco tower that crowns city hall.

The second LA, as Hawthorne sees it, took shape following the Second World War. Much as the Los Angeles Times’ editorial writers had feared twenty-five years earlier, LA had extended into a policentric urban region with dozens of smaller downtowns, all of them connected by a fast-growing network of freeways. It was a vast sprawl.

For a time, it was a wildly successful one. Hollywood led the globe in entertainment. Fueled by Cold War spending, LA grew into a manufacturing giant and a world leader in aerospace. And LA’s freeway culture was central to its brand, one of freedom, sunshine, and sex. “She makes me come alive,” the Beach Boys sang, “and makes me want to drive.”

Yet as Hawthorne sees it, the civic spirit, the sense of belonging to something in common, slackened during this period. This wasn’t unique to LA, of course. But in Los Angeles, as is often the case, the change came earlier and was more extreme. People spent more time cocooned in their homes and their cars, and less of it within chatting distance of fellow Angelenos. With growing crime in the area, the most gruesome cases looped endlessly on TV, the streets themselves started to feel dangerous. In the second LA, the car was a safe space, a shield.

Now Hawthorne sees a third LA rising. In many ways, it recalls the original version, the one centered on a downtown, where people bumped into one another on electric trains and crowded sidewalks. In this process, LA doesn’t revert to a single downtown. But it does become a denser place, with more people packed into many of its empty spaces, more of them living in apartments. This more concentrated population will depend far less on cars, and fewer of its inhabitants will need to own one.

This shift is already under way. You can see it in the Arts District, a fifteen-minute walk from city hall. A neighborhood of old warehouses and small manufacturing plants, it’s now sprouting galleries, cafés, converted lofts, and new apartment buildings. People bike and scooter and stroll on sidewalks. This preview of the third LA looks and acts more like a traditional city.

For this filling-in trend to spread across greater LA, Angelenos will need a host of new mobility options. These extend from the familiar—walkable sidewalks, bike paths, new Metro lines—to technology’s cutting edge: think autonomous air taxis and high-speed pods blazing through tunnels.

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, leaning back on a couch in his spacious city hall office, is reminiscing about his first car, a 1975 gas-guzzling Ford Torino station wagon. He reaches for his phone and does a fast image search. “Here it is,” he says, pointing to a boxy behemoth with fake wood paneling on the sides. “It was more a question of gallons per mile than miles per gallon.”

It was a couple of months after Garcetti’s sixteenth birthday, in 1987, that his father, Gil (who would later serve as LA’s district attorney), bought back the Torino from the man he’d sold it to and presented it to his son. Even with its miserable gas mileage, the Torino represented freedom, and driving in LA still seemed fun. Today, the mayor says, LA still has some “amazing drives,” up the Pacific Coast Highway, for instance, or the twists and turns of Mulholland Drive. Topanga Canyon is still gorgeous. Add it all up, and the nice drives occupy “about two percent of the time,” Garcetti says grimly. “The other ninety-eight percent you’re in traffic.” And crawling.

Driving in LA is mostly an exercise in tapping the brakes. Eastbound rush hour traffic trudges on the 10, from Santa Monica to downtown, at about nine miles per hour, no faster than a six year old on a bike. In fact, many routes in LA are slower today than they were in the 1920s, when people were still driving Model Ts.

Immobility saps the Los Angeles region of its very essence. The whole point of living and working in a city, after all, is to connect with other people. In LA, it might be to haggle over a merger in Pasadena, to play tennis on the courts at UCLA, to celebrate a quinceañera in Boyle Heights, to dream up a screenplay over drinks in Marina del Rey. People interacting with other people is akin to a city’s nervous system. For it to work, people have to be able to move. Otherwise, why pay the rent to live in LA? You might as well FaceTime from somewhere else.

For decades, the answer has been to widen the highways—which is almost always an exercise in futility. Way back in 1955, the social critic Lewis Mumford quipped that adding highway lanes to ease congestion was like loosening your belt to cure obesity. More supply simply generates greater demand. The most recent example was a $1.1 billion widening of the key north–south artery, the 405. The job, which involved hacking out a wider pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, took four years. It led angry commuters through miles of convoluted detours. Once complete, that stretch of the 405 was as slow as ever. Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, an LA resident since 2002, laments to a gathering of Bel-Air residents that the 405, even with the improvements, “varies between the seventh and eighth levels of hell.”

