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© John Rossant and Stephen Baker 2019

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DEDICATION

To the young ones,

Alex Rossant, Sloane Wright, and Louise Craver,

who will have so many different choices

when it comes to moving around.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1: Hit Enter to Print Car

2: LA: Crawling to Topanga Canyon

3: 800 Electric Horses

4: Jurassic Detroit

5: Helsinki: Weaving Magic Carpet Apps

6: In the Company of Hawks and Nightcrawlers

7: Dubai: Grasping for the Cutting Edge

8: Idiot Savants at the Wheel

9: Shanghai: Petri Dish on the Huangpu

10: Squadrons of Pack Drones

Conclusion: Minutes, Meters, and Moolah

Acknowledgments

Notes

List of Searchable Terms

Praise for Hop, Skip, Go

About the Authors

Also by Stephen Baker

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Where have you been your whole life? Think of all the places: home, school, work, restaurants, the gym. Maybe Carnival in Rio, a cheap hotel in Paris? All those memories and routines involved moving your body from one place to another. Movement is such a constant in our lives that it’s easy to overlook. It occupies hours of each day and devours a good share of our money. It’s central to our existence, nearly on a par with eating. If we didn’t move, we’d never see each other. Now, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the ways we move are changing dramatically.

At about this point, as we describe this book, people often interrupt and say, “Driverless cars, right?”

What’s coming is more than just one instance of robotic navigation, and much bigger. You can see it gearing up around the world. Overwhelmed by traffic and wheezing from smog, cities are confronting the limits of the century-old automobile economy and taking steps to rein it in. Many are extending greenways and building bike lanes. Some, like Madrid, are starting to ban cars altogether from city centers. Others are charging fees to drive in congested areas while presiding over a proliferation of bike- and car-shares. At the same time, a technology explosion is unleashing a new generation of networked machines and services. And yes, it’s true, the automobile, step-by-step, is turning into a robot.

The car we all know, the gas-gulping machine we drive, has had quite a century. Our urban geography has molded itself to its demands. Its networks of highways gave birth to new suburbs, while developers carved out vast downtown acreages for parking lots. Cities grew into planned preserves for countless herds of these four-wheeled creatures, Serengetis for cars and trucks. That automotive monoculture spread around the world, from Los Angeles and Caracas to Moscow and, more recently, Beijing and New Delhi. The car reshaped the surface of the planet and poisoned the air above.

While the automobile isn’t going away, it is losing its primacy. Over the next decade, many of us will find new ways to move. This next stage of human mobility, unlike the last, will not be defined by a single iconic technology. Instead we’ll be faced with a host of choices, most of them tracked and mediated by digital networks. Where it works, this arrangement will be greener, cheaper, faster, and safer than today’s smoggy and gridlocked status quo. The financial impact, for everything from households to national economies, will be profound. Once again, mobility will reshuffle our industrial landscape, juggle the timetables of our lives, and reshape our cities. It will also weigh heavily, for better or worse, on the future of our planet.

Much of the change ahead is tied to digital knowledge—a sprouting awareness of where we are, where we want to go, and what’s available to take us there. This intelligence poses a profound contrast to the status quo of the automobile age, which has been marked by abject ignorance.

To recall just how little we knew, picture the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde on their murderous bank-robbing rampage through the Great Plains in the 1930s. They were driving on public highways, yet no one knew where they were. The police had to track down eyewitnesses and then stick time-colored pins in maps as they attempted to determine where the outlaws might be and where they’d strike next. Cars, for most of the century, were as footloose as hyenas. For millions of teenagers, this ignorance of whereabouts spelled freedom. We were out driving … somewhere. Our parents trusted we weren’t robbing banks. But they knew only vaguely, if at all, where we might be.

City planners were also in the dark. Until recently, highway engineers would stretch cords equipped with counting sensors across roads. This provided primitive insights, but only on the behavior of our motorized herds. And engineers had precious few tools with which to manage the flow. Traffic, like a force of nature, simply happened. So most cities bowed to its unrelenting pressure and dedicated big chunks of their budgets to widening roads and highways, and opening up more space for parking. The resulting status quo was rife with waste—of energy, time, and money. The massive backups, the crawling lines of single drivers in five-thousand-pound hunks of metal, epitomized its inefficiencies.

The abundant waste found in the ignorant status quo spells boundless opportunity. Planners and entrepreneurs alike can now measure and count all kinds of things. As they do, they can sharpen their focus from the herd to the individual. This fuels new businesses. A commuter in Paris, for example, inches along the clogged Boulevard Périphérique at the wheel of a Renault Clio. Say there’s a service or an app that can slice a half hour off her commute, in each direction, freeing up five hours a week. What would she pay for those miles and minutes?

These are burgeoning markets of space and time. Most of them would have been beyond our reach until recently. But a host of enabling technologies are now at hand. Arrays of sensors can now provide second-by-second reads on our location. High-speed networks, including 5G, can zip that data to computing clouds. Advanced artificial intelligence can turn it into insights about where we’re going—and how best to get us there. Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies, devised only a decade ago as the foundation for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, provide secure channels through which vehicles can share information and coordinate their actions. This sharing is fundamental for creating hyperefficient networks—even while we’re still behind the wheel.

One other fundamental technology is the battery. The new mobility machines run, for the most part, on electricity, which happens to be what computers eat. Most of the new conveyances, in essence, are networked computers fitted with wheels or wings. Even bikes are getting smart.

Mobility, as we see it, represents the third stage of the Internet. The networked age debuted in the final decade of the last century, when rich troves of information, from mail to music, went digital. In the following decade, with the explosion of smartphones, information went mobile. That was stage two. The marriage of the cell phone to a networked computer placed the universe of knowledge into our pockets and purses, and added what amounts to an electronic lobe to the human brain. We’re now accustomed, and even addicted, to carrying around networked technology. As we embark on stage three, ever more advanced blends of that technology are carrying us around.

In the coming age of mobility, practically every rolling and flying conveyance will be a networked device. For a glimpse of what this means, open a ride-sharing app, such as Uber or China’s DiDi. The dots on the screens provide a glimpse of the future, one in which each of us moves as a node on a network map.

Ride-sharing was the first big splash of a tech wave that had been hyped for two decades: the so-called Internet of Things. Refrigerators would order milk, we were told, and smart light bulbs would brighten when we walked into a room. A good number of these machine-to-machine applications are finally creeping into the marketplace. But the biggest and richest arena for the Internet of Things will be mobility. It dwarfs the rest of the field.

This doesn’t mean that the next cars we buy will be driverless, or that we’ll soon be gliding over rush hour traffic in autonomous flying pods. These technologies, as we’ll see, are in the works and will indeed be lifting off, in some places much sooner than others. For most of us, though, the coming transition will begin not with a miraculous new machine at the curb, but with a series of new questions.

Imagine you’re a twenty-nine-year-old, just out of grad school, taking your first good job. You’re in LA. The commute—the only real downside to the job—looks to be a fifty-minute rush hour crawl to and from Santa Monica, most of it on the I-10. You need a car.

The first thought is money. For an apartment renter like you, the car will be far and away your most valuable possession. You’ll need a loan to buy it. Factoring in price and maintenance, it will cost about $8,000 a year to own and maintain the car. And the dumb thing will be parked for about 95 percent of its existence. It’s a cash drain. Even parking it costs money. Car ownership isn’t all that different from caring for a needy animal and paying for regular visits to an expensive vet. In fact, if you consider expense and upkeep, and even function, the car has much in common with the high-maintenance mobility heavyweight it dethroned, the horse.

It’s at this point, with an auto dealer reaching for your wallet, that you might consider the shape of the coming decade you’ll be sharing with this hypothetical car. Will you really need it?

Try thinking about it the other way: Instead of a car, you have the $8,000 a year that owning it would cost. That’s your transportation fund. Even a decade ago, the money wouldn’t have gone far. There was no Metro train between downtown LA and Santa Monica. Bus service was a bad joke. Taxis—if you could find one in LA—were out of the question; they’d eat up $8,000 in a few months. The only choice back then was whether to buy a car or to lease one.

But the next decade will offer new choices, and more of them every year. Ride-sharing services and scooters are just the beginning. Los Angeles Metro, once an afterthought for the hordes on the highways, is expanding dramatically, thanks to billions of dollars in bonds approved by voters. Drivers, it turns out, were so desperate for relief that they funded transit by raising their own gas tax. For many, it’s a prayer that better public services will deliver a dose of relief for highway traffic and make driving tolerable once again.

