Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker

sounds like Helsinki, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities around the world.

      In LA, though, one problem stands out: while the city and county are spending billions on new Metro lines and expanded bus service, it’s not yet catching on. Only 7 percent of the population rides public transit. Worse, these numbers have been shrinking. Growing numbers of working poor in the area, data show, are ditching the buses and trains, and instead buying used cars.

      This is the downside of economic success. Since the rise of the automobile, public transit in LA, as in much of the car-centric world, has largely served the underclass, including many who cannot afford their own personal vehicle. But now, just as the city leaders try to transition away from the car economy, growing numbers of Angelenos are “graduating” into it. They add to congestion. So do the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers plying the streets and byways in search of passengers. After decades of progress against smog, LA’s air grew dirtier in 2016 and 2017, registering some of the nation’s highest ozone counts.

      Garcetti boils the problem down to one of geometry. You have millions of people trying to get from point A to point B, he says, “and they’re all occupying the same plane.” That plane is defined by the surface of the earth and the roads plastered on top of it.

      To visualize the limits of the status quo, think of all the people working in the city hall building. Since they’re organized in layers—thirty-two floors—they’re not too crowded. But most of those people came to work—at rush hour, no less—smushed onto a single plane, along the same ribbons of highway. Only later do they ease this crush by stacking vertically. One solution to the congestion, Garcetti suggests, is to add new planes for mobility, above the earth and beneath it.

      FOR SELETA REYNOLDS, urban aerial mobility is not a current pressing concern. Nor are the tunnels Elon Musk’s Boring Company has begun to dig (which we’ll visit in chapter 6). Reynolds heads the LA Department of Transportation, and her focus is on moving millions of people, most of them by traditional means. She thinks much more about providing decent transportation to have-nots, and doesn’t worry much about the people crawling in Lamborghinis or Porsches up and down the 101.

      Reynolds, a Mississippian with a history degree from Brown, came to LA from San Francisco, where she’d been an activist manager in the Municipal Transportation Agency. Her division was Livable Streets, and she oversaw the launch of Bay Area Bikeshare. In 2014, Mayor Garcetti brought her to Los Angeles as the top transportation official. She now sees the city at a crucial transition, much like the one a century ago, from streetcars to automobiles. Back then, for-profit corporations with bottomless reservoirs of dollars for promotion and greasing of the political levers sold the public on an enticing technology. And once the public was behind the wheel, it was hooked. By that point, the government was reduced to satisfying motorists’ demands: building highways, making sure people had places to park—in short, surrendering to the car.

      All these years later, as Reynolds sees it, LA has a second chance. Tech entrepreneurs are promising a transformation—mobility that’s cheap, green, and fun. But from Reynolds’s perspective, if the government doesn’t step in and assert a measure of control over this new ecosystem of mobility, the technologists will dictate the shape and nature of the city for the coming century. In that case, it will be made to fit their needs, and their bottom lines, and not those of the eighteen million people living in greater Los Angeles. “We could repeat the mistake we made a century ago,” she says. “We adjusted the city to the technology, instead of the other way around.”

      Reynolds focuses most on social equity. Entire neighborhoods of LA are transit deserts. She cites the example of Boyle Heights, a historic Mexican American enclave near downtown that is fenced in by freeways. “If you live there without a car,” she says, “you’re trapped.” Those who cannot move across the region efficiently and at an affordable price lose out on opportunities. They struggle to get to trade schools or to job interviews. Entire job markets lie out of reach. This trend worsens with time. The poor migrate to neighborhoods where the rent is cheap, which often are affordable, in great part, because the transportation is so terrible. In these mobility deserts, the poor get poorer, and many fall behind on their rent. This in turn feeds the epidemic of homelessness in LA.

      The obvious answer is to wean Angelenos from their addiction to cars. LA Metro is spearheading this strategy by dramatically extending its network. Plans call for new lines stretching to the airport, and others linking downtown to Hollywood and the UCLA campus in Westwood. By the time the Olympic torch is lit in the LA Memorial Coliseum, according to the plan, LA County may boast the second-largest urban train system in the United States, behind only New York’s.

      To some evangelists of the mobility revolution, this seems a bit retrograde. Who will take the Metro if Elon Musk’s underground network springs into action, zipping around Angelenos like packets of data? And what about the fleets of autonomous pods, the next generation of dockless electric bikes, the air taxis?

      Like Reynolds, Phil Washington, CEO of LA Metro, sees public transportation serving as the main trunks and branches of the third LA, with the scooters, bikes, and car-shares working as connecting tendrils. His logic is based on the immense distance to be traveled—all those round-trips to the sun. Millions of people, he says, must share a good portion of those miles. Otherwise, if each trip carries a single person on a single trajectory, the next stage of transit could be knotted up even worse than rush hour on the 405 at Sepulveda Pass.

      From Washington’s point of view, the competition between public transit and all the mobility entrepreneurs just isn’t fair. LA County’s Metro, like other public agencies, has a mission to provide service to everyone. This dramatically raises costs. In the United States, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 mandates universal access to public transit. Metro must spend for buses that hoist wheelchairs from the curb, and equip train stations with ramps and elevators. It must also provide transport to isolated neighborhoods, and look out for those lacking a smartphone to hail an Uber. This is expensive. It serves the people who need help—whom mobility entrepreneurs can blithely ignore. Those new players, Reynolds says, “are building businesses on our infrastructure. And we get nothing in return.”

      What’s worse is that if new privately owned services take off willy-nilly, each one rushing to develop its own niche, they’ll claw for market share by selling mobility at bargain-basement prices. A century ago, when this happened, the government was ineffectual. It ended up being an enabler of the automobile monoculture. Those cars also had the right, at least for their first century, to pollute, congest, and roar. Running over people was collateral damage.

      Like most city officials, Reynolds is eager to avoid a reprise of that mess. She wants not just to supervise traffic, but to manage it. This isn’t easy, because broader LA County is fractured into scores of fairly independent municipalities. And Metro, like most transit agencies in the United States, is not particularly popular. Most motorists use it rarely (while wishing others would).

      Yet in Los Angeles, as in cities worldwide, someone, some entity, is going to be monitoring and managing our movements. This will happen more in some places than in others. But this control is the nature, and the promise, of connected mobility, the key to cleaner, safer, cheaper, and faster movement. The political fights ahead will focus not just on the extent of this control, but also on who’s in charge. Governments are sure to jostle with businesses large and small, and the crucial factor will be data.

      In coming years, practically every conveyance will be linked to networks. Most already are. But in Los Angeles, as we’ll see in Helsinki, the data travel in different streams. The subway counts its riders, as do dockless bike companies like Lime. The phone companies can track the movements of their users, as can Google and Facebook. When autonomous cars hit the roads in growing numbers, each one will gush thick rivers of data.

      Yet at this point, no one has access to the entire span of mobility data. This is perhaps the ultimate treasure in the coming era. Whoever controls the data will be in a position to manage movement, and to build businesses on it. LA took a first step in 2019, establishing data specifications for bike-share and scooter services. This will allow officials to track