Absent this powerful and widespread frustration with LA’s car monoculture, local authorities would have little hope of transforming mobility in the region. But even car-loving Angelenos now see that the second LA is unsustainable. In 2016, voters were so fed up with the status quo, they approved Measure M, which hiked gas taxes to finance $120 billion over four decades in transportation spending, much of it in Metro expansion.

For a target, Garcetti focuses on the LA Olympics in 2028. His office is decorated with enormous black-and-white photos of LA’s two previous Olympics. The 1932 games, LA’s coming-out party, left the city its iconic Coliseum. The Olympics of 1984, staged at the height of the Cold War, felt like a victory parade. First, LA beat out New York City for the games, which made it sweet. Then Americans, like the sunny gymnast Mary Lou Retton and the sprinter Carl Lewis, scooped up loads of medals (thanks in part to the Soviet and Eastern Bloc boycott). In the ’84 Olympics, LA even figured out a way to make a profit—which enhanced its reputation as a can-do region, one capable of economic miracles. Time magazine named the games’ organizer, Peter Ueberroth, its 1984 Man of the Year.

By the time the 2028 Olympics roll around, in Garcetti’s vision, the third LA should be on full display, the city’s mobility largely transformed. County-controlled LA Metro plans to have twenty-eight major transit projects completed in time for the ’28 games. They include a doubling of the Metro line, the introduction of electric buses, the availability of subsidized electric ride-share services for the poor and disabled, and the expansion of bike lanes and pedestrian greenways.

The city and county are wooing mobility players big and small, whether they’re running fleets of autonomous jitneys, operating air taxis, or building electric buses. “If you think about the finance capitals of the world,” Garcetti says, “New York and London come to mind. Car cities, Detroit and Munich, Tokyo. But what city is the leader in transportation technology? That’s what I want LA to be.” He points to the city’s leadership in aerospace, the five-hundred-odd tech start-ups along the western strip (so-called Silicon Beach), the two Hyperloop companies, and an openness to experimentation. “I want everyone to come here and try stuff,” he says. “I want LA to be the kitchen where this is all cooked.”

At the same time, he sees LA’s paved roadway, the asphalt tapestry smothering much of the region, as an asset. The roads can be repurposed, he says, parts of them transformed into bike paths and walkways. “Look at the High Line,” he says, referring to a converted stretch of elevated railway in New York City that is now a world-famous park.

Of course, many of the roads will remain focused on their current job: the movement of automobiles. Even as other options emerge, the automobile isn’t deserting Los Angeles any time soon. The region has 6.4 million cars and trucks, and the average vehicle stays in operation for eleven years, many for much longer. So on the eve of the 2028 Olympics, millions of cars would be still circulating in LA even if Angelenos, en masse, stopped buying them today. And that’s not happening.

The idea is not to get rid of the car, but to end the car monoculture. It’s a matter of giving people choices. As this happens, the city will become multimodal and greener. That part of the LA vision sounds like Helsinki, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities around the world.

In LA, though, one problem stands out: while the city and county are spending billions on new Metro lines and expanded bus service, it’s not yet catching on. Only 7 percent of the population rides public transit. Worse, these numbers have been shrinking. Growing numbers of working poor in the area, data show, are ditching the buses and trains, and instead buying used cars.

This is the downside of economic success. Since the rise of the automobile, public transit in LA, as in much of the car-centric world, has largely served the underclass, including many who cannot afford their own personal vehicle. But now, just as the city leaders try to transition away from the car economy, growing numbers of Angelenos are “graduating” into it. They add to congestion. So do the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers plying the streets and byways in search of passengers. After decades of progress against smog, LA’s air grew dirtier in 2016 and 2017, registering some of the nation’s highest ozone counts.

Garcetti boils the problem down to one of geometry. You have millions of people trying to get from point A to point B, he says, “and they’re all occupying the same plane.” That plane is defined by the surface of the earth and the roads plastered on top of it.

To visualize the limits of the status quo, think of all the people working in the city hall building. Since they’re organized in layers—thirty-two floors—they’re not too crowded. But most of those people came to work—at rush hour, no less—smushed onto a single plane, along the same ribbons of highway. Only later do they ease this crush by stacking vertically. One solution to the congestion, Garcetti suggests, is to add new planes for mobility, above the earth and beneath it.

FOR SELETA REYNOLDS, urban aerial mobility is not a current pressing concern. Nor are the tunnels Elon Musk’s Boring Company has begun to dig (which we’ll visit in chapter 6). Reynolds heads the LA Department of Transportation, and her focus is on moving millions of people, most of them by traditional means. She thinks much more about providing decent transportation to have-nots, and doesn’t worry much about the people crawling in Lamborghinis or Porsches up and down the 101.

