Speed in the City of Quartz:
The classic action film as a unique product of Los Angeles 20th century urban design
Imagine for a moment that you are in your car, in the middle of morning rush hour in the city with the greatest traffic congestion in the world,¹ at a standstill on the freeway. But good news: you can get into a vehicle that must, without exception, continue at a speed of over 55 miles per hour obstacles be damned. There is only one catch: your veSpeedhicle may explode at any moment. Given the choice, there are many Los Angeles commuters who would make this bargain.
For the majority of the on-screen characters in Speed, this is the essential plot of the 1994 action classic starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Hard-boiled down to its core, the film is about a morning commute on public transportation that is disrupted by the “whim of a madman.”² But the very premise of the film, the joke embedded in the title and the foundation for dozens of other punchlines in the script, is the intractability of life on that concrete monument composed of infinite tendrils that is imposed across the face of Southern California, the essential blight that scars the perfect landscape under the perfect sun: the freeway. The aforementioned madman, named with a wink as Howard Payne and played with unhinged brilliance by Dennis Hopper, has it out for the city’s bright young top cop, known simply as Jack, played by Reeves. His method of choice for torturing and (hopefully) killing Jack? A Los Angeles city bus, rigged to explode if it drops under 55 miles-per-hour. All Jack has to do is stop the bus — or, more precisely, keep it going really fast until he can stop it. If it sounds like a brilliant set-up for a movie, that’s because it is. If it seems they don’t make movies like it anymore, that’s because they don’t.
Speed took in over $120 million at the domestic box office, $350 million worldwide,³ and those are 1994 dollars. It reigned supreme in the era of home video rentals and remains an action classic. But Speed is more than the beneficiary of blind luck of the box office that can never predict a surprise hit. Underneath the surface-level action mechanics that propel the movie forward lies a confluence of streams: the specific history of Los Angeles’ urban development and economic inequality; the culture, already ascendent, of freeway chases in the region; and freeway construction, of one expressway in particular, that allowed for a one-time-only film production schedule. Speed, conceived only for Los Angeles, can exist only in Los Angeles and could only have been produced in Los Angeles in the early 1990’s. Inadvertently, Speed does more than any action movie in the long history of Los Angeles-based action movies to speak about the city itself and its many failures to meet its aspirations at the end of the 20th century. There may not be another movie set in L.A. that is more Angeleno.
Speed marked the directorial debut of the highly decorated cinematographer Jan de Bont. Known for shooting such films as Jewel of the Nile, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October as a Director of Photography, de Bont came to the Graham Yost-written screenplay for Speed and found an ensemble film, a gritty tale of a racially-diverse group of Angelenos trapped on a bus who must work together to defuse the deadly efforts of an urban terrorist. Many studios had passed on the script. De Bont set to work crafting the film into a high-octane action vehicle for its star Reeves and its then little-known love interest Bullock. No longer would the film be a showcase for character actors or a dive into the socio-economic politics of Los Angeles, much to the chagrin of many of the already-cast supporting players.⁴ Furthermore, with hindsight we now know that Speed exists at the center of a forever-gone era in film that is best described as “90’s-style action.” Spanning the late 1980’s into the early 2000’s, these movies featured hard-edged men of action, huge-draw stars, domestic threats, and cheesy one-liners. Although they were all a product of their concurrent political and social climates, as we will discuss later, Speed is a unique product of its particular physical setting as well.
Though he would only helm four other films as a director, including an ill-fated Speed sequel, de Bont was poised to make an indelible mark on Los Angeles as a movie location. He embraced the movie’s title, opting to move things along at a considerable pace at the expense of character development, as well as nonchalantly employ violence on an epic scale, even by the standards of Los Angeles-based violence that has been depicted on film since the early days of Hollywood.