The question remains: Do you spring for the car? While your options will continue to expand, complications remain. What do you do, for instance, when winter rains pelt down and the scooter ride from the Metro station is in the dark?

The answers still aren’t easy. Even as new networks and technologies take root over the coming decade, many of us will stick with the car—or be stuck with one. The mistake, though, is to expect that the next stage of mobility will be like the last, simply with smarter and cleaner machines. In this vision, we keep the driveway, the two-car garage, and the parking lots. We hold on to the entire automobile monoculture, but we replace the gas-powered machines we’ve been driving for the last century with zippy electric models that will eventually drive themselves.

It’s natural to think that way. Early in the twentieth century, many people assumed that automobiles would simply replace horses. Sure, they’d consume gas instead of oats, foul the air more than the roads, and run faster. And yes, when they broke down, it would be a mechanic, not a veterinarian, who’d coax them back to health. But the world would continue more or less the same. The name for these new machines said as much. They were “horseless carriages.”

The automobile, however, went on to mold much of the global economy, from manufacturing to oil. It also transformed urban geography. Over the last century, asphalt, a byproduct of oil refining, coated a good chunk of the planet, including the parts where most of us live. Asphalt is what cities wear.

Billions of us are still tied to cars and trucks. Some of us adore them. Others drive simply because in the world created by cars, the car remains the best way to get from here to there. That’s why automobiles have essentially run the world, and much of its economy, for the last century.

But now the entire car economy, from giants like Toyota and Ford to Daimler, has to find its place in a world of connected vehicles, most of them running on electricity. Oil companies also face existential challenges. The move away from the internal combustion engine threatens to eviscerate the market for gasoline, which currently accounts for nearly half of the oil we consume. That could lead to a collapse of oil prices. The need for lithium and a host of rare earth minerals, all of which are key battery components, could spark mad rushes to Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Disruption awaits everywhere.

Consumers, meanwhile, will be facing a smorgasbord of new possibilities. A host of start-ups, such as companies like Arcimoto, in Oregon, are building new types of mobility machines. Arcimoto’s electric buggy is a three-wheeled blend of a car and cycle, with a roof. In China’s provincial capitals, the streets teem with bike-like microcars. They’re slow, with a range of only seventy miles, and they have as much protective armor as a toaster. But some of them cost only $1,000. Mobility at its most basic level is going to get extremely cheap.

This shift toward networked mobility will also stir up social questions, many of them fraught. While the automobile economy created and still sustains tens of millions of middle-class jobs, AI and robotics enrich a much smaller technology elite. The migration of mobility toward the digital economy threatens to widen the global gap between haves and have-nots. What’s more, cities are the laboratories for this revolution. If new mobility options enhance their competitiveness and lift the urban quality of life, they’re likely to attract even more talent—in turn exacerbating the city-country divide.

THIS STORY OF movement is almost as big as the earth itself. So how do we tell it?

We start with the people who are putting it together—creating the flying machines, electric cars, AI-fueled services, and new networks that will change the way we move. The people we’ll meet in each chapter represent entire ecosystems of activity. There’s Kevin Czinger, the founder of Divergent 3D. Headquartered just a few miles south of LA’s airport, Divergent is building an entirely new automobile manufacturing setup. The car is designed on a computer, its parts spit out by 3-D printers and then assembled largely by a team of robots. If you’re not happy with it, you melt the pieces, tweak the design, and try again. That’s the advantage of a software economy. It’s easy to change and to try things. It’s why innovation comes so fast. The world of mobility is facing whirlwinds of it.

We’ll also explore one of the most ambitious education efforts currently under way in artificial intelligence: the race on three continents to teach machines how to drive. We’ll see a Chinese cartographer named Wei Luo, in a Palo Alto start-up, DeepMap. She’s building a new generation of maps, which direct autonomous cars by the centimeter and alert them to fender benders and fallen branches. This is a new rendering of geography for a different and infinitely more exacting consumer: a machine. Meanwhile, in China’s southern megapolis of Guangzhou (once known as Canton), scientists at a start-up called Pony.ai are fine-tuning the cognitive processes of autonomous cars running down their streets, while trying to figure out how much of what they learn in China, or in California, will work in Rome or Cape Town.

Building systems that can navigate the physical complexity of the world by themselves, while also dealing with swarms of impetuous, irrational, jaywalking, drive-texting humans, will be one of the towering technological feats of the century. For most of the coming decade, though, the lion’s share of business in autonomy will be for applications that can make money while smart cars are still undergoing their apprenticeship. In other words, while full autonomy is the research goal, semiautonomy will be the bigger market, at least over the next few years.

Robert “RJ” Scaringe, founder of the electric car start-up Rivian, whom we’ll meet in chapter 3, imagines a semiautonomous feature for his coming electric SUVs and pickups: a guided autonomous tour of a national park—maybe Yellowstone or South Africa’s Kruger. The car will drive itself on a premapped course, as if on train tracks, and provide commentary en route. This will not be full autonomy, but it should offer enough of it for the driver to turn around and gape at a bear or a giraffe, and even to take pictures while the wheel turns itself. This apprenticeship will be valuable not only for the cars (or whatever we end up calling them). It will also introduce us to autonomy little by little, so that when machines are finally fully capable of navigating the surface of the earth, we might not find them scary. Maybe by then we’ll have figured out how to regulate them.

Not all the new movement will be happening on land. A host of companies, from start-ups to aviation titans like Airbus and Boeing, are engineering a new generation of flying machines. An engineer named Mark Moore worked for three decades at NASA to develop robotic flying craft. For much of that time, they seemed less likely than the robots destined for Mars. Yet now more than one hundred companies around the world are building these electric airships and whirlybirds, and Moore has jumped from NASA to Uber, where the plan is to operate networks of robotic flying taxis in cities, starting with Los Angeles and Dallas. Flying pods sound even more exotic than driverless cars, and yes, there are all sorts of legal and regulatory wrinkles to iron out. But once these vessels are up in the air, they face a simpler mission than that of autonomous cars, simply because the sky is a lot less busy than our tangled world below.

Other mobility ventures are driven less by cutting-edge technology than by imagination and entrepreneurship. In 2010, Nadiem Makarim, a young Indonesian, had the idea to organize so-called ojeks, or motorcycle taxis, into a ride-sharing network, Go-Jek. He launched in Jakarta with twenty of them, and now Go-Jek has more than a million of these two-wheeled chauffeurs, and the company is spreading throughout south Asia. Once Makarim had his mobility app on millions of phones, he started to use it to deliver a host of other services, from banking and massages to package delivery. His company runs on data, and it operates one of the biggest AI labs in Southeast Asia. Little wonder Google recently led a $1 billion investment round for a stake in it.

THIS THIRD STAGE of the digital age differs from its PC and smartphone predecessors in two fundamental aspects. The first has to do with geography. The first network boom was largely local: a handful of companies on the West Coast of the United States defined the Internet revolution and towered above it. The dominant smartphone platforms—those produced by Apple and Google—came from the same neighborhood. But the mobility revolution, from its very inception, has been a global phenomenon. China is on equal footing with the United States, if not ahead of it. Israel is a key technology player, as are European hot spots like Berlin. Entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Mexico are creating transformative networks that can catapult them into international markets. In short, the mobility revolution is exploding everywhere.

With one caveat: it starts in cities. And that leads to the second big difference in mobility. While the Internet engendered its own virtual worlds on screens, mobility takes place in the physical realm we inhabit, much of it in our shared space. It involves roads and bike lanes, and machines that can hurtle down sidewalks and bang into us. It has to be managed. So from the get-go, there’s a clear role for government.

It stands to reason that the world’s cities would serve as laboratories for new forms of mobility. Only they can offer thousands of potential customers within a few blocks of one another. That’s why it’s a cinch to summon a ride-share or rent a bike in Munich or Tokyo, and why it’s impossible in most of Patagonia or Wyoming. Cities are also central to our story because, increasingly, humanity is turning into an urban species. Today, more than half of us live in cities. That number is expected to grow to 68 percent of the global population, topping 9.5 billion, by 2050. This means that the urban population is expanding at an average of 1 million people—or a city the size of Stockholm—every week. Facing this crush, many cities will find themselves looking to smart mobility as an antidote to urban paralysis and asphyxiation.

