They trace ancient routes in the Southern California landscape, linking communities in what Los Angeles’ elegant observer D.J. Waldie, author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” calls the “archipelago of places.” They connect homes to workplaces, warehouses to retailers. They insert Los Angeles into trade routes that extend from the manufacturing centers of China to the vast consumer base of North America.

And they bifurcate communities and encourage sprawl. They are monuments to racial injustice, sometimes intended, sometimes inadvertent. They contribute to the warming of the climate and the isolation of Angelenos.

They are the defining feature of the Los Angeles landscape: its freeways.

The Los Angeles freeway system got its start in the years between the wars. The Pasadena Freeway, originally known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway, opened in 1938 and was completed in 1940. Hard as it is to believe today, it was designed to be aesthetically pleasing, to offer a peacefully winding trip between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles. It was built to carry 27,000 cars a day; today, it typically sees more than five times that.

The rest of the network filled in, mostly in the years immediately after World War II. The 110 reached south from downtown to the Port of Los Angeles, making it not just a scenic route for Pasadena residents to go to work but also a link in trade to the Pacific Rim (a link further bolstered by the 710 freeway and the Alameda Corridor). Interstate 5 connected northern and southern California, later uniting the entire West Coast. Interstate 10 connected downtown to the beach and extended east into the Inland Empire and beyond. State Route 60 began in downtown Los Angeles and headed due east to Arizona, taking in Ontario, San Bernardino and Riverside along the way.

Collectively, they created a web of connection and alienation. Individually, they opened up some neighborhoods, shut some down and cut some up. Their effects linger with Angelenos today in every aspect of our lives.

“Recently Caltrans identified 43 priority sites for where wildlife crossings are needed the most.”

Wildlife crossings have emerged as a best possible solution for how we can bolster urban ecological resilience.

“The freeways were a fix,” says Clare Beer, a political ecologist and professor of urban and environmental studies in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. Freeways are so interwoven with the life of the region that their study is inescapable, she says, though the conclusions are more bleak than encouraging.

“They’re not a fix anymore,” she says. “They’re a problem.”

“They’re not a fix anymore,” she says. “They’re a problem.”

The 110

The goal of the Arroyo Seco Parkway was to provide a convenient scenic trip for the middle-class residents of Pasadena to shuttle to their downtown workplaces. It succeeded. Considered the nation’s first freeway, the 110 was distinguished by its limited access — on-ramps and off-ramps were a new idea in 1938, replacing intersections that slowed traffic.

But intersections also are choices, places where drivers can turn off the main road, stop for groceries or a bite to eat, and discover a community and those who live there. Limited access meant limited exposure — now, those Pasadena commuters could make their ways to and from work without getting a glimpse of Highland Park or Montecito Heights. And that’s to say nothing about the little community in Chavez Ravine, soon to become slated for public housing and then bulldozed for Dodger Stadium.

Those neighborhoods gave way to the freeways in part because riders on the freeways had no connection to those neighborhoods. They were pass-throughs. The business of the city was at one end, and the relaxation of its residents was on the other. Why bother with the spaces in between?

But there is no denying that they brought benefits as well. The most obvious was the kind of life they made possible. The man or woman working in downtown Los Angeles could live farther out, thanks to the freeway, could own a bungalow in Pasadena and raise a family there, with a yard and a dog and a life that American advertising and popular culture lionized. There are too many versions of the “American Dream” to call it a single thing, but one was certainly that. And it was thanks to the freeway.

The 10

If the Pasadena Freeway opened up the region for commuters, the 10 freeway connected Los Angeles to something vastly larger: the universe of international trade.

The Santa Monica Freeway alone did not accomplish that. There is no major port in Santa Monica, as there is at the base of the 110 and 710 freeways, which link to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. But those freeways brought goods from the ports to nation’s rail network, sending out everything from toys to medical supplies made in China to the rest of the country.

In building the 10, planners anticipated the region’s potential as a hub for trade and sought a way to connect downtown to the beach. They succeeded in both respects. They did so, however, at the expense of the neighborhoods in between, notably, the predominantly Black community of West Adams.

Bifurcated by an imposing mass of concrete, the elegant neighborhood of Craftsman and Victorian homes was shattered by the freeway when it plowed through in 1963. It was unusual, even in its day, in that West Adams was not the classically poor community bulldozed for progress; it was home to wealth and even influence. But it was Black.

Nathan Sessoms, a professor of urban planning in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, grew up with L.A. freeways on his mind. “CHiPs” was on television, and freeways were fast and exhilarating. He studied urban planning and was taught about the Interstate Highway Act and the powerful role it had in opening up American suburbs and commerce. The highways were sleek and efficient ways to move people and goods.

“The 10 freeway, in many ways, is responsible for the destruction of the Sugar Hill community.”

Building freeways through communities, not only destroys you destroy the physical aspect of the community but also the very important cultural history that exists in neighborhoods like Sugar Hill.

But then he moved here, arriving 20 years ago from Cleveland. “I was able to watch what I had learned in planning school,” he recalls.

And he came to learn that those same highways that allowed for speed and growth also were expressions of American racism. The 10 freeway bulldozed West Adams because a Black neighborhood could not stand in the way of a quick way to the beach, while the 710 freeway was blocked by the white middle-class community of South Pasadena even though it would have sewed up a link in the regional transportation network.

Countless other highway projects tore through poor and minority communities, sometimes because planners were happy to destroy those neighborhoods, other times because the property values were lower there and the agencies could save money by condemning less valuable real estate, using what Beer calls the ultimate state power, the power to seize a person’s property in the name of progress.

