Dudes have to get off the Freeway, then travel through SF on surface streets. Streets where there are pedestrians. More traffic equals more dead pedestrians.
Oh, well that’s kind of murky territory then. What makes you think there wouldn’t be fatal accidents on the freeway? Although I suppose the very hilly nature of SF makes it more dangerous for pedestrians than other places?
Uncle Cecil’s Take on the LA Streetcar “conspiracy.”
The rapid growth of Los Angeles in the early 1900’s can be attributed to three main factors:
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Climate: It’s quite pleasant living in the LA area, and you can pretty much choose your own micro-climate, from the cooler regions near the ocean to the warmer regions in the inland valleys. By comparison, the Bay Area has cooler temps, and more fog and rain.
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Geography: There is a LOT of land available to build on, even before they started chewing up mountainsides. The whole of the LA metropolitan area basically includes everything from Ventura on the west to the Redlands area on the east (120 miles long), and everything from the Newhall/Saugus area on the north to San Clemente on the south (about 90 miles). That’s a LOT of real estate, even given that there are large chunks of it that have difficult to build on topology. The Bay Area, while fairly large itself, has this huge chunk of water in the middle of it, which makes building out the area difficult (which is why all the commuters now come in from the Central Valley, to the east). And while LA’s lack of water would have been an impediment to growth, the city solved that in the early part of the 1900’s with the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
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Industry: specifically, oil, Hollywood, and airplanes. A thriving industry sprang up when oil became important as a source of automobile fuel; at one point the LA basin produced one-quarter the world’s oil. Then, the boom in airplane manufacturing provided a steady need for workers and support industries, allowing the basin to import more and more people without causing an oversupply of labor. And the Hollywood film industry not only employed people, but made LA seem like a very pleasant place to live.
Now, the OP asks, why Los Angeles over San Francisco? Well, mostly it’s the land issue. If you think about it, both areas are pretty well built-out (Los Angeles actually has some ways to go to totally build out; Orange County has substantial tracts of farmland still). So to the extent that the LA metropolitan area is substantially larger than the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose metropolitan area, it’s an issue of available land on which to build. The result is that the greater Bay Area has about 6 million people, whereas the greater LA area has about 17 million people. San Diego also has substantially less flat area on which to build than LA, but keep an eye on it; it will catch and pass the Bay Area someday, just because of its proximity to the border and its plentiful ability to expand to the northeast.
Now, as with any story of expansion, there are lots of subplots. In the early part of the 20th century, LA had one of the best electric railway systems in the world, facilitating movement around the area. When the post-WWII motoring boom hit, LA built a ton of freeways; literally no other metropolitan area is as well accessed by a freeway system. The “Port” of “Los Angeles” is not a natural harbor, but the visionary men of LA in the late-1800’s realized that no longer mattered. With the advent of non-wind-powered ships, you didn’t need to protect docked ships from the weather in a natural harbor. So, instead, a massive breakwater was built and a port was born, which is one of the most prolific in the world, especially in container traffic. And this port was linked to a substantially better railroad network than that which serves San Francisco, because the railway out of SF has to go over the Sierras to get much of anywhere, whereas the railway out of LA simply has lots and lots of desert to cross; which, of course, trains do quite efficiently.
So, in sum, LA got so big because it had a lot of land in which to grow, and there were men at the turn of the 20th century who envisioned that growth and saw to it that it happened (usually lining their own pockets in the process). The San Francisco Bay area also grew, but it had limitations on that growth which were primarily geographic, but also to some extent cultural. Just wait until it gets passed in size by the Sacramento/Stockton megalopolis. 
By the way, just an afterthought: do NOT, if you live in the Bay Area, sit there all smug about your area having a better moral approach to this issue. It didn’t. LA tricked the Owens Valley property owners into committing self-destruction by selling water rights, then built the Aqueduct; San Francisco managed to damn the Hetch Hetchy valley and import its own water, which sits in a reservoir built in a small valley directly over the San Andreas fault. LA had robber barons and train men; San Francisco did as well, most notably Leland Stanford. For every sordid episode in LA’s history from the period 1875 to 1950, you can usually find a parallel in San Francisco’s history.
Good post, DSYoungEsq, but there are a few things I feel the need to comment on:
It doesn’t make any difference whether the ships in the port move by wind or not - they still need to be protected from the weather. Hulls of steel and iron make a small difference, but not the motive force to move the ship. Sailing vessels can be protected in artificial harbors just as easily as motor vessels. Steel-hulled ships of either type - sail or motor - seek sheltered harbors for a reason, not because it’s convenient.