But still, people will have to figure out how to manage it. That’s why, in the course of telling this story, we take to the road (and the skies) to visit four cities on four continents. Each one is a petri dish for new ways of moving people and their things. Each will come up with its own formulas (while borrowing liberally from hundreds of other cities around the world). Their decisions, from taxes to investments in electric chargers, new train lines, and the rules of the road for autonomous fleets, will shape neighborhoods, define commutes, and establish competitiveness worldwide. After all, if a company has a choice between two cities, one gridlocked and smoggy, the other where movement is faster, cheaper, and greener, the decision is a no-brainer.

You might think that Los Angeles, the most iconic car city on the planet, would be the last place for a mobility revolution to occur. For starters, who can organize it? The mayor not only shares power with the city council, but he or she must also grapple with no less than eighty-seven other independent and headstrong municipalities within the vast LA County, with a population larger than forty-one individual American states. Yet as we’ll see, LA is positioning itself as a sprawling test bed for what’s coming. It has powerful assets: a sunny climate that smiles on scooters and bikes, an explosion of mobility tech start-ups, and also a leadership position in the aerospace industry. (A mastery of new materials and lightweight construction is highly relevant to the new contraptions we’ll be riding.) Perhaps most important, LA has a population that’s fed up with jammed freeways and ready for new approaches.

Later, we’ll visit Dubai, where a government flexed with power and a near-limitless budget is positioning itself as a mobility pioneer. The plan is to operate flying taxi drones by the early 2020s. By 2030, according to the government’s plans, one-quarter of the kilometers traveled in Dubai will be autonomous. And a planned vacuum train—a so-called Hyperloop—promises to shrink the two-hour drive to neighboring Abu Dhabi to a mere fourteen minutes.

Compared with LA and Dubai, Helsinki already seems like a mobility dream. It’s a walkable city with trams, subways, and buses that seem to pass by every minute or two. But it still wasn’t easy, a decade ago, for a college student named Sonja Heikkilä to cross town for soccer practice. Her frustrations grew into a vision: What if she could call up every available form of transportation on a single smartphone app—and then pay for mobility as a subscription, as with Spotify or Netflix? Her idea is taking root in Helsinki, where owning a car could one day become an anachronism, as quaint as buying a CD. (Auto executives need look no further than the beleaguered music industry to see how disruptive the transition from physical ownership to a digital service economy can be.)

Perhaps the most important stop on our global mobility tour is Shanghai. Until a few decades ago, it was a city of buses, bicycles, and swarms of pedestrians. Cars were rare. But now, like the rest of China’s industrial east, Shanghai is transformed. It’s become a thriving megapolis of twenty-five million, complete with jammed freeways and dirty air. The city’s soaring ambition is to solve these problems while leading the world in the race to new forms of mobility. Its greatest asset is a bottomless ocean of data describing the movements and moods of every person in the city. This data, combined with advanced AI in the hands of a powerful government and a single dominating Communist Party, could one day manage human movement with the precision of an industrial supply chain.

But is this the future we want, each of us being shuttled from place to place with remorseless efficiency, like the fenders, seat cushions, and spark plugs in a Toyota plant? With each advance of the mobility revolution, we’ll confront tough choices about the kind of world we’d like to live in. On one side will be the freedom of the individual. This includes the freedom to be wasteful, to travel incognito, even to get lost. Balanced against that are the interests of society, such as safety, efficiency, economic competitiveness, and a clean environment. This tension between the individual and society will run through the mobility revolution, and through this book. The contrast will come into stark relief as we explore the race to mobility in the world’s two leading economies, those of the United States and China.

In the end, the story is about us: billions of people on the move. We measure each trip we take, whether to Kuala Lumpur or the corner drugstore, in the distance we travel, the time it takes to get there, and the money it costs. Miles, minutes, dollars. Underlying each stage of mobility, from foot to horse to cars and jets, are the mathematics of these three fundamental variables: time, space, and money. The coming mobility revolution will be no different. In the conclusion, we’ll explore how the coming changes might revamp our conception of the geography of our planet, the hours in our days, and where in the world we might be able to go.

1

Hit Enter to Print Car

If you wanted to pinpoint the epicenter of movement in the United States, you might consider the otherwise unremarkable Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, California. It’s barely ten minutes south of Los Angeles International Airport, the fourth-busiest in the world. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together handle more than one-third of the cargo coming into the United States, are just a couple of exits away. In the part of Torrance where Kevin Czinger has set up shop, near the junction of two teeming ten-lane interstates, the 110 and 405, the wide boulevards seem endless. They’re flanked by warehouses and dominated by trucks. The skinny palm trees in the medians look lonely and forlorn.

Czinger arrived at this hub in 2014 with a bigger-than-life goal: to reinvent auto manufacturing for the next century. The reigning status quo, as Czinger sees it, features massive factories mass-producing cars and trucks. These plants are geared toward tonnage and are punishingly rigid. The vehicles rolling off their lines choke our cities and cook our planet. It’s a model, as Czinger sees it, well along the path to extinction. His alternative is designed to diverge from that death march, which is why Czinger named his company Divergent 3D. His model is fast and flexible, similar, in Darwinian terms, to the small, cagey mammals that survived cataclysmic climate change millions of years ago. Automakers large and small, in his view, need the same mammalian skills—speed and flexibility—to survive. That’s what Kevin Czinger wants to sell.

Czinger’s manufacturing setup, like so much else in the coming age of mobility, encodes the entire process in software. Like a magazine or a song, or a million other products in today’s world, the entire vehicle is pieced together virtually, on a computer. Once the engineers are happy with the design, they hit the Print button, and 3-D printers spit out panels and joints, each one optimized for weight, strength, durability, fuel efficiency—in short, whatever quality the engineers ask for. Later a small cohort of robots assembles the car, plunks in an engine (either gas or electric), and adds four wheels and a few finishing touches. If the car is not quite right, the Divergent team melts down the pieces, tweaks the design, and reprints. As Czinger sees it, this new process will allow entrepreneurs and small design studios to barrel into small-scale car manufacturing. Setting up mini–manufacturing plants, he says, will cost a tenth of the mass-manufacturing norm, perhaps only $50 million, and will give birth to all sorts of boutique automakers. “We could have ten new car manufacturers in LA alone,” he says. “[The outdoor retailer] Patagonia could make their own brand of cars.”

It looks, though, like the first market for these 3-D printed cars will be in China. Czinger’s leading investors, including the Hong Kong real estate magnate Li Ka-shing, are members of a Chinese syndicate. They’ve earmarked more than $100 million for his operation, and are setting up the first 3-D car manufacturing plant in Shanghai.

ON A SUNNY spring day in Torrance, Kevin Czinger strolls through his spacious office, past a few rows of programmers and engineers hunched over computers. He opens the big metal door onto a dusty construction site. A crew is busy leveling the ground for a team of car-building robots. The surface must be perfectly flat so that the robots can piece together the cars with millimetric precision.

Czinger, in his late fifties, has the erect bearing of a soldier. He wears a tight short-sleeved shirt. The arms coming out of the sleeves seem a couple of sizes bigger than the rest of his body, and both are popping with veins. He was a college football player, and in the terms of that sport, he looks like a defensive back with the arms of a lineman.

He grew up the youngest of five in a working-class family in Cleveland. Two of his brothers were mechanics and into drag racing. Czinger, while still in high school, refitted a ’68 Plymouth Barracuda with a powerful 440 wedge V8 engine. That was hot-rodding. In those days, he says, it was the closest thing to computer hacking. “You had stuff from the manufacturers that didn’t work so well, and you were trying to make something better.”

It turned out to be football, not hot-rodding, that carried Kevin Czinger from Cleveland to Yale—and kick-started his career. Czinger was a demon on defense. Less than two hundred pounds, he played noseguard, lining up right across from the much-burlier centers. From this spot, just a few feet from the opposing quarterbacks, he waged war on the offense. “For three years,” wrote the Harvard Crimson in 1980, “the key to the [Yale] defense’s success has been middle guard Kevin Czinger.” The article quoted the coach at Brown University, who said that Czinger had “singlehandedly” dominated his team two years in a row. “He ruins your whole game plan.”

