Is Los Angeles the most car-dependent city in the world?

This is the historical core of the city, an area which you might expect to have been preserved and be decently walkable, with lots of amenities. And yet it’s a criss-cross of huge streets, with most old buildings having been torn down except for a few near the park in the lower middle part of the picture. Behind it there’s a pattern of parking lots and modern buildings, each occupying about 50% of the space. In the bottom right, union station’s rail park is almost dwarfed by the massive motorway spanning all across the bottom of the screenshot, with who knows how many lanes. Finally, coronation of the whole urban geography, the grey blob that you can see in the background, amongst the green rolling hills, is a baseball pitch with miles and miles of parking lots surrounding it. I can’t even imagine what the heat there would be on a hot summer’s game day.

The rest of the city more or less repeats this pattern, all the way from Malibu to Palm Springs and from the mexican border to the space shuttle’s old proving ground.

This is the historical core of the city, an area which you might expect to have been preserved and be decently walkable, with lots of amenities. And yet it’s a criss-cross of huge streets, with most old buildings having been torn down except for a few near the park in the lower middle part of the picture. Behind it there’s a pattern of parking lots and modern buildings, each occupying about 50% of the space. In the bottom right, union station’s rail park is almost dwarfed by the massive motorway spanning all across the bottom of the screenshot, with who knows how many lanes. Finally, coronation of the whole urban geography, the grey blob that you can see in the background, amongst the green rolling hills, is a baseball pitch with miles and miles of parking lots surrounding it. I can’t even imagine what the heat there would be on a hot summer’s game day.

The rest of the city more or less repeats this pattern, all the way from Malibu to Palm Springs and from the mexican border to the space shuttle’s old proving ground.