As someone who’s lived in LA for 4 years now without a car, I think it’s a trap that we’ve all fallen into to assume SoCal was fundamentally designed exclusively for the car. While, yes, automobiles have dominated the regional planning conversation from the 1960s up until very recently (LA and neighboring cities are finally taking public transit planning seriously), up until the 50s Los Angeles had one of the world’s largest streetcar and interurban train systems in the world. The city was, quite literally, built by and for transit — even its far-flung suburbs, like the town of Huntington Beach or Claremont, were built and developed as terminuses to train lines (and the train line to Claremont, on the very eastern edge of LA County, still exists in the form of the MetroLink).

There’s been some serious sprawl since then, yes, but at its heart Los Angeles is a city that is conducive — not contradictory — to public transit. And I think our planning decisions will only get more effective once we, as a region, realize that.

https://usp100la.weebly.com/history-of-transportation.html (scroll down for a map — and note that this doesn’t include the downtown/central LA streetcar system, which essentially covered every other block in downtown LA)