After college, Czinger signed up for the Marine Corps and went to law school, also at Yale. He later clerked for Gerhard Gesell, a federal judge who presided over momentous cases, from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate. When Czinger expressed an interest in prosecuting crime, Judge Gesell lined him up at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where Czinger soon found himself working as an assistant US attorney under Rudolph Giuliani. There he worked with a host of rising stars, including James Comey, the future FBI director.

Czinger’s career reads like a guidance counselor’s greatest hits—except that it’s all one person. He won a prestigious Bosch fellowship in Germany, and he ran media and telecom for Goldman Sachs in London. For a couple of years, he was a top executive at the German publishing conglomerate Bertelsmann. When the Internet started to percolate as a history-changing force in the mid-1990s, Czinger landed in Silicon Valley, where, as chief financial officer and head of operations, he ran one of the most ambitious and visionary of the first wave of Web companies—and one of its most notorious failures. The first big online grocer, it was called Webvan.

Although Kevin Czinger’s career continued its hopscotching path into this century, let’s stop for a moment at Webvan, because it offers some parallels to his current venture, Divergent 3D.

There was a brief time, in the late 1990s, when Webvan had the look of a rising giant. Right after the 1995 initial public stock offering of Netscape, which set off the first Internet boom, a host of start-ups raced into what was then called “cyberspace” and carried out (online) land grabs. The thinking at the time was that each niche would eventually support only a couple of competitors, and perhaps only a single dominant player. Amazon, in these early days, was shaping up merely as the leading online bookstore. Webvan’s aim was much grander. It would disrupt the $430 billion market for groceries. It promised to feed the nation, and with time, much of the world.

Venture capitalists showered millions on Internet start-ups, pretty much indiscriminately. Few of these dot-coms swallowed up bigger bets than Webvan. Leading venture firms, including the Silicon Valley titans Benchmark and Sequoia Capital, plowed hundreds of millions into the company. Webvan, intent on quickly establishing itself as the rising giant of e-grocers, rushed to open operations in ten major cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This meant building high-tech warehouses and torturously complex supply chains, and delivering food to customers within a tight deadline—ideally, before it went rotten. It was insanely ambitious, and Kevin Czinger was calling most of the shots.

Czinger’s current automaking venture is in many ways similar. It’s ambitious and disruptive. It benefits from investors’ rush into mobility. With Divergent 3D, Czinger continues to make bold promises. This time, instead of feeding the world, he’s out to change the way we make things. Manufacturing, after all, is the foundation of the global economy. Snipping out 90 percent of the industrial process, as Czinger plans, could eliminate tens of millions of jobs. But it might also be the key to cleaning up humanity’s ways—and carving out a path to sustainability.

Soaring visions like Czinger’s flourish during the hype stage of a technological revolution, a period of sky-high promises and fearless investors. Visions sell and money flows. For many companies, profits are far off, and during this glass-half-full stage, that’s OK. Each company can sell itself as a survivor, even a potential champion.

But Czinger’s Webvan experience might tamp down a bit of the giddiness. There’s a point in every boom, he knows, when markets turn from wonder to skepticism. This usually occurs after an early highflier goes bust, which leads investors to start asking hard questions about revenue and profits.

As pretenders fail, investors retreat and survivors feast on the fallen, picking up their code, their brainpower, their customers. In the aftermath, giants emerge. We cannot say at this point—no one can—where the companies we’re getting to know, including Divergent 3D, will end up in this food chain. But whether they emerge as champions or fall and get swallowed along the way, they’re busy building the next generation of mobility. Their workers and the code they write, and the industrial process they create, will play a part of this revolution, no matter which competitors emerge on top.

This was true for Webvan as well. The company was investing mightily, its monthly expenses dwarfing revenue. Profits, if they ever arrived, were years away. By the time the market’s mood changed, in the spring of the year 2000, and investors’ gazes turned from soaring visions to the bottom line, Webvan might as well have worn a sign around its neck saying SHOOT ME. The company’s funding dried up, and it declared bankruptcy in 2002. Amazon, the survivor, promptly pounced on Webvan’s assets, including its warehouses. That giant got bigger. “The core team up at Amazon,” Czinger says, “is the old Webvan team, from robotics to warehousing.” He and his team lost control, but fed the ecosystem.

Nonetheless, Kevin Czinger managed not only to escape this Darwinian drama, but to walk away a rich man. He had managed to vest rich options while Webvan’s stock soared. He subsequently added to his wealth with lucrative stints in private equity.

So in 2008, not yet fifty years old, Kevin Czinger decided to do something big. His goal was nothing less than to save the world from global warming, while at the same time returning to his lifelong passion for cars. So he cofounded an electric car company, Coda Automotive. Most of his investors came from China, and the venture targeted the Chinese market.

As it turned out, Coda released its only model, an electric sedan, in 2012—the same year that Tesla came out with its hit luxury car, the Model S. The Tesla bested Coda in crucial categories, including range, and trounced it in the marketplace. That spelled Coda’s doom. Within a year, Czinger was shoved out, and Coda was seeking bankruptcy protection. Now having succumbed to two iconic companies, Amazon and Tesla, Kevin Czinger was plotting his next move.

Even before Coda’s fall, he says, he realized that his push for affordable electric cars was foolish—or at least dangerously misinformed. He had believed, like millions of electric car drivers today, that shifting the auto industry to an electric fleet would help save humanity from overheating our planet and killing ourselves. The cars don’t pollute. They don’t even have tailpipes.

But in 2009, Czinger came across a document that changed his thinking: a five-hundred-page report, Hidden Costs of Energy, produced by the National Academy of Sciences. It introduced the concept of life-cycle analysis and convinced Czinger that his entire vision (and those of other electric car companies, including Tesla) had everything backward.

Cars begin polluting, the report argued, long before a new owner presses the accelerator for the first time. It detailed the immense energy consumed in manufacturing a vehicle. This consumption starts with iron miners digging deep into the earth, hauling up mountains of ore, and loading them onto trains or barges. They transport it usually hundreds of miles, which consumes more energy. In steel mills, iron pellets fired with hard coal, called coke, are smelted in roaring blast furnaces that reach nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The molten iron ore flows into other furnaces, where it’s refined into thick slabs of steel, which are pressed by massive rolling pins and eventually flattened into sheets. Then the gleaming rolls of steel are shipped off to an auto plant. Each step of this process burns lots of fuel, in turn spewing metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The other materials arriving at the same auto plant’s docks—the plastics, glass, and chemicals—each emerge from their own industrial processes, most of them involving fires and furnaces. The manufacturing of a car, according to the report, consumes more energy and creates more earth-warming havoc than the actual car will produce as it plies the streets and highways for a decade or two. As Czinger read the report, it became clear to him that practically any new car, even an electricity-fueled Leaf or Tesla, was an environmental liability. “I was such a dummy,” he says.

But this revelation led Kevin Czinger toward yet another staggeringly ambitious goal: This time, instead of feeding the world or electrifying transportation, he would take it upon himself to dramatically clean up auto manufacturing. And as if that weren’t enough, he also aimed to minimize the environmental damage that cars create once they’re built. This is where, a decade earlier, he had held out hope for emission-free electric cars. But the simple laws of physics overturned this logic. If you’ve ever tried pushing a car, you know that budging even a smallish one, a Mini Cooper, say, or a Camry, requires loads of energy (and a strong back). Compared with those cars, Tesla’s luxury Model S, the one that sank Coda, was a behemoth. The first prototype, displayed in 2009, weighed in at 4,600 pounds. About one-quarter of that weight came from the battery alone. Moving millions of them would require countless gigawatts.

Even without an internal combustion engine, and absent the fumes, those gigawatts had to come from somewhere. About two-thirds of the electricity in the world, Czinger saw, came from burning fossil fuels. This added to global warming. Sure, there were promising trends. Norway’s electrical grid was fueled by alternative energy. California was quickly making strides in that direction. Electricity in France came mostly from nuclear plants, which despite other concerns produce no greenhouse gases. But most of the world’s electricity came from carbon, and it would for decades. Using that electricity to move heavy vehicles hundreds of billions of miles, Czinger realized, was unsustainable.

What’s more, the world’s biggest and fastest-growing car market—China—promised unmitigated disaster. Most of China’s electric cars, in effect, would be running on filthy coal. This promised some relief for the coughing and wheezing masses in smoggy Beijing and Shanghai. But from a global perspective, it simply shifted the pollution from crowded cities to the distant fossil fuel–burning utilities elsewhere. For the future of the planet, it was even worse. “Turning China’s fleet to electric cars,” he says, shaking his head, “is the most insane thing you could ever think of doing.”

