More than roads or rails

This is the first of two articles on the intersection of public transit, urbanism and architecture on next week's ballot.

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There is a pedestrian path -- maintained, if that is not too generous a word, by the city of Los Angeles -- near my house in Eagle Rock. Parents use it to walk their kids to the neighborhood elementary school down the hill. Teenagers sometimes take advantage of its steepest sections to test out harebrained new skateboarding tricks. On occasion I've seen personal trainers marching up and down it, putting exhausted-looking clients through their paces.

What few of my neighbors seem to realize -- and why would they? -- is that the path, its concrete stamped in one spot with the date 1927, is a remnant of an era when Los Angeles was laced with an extensive network of streetcars. It was built as a way to bring people over the hill to reach a stop on Colorado Boulevard. Though the streetcar tracks were torn out by the 1940s, the path remains -- a phantom limb of an older, more connected city.

On Tuesday, voters in L.A. County will decide the fate of Measure R, which proposes raising the sales tax by a half-penny to pay for new subway and light-rail lines, along with some roadway improvements. (In all, 65% of its proceeds, pegged at roughly $40 billion over 30 years, would go to public transit.) It faces an uphill battle, primarily because it requires two-thirds approval to pass but also because it has divided politicians around the county. Those on the Westside, which would benefit most directly from Measure R dollars -- particularly for a subway extension along or near Wilshire Boulevard -- tend to favor it. Those in areas set to receive less funding, including Long Beach and Pasadena, have strongly opposed it.

From a political as well as fiscal point of view, to be sure, the measure might have been more stragetically written. Still, its implications for urbanism -- beyond the question of how to move people around the city and get them out of their cars -- have not received nearly enough attention.

Since World War II and the death of the streetcar system, the mobility that has always helped define Los Angeles in the public imagination has turned almost entirely private. It is made possible not by streetcars but by roads, boulevards and freeways carrying individual cars and trucks. In recent years, of course, that mobility has been severely curtailed by thickening traffic, particularly on the Westside. Traffic, in turn, has begun to chip away at the very idea of a unified Los Angeles, of a single place that comfortably contains both beaches and mountains, both the Getty and the Norton Simon.