Also, rail lines running out of San Francisco do not need to run over the Sierras. Once you get east of the East Bay Hills, there’s the Central Valley, with a clear shot north and south for hundreds of miles. In fact, Stockton and Sacremento, in the Central Valley, are large rail termeni even to the present day. Directly east, of course, is the Sierras, but even the First Transcontinental Railroad ran through them to Sacremento before there was a southern route connecting to L.A.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#United_States
Rail lines running out of Los Angeles do need to cross mountains unless they hug the coast northwest towards Santa Barbara or south to San Diego. You’re correct about the fact that they have to run through desert, but it’s high desert - much of the Mojave Desert, for example, is at 600 to 1,200 meters above sea level with higher peaks and the lowest point in the U.S. - a challenging range of elevations. Going up mountains makes it difficult to build, but so does going down steep grades into valleys.
L.A. is bounded on the west and south by ocean, on the north by the Santa Monica Mountains, and on the east by the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains. The topography immediately surrounding the L.A. area is more challenging than that immediately surrounding the S.F. area, although the L.A. area has considerably more flat land within those boundaries.
I think it’s notable that L.A.'s growth really only kicked in during the 20th century - the rail lines were already built when S.F. was larger, and L.A. did not exceed San Francisco’s size until between 1910 and 1920, when the railroads had been serving S.F. for 40 years and had been serving L.A. for 30 years.
In general, you’re right about geographical and some cultural features encouraging a larger city to be built in L.A. versus S.F., but I’m not sure the topographical challenge to railroad building is one of them.
Well it is the cultural epicenter of the Western U.S. now, San Francisco notwithstanding. I like all the museums, but I don’t like the typical L.A. lifestyle of having to drive everywhere. I like the fact that I live in an area of West L.A. where I can walk to lots of places, but I would prefer to live in an older, more urban neighborhood like downtown or Hollywood, from where I could take the train to work in El Segundo.
Thank-you for the compliment. 
I grew up in the Mojave Desert, went to law school in Sacramento, lived in Tahoe, and on the Central Coast, worked in San Jose, etc., so I have some familiarity with the topography involved. 
Regarding the railroads:
There are two main lines that run east from Los Angeles. The first runs up over the Cajon pass, through Barstow and thence eastward (Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe). The second runs through the gap between Mt. San Bernardino and Mt. San Jacinto, down through Indio, and on to Tuscon via Yuma (Southern Pacific). The Santa Fe RR eventually ends up in Chicago via St. Louis. The SP RR eventually arrives in New Orleans, via Houston (IIRC). Note that the SP line crosses no significant mountain ranges between LA and Tuscon. As for the Santa Fe line, while Cajon pass isn’t exactly a piece of cake, it’s only 4000 ft. high, and once over it, the route through Barstow and on to Flagstaff is not that difficult. Much more difficult was the Union Pacific route that went from Barstow through Vegas and on to Utah, but that was only tangentially connected to the LA area, and not the main source of LA commerce.
By comparison, from SF eastward, the rail lines have to get over the Sierra Nevada. Yes, they go through Sacramento, they can head north to Seattle, but in the late 1800’s, that was irrelevant. Commerce was with the Midwest, and through it, to the East Coast. The main pass the railroad takes across the Sierras is 8000’ high. The mountains themselves require more than 50 miles of track to complete the crossing. The line is subject to closure in the winter months from snow. It is a MUCH more difficult and expensive line to ship goods on than either southern route.
So why was it first to completion? Well, primarily because the Civil War precluded an attempt to build through the South, which had been identified as the premium route during the 50’s. The Gadsen Purchase was made in 1853 in order to secure the most efficient route as US territory. But the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to such plans. Instead, the federal government in 1862 designated the central route as preferred, and enacted the Pacific Railroad Act to accomplish this design. It should be noted that the efforts of the “Big Four” in California, all of whom were San Francisco based, had much to do with this decision. It also made much sense, because in the 1860’s, the San Francisco area of California, as well as the Sacramento and Gold Rush regions, was much more important than the then sleepy little hacienda of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula.
Note that it was completed in 1869, but that by 1883 (a mere 14 years later), there were two southern routes AND a more northern route completed.
Now, look at the demographics for the populations of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco during the 1850’s went from less than 7250 permanent residents to 56,802. After that, by decade the rate of growth per decade was:
1860's 163%
1870's 56%
1880's 28% 155%
1890's 15% 103%
1900's 22% 211%(!)
1910's 22% 81%
1920's 25% 115%
1930's 00% 22%
1940's 22% 31%
What are those numbers that show up to the right? That’s Los Angeles, which was less than 20,000 in 1880, but which exploded after that. Note the correspondence of this explosion with the arrival of two transcontinental railroad lines in 1882 and 1883. 