So Kevin Czinger would not only clean up the industrial process. His manufacturing system would also produce dramatically lighter cars. At one-third the weight of traditional cars, they would consume less energy, regardless of the engine type. That would result in cleaner air.

His goal was to replicate the cyclical patterns and feedback loops of nature. This is a recurring theme throughout the mobility world, and indeed, in the broader sphere of computing. The idea is that throughout our industrial history, we have been starved of vital information, or feedback. Most traffic lights at four thirty a.m. don’t see that we’re waiting at the corner all alone. They cannot adjust to changing conditions, as a crossing guard might, and wave us through. Lacking this data, they blindly rely on programmed rules. On an intelligence scale, they’re somewhere between rocks and refrigerators—unresponsive, but reliable. Entire industries, as we’ll see, are focused on seeding elements of the physical world, including traffic lights, with sensors, and turning the dumb machines into adaptive networks, ones that behave more like plants and animals.

This same logic extends to manufacturing. Car companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars to mass-produce legions of identical units. It’s a dumb, inflexible process. Lacking feedback loops to catch defects or to gauge popularity, an auto plant simply pumps out the units. If something’s wrong, the company issues hideously expensive recalls. And if certain aspects of the car or truck—the hood design, lumbar support, highway mileage—turn off buyers, there’s no easy fix. The structure is locked in. Failures cost hundreds of millions. It’s money down the drain.

In Czinger’s scheme, which he relates to biology, each car evolves. The 3-D printer process can spit out single specimens, which can be tested for speed, handling, comfort, fuel efficiency. This creates feedback loops. As test data comes in, the engineers can melt down the car and tweak the software design—the car’s DNA. They can spawn different species for varying markets—or ecosystems—perhaps one car for the long, flat boulevards of Torrance, another for the chaotic streets and alleys of Karachi.

The former noseguard gets most excited when talking about the most violent of feedback loops: crashes. Because most of a printed car can be melted down and recycled, it’s much cheaper to run them through crash tests. Each test will produce rich data on every material and design feature in the car. In Czinger’s vision, next-generation manufacturers around the world will crash their cars, scores of them, creating oceans of feedback data, which they’ll share with everyone else. “We’ll be swimming in crash data,” Czinger says. Once this data is fed into learning engines, they can analyze the performance of each component, gradually leading to the safest and most crashworthy designs. Such is the supple nature and competitive advantage of a manufacturing process that exists, in large part, as software.

DIVERGENT 3D REPRESENTS merely one stab at manufacturing the next generation of vehicles. Entrepreneurs around the world are busy devising new machines, and a good number of them are innovating with schemes simpler than Kevin Czinger’s robots and 3-D printers.

Many such start-ups are repurposing industrial machinery used to make stoves or bicycles. The result is an explosion of tinkering. VeloMetro, a Vancouver, British Columbia, start-up, created the Veemo, a three-wheeled electric-aided bicycle encased on three sides in an all-weather pod. Big companies are in on it, too. Renault’s Twizy, a featherweight electric automobile, looks like a go-cart. Its two doors rise up on its sides, like a bat’s wings. Over the coming decades, the streets and sidewalks of cities around the world will be crowded laboratories for a wild and diverse generation of mobility machines. They’ll look like something dreamed up for video games, or from a world inspired by Dr. Seuss.

In the college town of Eugene, Oregon, a former video-game designer named Mark Frohnmayer is putting together one such machine, an electric auto–motorcycle hybrid called Arcimoto. Imagine, for starts, turning a tricycle around, so that two wheels are in front, one behind. Then expand it to the size of a motorcycle, put in a couple of seats, one behind the other, and enclose it with an arc of plexiglass. These odd beasts are now rolling out of an Oregon manufacturing plant and selling for $11,000.

Frohnmayer, a UC Berkeley–educated computer scientist, succeeded early in his career as a video-game designer. One of his hits in the late 1990s, Starsiege: Tribes, was an early online multiplayer game set a couple thousand years into the future. Each player’s character was equipped with a gun, and he gathered with other tribes of humans for fights that jumped from one galaxy to the next. In 2001, Frohnmayer and his partners founded a software company called GarageGames. The idea was to develop easy-to-use tools for people to create their own video games. Six years later, Frohnmayer and his team sold the company to Barry Diller’s Internet conglomerate, IAC, for a reported $80 million.

This left him with a chunk of money and some free time. So he went shopping for a car. After a successful “exit,” as it’s called in the venture business, plenty of entrepreneurs might splurge on a Tesla S or a Porsche Panamera. But Frohnmayer is in Oregon, not the Valley. He’s the son of a university president, very idealistic, and, like many in the new mobility businesses, bright green and eager to save the world.

He was in the market for a socially responsible set of wheels, something to use when it was too wet to bike. He didn’t want to spend too much for it—maybe $10,000. He was disappointed. Even the cheapest cars seemed too big and cumbersome. He considered a motorcycle. It would be easy to park and fuel efficient. But motorcycling is miserable in the rain, which pretty much defines Eugene from October to June. Also, motorcycles are dangerous. People fly off them like missiles.

“What I saw,” Frohnmayer recalls, “is this enormous space between the motorcycle and the car.” Most trips around town, he said, involve one person, sometimes two, rarely more. So there had to be a market for people like him, who wanted a cheap and extremely fuel efficient electric vehicle for driving around town in bad weather, maybe just the mile or two to a train station or bus stop. The vehicle, he thought, should be as easy to park as a motorcycle, but as safe as a car, and with enough storage to bring home a few bags of groceries. He figured he could assemble a team to design this new species.

It turned out to be harder than software. “When you build a game in software,” he says, “you can copy it for no cost. You can fix a bug. Software is almost magical.” Manufacturing in the physical world, by contrast, proved to be “fantastically more complex.” Starting in 2008, his team in Eugene created one version after another of the two-seated roadster. This development went on for eight years—the entire Obama presidency. The Arcimoto team kept subbing in different materials and designs to reduce weight; they replaced handlebars with a steering wheel, then returned to handlebars again. They wedged stronger batteries into smaller nooks.

In all, they went through seven versions, and something was always … not quite right. But the eighth version sold them. It had a range of seventy-five miles. Though hardly a speed demon, the Arcimoto could still hold its own with cars, with a top speed of eighty miles per hour.

Finally, Frohnmayer had a green machine to strut before investors. In 2017, Arcimoto listed its stock on the Nasdaq Global Market and raised $19.5 million. That was enough to go into production. It launched sales early in 2019, but with a higher price than anticipated—some $19,900. Frohnmayer vowed to the press that with greater volume and expertise, they’d eventually get the price down to the $11,900 target. This is the tough learning curve start-ups face in manufacturing. The traditional players are wizards when it comes to mass production. No other industry has come close.

Arcimoto’s manufacturing is primitive, compared with Divergent 3D’s robotics and 3-D printing. In the Eugene factory, Arcimoto’s workers shear metal parts from sheets of steel, and then use a press to bend them to the right shapes—“Essentially sheet metal origami,” says Frohnmayer. The Arcimoto SRK, more motorcycle than car, is a far simpler vehicle than the cars Divergent 3D is designed to build. But Arcimoto also spent a lot less than the $50 million for a Divergent minifactory. The company has raised a mere $30 million in funding, and it already has its full manufacturing operation up and running. “And a lot of the money is still in the bank,” Frohnmayer says.

In the fight to build the next generation of mobility manufacturing, a host of variables are in flux. The dollar investment in manufacturing is falling, as is the cost of vehicles. Meanwhile, the choice of vehicles is exploding, and each year batteries provide a greater range and lower costs. The challenge, whether the current product is an Arcimoto, a Veemo, a Twizy, or one of the 3-D printed cars coming off a new line in Shanghai, is to build an enduring business plan for times of unrelenting change.

AT THE DAWN of the Internet age, when Kevin Czinger was busy building an online grocery business, the mobility revolution would have been impossible. Yet over the following two decades, crucial technologies advanced dramatically, turning visions like 3-D printed cars from far-fetched fantasies into factory installations.

