Changes

According to Norton, motordom sought to eliminate pedestrians, trains and street cars from city streets and create automobile centric roads. In Scott L. Bottles’s <i>Los Angeles and the Automobile</I>, he claims that widespread dissatisfaction with the companies managing the city’s mass transit encouraged the city and citizens to turn to automobiles to solve Los Angeles’s gridlock problems. Angelinos favored cars because mass transit had failed to meet their needs. While there is some overlap in these arguments, these scholars fundamentally disagree over the spark that triggered the automotive age. While each of these arguments has merit on their own, Bottles argument is ultimately the most persuasive because he presents a compelling case that Angelinos had given up on mass transit.

In 1890, Los Angeles had only 11,000 citizens and was the 187th largest city in the United States. But by 1930, it had grown to 1.2 million people in Los Angeles (2.3 million in the metropolitan area) and was the largest city in the West.<ref> Robert Fogelson. <i>Bourgeois Nightmare: Suburbia, 1870-1930</i>, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 147. </ref> While Los Angeles lacked water, capital, coal, and a port in 1890 by 1930 it had “an artificial river tapped from the Sierras, a federally subsidized harbor, an oil bonanza, and block after block of skyscrapers under construction.”<ref> Mike Davis, <i>City of Quartz</i>, (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 24-25.</ref> During this time, Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the United States, and much of this growth occurred between 1920 and 1930.