Believe It or Not, L.A. Was Almost Our Greenest City

Sirens wailed. Red lights flashed. Police chased some alleged bad guys, and traffic on the Pasadena Freeway came to a dead stop. Typical Los Angeles. What happened next wasn't.

With all those cars going nowhere, drivers turned off their engines and got out to stretch. The members of a mariachi band started strumming and singing. Ice-cream vendors pushed their jingling carts through a hole in a chain-link fence. Then passing bicyclists rolled their vehicles of choice onto the freeway turned parking lot to join the spontaneous celebration, reclaiming a route their kind had once ruled.

As it happens, this 2004 event was the second time in as many years that bikes had taken over this stretch of freeway. I had helped orchestrate the first.

IN 1900, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS CREATED a futuristic traffic structure catering to the mechanical marvel of the day--the bicycle. It opened along a corridor known as the Arroyo Seco, named for the seasonal stream that flows from the San Gabriel Mountains and enters the Los Angeles River just north of downtown Los Angeles.

It was part of a grand plan to connect Los Angeles to Pasadena through an eight-mile "great transit artery." A Pasadena mayor, Horace Dobbins, provided the start-up funds to create an elevated, multilane, wooden "cycleway," complete with streetlights and gazebo turnouts.

When the first leg opened, swarms of bicyclists handed over the 15-cent toll. A Los Angeles Times commentator gushed that the countryside it passed through "is the loveliest in Southern California, the route having been chosen with an eye to scenic beauty as well as to practical needs."

The Los Angeles region, with its mild Mediterranean climate and relatively flat terrain, was in fact considered an ideal home for the bicycle, with more than 20 percent of the population biking for pleasure or to work when the cycleway was proposed.

"There is no part of the world where cycling is in greater favor than in Southern California, and nowhere on the American continent are conditions so favorable the year round for wheeling," one 1897 newspaper article commented. The bicycle use complemented the city's streetcars.

Soon the automobile gained popularity, however, and the elegant bicycling structure was eventually dismantled. Early discussion of car routes, meanwhile, highlighted the concept of a "parkway" as part of a mixed-transit system, built along scenic corridors with adjacent parkland.

Designers incorporated some of these features into the Arroyo Seco Parkway--the first freeway of the West, as it came to be called. It roughly followed the route of the old bikeway.

By the 1940s, Los Angeles, like other regions, had begun to reorient its transportation planning to exclusively favor the car, and the parkway officially became the Pasadena Freeway in 1954. With the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and its dedicated Highway Trust Fund, the car and the utilitarian freeway triumphed.

"America lives on wheels," Treasury Secretary George Humphrey proclaimed in 1955, "and we have to provide the highways to keep America living on wheels and keep the kind and form of life we want."

For the next several decades, transportation policy in Los Angeles and nationwide focused almost exclusively on where and how to build and expand the freeway system. Highway construction molded and shaped the land-use patterns, commercial and industrial activities, and spatial identities of cities and the countryside.

By the 1980s and '90s, however, the economic, political, legal, and environmental costs of such massive construction projects were causing officials to doubt their continued viability. Planners shifted their focus from system expansion to system management, as hours-long commutes began to stir public outrage.