It’s astounding how many crucial pieces have fallen into place in so little time. Start with data, the feedstock of the information economy. At the turn of the century, the age of data had not yet taken shape. This is because most of us weren’t yet spending our lives interacting with screens and surrounded by sensors, or busily feeding social networks. The networks didn’t learn much about us—our buying habits, our diseases, our networks of friends. Our lives were still largely off-line. Many computers, strange as it sounds today, sat cloistered in “computer rooms.” Laptops had no Wi-Fi. And even if we had uploaded the data on floppy disks to networks, there weren’t yet powerful cloud computers to store and process it, turning our behaviors and movements into insights and fueling crucial advances in artificial intelligence.

In those early Internet years, networked sensors, the eyes and ears of the mobility world, were still in their infancy. By far the most important of these sensors, the smartphones we carry around everywhere, did not yet exist. Without smartphones, an entire wing of the mobility economy, from Uber to dockless bike and scooter companies, would disintegrate. (For those companies, our smartphones are their customers, not us. We’re simply stuff that rides along, the smartphones’ luggage.)

One of the recent breakthroughs in the data economy has been the increased mastery of human language by machines. All our online scribbling and yammering has created massive language sets for computers. In effect, we have taught them language. This enables us to talk to the machines moving us around. Speech is the dominant interface for mobility technology. This wouldn’t have been possible, except in a handful of primitive applications, before about 2015.

By looking back even a decade or two, we can sense the speed of the tech current pushing us forward. It’s fast, and it’s accelerating. The technologies powering the mobility revolution, from AI to manufacturing and network management, are sure to advance just as dramatically over the next decade or two.

The same growth curve is being experienced by 3-D printing. In the first decade of this century, the mere suggestion of harnessing armies of 3-D printers for automobile manufacturing would have sounded outlandish. Such printers in their infancy were mostly for hobbyists. Designers could draw up something on their computers—perhaps a refrigerator handle, or a new stem for a broken pair of sunglasses. But the process was slow. Similar to a child building a sand drip castle at the beach, the printer deposited material layer upon layer, and gradually an object rose into the physical world. It was called “additive” technology. Instead of a child’s stubby fingers dripping sand, a 3-D printer used a precision nozzle that spit out minutely calibrated material, usually plastic. It was miraculous, in its way, but deliberate, built to craft one object at a time. It might have been the next stage of craftsmanship, but it was hardly a rival to mass manufacturing.

Yet the manufacturers of such devices kept shooting ahead. In the last decade, 3-D printers have radically expanded their diet and equipped themselves for more serious work. These digital factories can now consume a variety of metallic powders and a broad array of composites. This increases their range. Their speed, meanwhile, has climbed up the exponential curve familiar to other digital technologies. Traditional carmakers are now using 3-D printers to create certain parts while leaving the rest of their mass-manufacturing process intact.

When it comes to speed, 3-D printing cannot compete with the astounding production of a traditional assembly plant. The question is whether the 3-D printing process will be fast enough for minifactories to make money in niche markets—or if it will be fast enough in three or four years.

DIVERGENT 3D’S FIRST car, which Czinger showcases at mobility conferences, is a sleek, purple sports car called the Blade. It has the curves of a 1950s-era Porsche, yet it weighs only 1,400 pounds. If it had a more modest motor, it could run more than one hundred miles on a gallon of gas. But the show version, built to wow motor-heads and car writers, sacrifices economy for performance. It has the power of 700 horses, and it can accelerate from zero to sixty in a blistering two seconds flat.

The Blade is only a concept car at this point. Divergent’s business, Czinger says, will not be in producing and selling cars, but instead in leasing its manufacturing system—its software—to automakers big and small around the world. Even as 3-D printing grows faster, it will never compete with the productivity of mass manufacturing. But niche markets don’t require such speed or scale. Czinger estimates that simple printed cars with commodity engines will sell for $6,000 or so—not even a third the price of Mark Frohnmayer’s Arcimoto SRK. The plans for the Shanghai factory call for the production of nearly one thousand such cars per month. The number is minuscule by mass-manufacturing standards, but it’s an entirely different business model. If this approach takes off, Divergent 3D could become a global software platform for vehicle manufacturing. That is Kevin Czinger’s goal.

2

LA: Crawling to Topanga Canyon

The story of Los Angeles, like that of most cities, is a tale of changing mobility. Until the 1880s, LA was a small river town at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, fifteen miles from the Pacific shore. The few thousand European Americans who lived there had either made a harrowing transcontinental journey across mountains and deserts in wagons drawn by animals, or they’d taken extravagant detours in ships, some of them sailing twelve thousand miles around Tierra del Fuego.

When trains from the east finally reached the town, they unleashed a wave of migration. In 1888, as two competing railroads, Union Pacific and Santa Fe, battled for the nascent Southern California market, a price war erupted. A passenger in Kansas City could travel all the way to Los Angeles for as little as twenty dollars, then ten dollars, and during one spectacular promotion, a single dollar. To these first travelers, this rolling conquest of an entire continent must have seemed magical.

With the new railways, the West was tamed. Travelers simply stepped into a railroad car at Kansas City’s new Union Depot. Two or three days later, they would find themselves far beyond the Rockies, the Sonoran Desert, and the Sierra Nevada, descending into a boomtown of palm trees and rolling surf, a city of angels.

What wasn’t to like? Los Angeles grew, and a railroad heir named Henry Huntington avidly pushed it along. Huntington arrived in Southern California in the 1890s and promptly began to buy up streetcar companies. He extended tracks throughout the region. He also acquired an electricity company, which fueled his trains. Nearly a century before the word existed, Huntington was a master practitioner of synergy.

He was also a visionary. He was in fact building transit for an immense city that did not yet exist. While he ran the electricity and the trains, the biggest money, he knew, was in real estate. The history of railroads made it clear that when tracks came through, the value of nearby land soared, turning scrub lots into premium parcels. So he bought loads of acreage, from the foothills town of Glendale and Pasadena all the way to Redondo Beach, and then connected them to his train lines. People who settled in those areas could ride his Red or Yellow cars downtown for work and shopping.

It was a comfy racket for Huntington and a handful of other investors, but it was headed for a big disruption, similar in many ways to the one we’re facing now. The first automobiles showed up early in the twentieth century, and after 1908, when the affordable Model Ts started rolling off Henry Ford’s new assembly lines, Angelenos embraced them. In 1911, to meet soaring local demand, Ford even set up a Model T factory on Seventh Street, in downtown Los Angeles. By the following year, one in every eight adults in Los Angeles had a car, more than twice the rate in such established cities as New York. Some of these new automobiles began to compete directly with Huntington’s streetcars. Jitney cabs trolled the streetcar lines, snatching away their passengers and collecting the same fee, a nickel. A century later, this same pattern is repeating in hundreds of cities, as commuters abandon buses and subways for car-sharing services.

As Angelenos took to the wheel, downtown LA grew congested. The streets effectively became narrower because of the parked cars. They were also more crowded, because drivers then—just like today—roamed in search of parking. The streetcars, which still served the majority of Angelenos, were getting tied up in traffic. As Richard Longstreth describes in his study of LA, City Center to Regional Mall, the city council addressed this problem by voting in 1920 to ban streetside parking in the urban core.

This raised vivid concerns. The Los Angeles Times warned that if people couldn’t park downtown, other competing downtowns would spring up, in lots of other neighborhoods, including Hollywood and Glendale. Those competing downtowns would sprout their own theaters and department stores, and with their cheaper real estate, they’d be able to offer parking. This would hollow out LA’s downtown.

Within a decade, the new order was firmly established. Cars prevailed, and again, it was real estate that drove the change. Developers built in areas far from public transit, because now people could drive. Those who moved into those suburbs were self-selected car people. During this decade of tumultuous expansion, LA fleshed out much of the land between the bare bones of the streetcar networks. In 1927, the director of the city’s planning department, an auto buff named Gordon Whitnall, wrote: “So prevalent is the use of the automobile here that it might almost be said that Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy … that our population has become fluid.”

The alarming point about this transition, from the perspective of Angelenos who don’t want history to repeat itself, is that it just seemed to happen. From the perspective of everyday folk in the area, the process was simple: There was this new way to move. People liked it. And it promptly overwhelmed a large piece of the planet; in this case, Southern California.

Peter Marx, a professor at USC and a former chief technology officer for Los Angeles, goes so far as to suggest that the automobile in Southern California is the dominant species, and that we human beings serve it. This is tongue in cheek, of course, but his logic has the ring of truth.

