The 1974 Center Plan

While RTD worked on the rapid transit proposals it had been mandated by the state Legislature to create, the city of Los Angeles had ideas of its own.

The impetus for the city's "Center Plan" began in the 1930s when, with the wildly popular new automobiles beginning to encourage urban sprawl (while simultaneously killing the region's transit system), city planners began to envision a Los Angeles that would be different from most big cities. Rather than discouraging the sprawl, they embraced it, producing a heavily suburban, horizontal rather than vertical, city with more than one center.

In 1974, City Planning Director Calvin Hamilton helped formalize the vision by delivering to the City Council a general zoning plan encouraging high-density development around 38 centers inside the city limits and 18 others outside the city. The key to the plan was mass transit. "Each center had its own light-rail system that connected with the nearby areas ... [to not have this] development just in the downtown area, but to encourage people to have jobs over practically the whole city," Hamilton said in a 1991 Los Angeles Times interview.

The plan worked ... sort of. Buildings were erected in the major centers of Century City, Westwood, and Warner Center. But the ambitious mass-transit system was not, due to Los Angeles' sheer size and its many low-density neighborhoods which have made it difficult to build big transit projects; relatively few people live near stations and residents tend to protest new projects near their homes. Without the envisioned network of rail transit, the major centers resulted in a far higher volume of automobile-based commuting to those major centers (the Southern California Association of Governments says only about 5% of the region's workers use mass transit to commute).

Ironically, even as the voters rejected various proposals by RTD and County Supervisor Baxter Ward, homeowner groups rose in discontent to rising traffic levels, with slow-growth, no-growth and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) sentiments driving the politics of the 1980s. The battle culminated in 1988, when city voters passed a ballot measure to limit the size of future buildings. But by then, the damage had been done, especially in areas like Westwood, which claims some of the worst traffic congestion in the city today.

(The map comes from a May 15, 2005 Los Angeles Times article, from which much of the research for this page was taken.)

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