Fighting Traffic Congestion 100 Years Ago with Brian Taylor

Professor Brian Taylor delivers a talk and presentation on proposals between 1920 and 1940 to fundamentally redesign the street system, transit system, and highway system in LA to cope with burgeoning traffic — why they mostly failed, and why LA is the worse for it today.  These stories are excerpted from Taylor’s book, The Drive for Dollars, the story of the interplay between finance, freeways, and urban form in the 20th century and their enduring impact on American cities and neighborhoods in the 21st.

Additional reading: A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles: 1920 – 2020

BRIAN D. TAYLOR, PhD, FAICP is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He is the Director Emeritus of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. He studies travel behavior and transportation equity, finance, politics, and history. He has recently studied falling public transit ridership; public sector responses to new mobility services; the travel of Millennials, high-school students, and same-sex households; the rise of local sales taxes for transportation; and the economic effects of traffic congestion. He was recently named one of the Top 10 Academic Thought Leaders in Transportation by the Council of University Transportation Centers, and honored as a National Associate by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. And perhaps most importantly, Professor Taylor is a former staff member of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.