Automobiles do seem to lord over us. We pay them extravagantly, and we polish and clean them—even though they tend to be lazy. Most of them labor for only a fraction of their existence, and they snooze the rest of the time in expensive lots and garages that we build for them.

Human beings in Los Angeles spend thousands of dollars every month to park their own bodies, many of them in cramped studios and duplexes. The city has an urgent homeless problem, with more than fifty thousand of its people living without a roof over their heads. The automotive overlords, by contrast, often park for free. Each one, on average, luxuriates in more than three spaces, many of them safer and more substantial than the ramshackle shelters and tents that homeless humans occupy. Parking spaces in greater Los Angeles take up some two hundred square miles. That’s five times the entire footprint of Paris.

The whole environment has been molded to the needs of these four-wheeled beings. If aliens came to earth and studied our species, they might notice that we appear happier when at the beach, on fields, in the mountains, or surrounded by vegetation. But those beautiful environments are inhospitable to cars (though useful as backdrops to advertise them). So for a century, as Joni Mitchell sang, we’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

To underscore our subservience to these machines, one more point: if, through carelessness or pride, we venture onto their paved terrain, they can kill or maim us.

SO IN THIS book about the coming age of mobility, why include a chapter about this iconic car town? The three other cities discussed in this book clearly make sense: Helsinki has its mobility apps; Dubai is spending billions for every new piece of technology on the shelf. Of course it would be silly to ignore China, so sure, Shanghai.

LA, though, doesn’t seem to fit. LA County minted the global model for highway-connected sprawl. With its eighty-eight municipalities, the county is shaped by thousands of miles of highways, driveways, boulevards, parking lots, and culs-de-sac. This is yesterday’s infrastructure. What does it have to do with tomorrow?

That’s precisely the point. Los Angeles, more than traditional compact cities, like San Francisco or Paris, must reinvent itself. The city’s leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have vowed to do just that. LA pioneered motorized mobility one hundred years ago, they say, and it can do it again. “My goal—and the goal of this city—[is] to be the transportation technology capital of the world,” says Garcetti. The challenges, as we’ll see, are immense. But the transition, when it comes, will likely be far more dramatic—for better or for worse—than in most other cities.

Consider the mileage. Drivers in LA County travel a combined average of 221 million miles a day. That’s the equivalent, every day, of a round-trip to the sun plus a one-way jaunt to Mars. You could argue that Angelenos would travel far more than that, maybe twice or three times as much, if the road experience were less miserable. The average LA driver spends one hundred hours a year stuck in traffic. Some commuters suffer multiples of that.

So for electric bus manufacturers, designers of flying machines, ride-sharing app developers, tunneling companies—for mobility entrepreneurs of every stripe and color—LA represents an immense and ravenous market for miles. The coming transition is bound to transform the economy, the cityscape, and life itself in this sun-soaked expanse of California.

In many ways, LA’s next step could be a return to its past. Christopher Hawthorne studies this history. For fourteen years, he was the renowned architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and more recently crossed the street to city hall, where he has a brand-new title: chief design officer. His job is to think about the emerging layout of the city: where people will live, work, study, and play, and—naturally—how they’ll move from one place to another. This has led him to conclude that in the twentieth century, there were two very different LAs, and now, in this new century, we’re seeing a third.

The first LA, Hawthorne says, started out as a traditional urban center, with a strong civic culture rooted in its downtown. That was the destination of Huntington’s streetcar lines. It was where people worked and shopped and went to the theater. You can still see vestiges of this first LA, from the grandiose Union Station, built in Spanish villa style in 1939, to the thirty-two-floor art deco tower that crowns city hall.

The second LA, as Hawthorne sees it, took shape following the Second World War. Much as the Los Angeles Times’ editorial writers had feared twenty-five years earlier, LA had extended into a policentric urban region with dozens of smaller downtowns, all of them connected by a fast-growing network of freeways. It was a vast sprawl.

For a time, it was a wildly successful one. Hollywood led the globe in entertainment. Fueled by Cold War spending, LA grew into a manufacturing giant and a world leader in aerospace. And LA’s freeway culture was central to its brand, one of freedom, sunshine, and sex. “She makes me come alive,” the Beach Boys sang, “and makes me want to drive.”

Yet as Hawthorne sees it, the civic spirit, the sense of belonging to something in common, slackened during this period. This wasn’t unique to LA, of course. But in Los Angeles, as is often the case, the change came earlier and was more extreme. People spent more time cocooned in their homes and their cars, and less of it within chatting distance of fellow Angelenos. With growing crime in the area, the most gruesome cases looped endlessly on TV, the streets themselves started to feel dangerous. In the second LA, the car was a safe space, a shield.

Now Hawthorne sees a third LA rising. In many ways, it recalls the original version, the one centered on a downtown, where people bumped into one another on electric trains and crowded sidewalks. In this process, LA doesn’t revert to a single downtown. But it does become a denser place, with more people packed into many of its empty spaces, more of them living in apartments. This more concentrated population will depend far less on cars, and fewer of its inhabitants will need to own one.

This shift is already under way. You can see it in the Arts District, a fifteen-minute walk from city hall. A neighborhood of old warehouses and small manufacturing plants, it’s now sprouting galleries, cafés, converted lofts, and new apartment buildings. People bike and scooter and stroll on sidewalks. This preview of the third LA looks and acts more like a traditional city.

For this filling-in trend to spread across greater LA, Angelenos will need a host of new mobility options. These extend from the familiar—walkable sidewalks, bike paths, new Metro lines—to technology’s cutting edge: think autonomous air taxis and high-speed pods blazing through tunnels.

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, leaning back on a couch in his spacious city hall office, is reminiscing about his first car, a 1975 gas-guzzling Ford Torino station wagon. He reaches for his phone and does a fast image search. “Here it is,” he says, pointing to a boxy behemoth with fake wood paneling on the sides. “It was more a question of gallons per mile than miles per gallon.”

It was a couple of months after Garcetti’s sixteenth birthday, in 1987, that his father, Gil (who would later serve as LA’s district attorney), bought back the Torino from the man he’d sold it to and presented it to his son. Even with its miserable gas mileage, the Torino represented freedom, and driving in LA still seemed fun. Today, the mayor says, LA still has some “amazing drives,” up the Pacific Coast Highway, for instance, or the twists and turns of Mulholland Drive. Topanga Canyon is still gorgeous. Add it all up, and the nice drives occupy “about two percent of the time,” Garcetti says grimly. “The other ninety-eight percent you’re in traffic.” And crawling.

Driving in LA is mostly an exercise in tapping the brakes. Eastbound rush hour traffic trudges on the 10, from Santa Monica to downtown, at about nine miles per hour, no faster than a six year old on a bike. In fact, many routes in LA are slower today than they were in the 1920s, when people were still driving Model Ts.

Immobility saps the Los Angeles region of its very essence. The whole point of living and working in a city, after all, is to connect with other people. In LA, it might be to haggle over a merger in Pasadena, to play tennis on the courts at UCLA, to celebrate a quinceañera in Boyle Heights, to dream up a screenplay over drinks in Marina del Rey. People interacting with other people is akin to a city’s nervous system. For it to work, people have to be able to move. Otherwise, why pay the rent to live in LA? You might as well FaceTime from somewhere else.

For decades, the answer has been to widen the highways—which is almost always an exercise in futility. Way back in 1955, the social critic Lewis Mumford quipped that adding highway lanes to ease congestion was like loosening your belt to cure obesity. More supply simply generates greater demand. The most recent example was a $1.1 billion widening of the key north–south artery, the 405. The job, which involved hacking out a wider pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, took four years. It led angry commuters through miles of convoluted detours. Once complete, that stretch of the 405 was as slow as ever. Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, an LA resident since 2002, laments to a gathering of Bel-Air residents that the 405, even with the improvements, “varies between the seventh and eighth levels of hell.”

Absent this powerful and widespread frustration with LA’s car monoculture, local authorities would have little hope of transforming mobility in the region. But even car-loving Angelenos now see that the second LA is unsustainable. In 2016, voters were so fed up with the status quo, they approved Measure M, which hiked gas taxes to finance $120 billion over four decades in transportation spending, much of it in Metro expansion.

