Southern California's Pasadena Freeway Celebrates 73rd Birthday — But Can We Achieve Sustainable Transportation?

As The Writer’s Almanac notes, the Los Angeles area’s Pasadena Freeway was opened on this date in 1940, the first freeway — a high-speed, divided, and limited-access thoroughfare — in the western United States.

This was just a few years after a group of large corporate interests related to the automotive and transportation industries, including General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks, bought over 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities here and several other large American cities, including Baltimore, Newark, Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland and San Diego and systematically dismantled then. Several of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce.

This, of course, is water under the proverbial bridge.  What matters now is how, if at all, we can progress in the direction of sustainable transportation.