Government used that power in Los Angeles to clear away people of color in order to let others move about more freely. It’s a bitter truth, and one that Sessoms fears today’s residents know too little about. “In a city like Los Angeles,” he notes, “it’s hard to undo what has been done.” But progress at least should require acknowledgement, a willingness to say that “we recognize this freeway came through here and did a lot of damage.”

Today, the 10 freeway presents a ribbon of division between South Los Angeles and the rest of the city, and though the destiny of demography drives Los Angeles back to its roots as a Latino hub, the freeway still connotes a racial barrier as much as a transportation corridor.

Freeways may reinforce racism — or at least separation — in other ways as well. By perpetuating Waldie’s “archipelago” they connect communities, but they also put distance between them. And that distance is traversed alone, without the rub and contact that comes with riding a bus or train.

“If I’m riding down Vermont and seeing regular people jumping on a bus, going to work, going shopping,” Sessoms says, there is the possibility of seeing those people as human. “That makes people confront their biases.”

But if that same neighborhood is traversed on the freeway, the driver is alone in a capsule of a car, music turned up, windows closed. The neighborhood flies by in seconds, invisible from the highway. No humans, no contact, no reason to see that place as anything but a short delay in getting from here to there.

The eastern terminus of the Santa Monica Freeway is in downtown Los Angeles, but the 10 keeps going, stretching out to the vast territory of the Inland Empire, the “land of cheap dirt,” as it is sometimes known. That has given the freeway a new purpose in recent decades. It is where America’s preoccupation with next-day delivery comes to reality — vast acres of warehouses filled with robots and people moving goods from one container to another, breaking down storehouses of supplies to be delivered to homes and businesses.

Today, the 10 freeway is clogged with trucks streaming in and out of those warehouses. Residents complain of traffic and air pollution. Amazon thrives and notes that it is creating thousands of jobs. But many are at the bottom of the pay scale. It’s not always pretty to be a cog in the world of international commerce.

The East L.A. Interchange

Noah Allison, who teaches city planning and urban inequality courses at Barnard College in New York, was a visiting professor in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts until fall semester 2024. He’s written about food vendors and urban life. He’s worked as a planner for CalTrans. So, Allison knows cities and freeways from many academic and intellectual angles.

But he knows what it’s like to be shoved aside by a freeway from real experience. His family lived in Boyle Heights when California decided that Interstate 5, Interstate 10 and State Route 60 should come together there and form a giant interchange. Those freeways now host thousands of trips, millions of drivers and passengers every day. Boyle Heights, however, paid the price.

“The freeway system both unites and pulls apart who we are as Angelenos.”

The freeway system creates a bond between people and places but it also creates distances, gaps, between them.

In the 1940s, Boyle Heights was a classical melting pot culture. It was home to L.A.’s closely woven Jewish culture — Zev Yaroslavsky, former L.A. County supervisor, grew up there — as well as an emerging Latino middle class. And then came the freeways. The interchange paved over huge swaths of homes and businesses, and the drivers whizzed above and around what remained. Boyle Heights became more of a place to dart across than one to live and work.

It wasn’t destroyed. Boyle Heights is still the home of Mariachi Plaza and Libros Schmibros, of the Hollenbeck police station (immortalized in Joseph Wambaugh’s novels and nonfiction) and inviting parks, but the community has for decades existed in the shadow of its freeways.

Why did Boyle Heights have to give way to the pressure of freeway construction? In part, Allison notes, it was because the community lacked the power to fight. “Freeway engineers could plow through the area,” he says, because it did not possess the “social capital to resist.”

Today, the interchange in Boyle Heights provides residents with access to the world, but it does so at the expense of the homes that once gave the neighborhood its particular character. Something was gained, but something also was undeniably lost.

Freeways today allow the Los Angeles region to be huge. Residents can live many miles from workplaces because freeways, at least when they’re moving, allow drivers to travel great distances in relative comfort.

But that benefit comes at considerable cost. Freeways bring congestion and air pollution, often to poor neighborhoods — the places without the “social capital” to say no. They elevate personal freedom — the mobility that comes with moving about in a private car — at the expense of planetary health. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that almost 30% of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by transportation — the largest of any category — and more than half of that comes from light-duty vehicles such as personal automobiles.

The automobile is paradigmatically an individual emitter of carbon gases, and its centrality to modern life in Los Angeles holds the region back from the much-needed and overdue shift to “collective consumption.” That is a scientific imperative.

Public transit, of course, is the answer pursued in other American cities, and it is belatedly remaking the landscape of Los Angeles. Voters have supported bond measures for rail construction and busways. The approaching Summer Olympics in 2028 has given new momentum to transit projects that will give fans better options for attending the games and will leave the region with lasting projects to improve mobility.

L.A. has not leapt to embrace trains or subways, but it is coming around — not by destroying freeways but by offering alternatives to them. That will change who we are, says Waldie.

The isolation of the car driver has had a profound impact on how they see themselves and how they see this place.

“The isolation of the car driver has had a profound impact on how they see themselves and how they see this place,” he says. “The growth of public transit will have significant effects on how Angelenos see themselves and each other.”

Might a shift in values be next? Perhaps the rub of humanity on trains and buses will let us appreciate our common humanity. And perhaps another gift as well. For while freeways encourage us to think big and fast, they discourage intimacy and the beauty of that which is small and slow. Walking to the local bookstore or market may lack the flash of racing about in a car, but it is tangible and human.

Notably, the professors who study these questions — Beer, Allison and Sessoms, and Waldie, too — rely on public transit, some exclusively, some whenever possible. They study these matters, but they live them, too.

“What enables me to thrive in this place and be happy,” says Beer, “is the ability to live in small circles. Our freeways are something to live with, but also to contend with.”

Small may indeed be beautiful.