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Opinion

A Warmer, Fuzzier Los Angeles

Credit...Andrew Holder

Los Angeles — I GOT lost the other day driving on Venice Boulevard. This is a street, a mile south of where I live, that I use to travel east or west. But it has changed of late, like much of Los Angeles.

Over the past few years, Venice Boulevard has been the site of a huge infrastructural project: the building of the second phase of the Expo Line. When it opens on May 20, this light-rail route, the latest addition to Los Angeles’s Metro system, will connect downtown and Santa Monica. It is a development both practical — a key component of a growing Metro Rail network — and potentially transformational, a centerpiece of the more transit-friendly city Los Angeles aspires to become.

Still, such a transformation will have its moments of dislocation, as I was reminded on Venice Boulevard. I navigate Los Angeles, as I have every city in which I’ve lived, by landmark: Helms Bakery, Ivy Substation, the curve of Culver Boulevard as it angles southwest like a spur. Faced with the newly completed Expo Line overpass at Venice and Robertson Boulevards, however, I found myself confused, unable momentarily to see where I was.

In part, my confusion was that of Los Angeles itself. This is a city, after all, that has long been defined by the automobile. “A good part of any day in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote in 1989, “is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” I quote this statement every chance I get; it is among the most trenchant ever written about the place. But all that is changing, or might be, if the promises implied by the Expo Line expansion can be kept.

Los Angeles was once a model public transportation city. In the early part of the last century, streetcars, known as Red Cars, traveled as far as Redlands, some 70 miles east of downtown. The Red Car system comprised a thousand miles of track and 2,000 trains. Its demise has become local legend, a conspiracy (or so the story goes) in which streetcar lines were bought and put out of service by companies backed by the automotive industry giants Firestone and G.M. That this coincided with the growth of the freeways has made the automobile the enduring symbol of Los Angeles’s peculiar postwar freedom: a freedom based both in the ideal of movement and in the ability — no, the privilege — not to interact with anybody but yourself.

Of course, such an ideal has become increasingly chimerical. The city in which I live is a landscape of terminal gridlock where rush hour never seems to end. This is where the Expo Line comes in, along with other improvement projects: the expansion of the Purple Line subway; the newly opened Gold Line extension; and downtown’s Regional Connector, which will link the Blue, Gold and Expo Lines, enabling riders to traverse much of the Los Angeles basin by train.

Will all this help to ease the gridlock? Early indications are that it may not. A recent study by researchers from the University of Southern California concluded that the initial stretch of the Expo Line, which began service in 2012 and extends from downtown to Culver City, did not significantly reduce congestion on the adjacent Santa Monica Freeway, or on neighborhood streets. This finding, coupled with a drop in transit ridership (10 percent over all on Metro trains and buses over the last decade) suggests that mobility may be more complicated than it looks.

But there is more at stake with these transit projects than merely changing traffic patterns. Just look at the language of Mobility Plan 2035, a proposal recently approved by the City Council that advocates the creation of bicycle and bus lanes on many major boulevards. “In today’s cities,” the plan notes, “streets not only facilitate movement but provide ‘places’ to gather, to congregate, to sit, to watch, and to interact.” Here, we see what Los Angeles is seeking to reclaim: not just public transit but also a more ambitious social idea — a sense of the street, of “place.”

It’s a cliché to say Southern California has never known this, although like most clichés, it has some basis in truth. As the writer Louis Adamic noted in the 1920s, the single-family home, with its emphasis on private life, is Los Angeles’s essential building block. In the resulting landscape, social life occurs behind closed doors. Taken to its most extreme form, this becomes the Los Angeles described by the urban theorist Mike Davis as “fortress L.A.” — “where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement,” and street life takes place only in a car.

Los Angeles, however, is contradictory: a city of sprawl, but also of neighborhoods; of glitz and glamour, but also of the most pedestrian realities. If I wander even just 10 blocks west from my home, I can see several subtle shifts in character, Little Ethiopia blurring slowly into the quiet residential streets of Carthay Circle, and then into the Orthodox Jewish community of Pico-Robertson.

IN recent years, there has been a return in Los Angeles, as in many other cities, to the urban core. (Sprawl, it turns out, cannot occur indefinitely.) The residential population of downtown has nearly tripled since 1998. Walk along Main Street or Broadway here on a Saturday evening and the atmosphere is that of a city reconstituting itself. Density, verticality, sidewalks crowded with pedestrians: This is public space, a sense of the street as a shared landscape in which we have no choice but to accept that we are here together. It’s Los Angeles not as fortress but its opposite: community.

“We’re not building for today,” Phillip A. Washington, the head of Metro, told The Los Angeles Times when asked about the declining numbers of riders on buses and trains. “We’re building for 100 years down the road.” That may sound like the rhetoric of public relations, but I think he has a point. In 2013, a designer named Nick Andert created a map of what the Metro system might look like in 2040. It features a dozen lines and hundreds of stations, most as yet unbuilt, “extrapolated from Metro’s concrete short-term plans and somewhat more vague long-term plans, along with a little guessing and creative license.” Wishful thinking? Possibly. A kind of civic parlor game? Without a doubt. Still, the word that most comes to mind is vision: a strategy to consider the city through its most expansive possibilities.

In that sense, the Expo Line (indeed, all of Metro) may be most valuable for how it encourages us to think about the future. The knock on Los Angeles has long been, to borrow Mr. Adamic’s ruthless formulation, that it “grew up suddenly, planlessly.” If the assessment is not untrue — how could it be otherwise, in a city where the population jumped from 100,000 to 1.2 million between 1900 and 1930? — it also doesn’t matter any longer. Like the Red Car, 1930 was a long time ago. More important is where we go from here.

Certainly, Los Angeles will always be a city of the car. But it may also become, is becoming, a city of the walker, of the rider, in which the streets are not only a terrain we pass through, but also one we actively share. Regardless of what the Expo Line ultimately does or doesn’t do for traffic, this is, I think, the essence of what it offers: the notion of Los Angeles as a space we occupy together, collective and evolving, where in the act of getting lost, as I discovered on Venice Boulevard, we may also unexpectedly be found.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms With Los Angeles.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Warmer, Fuzzier Los Angeles. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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