Everyone knows Los Angeles as a car city. Five-lane freeways, parking minimums, the 405 at rush hour, the assumption that no one walks anywhere. But this wasn't always the case — and the story of how Los Angeles transformed from one of the world's best-served transit cities into the world's most car-dependent metropolis is one of the most consequential urban planning stories of the 20th century.
The 1940s: The Pacific Electric at Its Peak
In the 1940s, Los Angeles was served by the Pacific Electric Railway — a network so extensive that it was known as the Red Cars. At its peak, the Pacific Electric was the largest electric railway system in the world: over 1,100 miles of track connecting Los Angeles to San Bernardino, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Pasadena, and dozens of points between. You could board a Red Car in downtown LA and arrive at the beach in Santa Monica in 50 minutes.
The system wasn't perfect — it shared streets with cars and was frequently late — but it worked. Middle-class Angelenos used it daily. The film industry, which was then at its zenith (the studio system's golden age ran roughly 1930–1960), transported actors, crew, and executives across the basin on Red Car lines. Hollywood itself was developed around streetcar access.
What People Actually Did in 1940s LA
Los Angeles, California. People on a downtown street. By photographer Russell Lee, 1942. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
The Los Angeles of the 1940s was a city in explosive, sometimes chaotic growth. The population doubled between 1930 and 1950. Defense industry jobs — aircraft manufacturing at Lockheed, Douglas, and North American Aviation; shipbuilding at Long Beach — drew workers from across the country. Japanese Americans were forcibly removed to internment camps in 1942; their neighborhoods and businesses were absorbed by others. Returning veterans after 1945 found a city building itself as fast as lumber and concrete could be delivered.
Social life centered on several distinct zones:
- Downtown: Broadway was lined with movie palaces — the Orpheum, the Million Dollar, the Los Angeles Theatre — which are now on the National Register of Historic Places and largely restored. Department stores (Bullock's, The Broadway) were the retail heart of the city.
- Bunker Hill: a Victorian residential neighborhood above downtown, connected by funicular (the Angels Flight, still operating intermittently) — later demolished in the 1960s urban renewal era
- Hollywood Boulevard: already touristy, already full of studios and glamour, the walk of fame not yet installed (that came in 1960) but the mythology already fully formed
- Central Avenue: the heart of Black LA, running south from downtown through neighborhoods that became the center of West Coast jazz and bebop. Clubs like the Dunbar Hotel brought Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington to LA audiences. This history is largely invisible to contemporary tourists.
The Destruction of the Red Cars
The Pacific Electric began declining in the late 1940s and was largely dismantled by 1961. The reasons are complex and contested. National City Lines — a holding company with investment from General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil, and Mack Trucks — bought many streetcar systems across America and converted them to bus lines. In 1949, the companies were convicted of conspiracy to monopolize the sale of bus equipment, but the systems were already gone. Whether this was the primary cause of the Red Cars' decline or just one factor among many (car ownership was rising regardless) remains debated by historians, but the outcome was decisive: LA chose the freeway.
The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 gave California billions in federal funding to build the freeway network. By the late 1960s, the freeway grid that defines contemporary LA was essentially complete — and with it, the assumption that owning a car was not optional but existential.
What You Can Still See
Traces of the 1940s city are there if you know to look:
- The Broadway theater corridor downtown is undergoing restoration — the United Artists Theatre and Orpheum still host events
- Angels Flight Railway, the funicular to Bunker Hill, has been restored and operates on Hill Street
- The Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue is a designated historic landmark
- The Getty Images Archive and the Los Angeles Public Library have extraordinary photographic collections of 1940s LA accessible online
- The Petersen Automotive Museum tells the car side of this story in vivid detail
Modern LA's Metro rail system has been quietly rebuilding what was dismantled — the Expo Line now serves Santa Monica, echoing the old Red Car route. It took 60 years to undo what was undone in 20. The city is still negotiating its relationship with how it wants to move.