Die Hard had destroyed a section of Los Angeles in 1988, with one tough-as-nails cop managing the mayhem in a single building. 1992 had seen Terminator 2: Judgement Day wreak havoc on a pseudo-future Los Angeles, with one of the most enduring images of contemporary Los Angeles in the film that of Arnold Schwarzanegger on a motorcycle in the empty basin of the Los Angeles River. In 1993, during the filming of Speed, Sandra Bullock’s breakout role in Demolition Man joined Sylvester Stallone for another futuristic vision of judicial violence on the city’s streets, and Schwarzanegger’s flop The Last Action Hero provided a tongue-in-cheek Hollywood send-up of all these explosions, indiscriminate killings, and chases. The open street warfare of Michael Mann’s Heat would follow Speed by a year. So from a certain vantage point, within the pantheon of contemporary action films, Speed offered a specific idea of Los Angeles, one that had much more to do with the reality of the city than any of those other films: an urban landscape defined by freeways and an urban life defined by commutes; an LAPD armed to the teeth with battlefield weaponry that posed a threat to citizens; and violence, deadly violence possible at any moment anywhere across the disenfranchised southern half of the city. Bleak, to some degree, but also disturbingly rooted in fact.
Violence has never been foreign to Los Angeles. At the time of Speed’s release, the city was only two years removed from the week-long riots of 1992. Even today, Los Angeles persists as the murder capital of California⁵ and violence seems to be a feature of the city’s makeup, not an aberration.
That the city is founded in inequality, and that this inequality has been a major driver of violence over the decades is the idea at the core of Mike Davis’ landmark book City of Quartz which first appeared in 1990 and was republished in a new edition in 2006. There may be no more comprehensive examination of the forces that created Los Angeles as we know it today. Davis, now on the faculty at the University of California at Riverside, writes in the preface to the new edition the succinct thesis of his work: that globalization and its economic forces impacted different areas of Los Angeles’ society in different, often contradictory, ways.⁶ The ways in which Los Angeles refused to distribute the benefits of its growth to the lower classes over the end of the 20th century were the result, in Davis’ view, of the city and region’s unique history: the advent of racist homeowner associations that fragmented the early city, a lack of any true communities as a way of protecting monied-interests first in downtown and then the Westside, and a police force that has most often been openly hostile to the people it is supposed to protect. Though his 2006 data is now over a decade old, it is still worth looking at: Davis notes that L.A. is the “nation’s poverty capital” with more poor people than any other metro area; 78% of adults in L.A. County are not college graduates; 1.8 million Angelenos are illiterate. And on the ground, mass transit accounts for only 1 out of 50 trips in the region.⁷ This collage of factors reveals a picture when we step back for a better view: a largely impoverished (and mostly minority) population living apart from the wealthy (and mostly white) elite who control the city, forced by inadequate city services to spend a lifetime commuting in gridlock to unfulfilling wage jobs that will allow them to scrape out an existence in segregated neighborhoods until those neighborhoods are inevitably gentrified. As Davis puts it, Los Angeles has never really been properly planned or designed, “but it is infinitely envisioned.” What he means is that the city has always had an idea of itself, one put forth by civic boosters in the interest of ever greater investment and ever greater return, but at the expense of those forced to live in the harrowing reality on the ground. There is no other city in America that inhabits a fantasy of its own creation the way Los Angeles does.
How does Speed fit into Davis’ L.A.? For a book that was published four years before the film’s release, it could have been written with Speed in mind. But anyone with an even cursory experience of Los Angeles knows what it is like there, and how it differs from other major metropolitan areas in the state and the country: Driving through the Mid-City area and seeing permanent police barricades that keep cars from entering particular ends of neighborhoods; the very visceral difference between life north of the 10 freeway and south of the 10; the omnipresent LAPD, a rolling army that feels like an occupier in the southeastern portion of the city; the decadence of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, areas so wealthy it seems they couldn’t possibly be part of the same metro region as South L.A, an area still referred to by many Angelenos as a “ghetto” to be avoided. For outsiders, the traffic and commute times and lack of neighborhood cohesion are expected, indeed almost celebrated aspects of the city. After all, isn’t it famous for its traffic, and for being filled with aspirants to the entertainment business who have no roots there? Moreover, car ownership as a symbol of Californian independence has a particular resonance in the national psyche; perhaps nowhere is driving more connected to a state’s identity. The result of Los Angeles’ evolution along all these lines is a seemingly endless sprawl of pure urban-ness from the polluted beaches of Venice, to the tree-less parks of Hollywood, to the desert-licked edges of the Inland Empire where many Los Angeles workers must begin their daily drive.
