Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law with Ethan Elkind, an attorney who researches and writes on environmental law and the author of Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System and the Future of the City. They discuss the reason visitors and even some Angelenos express surprise at the very existence of the city's subway; the roots of the assumption that Los Angeles would always have a 1950s-style "car culture"; why something as essential as a rail system has required a "fight"; the persistent Roger Rabbit conspiracy theory about the dismantling of Los Angeles' first rail transit network; why so may, for so long, failed to consider the city's inevitably dense and increasingly less car-compatible future; Los Angeles' long-standing anxiety about joining the ranks of "world-class" cities, and how the absence of a subway fueled it; how Californian rail systems, Los Angeles' especially but the San Francisco's Bay Area's BART as well, physically embody the