Reynolds, a Mississippian with a history degree from Brown, came to LA from San Francisco, where she’d been an activist manager in the Municipal Transportation Agency. Her division was Livable Streets, and she oversaw the launch of Bay Area Bikeshare. In 2014, Mayor Garcetti brought her to Los Angeles as the top transportation official. She now sees the city at a crucial transition, much like the one a century ago, from streetcars to automobiles. Back then, for-profit corporations with bottomless reservoirs of dollars for promotion and greasing of the political levers sold the public on an enticing technology. And once the public was behind the wheel, it was hooked. By that point, the government was reduced to satisfying motorists’ demands: building highways, making sure people had places to park—in short, surrendering to the car.

All these years later, as Reynolds sees it, LA has a second chance. Tech entrepreneurs are promising a transformation—mobility that’s cheap, green, and fun. But from Reynolds’s perspective, if the government doesn’t step in and assert a measure of control over this new ecosystem of mobility, the technologists will dictate the shape and nature of the city for the coming century. In that case, it will be made to fit their needs, and their bottom lines, and not those of the eighteen million people living in greater Los Angeles. “We could repeat the mistake we made a century ago,” she says. “We adjusted the city to the technology, instead of the other way around.”

Reynolds focuses most on social equity. Entire neighborhoods of LA are transit deserts. She cites the example of Boyle Heights, a historic Mexican American enclave near downtown that is fenced in by freeways. “If you live there without a car,” she says, “you’re trapped.” Those who cannot move across the region efficiently and at an affordable price lose out on opportunities. They struggle to get to trade schools or to job interviews. Entire job markets lie out of reach. This trend worsens with time. The poor migrate to neighborhoods where the rent is cheap, which often are affordable, in great part, because the transportation is so terrible. In these mobility deserts, the poor get poorer, and many fall behind on their rent. This in turn feeds the epidemic of homelessness in LA.

The obvious answer is to wean Angelenos from their addiction to cars. LA Metro is spearheading this strategy by dramatically extending its network. Plans call for new lines stretching to the airport, and others linking downtown to Hollywood and the UCLA campus in Westwood. By the time the Olympic torch is lit in the LA Memorial Coliseum, according to the plan, LA County may boast the second-largest urban train system in the United States, behind only New York’s.

To some evangelists of the mobility revolution, this seems a bit retrograde. Who will take the Metro if Elon Musk’s underground network springs into action, zipping around Angelenos like packets of data? And what about the fleets of autonomous pods, the next generation of dockless electric bikes, the air taxis?

Like Reynolds, Phil Washington, CEO of LA Metro, sees public transportation serving as the main trunks and branches of the third LA, with the scooters, bikes, and car-shares working as connecting tendrils. His logic is based on the immense distance to be traveled—all those round-trips to the sun. Millions of people, he says, must share a good portion of those miles. Otherwise, if each trip carries a single person on a single trajectory, the next stage of transit could be knotted up even worse than rush hour on the 405 at Sepulveda Pass.

From Washington’s point of view, the competition between public transit and all the mobility entrepreneurs just isn’t fair. LA County’s Metro, like other public agencies, has a mission to provide service to everyone. This dramatically raises costs. In the United States, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 mandates universal access to public transit. Metro must spend for buses that hoist wheelchairs from the curb, and equip train stations with ramps and elevators. It must also provide transport to isolated neighborhoods, and look out for those lacking a smartphone to hail an Uber. This is expensive. It serves the people who need help—whom mobility entrepreneurs can blithely ignore. Those new players, Reynolds says, “are building businesses on our infrastructure. And we get nothing in return.”

What’s worse is that if new privately owned services take off willy-nilly, each one rushing to develop its own niche, they’ll claw for market share by selling mobility at bargain-basement prices. A century ago, when this happened, the government was ineffectual. It ended up being an enabler of the automobile monoculture. Those cars also had the right, at least for their first century, to pollute, congest, and roar. Running over people was collateral damage.

Like most city officials, Reynolds is eager to avoid a reprise of that mess. She wants not just to supervise traffic, but to manage it. This isn’t easy, because broader LA County is fractured into scores of fairly independent municipalities. And Metro, like most transit agencies in the United States, is not particularly popular. Most motorists use it rarely (while wishing others would).

