Autopia
Traffic is to Angelenos what the weather is to The British.
Moaning about a logjam on the 405 Freeway, a pile-up on the I-10, or a bumper-to-bumper tailback on Lincoln Boulevard is the Angeleno equivalent of talking about how grey/rainy/miserable the weather is in London.
To be honest, I’d much rather spend half an hour in traffic than thirty minutes on the London Underground with my head in the armpit of a freely-sweating banker who needs to buy better anti-perspirant, but perhaps it’s just a question of perspective.
(Also, talking about the weather here doesn’t really give you much to moan about, so inevitably people found something else instead).
I watched Echt-LA movie “La La Land” recently, and during the opening scene — a bravura song-and-dance number that takes place during a mile-long traffic jam on the I-10 — a murmur of audible recognition and appreciation rippled through the audience. This, for all of the singing and effects and clever references to the Golden Age of Cinema, was truly an LA movie about the real Los Angeles Experience.
Los Angeles is a giant concrete cathedral to the worship of cars, on whose altar thousands of people are sacrificed every year in accidents, crashes and traffic-related incidents. It is a city designed around, devoted to and in service of vehicles, so much so to the extent that sometimes it appears that people come as a distinct afterthought — on its worse days, LA feels like just one giant parking lot, which is probably because an estimated 14% of the wider Los Angeles area is. Cars seem to be at the root cause of the fact that LA can be a strangely impersonal place to visit with little sense of communal life upon first glance, and that’s before you come to terms with the fact that restaurants will charge you hundreds of dollars for plates of over-priced food and then stiff you for the privilege of parking your car on their property as well.
Roads and freeways are such a central part of LA living that architectural godhead, Englishman and Angelenophile Reyner Banham made one of his four quadrants of the city “Autopia”, correctly identifying that most Angelenos spend almost as much time in their cars as they do in their homes .
Even ignoring its contribution to climate change and how ugly this makes the city at first glance, this car culture has many other downsides: downtown Los Angeles is coated with a layer of smog that gets worse the hotter it is, a great deal of Los Angeles pay a ‘traffic tax’ which costs them hours of their lives every day getting to and from work, and and barely a day goes by without me witnessing some form of accident or pile-up resembling the art exhibits from JG Ballard’s Crash.
(This notion of cars and motorways as the theatre for performance have been taken to the extent where an LA theatre company staged an entire opera, Hopscotch, during which the performance shifted set across several motorways and a series of different cars)
Cruising around the city and looking at it through the eyes of a European or a Londoner, the city’s lack of an actual centre, its endless parade of strip-malls, drive-throughs and mini-marts, seem to be a visual indictment of designing it around cars, and it’s very hard to think about The American Dream when you’ve been stuck on a motorway for 2 hours.
The car-dominant nature of the city also has its effects on the psyche of its citizens: getting Angelenos to come out for drinks spontaneously without considering where they will park their car is remarkably tricky, and when you do, it’s pretty horrifying how cavalier the attitude to drink-driving is - as best summed up in the handy phrase ‘five and drive’. Californians are generally far sunnier and friendlier than Londoners, but their cars seem to unleash some buried Freudian impulse to violence and anger, and so road rage seems to be a fairly common problem as well.
Even homelessness here is filtered through the lens of the automobile: people sleeping rough are frowned upon and moved on, but somehow people living out of their cars are more active participants in The American Dream and Angeleno living than those trying to kip on the street.
Here, car watching is almost as interesting as people watching: the roads of LA are packed with the most absurd jacked-up rides, vintage cars polished to a gleam, sports cars and muscle cars and performance cars, and what appear to be decommissioned military vehicles from Operation Desert Storm roaming the streets of Venice.
Cars are a way of expressing your personality and values, almost a second set of clothing that people wear — this is true everywhere, but there can’t be a city in the world where the vehicle that you drive matters quite as much. The man who lives in the house behind me owns not one, but two vintage ‘67 Ford Mustangs. As far as I can tell, the only difference between them is the colour, and he alternates between them according to his mood like someone might between two identical pairs of shoes.
I drive a dusty Honda Civic covered in Beagle hair and have been mistaken for both an Uber driver and a Pizza Delivery boy when driving into some of the more salubrious carparks in LA, which is probably the closest I’m ever going to come to being profiled. I have also heard several women that I’m friends with talk about men they were dating by first referring to the car they drive, as if it were a far more accurate read on their true personality than their stated interests, career or Tinder profile picture.
However, there are sides to this autophilia that are less painful. Once you get past any British snobbiness about how a city should look and work, you start to see the cars as a key element in the way that the city functions, a sort of permanently moving layer that add something unique to it.
Uber Drivers make up a key group amongst The Citizens of Autopia, and I would encourage anyone visiting here to get an Uber just to chat to the unique and beguiling mixture of freelance workers, recent immigrants, aspiring directors, film-makers and actors, and just plain weirdoes who criss-cross the city all day for a living — these conversations are often strange, but they’re very rarely dull.
I couldn’t drive until I moved here — yes, this is even more stupid than it sounds — but even taking into account the fun to be had getting an Uber, LA without driving would be like living in London without drinking, a sort of LA-Redux which would mean not really living in the city at all.
Some of LA’s greatest pleasures are automotive: a drive down Sunset Boulevard as the night kicks in and the neon signs fire up, a cruise down the Pacific Coast Highway during the golden hour, a looping Canyon Drive on the weekend. The nearest London has is the Westway rolling into London, and it doesn’t even come close.
The idea of cars as a second home is second nature here, but it goes some level beyond that into being a sort of psychological safe space for Angelenos to let it all out. People here live in their cars, and if autonomous driving becomes a reality then cars in LA will start to fulfill the role houseboats have been serving in London, allowing people to save on rent by living in a part of the city that’s supposed to be for transport only.
I find myself, increasingly, peering into people’s cars in LA with the same voyeuristic thrill as if I were looking across an avenue into a lit twentieth-floor apartment after midnight in New York, or in peering through people’s living room windows in London.
Here, all around you at every stop light and traffic jam, is life in all its glory, people alone in a strange wheeled steel capsule where somehow they think that it’s okay to act as if no-one is watching. I have only to walk out onto my flat balcony at night to hear snippets of conversations, arguments and startling intimacies going by at thirty miles an hour with the windows open — I know when a song is about to reach its pop-cultural tipping point over the summer by the number of times I hear it passing on the radios of every car that drives down my street.
So yes, LA might seem an impersonal city dominated by cars, but somehow, if you look closer, there is much more to it. Just like everything else in this city, the best parts are still there, they’re just hidden — in this case, behind the closed doors of every car that rides the ugly concrete motorways in the City of Angels.