This drive, this daily commute, is at the heart of Speed’s plot. Sandra Bullock’s Annie picks up the bus in Venice Beach and is headed downtown. Immediately, the racial and class divides of Los Angeles are embedded in the film. Annie, a young caucasian woman, is only riding the bus because she lost her license and is not allowed to drive. Later, in a conversation with Jack, this fact will be brought up in the context of a joke, as Annie is forced to drive the bus and she tells him that she lost her license after getting tickets for speeding. But the subtext of her presence on the bus is apparent to anyone who has lived in L.A., i.e. white professionals only use public transit if they have been convicted of a crime. De Bont’s desire to fill the bus with a variety of races and faces,⁸ while admirable, was entirely unwarranted: public transit in Los Angeles is the domain of the non-white population, another tool used in the class-separating efforts of the city alongside the education system and housing market. Looking around the bus, all of the memorable characters fit into this dynamic. There is the elderly black couple, the middle-aged asian woman, the Latino construction worker complete with lunch pail and hard hat, and of course the apparent Latino gangbanger who immediately pulls a gun when Jack makes his police presence known. The most memorable white character, an annoying podunk tourist played comically by Alan Ruck, is, like Annie, also on the bus for reasons not related to economic status. In fact part of the joke that he embodies is that a white tourist visiting Los Angeles might take the city bus as yet another attraction, a ride among the “regular people” (read: minorities) that could constitute fun for the day.
Davis describes these public transit commuters, along with drivers on the freeways coming from parts south and east, in the context of economic forces that have pushed poorer residents further to the literal margins of the city. As a result of corporate investment in the downtown and Westside areas, home prices for lower-class families are virtually unaffordable. These families must live far outside of the city’s centers and commute to work. As Davis writes, “The upscale malls, culture acropolises, Westside luxury, etc. are increasingly dependent on the virtual imprisonment of third-world service proletariat who live in ghettoes.”⁹ Service workers endure hundreds of hours in transit annually for the privilege of shining the homes of wealthy Angelenos. As manufacturing collapsed in the second half of the 20th Century, suburbs like Fontana grew on the grounds of former factories and created bases from which people travel three hours daily to get to and from work. Davis calls these areas “the new dormitories of SoCal’s burgeoning workforces.”¹⁰ These are the people represented on the bus in Speed, the pawns who must endure a harrowing journey in an attempt to simply go about their lives. Unfortunately for many Angelenos today, it is not an entirely fictional depiction.
However, the freeway is not the only physical arena used in the film. Speed unfolds in three distinct action sequences. First, in an elevator in a downtown corporate building, Jack thwarts Payne’s initial plot by rescuing an elevator-car full of office workers from an explosion and a plummet to certain death. Naturally, this angers Payne so much that he concocts the bus scheme, and harrowing freeway ride then constitutes the large middle act of the film. Finally, after surviving the bus fiasco, Jack must reckon with Payne face-to-face in the tunnels of the unfinished subway. While the latter two sequences are connected by public transit, all three share some common features. Notably, the experience of Los Angeles during the film is that of claustrophobic, suffocating, mechanized interiors. This holds true even during the freeway chase, as none of the passengers is allowed to disembark and the action takes place inside a small environment even as the bus races along the open freeway. The other common feature is the impact of police actions everywhere: at work, downtown, on the freeway, on the subway, at construction sites. There is nowhere out of reach of the LAPD. The freeway chase and subway showdown are most pertinent to the discussion here, but the entirety of the film is worth noting for its depiction of urban life as eternal warfare and an experience of endured terror.
