The Freeway and the Car, California's Concrete Geography

California invented the freeway. The Arroyo Seco Parkway in Los Angeles, which opened on December thirtieth, nineteen forty, was the first limited-access, high-speed divided highway in the American West. Its roughly eight miles connected Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles.

Drivers entered it at speed from surface streets, with no on-ramp deceleration lanes, and it had no shoulders worthy of the name. It was immediately overwhelmed with traffic. By the time engineers understood what it would become, California was already building more.

The Interstate Highway System, authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen fifty-six, gave California the national funding to build on a scale it had already been imagining. By the nineteen seventies, the state had more freeway miles than any other and a relationship to the automobile that was unlike anywhere else. Entire cities were designed around the assumption of the car: suburbs with no sidewalks, commercial strips accessible only by driving, shopping centers that turned their backs to the street.

The freeway was not just infrastructure. It was ideology. It also had victims.

Urban freeway construction in the nineteen fifties and sixties cut through some of the state's densest and most affordable neighborhoods, which in city after city happened to be Black and Latino communities. The Century Freeway, later renamed the Glenn Anderson Freeway, displaced thousands of people from their homes along its route through Watts and neighboring communities. Similar patterns played out in Sacramento, Oakland, and San Jose.

The car shaped California's relationship to its own geography. Los Angeles spreading into the San Fernando Valley, Sacramento reaching into Elk Grove, the Bay Area sprawling into Contra Costa and Alameda counties: all of it followed the freeway. California remains the state most dependent on the personal automobile, and the state doing the most serious work to undo that dependency.