Origins Southern California's romance with the automobile owes in large part to resentment of the
Southern Pacific Railroad's tight control over the region's commerce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During his successful campaign for governor in 1910, anti-Southern Pacific candidate
Hiram Johnson traveled the state by car, which was no small feat at that time. In the minds of Southlanders, this associated the automobile with clean, progressive government, in stark contrast to the railroads' control over the corrupt governments of the
Midwest and
Northeast. While the Southern Pacific-owned
Pacific Electric Railway's famous Red Car streetcar lines were the axis of urbanization in
Los Angeles during its period of spectacular growth in the 1910s and 1920s, they were unprofitable and increasingly unattractive compared to automobiles. As cars became cheaper and began to fill the region's roads in the 1920s, Pacific Electric lost ridership. Traffic congestion soon threatened to choke off the region's development altogether. At the same time, a number of influential
urban planners were advocating the construction of a network of what one widely read book dubbed "Magic
Motorways", as the backbone of
suburban development. These "
greenbelt" advocates called for decentralized, automobile-oriented development as a means of remedying both urban overcrowding and declining rates of home ownership. Traffic congestion was of such great concern by the late 1930s in the
Los Angeles metropolitan area that the influential
Automobile Club of Southern California engineered an elaborate plan to create an elevated freeway-type "Motorway System," a key aspect of which was the dismantling of the streetcar lines, to be replaced with buses that could run on both local streets and on the new express roads. In the late 1930s, when the freeway system was originally planned locally by Los Angeles
city planners, they had intended for
light rail tracks to have been installed in the center margin of each freeway (which would presumably have carried
Pacific Electric Railway red cars), but this plan was never fully implemented.
Planning and construction During
World War II, transportation bottlenecks on Southern California roads and railways convinced many that if Southern California was to accommodate a large population, it needed a completely new transportation system. The city of Los Angeles favored an upgraded rail transit system focused on its central city. However, the success of the
Arroyo Seco Parkway, built between Los Angeles and
Pasadena in 1940, convinced many that a freeway system could solve the region's transportation problems. Leaders of surrounding cities, such as
Whittier,
South Gate,
Long Beach, and Pasadena, accordingly called for a web of freeways to connect the whole region, rather than funneling their residents out of their own downtowns and into that of Los Angeles. Pro-freeway sentiments prevailed, and by 1947, a new comprehensive freeway plan for Los Angeles (based largely on the original locally planned 1930s system, but without the light rail tracks in the median strips of the freeways) had been drawn up by the California Department of Public Works (now
Caltrans).
San Diego soon followed suit, and by the early 1950s, construction had begun on much of the region's freeway system. ==Proposed/future freeways==