The Streetcars that time forgot (courtesy Los Angeles Public Library)We’ve gotten some interesting feedback this week from friends and others about Tom’s entry for the A New Infrastructure Los Angeles competition. One comment led to a quick google search for “LA streetcar”, which yielded the fascinating 1938 Los Angeles Railway route map above, courtesy the Los Angeles Public Library. Now, we knew that LA had an significant network of streetcars prior to the hegemony of the automobile—but this map suggests that its coverage was extensive enough to serve the transit needs of a diffuse urban field, something that Los Angeles and other sunbelt cities struggle to do today.

This begs an important question: what is the difference—really—between the network of streetcars that once was and the network of buses that serves LA County today, besides the mode of conveyance?  A closer look at the map above bears out this basic equivalence, revealing that the late 30's was actually a period of transition between the era of the streetcar and that of the bus: "Motor coach" lines extend from the terminus of several west and south-bound streetcar routes above.

Why do we neglect the bus in discussions on the subject of public transit? Buses hold the significant advantage of flexibility over any mode that requires fixed-rail and electric power infrastructure to operate.  Until very recently, however, the bus has suffered the stigma of bad object to the the private car's virtuous individualism. Like so much public housing, municipal bus systems have been allowed to shrink and decay, thanks to the post-war exodus of the city’s middle class tax base to the suburbs in their cars. To the point, Yonah Freemark of the Transport Politic reminds us that the cruel irony of the civil rights movement’s early triumphs in bus desegregation was the general disinvestment in municipal transportation that followed.

So as the dust settles post-recession and we find ourselves on the other side of peak oil, how will we reinvest in efficient, shared transportation? A couple things are clear: the car is too entrenched to simply be replaced in a fit of transit shock-therapy, and the cost of new infrastructure is exponentially greater in the age of global demand for scarce resources. The challenge will be to find ways to do two things synergistically: leverage some sort of new middle-class transit lifestyle as means of paying for modest retrofits of our roadways into ...

Electric highways? Park-boulevards? Bike-boulevards? Eco-boulevards? Urban Pasta?

In any case, streets and highways currently smother 26% of LA’s land with publicly-funded, uninhabited, impervious, traffic-clogged, boundary-forming heat islands, utilized by wealthy citizens for free. We can do better. High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes on the freeway are perhaps the most practical way to get the rich to start paying into transit voluntarily (with almost zero infrastructural spending), with the added benefit of relieving congestion. So-called “Lexus lanes” are essentially HOV lanes shared by Buses and those single-occupancy vehicles willing to pay a premium for their use.  As a new milieu for the “early adopter,” HOT lanes could become self-funded laboratories for almost anything good: new clean technologies and interesting hybridization of mass- and private transportation, among other things:

SELF-FUNDED TRANSIT LABORATORIES: HOT lanes are already planned for the I-10 and I-110 freeways in Los Angeles, but they will replace HOV lanes, thereby penalizing carpools. This is obviously counter-productive and suggests that HOT lanes should replace regular mixed-flow lanes instead of existing HOV.