Hop, Skip, Go

Immobility saps the Los Angeles region of its very essence. The whole point of living and working in a city, after all, is to connect with other people. In LA, it might be to haggle over a merger in Pasadena, to play tennis on the courts at UCLA, to celebrate a quinceañera in Boyle Heights, to dream up a screenplay over drinks in Marina del Rey. People interacting with other people is akin to a city’s nervous system. For it to work, people have to be able to move. Otherwise, why pay the rent to live in LA? You might as well FaceTime from somewhere else.

For decades, the answer has been to widen the highways—which is almost always an exercise in futility. Way back in 1955, the social critic Lewis Mumford quipped that adding highway lanes to ease congestion was like loosening your belt to cure obesity. More supply simply generates greater demand. The most recent example was a $1.1 billion widening of the key north–south artery, the 405. The job, which involved hacking out a wider pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, took four years. It led angry commuters through miles of convoluted detours. Once complete, that stretch of the 405 was as slow as ever. Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, an LA resident since 2002, laments to a gathering of Bel-Air residents that the 405, even with the improvements, “varies between the seventh and eighth levels of hell.”

Absent this powerful and widespread frustration with LA’s car monoculture, local authorities would have little hope of transforming mobility in the region. But even car-loving Angelenos now see that the second LA is unsustainable. In 2016, voters were so fed up with the status quo, they approved Measure M, which hiked gas taxes to finance $120 billion over four decades in transportation spending, much of it in Metro expansion.

For a target, Garcetti focuses on the LA Olympics in 2028. His office is decorated with enormous black-and-white photos of LA’s two previous Olympics. The 1932 games, LA’s coming-out party, left the city its iconic Coliseum. The Olympics of 1984, staged at the height of the Cold War, felt like a victory parade. First, LA beat out New York City for the games, which made it sweet. Then Americans, like the sunny gymnast Mary Lou Retton and the sprinter Carl Lewis, scooped up loads of medals (thanks in part to the Soviet and Eastern Bloc boycott). In the ’84 Olympics, LA even figured out a way to make a profit—which enhanced its reputation as a can-do region, one capable of economic miracles. Time magazine named the games’ organizer, Peter Ueberroth, its 1984 Man of the Year.

By the time the 2028 Olympics roll around, in Garcetti’s vision, the third LA should be on full display, the city’s mobility largely transformed. County-controlled LA Metro plans to have twenty-eight major transit projects completed in time for the ’28 games. They include a doubling of the Metro line, the introduction of electric buses, the availability of subsidized electric ride-share services for the poor and disabled, and the expansion of bike lanes and pedestrian greenways.

The city and county are wooing mobility players big and small, whether they’re running fleets of autonomous jitneys, operating air taxis, or building electric buses. “If you think about the finance capitals of the world,” Garcetti says, “New York and London come to mind. Car cities, Detroit and Munich, Tokyo. But what city is the leader in transportation technology? That’s what I want LA to be.” He points to the city’s leadership in aerospace, the five-hundred-odd tech start-ups along the western strip (so-called Silicon Beach), the two Hyperloop companies, and an openness to experimentation. “I want everyone to come here and try stuff,” he says. “I want LA to be the kitchen where this is all cooked.”

At the same time, he sees LA’s paved roadway, the asphalt tapestry smothering much of the region, as an asset. The roads can be repurposed, he says, parts of them transformed into bike paths and walkways. “Look at the High Line,” he says, referring to a converted stretch of elevated railway in New York City that is now a world-famous park.

Of course, many of the roads will remain focused on their current job: the movement of automobiles. Even as other options emerge, the automobile isn’t deserting Los Angeles any time soon. The region has 6.4 million cars and trucks, and the average vehicle stays in operation for eleven years, many for much longer. So on the eve of the 2028 Olympics, millions of cars would be still circulating in LA even if Angelenos, en masse, stopped buying them today. And that’s not happening.

The idea is not to get rid of the car, but to end the car monoculture. It’s a matter of giving people choices. As this happens, the city will become multimodal and greener. That part of the LA vision sounds like Helsinki, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities around the world.

In LA, though, one problem stands out: while the city and county are spending billions on new Metro lines and expanded bus service, it’s not yet catching on. Only 7 percent of the population rides public transit. Worse, these numbers have been shrinking. Growing numbers of working poor in the area, data show, are ditching the buses and trains, and instead buying used cars.

This is the downside of economic success. Since the rise of the automobile, public transit in LA, as in much of the car-centric world, has largely served the underclass, including many who cannot afford their own personal vehicle. But now, just as the city leaders try to transition away from the car economy, growing numbers of Angelenos are “graduating” into it. They add to congestion. So do the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers plying the streets and byways in search of passengers. After decades of progress against smog, LA’s air grew dirtier in 2016 and 2017, registering some of the nation’s highest ozone counts.

