Is the L.A. of 2014 driving around on a route web built for the L.A. of the 1980s ? That ’s one conclusion two researchers at Arizona State University attracter from their abovedata visual image , which uses building records from the Los Angeles County Assessor ’s Office to infer the years of the metropolis ’ road . Green represents the oldest roads , red the newest .
The animation by doctoral student Andrew M. Fraser and professorMikhail V. Chestertracks the steady growth of L.A. ’s road substructure through the metropolis ’s prewar boom and its postwar suburbanization . After 1955 — the shortcut point between green / yellow and orangish / red — the growth slow . It then more or less stops by 1990 , when the county was home to nearly one million fewer people . In an email substance , Chester alludes to that disconnect :
By the late 1980s nearly 99 % of all lane mi that exist in LA County today had been deployed . need ( measured in Vehicle Miles of Travel , VMT ) , however , preserve to increase until the the early 2000s . This lift in demand without tantamount increment in the provision of transportation infrastructure may have contributed to the growing levels of over-crowding have in Los Angeles .
That ’s not land - shattering news to anyone who ’s spent a farsighted good afternoon on the 405 , but the pair ’s research could render a data - push rationale for rethinking how Angelenos get around . Chester continues :
We are investigating whether the impregnation of infrastructure supplying has contributed to the leveling off of VMT in the region over the last 10 . In unforesightful , the roadway substructure in Los Angeles may have hand a capacitance limit for vehicle traveling which , coalesce with population growth , may lead to lessen level of personal mobility if the current transportation and res publica use paradigm remain [ accent added ] .
Check outFraser ’s and Chester ’s full reportfor more , including an explanation of their methodology .
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