Californians and Their Cars: The Ties That Continue to Bind

My favorite image of Southern California lies at the end of the road, just around the last bend of the I-10. You drive through a dim tunnel, and suddenly it hits you like a blinding vision from God-- shimmering white sand, a brilliant sky and the breaking surf of the Pacific--framed by an arch of concrete.

I used to tell first-time visitors to Los Angeles to drive west on the Santa Monica Freeway till you ran out of continent. They were always surprised and captivated by that amazing sight, that golden glimpse of a California just as they had always dreamed it would be. Well, now you can’t get there from here--here being any place east of La Brea--and the idea of Southern California as a vision of paradise seen best through the windshield of a car, lies shattered like the Santa Monica Freeway.

Some see this as a good thing. These neo-utopians hope that out of disaster will Fred M.H. Gregory is a contributing editor to Car and Driver magazine.

come the opportunity to free us from the odious steel capsules that clog our streets, poison our air and separate us from meaningful discourse with our fellow beings. They see a millennium where we shuttle from home to work in shiny rail cars or commuter vans, where parking lots become village greens and where most cars sit collecting dust in the garage or, better yet, moldering in some scrap yard, awaiting the crusher.

An idyllic vision, to be sure--but don’t bet on it. Our city and the way we live are intertwined with the automobile, and as long as there’s an ounce of oil under Kuwait, it will probably stay that way. The car is to Los Angeles what the gondola is to Venice--a city symbol that’s inextricably linked to our history and culture. And that’s how we want it, even if we hate to admit it.

This has nothing to do with our alleged love affair with the car. People don’t fall for hardware. This absurd notion was probably dreamed up by some New York intellectual whose bicycle was just stolen. If anything, we take the car for granted; it’s part of our stuff, like a woman’s purse or an agent’s tasseled loafers.

Our cars are accessories we change with our mood and circumstances. A writer sells a script and it’s goodby Nissan Sentra, hello Lamborghini Diablo. A bodybuilder bulks up his curb appeal with a big-wheeled Jeep, and a mom and dad shuttle the kids in a Ford Explorer complete with ski rack and rhino guards.

We even transform our cars to suit our taste. Westside high-rollers replace the mundane tires of their Mercedes SL’s with racy-looking Pirellis mounted on $1,000 magnesium wheels. Kids in Koreatown lower their Honda Civics, bolt on fiberglass spoilers and fender flares and careen around the neighborhood. In East Los Angeles, compact pickups as colorful as pinatas cruise the boulevards, their 500-watt sound systems putting out a bass wave powerful enough to collapse a bystander’s lungs--and soon people all over the country pick up on the style. Next to movies, car culture could be our biggest export.

Is it any wonder that nearly all the world’s car companies have studios scattered around Southern California so their designers can find inspiration? Automotive fashion was born here. Harley Earl, Detroit’s first auto stylist, learned how to do it in Pasadena from coach builders who were creating custom Duesenbergs for the rich and famous.

Of all the world’s great cities, Los Angeles is the only one that passed from infancy to maturity in this century. It isn’t a collection of baggage from the past, like the ancient European and Asian metropolises. It doesn’t owe anything to the 19th Century--which set the shape of New York and the other Eastern cities. The growth of Los Angeles parallels the evolution of the automobile. Its scale was determined by the car and built to accommodate it.

Los Angeles, after all, was the terminus of Route 66, and all those early settlers who chugged out here in their Model T’s weren’t about to give up their new-found freedom to drive around at will. So they built the first freeway and went on to web the city with the finest highways in the world. They invented drive-in commerce and perfected the drive-in restaurant--though history gives credit for the first one to Royce Harley’s Pig Stand in Dallas. Just for fun, they created hot-rodding and laid out the first drag strip, in Santa Ana.

People muse wistfully about the Red Car lines that once connected the region’s distant hamlets, about how civilized and charming they were. In fact, when the opportunity arose, Angelenos of the day scrapped the red rattletraps without regret in favor of more freeways, more roads and more cars.

I have little doubt that most of us prefer our cars to any of the alternatives, such as they are. Our public transportation is simply incapable of getting us to most of the places we might want to go. People point to the recent popularity of Metro Link as a sure sign of the future. My survey of one rider indicates otherwise. She lives in Canyon Country and works in Highland Park, and when her link between the two was severed by the quake, she bought a week’s worth of Metro Link tickets. Before she used the first one, it occurred to her that she’d have to drive to the station, ride the train, then figure out how to get from Glendale to Highland Park. Couldn’t be done. At least not any faster than driving, even with the inconvenience of a detour. I have a feeling she is not an isolated example.

I don’t expect to see much more than a few miles of Metro, Blue Line and light-rail tracks being laid in my lifetime. A city still spooked by the ghost of Howard Jarvis is not likely to spend billions for a Parisian-style transportation system. Who needs it when we already have a mass-transit system that requires no waiting on platforms, is private and relatively safe and runs according to our own schedules--it’s called the car.

We’ll stay in our cars because we like them and need them. We expect them to be there when we want them and to get us where we want to go. If we live in Santa Monica and decide to drive over to Monterey Park for some Beijing duck, we’ll still do it. If the Santa Monica Freeway is folded up like some piece of reinforced-concrete origami, we’ll figure out a way to get around it. Just like Londoners in the blitz, we will muddle through, developing a new sense of urban cunning as we go.

Don’t expect to hear taps sounding over the automobile just yet. It’s going to take more than a 6.6 earthquake to shake us from behind the wheel. Besides, we’ll need our cars when the Big One hits, so that those who survive can get the hell out of town.*