So, as we can see, the arrival of the railroads was the initator of population explosion in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, it sustained the population growth through the 70’s, but once the 80’s hit and the rail lines into SoCal had been built, there was less population flood into the Bay Area (yes, I know this also has to do with the relative size of SF and LA, but LA didn’t start expanding its boundaries until the 20th century). And the plain fact is that the rail lines into LA from the East are less difficult to run trains over than the one into SF from the East.
No, it shouldn’t have. San Francisco has the highest vehicle density in the country, but traffic congestion still ranks below that of LA. The mostly orderly layout and lack of freeways that everyone is pushing to get on means that traffic within the city is more spread out. What makes you think that one or two arterial freeways wouldn’t be just as packed as the bridges are now, with both residents and through traffic clogging them up?
Take your example (crossing South to North) — while 19th Ave (not 19th Street) is mostly arterial, there’s another arterial route, 101/Van Ness. Then there’s Sunset, or the Great Highway, or any parallel residential street if need be. The interesting thing is that most people who routinely drive in SF have their own preferred route they think is faster, and there’s no point in arguing, since just about all of them take the same amount of time.
As for the fatality issue, unless you have some clear data, I doubt that the total death rate would all that different with highways. You may be correct that more pedestrians are killed, but the deaths would just be shifted to drivers. Not to discount the moral argument that pedestrians are the more innocent group, but claiming that the city values aesthetics over human life is going too far.
This sort of thing was typical of the values prevalent during the era. I’m sure the Old Boys at the Bohemian Club in SF were no more ethical with regard to things like water rights, than were the Old Boys at the Jonathan and California Clubs in L.A.
Passenger mile per Passenger mile, Freeways are safer than surface streets for the drivers. And nearly infinitely safer for pedestrians.
DSYoungEsq did your source have the population growth numbers for the 1950’s? I would love to see what happened to LA population post war.
I was born and grew up in LA. When I attended elementary school, the teachers would start the new year with a geography lesson. They would ask each child where they were born, and when they came to LA. For several years, I was the only native Californian in the room of 30 children.
I think this population influx is due to several things. During the war, GI (at least those not actively in combat watched movies to pass the time in the evening. Those movies were made in Hollywood. The outdoor scenes showed what probably looked like paradise to a GI far from home. Add to this the fact that the City of LA is freakin huge. Four hundred sixty nine square miles if Wiki is to be believed. At the time of the war, the city limit signs were way way beyond where the city was located. (for example I know an older gentleman that grew up in Hollywood/Silver Lake in the 1920-1930. He told us, how going to Tujunga was a full day trip with a picnic lunch and a visit with friends in the middle. He would have never left the City of LA during such a drive. By comparison, such a trip now takes less than 30 minutes.) This led to a common GI joke that can be seen in some old news reels, photographs, and period movies. A large sign post with signs that point to various home towns with mileages (New York–> 2481miles) would often sport a sign that read LA City Limits This kept LA in the minds of the GIs.
After the war, Cheap land, GI bill houses, good weather, and jobs. Added to the oil, water, Hollywood, and the Rose Parade that have already been mentioned. You wind up with me being the only native in the class (and this just because my father packed up as soon as he got home and led the parade.)
I’d have to agree with the idea that a freeway - even if just a local one not connected to any external interstate highway, is a very good thing. City driving uses more gasoline, and there are innumerablly more factors to worry about.
Speakling of LA, I actually read that the traffic congestion in LA is a result not of too many roads, but of the oppositte - too few. The system was excellent when first designed. However, they haven’t expanded the system to meet new growth, so it’s ridiculously overburdened.
I’ve been an L.A. and S.F. resident as well - I’d say I know the topography pretty well too.
I’d call the San Bernardino Mountains a significant mountain range, but perhaps this is a difference of opinion. The San Gorgonio Pass sits at 762 m (2,600 ft), while not the Donner Pass (2,160 m or 7,085 ft), is still pretty high above the basin – and a greater barrier than the East Bay Hills.
The point is that once the railroads were completed, people could more freely move between points east and west. After the completion of both railroads, people didn’t avoid San Francisco because they couldn’t get there – railroad access to San Francisco was finished first. Even after rail access to San Francisco and Los Angeles was complete, people could travel to San Francisco via the Los Angeles rail connection if there were sufficient reason to move there. The key is that while you are correct that railroads enabled a population boom in both cities (shipping enabled an earlier population boom in San Francisco,) railroad access did not determine the eventual size these cities would reach.
Kansas has few barriers to railroad access, and yet has a low population.
