The city of Los Angeles has rightfully gripped the nation’s attention this month as wildfires rage on. While the devastation induced by our changing climate demands superhuman effort to squelch it, the transportation sector (stubbornly responsible for the greatest share of U.S. emissions) is ironically observing a significant milestone. January 24, 2025, marks the centennial of the implementation of the Traffic Ordinance for the City of Los Angeles. This 35-page bureaucratic document redefined the use of America’s streets, tailoring them to the benefit of the automotive industry.
American streets were once dominated by people. A documentary travelogue of New York City (embedded below) captured by Scenska Biografteatern from 1911 is crowded with pedestrians crisscrossing streets in their daily routines. Trollies, carriages, and the occasional automobile jostle by, unhindered by traffic signals or centerlines. To us today, it can seem chaotic, but the pace of the street is slow, and people navigate each other with fluency. San Francisco’s A Trip Down Market Street, shot just a year before the 1906 earthquake, shows the view from a streetcar, picturing the Ferry Building at the street’s end obscured by intertwining streetcars, horses, bicyclists, cars, and people. Pedestrians stand undaunted in the center of the street, waiting to board the slow-moving streetcar. A boy playfully darts in front of the train, as if he is challenging it to a game of tag. Growing up in American cities meant playing in the streets, even in the country’s most dense neighborhoods.
Back then, people shared the roadway with streetcars and bikes. In the early 1900s, Los Angeles had the most extensive electric streetcar system anywhere. From Minneapolis and Chicago to Washington D.C. and New York City, bicycles were used by women and men commuting to work in the 1890s. And they were not alone. As Evan Friss chronicles in The Cycling City, people rode bikes in U.S. cities as much as they now ride in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the best cycling cities in the world.
This was all before the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance was passed. The Ordinance was written by Miller McClintock, then a doctoral student of municipal government at Harvard University, who was recruited by a champion of the automobile industry, Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had dropped out of the University of Chicago to sell Studebakers at 18 years old. At 33, he was close to making his first million dollars in the industry and had been appointed chairman of the Los Angeles Traffic Commission – a body responsible for regulating streets. For the first time, the Ordinance prioritized cars on the city’s increasingly congested roadways. It quickly became the template for the country.