LA Times:
“The relationship between Southern Californians and our freeways is broken. Freeways still enable mobility — at certain times of the day. At many other times, they actively seem to frustrate it. They don’t stitch together the region, if they ever did, as much as divide it. The idea that they help us make sense of Los Angeles — that they operate as existential way-finding devices — now seems quaint, at best...
Increasingly the fundamental task Los Angeles faces is one of re-urbanization — of infill development, of reanimating or repairing the public realm. At the heart of that task is an understanding that the most successful kinds of spaces in the city are the ones where a broad range of activities has a chance to play out.
In this emerging Los Angeles, the freeway is an outlier, a hulking support system for an aging, if not outdated, set of beliefs. The freeways were built to allow the region to stretch outward; the movement that counts now is in the opposite direction, as the city doubles back on itself, looking to develop more densely areas where it built lightly before.”
Mass transit was our past and it is our productive future.