Garcetti boils the problem down to one of geometry. You have millions of people trying to get from point A to point B, he says, “and they’re all occupying the same plane.” That plane is defined by the surface of the earth and the roads plastered on top of it.

To visualize the limits of the status quo, think of all the people working in the city hall building. Since they’re organized in layers—thirty-two floors—they’re not too crowded. But most of those people came to work—at rush hour, no less—smushed onto a single plane, along the same ribbons of highway. Only later do they ease this crush by stacking vertically. One solution to the congestion, Garcetti suggests, is to add new planes for mobility, above the earth and beneath it.

FOR SELETA REYNOLDS, urban aerial mobility is not a current pressing concern. Nor are the tunnels Elon Musk’s Boring Company has begun to dig (which we’ll visit in chapter 6). Reynolds heads the LA Department of Transportation, and her focus is on moving millions of people, most of them by traditional means. She thinks much more about providing decent transportation to have-nots, and doesn’t worry much about the people crawling in Lamborghinis or Porsches up and down the 101.

Reynolds, a Mississippian with a history degree from Brown, came to LA from San Francisco, where she’d been an activist manager in the Municipal Transportation Agency. Her division was Livable Streets, and she oversaw the launch of Bay Area Bikeshare. In 2014, Mayor Garcetti brought her to Los Angeles as the top transportation official. She now sees the city at a crucial transition, much like the one a century ago, from streetcars to automobiles. Back then, for-profit corporations with bottomless reservoirs of dollars for promotion and greasing of the political levers sold the public on an enticing technology. And once the public was behind the wheel, it was hooked. By that point, the government was reduced to satisfying motorists’ demands: building highways, making sure people had places to park—in short, surrendering to the car.

All these years later, as Reynolds sees it, LA has a second chance. Tech entrepreneurs are promising a transformation—mobility that’s cheap, green, and fun. But from Reynolds’s perspective, if the government doesn’t step in and assert a measure of control over this new ecosystem of mobility, the technologists will dictate the shape and nature of the city for the coming century. In that case, it will be made to fit their needs, and their bottom lines, and not those of the eighteen million people living in greater Los Angeles. “We could repeat the mistake we made a century ago,” she says. “We adjusted the city to the technology, instead of the other way around.”

Reynolds focuses most on social equity. Entire neighborhoods of LA are transit deserts. She cites the example of Boyle Heights, a historic Mexican American enclave near downtown that is fenced in by freeways. “If you live there without a car,” she says, “you’re trapped.” Those who cannot move across the region efficiently and at an affordable price lose out on opportunities. They struggle to get to trade schools or to job interviews. Entire job markets lie out of reach. This trend worsens with time. The poor migrate to neighborhoods where the rent is cheap, which often are affordable, in great part, because the transportation is so terrible. In these mobility deserts, the poor get poorer, and many fall behind on their rent. This in turn feeds the epidemic of homelessness in LA.

The obvious answer is to wean Angelenos from their addiction to cars. LA Metro is spearheading this strategy by dramatically extending its network. Plans call for new lines stretching to the airport, and others linking downtown to Hollywood and the UCLA campus in Westwood. By the time the Olympic torch is lit in the LA Memorial Coliseum, according to the plan, LA County may boast the second-largest urban train system in the United States, behind only New York’s.

To some evangelists of the mobility revolution, this seems a bit retrograde. Who will take the Metro if Elon Musk’s underground network springs into action, zipping around Angelenos like packets of data? And what about the fleets of autonomous pods, the next generation of dockless electric bikes, the air taxis?

Like Reynolds, Phil Washington, CEO of LA Metro, sees public transportation serving as the main trunks and branches of the third LA, with the scooters, bikes, and car-shares working as connecting tendrils. His logic is based on the immense distance to be traveled—all those round-trips to the sun. Millions of people, he says, must share a good portion of those miles. Otherwise, if each trip carries a single person on a single trajectory, the next stage of transit could be knotted up even worse than rush hour on the 405 at Sepulveda Pass.

From Washington’s point of view, the competition between public transit and all the mobility entrepreneurs just isn’t fair. LA County’s Metro, like other public agencies, has a mission to provide service to everyone. This dramatically raises costs. In the United States, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 mandates universal access to public transit. Metro must spend for buses that hoist wheelchairs from the curb, and equip train stations with ramps and elevators. It must also provide transport to isolated neighborhoods, and look out for those lacking a smartphone to hail an Uber. This is expensive. It serves the people who need help—whom mobility entrepreneurs can blithely ignore. Those new players, Reynolds says, “are building businesses on our infrastructure. And we get nothing in return.”