Yet in Los Angeles, as in cities worldwide, someone, some entity, is going to be monitoring and managing our movements. This will happen more in some places than in others. But this control is the nature, and the promise, of connected mobility, the key to cleaner, safer, cheaper, and faster movement. The political fights ahead will focus not just on the extent of this control, but also on who’s in charge. Governments are sure to jostle with businesses large and small, and the crucial factor will be data.

In coming years, practically every conveyance will be linked to networks. Most already are. But in Los Angeles, as we’ll see in Helsinki, the data travel in different streams. The subway counts its riders, as do dockless bike companies like Lime. The phone companies can track the movements of their users, as can Google and Facebook. When autonomous cars hit the roads in growing numbers, each one will gush thick rivers of data.

Yet at this point, no one has access to the entire span of mobility data. This is perhaps the ultimate treasure in the coming era. Whoever controls the data will be in a position to manage movement, and to build businesses on it. LA took a first step in 2019, establishing data specifications for bike-share and scooter services. This will allow officials to track their coverage, and coordinate with public transit. This common data standard is now dubbed MDS, for mobility datasets.

The key to controlling networked mobility is data. But who will own it? Could one dominant player, perhaps a company like Google, become the de facto mobility platform?

The strategy in the LA government is for the city to control the data, and to share it with other players on a need-to-know basis. From Reynolds’s point of view, who else can claim to be looking out for everyone?

Transit officials in LA have in fact been working on optimizing traffic for decades. Take an elevator down four levels beneath city hall, pass through a series of security barriers, and you’ll find yourself facing walls of TV screens in the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control Room. Set up for the 1984 Olympics and originally funded by the federal government, it provides video feeds on hundreds of intersections and problem spots in LA. Back in 1984, the data analysis was primitive: human beings looked at TVs and saw traffic jams. The tools they had to respond were also unrefined. They could lengthen red or green lights where they saw problems, or in serious cases dispatch a traffic cop to the scene.

In the modern version, the surveillance network has spread to 4,700 intersections. In addition to images, sensors send in detailed reports on the traffic conditions: the number of vehicles passing, their speed, the flow of pedestrians. An AI engine churns through this information and attempts to optimize the flow, with a priority for mass transit. If a Metro bus, for example, is running behind schedule through East Hollywood, the computers can automatically orchestrate the lights on North Vermont Avenue to hurry it along.

Over time, the system will attempt to orchestrate the movement of growing numbers of vehicles, public and private alike. Autonomous cars, for example, will be sent along the most efficient paths and rerouted at a moment’s notice. Traffic lights will flash routing instructions to other cars, as well as to cyclists, and even to pedestrians.

When it comes to surveillance and control, as we’ll see in Dubai and Shanghai, this is still kids’ stuff. But unlike those cities, where government control has long been a fact of life, LA is attempting to manage millions of people who associate driving with freedom, who often view government with suspicion, if not contempt—and who can rebel at the polls against officials who rub them the wrong way.

ON THE BUSY pedestrian walkway in the oceanside municipality of Santa Monica, a black electric scooter, a Bird, is leaned against a palm tree. The Bird company, a hometown start-up, launched its business one autumn night simply by littering hundreds of its scooters throughout the eight square miles of Santa Monica, from its Ferris-wheeled pier all the way to the Brentwood town line. Residents who stopped the next morning to inspect these two-wheeled apparitions noticed a link to a smartphone app. Many downloaded the Bird app that very morning and started activating the scooters with their phones. (As a condition in the rental agreement, they vowed to wear bicycle helmets, but residents broke that promise en masse.) Paying a dollar for each ride, plus fifteen cents a minute, they were zipping around town with very few questions asked, other than “Will it get me there?” The answer was a resounding yes.

The day after the Bird scooters descended on Santa Monica, the company’s founder, a round-faced young man named Travis VanderZanden, reached out on LinkedIn to the mayor of Santa Monica, Ted Winterer, according to an account in the Washington Post. He invited him to drop by Bird’s headquarters. It was just a few blocks away. There they could discuss Bird’s mobility strategy for the region.

First, the mayor told him, they had a few legal issues to discuss. After all, Bird had never asked for authorization, much less discussed safety issues, sidewalks, or parking with the city. The company hadn’t said boo.

It didn’t take long to recognize a familiar pattern. VanderZanden, it turned out, was a former executive at both of the ride-sharing powerhouses, Lyft, and more significantly, Uber. The practice at Uber was to launch the service first and hammer out the legal details later. This had an impeccable logic. Once a mobility start-up gained lots of riders, it could attract millions of dollars from venture funders. Then it could use that money to hire armies of lawyers and make peace with the cities—to get legal. The key was to come to these negotiations as a popular and newly rich powerhouse, and not a supplicant.

