How the automobile shapes cities for the worse

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by Minato Ku

I'm not even sure of that.
Looking in a broader picture if less spaces had been allocated to automobile and more for developments it may have been better for real estate in average.

I guess I was thinking more in terms of the US, and Los Angeles in particular. Real estate development greatly shaped LA.

People in LA took to cars very early in the 20th Century. It was the case that most development followed the interurban streetcar lines (the Pacific Electric) as LA was expanding, but as soon as more people started to drive, you would see commercial and residential developments pop up seemingly in the middle of nowhere, nowhere near a streetcar line, surrounded by a lot of vacant land, that would draw traffic.

Westwood, Los Angeles, 1929.

LADWP

A colorized version.

Colorization by Richard Holoff

Decentralization in LA started early, and people would drive from miles around just to go to commercial districts on Fairfax Avenue (which had no streetcar line), or the Westside. Wilshire Boulevard, by law, was not allowed to have a streetcar on it (the overhead wires would be too "ugly"), but a bus line did go down Wilshire during the streetcar era.

Los Angeles truly was shaped by the car. Well, drivers. Even the downtown street grid, which used to have irregular street angles, became straightened out as more people started to drive.

1927, Los Angeles City Hall under construction. 19th Century LA meets 20th Century LA.

LADWP

This street is no longer curved, and is wider.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The chart is from 1921 .

And there you go.

Originally Posted by craigs

So 15% of the population and 9% of the car ownership in cities over 500,000.

And I would wager that an inordinate amount of that discrepancy was from NYC alone, America's ridiculous urban outlier, as true then as it is today.


I wish my grandparents (all 4 born and raised middle class in Chicago) were still alive so I could ask them when their families first got cars, but I do remember one of my maternal great grandfathers who lived to be 101 retelling the story of when he bought his first car in the 1920s. He lived about a mile south of where I'm at now, in north center (St. Ben's), smack dab in the heart of "neighborhood Chicago").

Looking at street pics of Chicago from the '20s, he was hardly alone.

[austlar1]

I'm in my late 70s today. My family (and extended family) has lived in Texas and/or the southern US since the 1880s. We are Jewish, middle/upper middle class, and, even today, city dwellers almost exclusively. I know for certain that my grandparents living in Fort Worth owned cars since the early 1920s. My mother and her younger brother both had cars by the end of the 1920s. Relatives living in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and New Orleans all owned cars and used them to commute to businesses located in the downtown areas of those cities. There were plenty of streetcar and bus options available well into the 1950s in all of those cities, but I have zero recollection of any of my relatives ever using public transit. I am certain that prior to the 1920s they rode buses or streetcars aplenty, but once cars became widely available, there was no looking back. Southern cities had a much smaller footprint prior to WW2, usually occupying well under 100 square miles, so there was a fair amount of density, although nothing like that found in NE or Midwestern cities.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I'm not so sure about that first part. Back then, cars weren't very useful since cities were too congested for them and there was little suitable infrastructure - both within cities and outside them. So cars were considered the luxury play things for the wealthy with little practical appeal. As their numbers increased there was massive opposition to them since there were frequent deadly accidents and it wasn't until society was re-arranged around them by banning non-car users from all but the "side walk" part of roads, enacting and enforcing strict traffic rules, etc. that they became mainstream. But because of their cost and limited practicality, few regular people would have expected any major life improvement from them. Well, other than from having enough money to buy and operate one.

There's more about the history below:

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/755187...alking-history

One quote:

"Automobiles were often seen as frivolous playthings, akin to the way we think of yachts today (they were often called “pleasure cars”). And on the streets, they were considered violent intruders."

So other than the option of getting money from selling it, having a car would probably not have appealed to most people.

When cars first came available to the general public, they were met with more or less the same response we've been seeing with EV's but that resistance didn't last very long and eventually the masses were on board once the "horseless carriage" proved to be a better alternative to an actual horse and not just a lateral move. If you look at old images from the late teens to early 20's and then the mid to late 20's, the changes are striking. My maternal grandfather grew up as a kid in the horse and buggy era while my other grandparents (10-15 years younger) all grew up around cars. I don't know if my great grandparents actually owned a car at the time. Poor immigrants..

[craigs]

I know that at least two of my great-grandfathers had cars in the 1920s because they both died in them. One was in a terrible accident, and the other got hit by a train. Just going on photos, it appears cars were pretty common in Indianapolis (where they both lived and died) pretty early on.

Indianapolis 1922:

Source