What’s worse is that if new privately owned services take off willy-nilly, each one rushing to develop its own niche, they’ll claw for market share by selling mobility at bargain-basement prices. A century ago, when this happened, the government was ineffectual. It ended up being an enabler of the automobile monoculture. Those cars also had the right, at least for their first century, to pollute, congest, and roar. Running over people was collateral damage.

Like most city officials, Reynolds is eager to avoid a reprise of that mess. She wants not just to supervise traffic, but to manage it. This isn’t easy, because broader LA County is fractured into scores of fairly independent municipalities. And Metro, like most transit agencies in the United States, is not particularly popular. Most motorists use it rarely (while wishing others would).

Yet in Los Angeles, as in cities worldwide, someone, some entity, is going to be monitoring and managing our movements. This will happen more in some places than in others. But this control is the nature, and the promise, of connected mobility, the key to cleaner, safer, cheaper, and faster movement. The political fights ahead will focus not just on the extent of this control, but also on who’s in charge. Governments are sure to jostle with businesses large and small, and the crucial factor will be data.

In coming years, practically every conveyance will be linked to networks. Most already are. But in Los Angeles, as we’ll see in Helsinki, the data travel in different streams. The subway counts its riders, as do dockless bike companies like Lime. The phone companies can track the movements of their users, as can Google and Facebook. When autonomous cars hit the roads in growing numbers, each one will gush thick rivers of data.

Yet at this point, no one has access to the entire span of mobility data. This is perhaps the ultimate treasure in the coming era. Whoever controls the data will be in a position to manage movement, and to build businesses on it. LA took a first step in 2019, establishing data specifications for bike-share and scooter services. This will allow officials to track their coverage, and coordinate with public transit. This common data standard is now dubbed MDS, for mobility datasets.

The key to controlling networked mobility is data. But who will own it? Could one dominant player, perhaps a company like Google, become the de facto mobility platform?

The strategy in the LA government is for the city to control the data, and to share it with other players on a need-to-know basis. From Reynolds’s point of view, who else can claim to be looking out for everyone?

Transit officials in LA have in fact been working on optimizing traffic for decades. Take an elevator down four levels beneath city hall, pass through a series of security barriers, and you’ll find yourself facing walls of TV screens in the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control Room. Set up for the 1984 Olympics and originally funded by the federal government, it provides video feeds on hundreds of intersections and problem spots in LA. Back in 1984, the data analysis was primitive: human beings looked at TVs and saw traffic jams. The tools they had to respond were also unrefined. They could lengthen red or green lights where they saw problems, or in serious cases dispatch a traffic cop to the scene.

In the modern version, the surveillance network has spread to 4,700 intersections. In addition to images, sensors send in detailed reports on the traffic conditions: the number of vehicles passing, their speed, the flow of pedestrians. An AI engine churns through this information and attempts to optimize the flow, with a priority for mass transit. If a Metro bus, for example, is running behind schedule through East Hollywood, the computers can automatically orchestrate the lights on North Vermont Avenue to hurry it along.

Over time, the system will attempt to orchestrate the movement of growing numbers of vehicles, public and private alike. Autonomous cars, for example, will be sent along the most efficient paths and rerouted at a moment’s notice. Traffic lights will flash routing instructions to other cars, as well as to cyclists, and even to pedestrians.

When it comes to surveillance and control, as we’ll see in Dubai and Shanghai, this is still kids’ stuff. But unlike those cities, where government control has long been a fact of life, LA is attempting to manage millions of people who associate driving with freedom, who often view government with suspicion, if not contempt—and who can rebel at the polls against officials who rub them the wrong way.

ON THE BUSY pedestrian walkway in the oceanside municipality of Santa Monica, a black electric scooter, a Bird, is leaned against a palm tree. The Bird company, a hometown start-up, launched its business one autumn night simply by littering hundreds of its scooters throughout the eight square miles of Santa Monica, from its Ferris-wheeled pier all the way to the Brentwood town line. Residents who stopped the next morning to inspect these two-wheeled apparitions noticed a link to a smartphone app. Many downloaded the Bird app that very morning and started activating the scooters with their phones. (As a condition in the rental agreement, they vowed to wear bicycle helmets, but residents broke that promise en masse.) Paying a dollar for each ride, plus fifteen cents a minute, they were zipping around town with very few questions asked, other than “Will it get me there?” The answer was a resounding yes.

The day after the Bird scooters descended on Santa Monica, the company’s founder, a round-faced young man named Travis VanderZanden, reached out on LinkedIn to the mayor of Santa Monica, Ted Winterer, according to an account in the Washington Post. He invited him to drop by Bird’s headquarters. It was just a few blocks away. There they could discuss Bird’s mobility strategy for the region.

First, the mayor told him, they had a few legal issues to discuss. After all, Bird had never asked for authorization, much less discussed safety issues, sidewalks, or parking with the city. The company hadn’t said boo.