This is a good point that I didn’t consider in my earlier post – it’s not that people can’t migrate, but that business opportunities draw people to an area. On the other hand, ‘business opportunities’ is at best indirectly indicated by rail access, there are industries that don’t use rail, and many industries for which shipping is preferable to rail. Do we know anything about job formation in S.F. and L.A. for the time period 1870-1920?
But the SF line was already extant – how can we be sure that rail access was a determining factor in population growth once both cities had it? I would imagine that once people could move into both cities, the other factors – flat land for building, climate, availability of resources, cultural choices, etc. would overwhelm rail access as a determining factor for people to move to that city.
As I mentioned though, I hadn’t thought about the difference the rails would make for business opportunities – it seems like we would need more information on the details of LA and SF’s growth to figure out how big a role that played.
I recall seeing a large mural somewhere in downtown L.A., perhaps at City Hall, that must have been painted early ca. 1960’s. (Dunno if it’s still there.) It showed the projected, completed freeway system expected to be finished in 20 years. It showed about twice as many freeways as presently exist. The plan was to built every second one, then fill in over the years as traffic grew. Instead, as new freeways first went up, the future ones were deleted from the master plan as protests increased.
I read somewhere that the original master plan called for freeways about 4 miles apart in both north-south and east-west directions, subject to terrain. This meant that in any trip of 2 miles or more, you were expected to get on a freeway at the nearest point. But only half of this was ever built.
So the present system wasn’t designed to be adequate for the 1980’s. No wonder it’s congested now.
I also recall reading someone saying that to handle today’s Hollywood to Ventura traffic for example, it would take an additional 10 lanes. To which someone else retorted (I think it was me), “Then why aren’t we building them?”
Ok, several things to deal with here.
First of all, let’s get back on track with the railroad issue:
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The rail lines from San Francisco to the Midwest go through the Sierra Nevada. This is a significantly less economic route to ship on than the lines out of Los Angeles across the desert. Cajon pass is no where near as difficult to get a train over as the Donner Summit route. And the route out through the so-called San Gorgonio pass is almost trivial; if you’ve been over that route by car you would know that it hardly works up a sweat (yeah, a mixed metaphor; so sue me
). Indeed, I question Wikipedia’s assertion of elevation for that pass, since most maps mark it as having either 1500’ elevation, or 2200’ elevation. Who CARES what the East Bay Hills are like? They aren’t the impediment to rail traffic out of San Francisco. The impediment is the Sierra Nevada, over which even a North South line has to pass to get to Los Angeles (unless you want to take route built much later, and very hard to keep open up the Salinas River Valley and thence to the coast). -
My only point about the railroads in my inital post was that, “this port was linked to a substantially better railroad network than that which serves San Francisco, because the railway out of SF has to go over the Sierras to get much of anywhere, whereas the railway out of LA simply has lots and lots of desert to cross; which, of course, trains do quite efficiently.” So the port of Los Angeles links to a commercially superior option for rail transshipping. This helped fuel the growth of Los Angeles. So it isn’t that rails fuel population growth by bringing in people, but, rather, that rails fuel population growth by offering economic opportunity which produces jobs, which produces growth.
This, by the way, is supported by the fact that almost all of the efforts to build out California were made by men conncected in some way with the railroads, or men who managed to obtain their own railroad networks to fulfill their plans. In the pre-automobile era, the rails were everything; you did not ship by truck.
As the data show, San Francisco had relatively uninspired growth after 1880. This coincides with the rapid expansion of Los Angeles. The only reason that the numerical population didn’t equalize until 1917 was that Los Angeles started from a fairly small figure, and San Francisco in 1880 was already a quarter-million strong. But we cannot legitimately assert that LA’s growth spurt didn’t occur until substantially after the railroads were already in place.
The data for SF and LA in 1960 are as follows: -4% growth for SF compared to 1950; +26% growth for LA. So SF actually shrunk in the 50’s while LA grew, but LA’s growth was no longer phenomenal, and actually had not been since 1930.
Source of my census numbers. An interesting site.
By this analysis, we would never have surface streets: all traffic would be moving around by freeway. :rolleyes:
San Francisco is a pain to drive through from south to north. It would be nice to have a freeway up 19th Ave. It would also be ugly, spoil the character of the place, and subject to the same troubles (earthquakes most notably) that all the other freeways in the area have. I, for one, despite having had many a day in the traffic of 19th Ave., and Van Ness, and others, would be quite unhappy to see a freeway there.
Further, you simply cannot support your argument without demonstrating that there would be significant traffic reduction on the N-S arterials if a freeway was built; in the absence of such reduction, pedestrian deaths would hardly be affected much. For that matter, how about offering some statistics about pedestrian deaths on Van Ness and 19th Ave, while you are at it? :dubious: