How Phoenix fought to not end up like LA


As someone who's lived in Phoenix, and Los Angeles, I understand it when people say that they don't want Phoenix to end up like LA. And by that they meant smog, congestion, jammed freeways, that sort of thing.

Because of that, Phoenix resisted building freeways. When I moved to Phoenix, in 1979, there was only one freeway. One. And Phoenix was already a pretty sizable town, so it was very difficult to drive, for example from Glendale to Scottsdale. The route was to go on Bell Road, as quickly as possible, and stopping every few blocks for the lights. The idea, of course, was that if Phoenix didn't build freeways, it wouldn't get crowded and congested, and have jammed freeways. That was the logic.

Another thing that Phoenix resisted was density. Places like LA were congested, and crowded, and Phoenix was wide-open. To this day Phoenix has an incredible amount of open, empty lots all over. Nowadays people speak of "infill", but this would have sounded too much like "congestion" several decades ago.

Phoenix also resisted the kind of bureaucracy that limited that types of freedoms that made Arizona different from California. Pollution controls were very slow in being enforced, and to this day gas stations don't have pollution controls, which Los Angeles has had for over thirty years. When Los Angeles started tightening up pollution controls for businesses, Phoenix paid no attention.

I don't hear too many people saying that "we don't want to be like LA in Phoenix" nowadays, except the old-timers who remembered how Phoenix had gone from a fairly small-town atmosphere to having a gigantic population almost overnight.

If you remember Los Angeles of thirty years ago, you'll be surprised at how much it's been cleaned up nowadays. The air is so much bluer! As someone who hugs trees, likes blue skies, and cherishes quiet neighborhoods, I would like to see Phoenix become more like LA, with better pollution control enforcement, freeways that take traffic away from surface streets, and of course, more trees.

Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/PhoenixHistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more