Speed, in its construction, reflects the Los Angeles of 1994. For a resident of the city at that time, a hyper-violent police chase across the entirety of the city’s freeway system wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. As Davis notes, the very architecture of the city is designed to repress people, and “L.A. has a long tradition of class warfare.”¹¹ In the case of Los Angeles the occupying army is the LAPD, which has been regarded as such by residents dating back to the tenure of Chief William Parker.¹² Davis uses the term “fortress city” to describe Los Angeles: “brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor…In cities like L.A., on the bad edge of post-modernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture, and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort.”¹³ During the terribly-conceived and ultimately failed War On Drugs, paramilitary sweeps by the LAPD became the norm, and the kind of SWAT team that descends on the trapped elevator at the beginning of Speed, or the combat troops surrounding the suburban home where suspect Payne might be holed-up, represent normal post-1980’s police operations. That the department could be so over-staffed and over-weaponized as to do battle in the streets for a full day against one man makes it so that viewers of Speed don’t even have to suspend disbelief; if anything, the response is mild when compared with many residents’ own experiences.
Sustaining residents and police alike is the network of major arteries and veins, the freeway system that defines Los Angeles. South to north on “the 110” or “the 405,” east to west on “the 10.”¹⁴ A person’s life in Los Angeles is defined by what freeways they take to work, or to school, or that they avoid during rush hour. Geographic markers, neighborhood separators, escape routes to weekend trips south — the freeways serve many functions, even if sometimes only to remind a person that they can’t even live near where they need to go in the city. It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to live in Los Angeles and not be aware of the freeways, as they either encroach on your neighborhood or serve as the basis of small talk in meetings. While it is true that Los Angeles is as beholden to its freeways as California’s other major cities, Los Angeles is also unique in that its freeways are a battlefield where the police force wages war against momentary heroes of the oppressed underclasses. This is manifested in one of the defining aspects of the city: the police chase. Speed traffics in police chase imagery like few other films in Hollywood history.
Police chases are embedded in the national psyche as germane to Los Angeles for good reason. As an illustration, in 2004 California had more chases than any other state with 7,321 police pursuits; Los Angeles provided the backdrop for 5,596 of them (76%).¹⁵ Although televised since the 1960’s, police chases really took off in the early 1990’s at the advent of the cable news era, with Los Angeles finding itself on the national radar nearly weekly with an episode of automotive mayhem on one freeway or another. The participants were sometimes cheered by bystanders¹⁶ while the police deployed all manner of methods to stop them. During that decade, police chases became a veritable sport in Los Angeles,¹⁷ followed in some quarters with the same fervor as the Lakers. The crimes of the perpetrators, never important to begin with, are rarely even identified by newscasters. What matters is the spectacle, the hovering angle provided by news choppers, and the blur of Los Angeles hurtling by as for only a few minutes the freeway is cleared for one car to race down. It isn’t hard to imagine where the inspiration for Speed came from.
Although there have been thousands of pursuits by police across America, it is fitting that the most famous police chase of all time occurred in Los Angeles. On June 17th, 1994 the nation and the world were treated to non-stop coverage of O.J. Simpson being driven while he sat in the backseat of his white Bronco, gun to his head, with the police trailing. O.J. himself is a combination of L.A. glitz, celebrity, ego, and violence.¹⁸ As if fate had a hand, the Simpson chase occurred one week after the release of Speed, and at the exact moment that Simpson was hurtling up the 405 freeway the film was the #1 movie in America.
If Simpson had a relatively clear path back to Brentwood before he gave himself up, it was nothing compared to the entire empty freeway afforded Jack and his busload of charges in the film. As Annie guides the bus into an almost-deadly turn onto a ramp, the bus goes onto the 105 freeway. After many miles of unfettered progress, Jack is faced with an unfortunate scenario: the freeway is unfinished, and there is a huge gap in the road ahead. But he is blessed with a single-track mind and urges Annie to press the accelerator to the floor, resulting in a giant city bus leaping over a fifty-foot gap without the aid of a (visible) ramp. It is the iconic moment of the film, in which an object of Los Angeles public transit finds itself finally free of car traffic and then miraculously defies the city’s inadequate freeway system.
