How A Car Has Changed Urban Environments In Los Angeles In California

The rapid expansion of car ownership revolutionised urban planning, as a new feature of the urban landscape must be accounted for. Prior to the widespread adoption of the car, cities were designed around pedestrians and public transport. The planning authorities now had to ensure enough space was set aside for parking, traffic management, and routes for the vehicles to travel on. The expansion of car ownership also allowed for a different style of urban planning, resulting in the expansion of suburbs and development of urban freeways. In this essay, I will discuss how the car has changed urban environments, particularly Los Angeles in California.

If you wish to discuss how the car has changed urban planning, the city you would need to focus

The design, traffic patterns, and even behaviour needed to change in the city to accommodate this new form of transportation. The city streets needed to change to accommodate cars, as the previous design would not accommodate the sheer number of vehicles on the roads - it was common for the roads and intersections in Los Angeles to get so backed up that streetcars could not get to their stops on time (Brown et al., 2009, 170). Roads needed to be widened, new laws needed to be introduced, and new traffic management systems needed to be developed and installed (Brown et al., 2009, 171). The changing urban landscape was best shown by the urban freeway. In Los Angeles, the Arroyo Seco Parkway was opened in 1940 as the first Urban Freeway in the United States (Taira, 2011). As the first access-restricted road in Los Angeles, it was a major turning point in urban design - cars were prioritised over other forms of transportation. The expansion of the urban freeway would also change the face of the city. As more people owned cars and travelled around the city, urban freeways needed to be built to ensure they could travel there quickly. As a result, there was a significant change in the urban fabric, as entire neighbourhoods were destroyed to make room for a freeway. The most significant example in Los Angeles is the Santa Monica Freeway. Completed in 1965, the Santa Monica Freeway was built over a wealthy African-American neighbourhood called Sugar Hill. Using Eminent Domain, urban planners and the government split the neighbourhood of Sugar Hill in two, forcing the predominantly African-American residents out of the neighbourhood to make way for the new Santa Monica Freeway (Chang et al., 2021). This occurred all over the world, where historic city districts and neighbourhoods were evicted and destroyed to build the new urban