It didn’t take long to recognize a familiar pattern. VanderZanden, it turned out, was a former executive at both of the ride-sharing powerhouses, Lyft, and more significantly, Uber. The practice at Uber was to launch the service first and hammer out the legal details later. This had an impeccable logic. Once a mobility start-up gained lots of riders, it could attract millions of dollars from venture funders. Then it could use that money to hire armies of lawyers and make peace with the cities—to get legal. The key was to come to these negotiations as a popular and newly rich powerhouse, and not a supplicant.

The day that Bird launched in Santa Monica, VanderZanden was still bankrolling the company with just a small round of angel funding. But that changed quickly. Within weeks he had attracted $15 million in VC money, and another $100 million soon after that. By early 2018, when the company agreed to pay a $300,000 fine to the city, its valuation topped $1 billion. By that point, the Santa Monica fine was something Travis VanderZanden could have jammed into a tip jar. He had an enthusiastic customer base, a plan to expand nationally, and a fearsome fortune. Cities would take him on at their own peril.

This model extends throughout the tech economy. Giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have behaved like jumbo versions of Bird. They start by providing valuable services to billions, at low cost or for free. Largely unencumbered by government regulations in their early years, they go on to build market capitalizations bigger than entire industrial economies. In a Vice News feature, Euwyn Poon, cofounder of the San Francisco scooter company Spin, called this “innovating on the regulatory side.”

What’s more, because of the services they provide, these tech companies are often more popular than governments, more trusted, and widely viewed as essential. It’s often when something goes wrong—when their autonomous machines kill someone, or a tech platform is used to spread lies or hack an election—that governments can start to regulate them. But by that point, the tech companies can fight back, with their legions of customers, advertising might, and armies of lobbyists.

This build-first, fix-later model could spell catastrophe in the mobility revolution, and especially in car towns like LA. Seleta Reynolds envisions autonomous pods, pimped out as rolling lounges, carrying people on joyrides at low prices. These pods could be small bars or restaurants, game pods with virtual reality hookups, even smoking chambers offering rich selections of California’s legal marijuana. The skies could be black with drones, some of them flying across the Santa Monica Mountains just to pick up tacos or a roll of toilet paper.

If governments fail to assert their control with taxes and regulations, cheap, ubiquitous mobility services could overwhelm the entire region, much the way the automobile did.

STILL, AFTER A century of the automobile monoculture, the region’s mobility revolution also offers opportunities to tackle some of LA’s toughest challenges, including homelessness. According to Zillow, the real estate database company, a median-earning family in Southern California must pay a staggering 46.7 percent of its income to rent median-valued housing. This is the highest such rate in the country. Some 130,000 households can no longer afford this expense and are transient or homeless. The most vivid display of this scourge is the sprawling LA tent city known as Skid Row. It occupies a square mile between downtown and the Arts District and is home to some ten thousand people in wretched conditions.

As we mentioned earlier, the physical structure of LA favors cars, in many ways, over people. But as Angelenos find other ways to move around, many of them will be left with a legacy of the automobile age: the garage. Steven Dietz, a leading venture capitalist based in Santa Monica, recently launched a start-up called United Dwelling. The business plans to convert unused garages into affordable housing. With the right incentives, he says, this could dramatically expand the housing supply within LA, reducing its century-old sprawl.

It doesn’t even have to wait for the air taxis, speeding underground trains, or other wonders of the coming age of mobility. Not long ago, Dietz, who also teaches at the University of Southern California, had his students knock on doors in LA to find out what people kept in their garages. In a study of seven hundred residences, all of them with two-car garages, only 8 percent of homeowners kept their cars in the garage. “The rest of them parked in the driveway and used the garage to store their stuff,” he says, laughing.

“This could work,” says Mayor Garcetti, back at his office. He does some quick math. “We have five hundred thousand single-family homes in LA,” he says. “If ten percent of them could convert their garages, that would be fifty thousand new housing units.”

The real estate opportunity extends far beyond family garages. The Los Angeles International Airport, known as LAX, is currently building a parking garage with 4,500 badly needed spaces. But as travelers find different ways to reach the airport, from Metro and ride-shares to flying taxis, those parking spaces might go begging. With an eye to that shift, says Justin Erbacci, chief innovation officer at LAX, the new parking lot is designed to be converted to either retail space or housing. “We’re making flat floors and higher ceilings,” he says. Instead of building the ramps inside the building, Erbacci’s team placed them on the outside, where the erstwhile garage, when the time comes, can shed them.

This is what the mobility revolution has in store for LA. It’s a real estate story, as it always has been. The value of each piece of land, and the use for it, depends largely on how people can get there, and where they can go. This was the case in the era of streetcars, and again in the century dominated by the automobile. Once more, changing mobility is poised to reshape life and geography in Southern California.

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