But the unfinished nature of the 105 is no fictional stretch. Running east-west, connecting LAX to Norwalk in the far southeast, the 105 freeway was in fact under construction during the filming of Speed, providing the perfect location for shooting a chase sequence of the magnitude required. Most recently, the 105 freeway is famous for being the setting of La La Land’s opening number, which is itself a huge movie sequence dedicated to the absurdity of Los Angeles traffic.¹⁹ It remains to be seen if Emma Stone tap-dancing on the 105–110 interchange will replace Sandra Bullock gripping a bus wheel in the popular imagination of this particular freeway. But in the 1990’s, the 105 was best known as an interminable construction project, a route first planned in the late 1960’s and not yet completed a quarter of a century later.
The reasons for this delay were many, but all of them ultimately sprang from the wells described by Davis. Most notable was neighborhood relocation, as by the second half of the 20th century it was impossible to build anything in Los Angeles without having to build right on top of something else. In the case of the 105, this meant a huge swath of family homes, some of them going back generations, with entire neighborhoods in the crosshairs of development.²⁰ Already during the city’s 1950’s building boom, largely Black and Latino neighborhoods suffered housing losses in the thousands due solely to freeway construction; to compound this class-biased problem, non-white residents were able to buy up only 3.3% of the new housing stock created during the period.²¹ So it was that when the 105 was planned, a history of ugly feelings persisted in the south L.A. neighborhoods that stood to suffer. As is the usual way of things in Los Angeles, white residents triumphant in the politics of NIMBY-ism managed to protect their own homes while using their checkbooks to lay waste to those less-fortunate. Ironically, the minority populations that were displaced by freeway construction then had to ride buses on those same freeways on their way back into the city for work. The image is sobering: workers looking out bus windows at where their roofs used to be, huge wheels pressing concrete pillars ever further down to where families once had foundations.
If one thinks that this kind of lament is melodramatic or overblown, consider the real consequences of Los Angeles freeway construction. The very first “set” of Crips, the far-reaching and (sometimes) violent street gang so often vilified in the public conscience, was created out of the ashes of 105-freeway demolition. Again Davis, citing extensive studies of the gang: “The first ‘set’ of Crips was created in the urban wasteland created by clearances for the Century Freeway (105). It was a traumatic destruction of neighborhood ties.”²² Thus Speed, in its infinite loop of urban creation-police response-urban destruction-police response, represents an outgrowth of civic and economic forces that worked together to create Los Angeles as the bleak picture of Southern California “progress” gone awry. That it is highly entertaining says more about the audience than it does about the filmmakers. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to think that thanks to an oft-delayed, contentious, and snail-paced freeway construction project called the 105, the filmmakers did indeed have the set they needed and could never have afforded to create. In an action film of this magnitude, it is difficult to quantify the financial benefit to the production of this pre-built location. But in creative terms, the use of an existing freeway within the confines of a shooting schedule means that the physical character of the freeway as it is ultimately represented on film was dictated more by its state in the early 1990’s than the whims of the filmmakers. It is in the freeway sequence that we see the strongest traces of the dance between filmmaking realities and the location; Speed only remains in our mind the way it does because of the state of the 105, not in spite of it. And the timing was fortuitous indeed: Speed wrapped production a matter of weeks before the freeway was opened to the public.
After outsmarting Payne and diverting the bus from the freeway to the tarmac at LAX, Jack manages to save all of the hostages as well as Annie, extricating himself from the brutality of a particularly hairy L.A. commute. But Payne is not finished, and in the film’s final act he kidnaps Annie, straps a bomb to her chest, and uses her to lure Jack into the bowels of the then-fledgling subway system. When Payne fires his machine gun in the downtown station, sending dozens of would-be riders scurrying, it seems as if Angelenos riding the subway was a regular occurrence. It was not. The Red Line train used in the film was only completed in 1993. It was the second light rail line in the system, after the mostly above-ground Blue Line connecting downtown to Long Beach that opened in 1990.