The day that Bird launched in Santa Monica, VanderZanden was still bankrolling the company with just a small round of angel funding. But that changed quickly. Within weeks he had attracted $15 million in VC money, and another $100 million soon after that. By early 2018, when the company agreed to pay a $300,000 fine to the city, its valuation topped $1 billion. By that point, the Santa Monica fine was something Travis VanderZanden could have jammed into a tip jar. He had an enthusiastic customer base, a plan to expand nationally, and a fearsome fortune. Cities would take him on at their own peril.

This model extends throughout the tech economy. Giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have behaved like jumbo versions of Bird. They start by providing valuable services to billions, at low cost or for free. Largely unencumbered by government regulations in their early years, they go on to build market capitalizations bigger than entire industrial economies. In a Vice News feature, Euwyn Poon, cofounder of the San Francisco scooter company Spin, called this “innovating on the regulatory side.”

What’s more, because of the services they provide, these tech companies are often more popular than governments, more trusted, and widely viewed as essential. It’s often when something goes wrong—when their autonomous machines kill someone, or a tech platform is used to spread lies or hack an election—that governments can start to regulate them. But by that point, the tech companies can fight back, with their legions of customers, advertising might, and armies of lobbyists.

This build-first, fix-later model could spell catastrophe in the mobility revolution, and especially in car towns like LA. Seleta Reynolds envisions autonomous pods, pimped out as rolling lounges, carrying people on joyrides at low prices. These pods could be small bars or restaurants, game pods with virtual reality hookups, even smoking chambers offering rich selections of California’s legal marijuana. The skies could be black with drones, some of them flying across the Santa Monica Mountains just to pick up tacos or a roll of toilet paper.

If governments fail to assert their control with taxes and regulations, cheap, ubiquitous mobility services could overwhelm the entire region, much the way the automobile did.

STILL, AFTER A century of the automobile monoculture, the region’s mobility revolution also offers opportunities to tackle some of LA’s toughest challenges, including homelessness. According to Zillow, the real estate database company, a median-earning family in Southern California must pay a staggering 46.7 percent of its income to rent median-valued housing. This is the highest such rate in the country. Some 130,000 households can no longer afford this expense and are transient or homeless. The most vivid display of this scourge is the sprawling LA tent city known as Skid Row. It occupies a square mile between downtown and the Arts District and is home to some ten thousand people in wretched conditions.

As we mentioned earlier, the physical structure of LA favors cars, in many ways, over people. But as Angelenos find other ways to move around, many of them will be left with a legacy of the automobile age: the garage. Steven Dietz, a leading venture capitalist based in Santa Monica, recently launched a start-up called United Dwelling. The business plans to convert unused garages into affordable housing. With the right incentives, he says, this could dramatically expand the housing supply within LA, reducing its century-old sprawl.

It doesn’t even have to wait for the air taxis, speeding underground trains, or other wonders of the coming age of mobility. Not long ago, Dietz, who also teaches at the University of Southern California, had his students knock on doors in LA to find out what people kept in their garages. In a study of seven hundred residences, all of them with two-car garages, only 8 percent of homeowners kept their cars in the garage. “The rest of them parked in the driveway and used the garage to store their stuff,” he says, laughing.

“This could work,” says Mayor Garcetti, back at his office. He does some quick math. “We have five hundred thousand single-family homes in LA,” he says. “If ten percent of them could convert their garages, that would be fifty thousand new housing units.”

The real estate opportunity extends far beyond family garages. The Los Angeles International Airport, known as LAX, is currently building a parking garage with 4,500 badly needed spaces. But as travelers find different ways to reach the airport, from Metro and ride-shares to flying taxis, those parking spaces might go begging. With an eye to that shift, says Justin Erbacci, chief innovation officer at LAX, the new parking lot is designed to be converted to either retail space or housing. “We’re making flat floors and higher ceilings,” he says. Instead of building the ramps inside the building, Erbacci’s team placed them on the outside, where the erstwhile garage, when the time comes, can shed them.

This is what the mobility revolution has in store for LA. It’s a real estate story, as it always has been. The value of each piece of land, and the use for it, depends largely on how people can get there, and where they can go. This was the case in the era of streetcars, and again in the century dominated by the automobile. Once more, changing mobility is poised to reshape life and geography in Southern California.

Hop, Skip, Go

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