Light rail, like all other matters of transit in Los Angeles, was a politically-fraught enterprise spanning much of the post-war era. Early in the city’s history, a streetcar system effectively made Los Angeles a public transit city, akin to San Francisco or even New York. But it wasn’t long until the city succumbed to the economic realities of automotive culture in an expanding and more suburban metro area. Even if the idea that GM conspired to kill the streetcar is only an urban myth, at the very least buses were deemed a more profitable option by the city. Thus by the 1960’s Los Angeles was a car city with the lower classes relegated to public buses, and this system persisted for the next two decades-plus as a new light rail system was planned, started, delayed, and finally completed. Pop quiz: Why would a city destroy an effective public transit system to replace it with a reliance on individual cars, endless gridlock, and smog-choked skies? What Payne tells Jack should suffice as an answer: “I want money, Jack. I wish that I had some loftier purpose, but I’m afraid in the end it’s just the money.”
As Speed hurtles to its conclusion, a viewer from outside Los Angeles may have thought it curious to end the film in a subway, as in the public mind there is probably nothing more antithetical to Los Angeles. The final shot of the film, after Jack has decapitated Payne in a tunnel and then held Annie tight as their subway car flies off the rails and crashes through the construction site of the Hollywood station, is of the subway car in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Mann’s Chinese Theater surrounded by gawking tourists. It is the final moment in creating this alternate L.A., in which public transit is at the center of city life and even undergirds the movie business. With the line nearing completion while the film was being made, it was really just another case of fortuitous timing and the luck that sometimes meets a film production: an available setting, the right place at the right time. While today a resident may have some experience on the recently-opened Expo Line that runs from downtown to Santa Monica, or one of the other five lines in the system, in 1994 during the release of the film it was just as likely for that same resident to watch the final sequence and say to their friend in the next seat over, “Huh…I didn’t know we had a subway in L.A.”
It has been 25 years since Speed graced the multiplex. What has changed in L.A. in that time? The city is still a creature of freeways, and although the metro area has added nearly 2 million new residents in that time,²³ there has not been a freeway built since the 105 was completed. Traffic has only grown worse alongside this population influx, and gridlock in L.A. remains a cultural touchstone recognized around the world. Public transit, while it has improved, is still nowhere near the dominant means of transport in the area. Despite being the second-largest city in America, Los Angeles’ underground heavy rail system ranks as the ninth-most used.²⁴ If Speed were made today, it would have to be a very different movie. There is no such thing as an empty freeway to divert onto, there is no light rail under construction. Perhaps a new installment could latch onto the proposed LA-Las Vegas rapid rail project: Speed 3: Sin City. While the traffic jokes might still land, and the cartoonish portrayal of the city’s ethnic groups would be met with some consternation, the fact is that production of the film now would be difficult. It was the perfect storm of a production’s needs and a city’s realities, in terms of public works projects and urban violence.
Movies have changed as well. September 11th and the subsequent War on Terror fundamentally altered action films in the United States, so much so that the action movies of the early 1990’s like Speed can feel almost quaint in comparison. The “90’s-style action movie” ceased to exist after the early 2000’s, prior to which global- and techno-terrorism were not the dominant threats in popular culture. A non-Muslim, domestic terrorist holding Los Angeles hostage with homemade bombs simply doesn’t speak to a post-9/11 world (similar plots drove contemporary cult-classics such as Face/Off). Despite the fact that terrorism as it is known today has never affected Los Angeles, if there were to be an action movie like Speed today it would almost certainly need to have a more somber tone, and traffic in the kind of military intelligence-focused plots found in hit television shows like Homeland. The era of the single cop battling evil appears to be over.
Yet there is still much of Speed left on the ground in Los Angeles. The imprint of its sets, from the 105 to the Red Line, loom large. The LAPD is still seen by many citizens as a corrupt force. Violence still plagues the city, although there have been improvements in recent years that coincide with national downward trends. The stars of the film have gone on to illustrious careers, playing iconic roles and participating in some of the best movies of their generation (and even teaming up for the Speed-sequel-in-an-alternate-universe, The Lake House).
Perhaps the lasting impact of Speed is meant to be only in the arena of cult classics and box office winners. The physical Los Angeles of Speed no longer exists, and never will again. It was created of its time, but not only for its time, as it left an indelible mark on American action movies. After so many years, it still lives out the same fantasy, that somebody can clear out the freeway. That the police would always be there is still a given, even an accepted bargain by residents. But for the times when one wishes the LAPD would do something good, that the drive in Los Angeles would be a little less gridlocked, and that people would come together as a community during the toughest (if somewhat cartoonish) of times, then Speed does exactly what movies are supposed to do: not mirror reality, but let us escape it.
¹In 2017 the average Los Angeles driver spent 102 hours in peak traffic. See City News Service. “L.A.’s traffic congestion is world’s worst for six straight year, study says.” Los Angeles Times, 6 February 2018, Local News.
²“The Whim of a Madman.” YouTube, clip from Speed uploaded by Shower Ideas Studios, 23 January 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6RRO3rFsz4
³ “Speed (1994).” Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=speed.htm
⁴ Tapley, Kristopher. “‘Speed’ 20th anniversary: Meet the passengers of bus 2525.” Uproxx: Hitfix, 6 June 2014, https://uproxx.com/hitfix/speed-20th-anniversary-meet-the-passengers-of-bus-2525. Accessed 23 January 2019.
⁵ Sklar, Debbie L. “FBI: San Diego Has Lowest Murder Rate of Any Big American City.” Times of San Diego, 25 September 2017, https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2017/09/25/fbi-san-diego-has-lowest-murder-rate-of-any-big-american-city/. Accessed 23 January 2019.
⁶ Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. London, Verso, 2006. Pp. vi.
⁷ Ibid, xi-xv.
⁸ Tapley, Kristopher. “‘Speed’ 20th anniversary: Meet the passengers of bus 2525.” Uproxx: Hitfix, 6 June 2014, https://uproxx.com/hitfix/speed-20th-anniversary-meet-the-passengers-of-bus-2525. Accessed 23 January 2019.
⁹ City of Quartz, 226–7.
¹⁰ Ibid, 376.
¹¹ Ibid, 229.
¹² Ibid, 271.
¹³ Ibid, 224.
¹⁴ Geyer, Grant. “”The” Freeway in Southern California.” American Speech, vol. 76 no. 2, 2001, pp. 221–224. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/2812.
¹⁵ Friend, Tad. “The Pursuit of Happiness.” The New Yorker, 23 January 2006, p.64.
¹⁶ Melton, Mary. “How High-Speed Car Chases Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles.” Los Angeles Magazine, 7 April 2016, originally run in a 2003 issue of Los Angeles, https://www.lamag.com/longform/how-high-speed-car-chases-became-a-citywide-pastime-in-los-angeles. Accessed 23 January 2019.
¹⁷ Ibid. The story of a police officer creating the subscription website “PursuitWatch.com” is particularly depressing.
¹⁸ For an engrossing discussion of O.J. Simpson, see: O.J.: Made in America. Directed by Ezra Edelman, ESPN Films, 2016. For a documentary specific to the infamous white Bronco freeway chase, see: June 17th, 1994. Directed by Brett Morgen, ESPN Films, 2010.
¹⁹ La La Land. Directed by Damien Chazelle, Summit Entertainment, 2016.
²⁰ For further discussion of the 105 freeway project, see: Perez, Jovanni. “The Los Angeles Freeway and the History of Community Displacement.” The Toro Historical Review, 29 September 2017, https://thetorohistoricalreview.org/2017/09/29/the-los-angeles-freeway-and-the-history-of-community-displacement. Accessed 23 January 2019. For a recent look at the 105’s legacy see: Sahagun, Louis. “L.A. County set to build its first new freeway in 25 years, despite many misgivings.” Los Angeles Times, 10 February 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-high-desert-freeway-20180210-htmlstory.html. Accessed 23 January 2019. See also: Masters, Nathan. “They Moved Mountains (And People) To Build L.A.’s Freeways.” Gizmodo, 17 March 2014. Accessed 23 January 2019.
²¹ City of Quartz, 168.
²² Ibid, 298.
²³ “Los Angeles County Population. (2017–12–16)” World Population Review, http://worldpopulationreview.com/california-counties/los-angeles-county. Accessed 10/10/2018.
²⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership. Accessed 23 January 2019. Even when adding light rail annual ridership, Los Angeles public transport by train pales in comparison to New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. It is first and foremost a bus city.