For a target, Garcetti focuses on the LA Olympics in 2028. His office is decorated with enormous black-and-white photos of LA’s two previous Olympics. The 1932 games, LA’s coming-out party, left the city its iconic Coliseum. The Olympics of 1984, staged at the height of the Cold War, felt like a victory parade. First, LA beat out New York City for the games, which made it sweet. Then Americans, like the sunny gymnast Mary Lou Retton and the sprinter Carl Lewis, scooped up loads of medals (thanks in part to the Soviet and Eastern Bloc boycott). In the ’84 Olympics, LA even figured out a way to make a profit—which enhanced its reputation as a can-do region, one capable of economic miracles. Time magazine named the games’ organizer, Peter Ueberroth, its 1984 Man of the Year.

By the time the 2028 Olympics roll around, in Garcetti’s vision, the third LA should be on full display, the city’s mobility largely transformed. County-controlled LA Metro plans to have twenty-eight major transit projects completed in time for the ’28 games. They include a doubling of the Metro line, the introduction of electric buses, the availability of subsidized electric ride-share services for the poor and disabled, and the expansion of bike lanes and pedestrian greenways.

The city and county are wooing mobility players big and small, whether they’re running fleets of autonomous jitneys, operating air taxis, or building electric buses. “If you think about the finance capitals of the world,” Garcetti says, “New York and London come to mind. Car cities, Detroit and Munich, Tokyo. But what city is the leader in transportation technology? That’s what I want LA to be.” He points to the city’s leadership in aerospace, the five-hundred-odd tech start-ups along the western strip (so-called Silicon Beach), the two Hyperloop companies, and an openness to experimentation. “I want everyone to come here and try stuff,” he says. “I want LA to be the kitchen where this is all cooked.”

At the same time, he sees LA’s paved roadway, the asphalt tapestry smothering much of the region, as an asset. The roads can be repurposed, he says, parts of them transformed into bike paths and walkways. “Look at the High Line,” he says, referring to a converted stretch of elevated railway in New York City that is now a world-famous park.

Of course, many of the roads will remain focused on their current job: the movement of automobiles. Even as other options emerge, the automobile isn’t deserting Los Angeles any time soon. The region has 6.4 million cars and trucks, and the average vehicle stays in operation for eleven years, many for much longer. So on the eve of the 2028 Olympics, millions of cars would be still circulating in LA even if Angelenos, en masse, stopped buying them today. And that’s not happening.

The idea is not to get rid of the car, but to end the car monoculture. It’s a matter of giving people choices. As this happens, the city will become multimodal and greener. That part of the LA vision sounds like Helsinki, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities around the world.

In LA, though, one problem stands out: while the city and county are spending billions on new Metro lines and expanded bus service, it’s not yet catching on. Only 7 percent of the population rides public transit. Worse, these numbers have been shrinking. Growing numbers of working poor in the area, data show, are ditching the buses and trains, and instead buying used cars.

This is the downside of economic success. Since the rise of the automobile, public transit in LA, as in much of the car-centric world, has largely served the underclass, including many who cannot afford their own personal vehicle. But now, just as the city leaders try to transition away from the car economy, growing numbers of Angelenos are “graduating” into it. They add to congestion. So do the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers plying the streets and byways in search of passengers. After decades of progress against smog, LA’s air grew dirtier in 2016 and 2017, registering some of the nation’s highest ozone counts.

Garcetti boils the problem down to one of geometry. You have millions of people trying to get from point A to point B, he says, “and they’re all occupying the same plane.” That plane is defined by the surface of the earth and the roads plastered on top of it.

To visualize the limits of the status quo, think of all the people working in the city hall building. Since they’re organized in layers—thirty-two floors—they’re not too crowded. But most of those people came to work—at rush hour, no less—smushed onto a single plane, along the same ribbons of highway. Only later do they ease this crush by stacking vertically. One solution to the congestion, Garcetti suggests, is to add new planes for mobility, above the earth and beneath it.

FOR SELETA REYNOLDS, urban aerial mobility is not a current pressing concern. Nor are the tunnels Elon Musk’s Boring Company has begun to dig (which we’ll visit in chapter 6). Reynolds heads the LA Department of Transportation, and her focus is on moving millions of people, most of them by traditional means. She thinks much more about providing decent transportation to have-nots, and doesn’t worry much about the people crawling in Lamborghinis or Porsches up and down the 101.

Reynolds, a Mississippian with a history degree from Brown, came to LA from San Francisco, where she’d been an activist manager in the Municipal Transportation Agency. Her division was Livable Streets, and she oversaw the launch of Bay Area Bikeshare. In 2014, Mayor Garcetti brought her to Los Angeles as the top transportation official. She now sees the city at a crucial transition, much like the one a century ago, from streetcars to automobiles. Back then, for-profit corporations with bottomless reservoirs of dollars for promotion and greasing of the political levers sold the public on an enticing technology. And once the public was behind the wheel, it was hooked. By that point, the government was reduced to satisfying motorists’ demands: building highways, making sure people had places to park—in short, surrendering to the car.

All these years later, as Reynolds sees it, LA has a second chance. Tech entrepreneurs are promising a transformation—mobility that’s cheap, green, and fun. But from Reynolds’s perspective, if the government doesn’t step in and assert a measure of control over this new ecosystem of mobility, the technologists will dictate the shape and nature of the city for the coming century. In that case, it will be made to fit their needs, and their bottom lines, and not those of the eighteen million people living in greater Los Angeles. “We could repeat the mistake we made a century ago,” she says. “We adjusted the city to the technology, instead of the other way around.”

Reynolds focuses most on social equity. Entire neighborhoods of LA are transit deserts. She cites the example of Boyle Heights, a historic Mexican American enclave near downtown that is fenced in by freeways. “If you live there without a car,” she says, “you’re trapped.” Those who cannot move across the region efficiently and at an affordable price lose out on opportunities. They struggle to get to trade schools or to job interviews. Entire job markets lie out of reach. This trend worsens with time. The poor migrate to neighborhoods where the rent is cheap, which often are affordable, in great part, because the transportation is so terrible. In these mobility deserts, the poor get poorer, and many fall behind on their rent. This in turn feeds the epidemic of homelessness in LA.

The obvious answer is to wean Angelenos from their addiction to cars. LA Metro is spearheading this strategy by dramatically extending its network. Plans call for new lines stretching to the airport, and others linking downtown to Hollywood and the UCLA campus in Westwood. By the time the Olympic torch is lit in the LA Memorial Coliseum, according to the plan, LA County may boast the second-largest urban train system in the United States, behind only New York’s.

To some evangelists of the mobility revolution, this seems a bit retrograde. Who will take the Metro if Elon Musk’s underground network springs into action, zipping around Angelenos like packets of data? And what about the fleets of autonomous pods, the next generation of dockless electric bikes, the air taxis?

Like Reynolds, Phil Washington, CEO of LA Metro, sees public transportation serving as the main trunks and branches of the third LA, with the scooters, bikes, and car-shares working as connecting tendrils. His logic is based on the immense distance to be traveled—all those round-trips to the sun. Millions of people, he says, must share a good portion of those miles. Otherwise, if each trip carries a single person on a single trajectory, the next stage of transit could be knotted up even worse than rush hour on the 405 at Sepulveda Pass.

From Washington’s point of view, the competition between public transit and all the mobility entrepreneurs just isn’t fair. LA County’s Metro, like other public agencies, has a mission to provide service to everyone. This dramatically raises costs. In the United States, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 mandates universal access to public transit. Metro must spend for buses that hoist wheelchairs from the curb, and equip train stations with ramps and elevators. It must also provide transport to isolated neighborhoods, and look out for those lacking a smartphone to hail an Uber. This is expensive. It serves the people who need help—whom mobility entrepreneurs can blithely ignore. Those new players, Reynolds says, “are building businesses on our infrastructure. And we get nothing in return.”

What’s worse is that if new privately owned services take off willy-nilly, each one rushing to develop its own niche, they’ll claw for market share by selling mobility at bargain-basement prices. A century ago, when this happened, the government was ineffectual. It ended up being an enabler of the automobile monoculture. Those cars also had the right, at least for their first century, to pollute, congest, and roar. Running over people was collateral damage.

Like most city officials, Reynolds is eager to avoid a reprise of that mess. She wants not just to supervise traffic, but to manage it. This isn’t easy, because broader LA County is fractured into scores of fairly independent municipalities. And Metro, like most transit agencies in the United States, is not particularly popular. Most motorists use it rarely (while wishing others would).

Yet in Los Angeles, as in cities worldwide, someone, some entity, is going to be monitoring and managing our movements. This will happen more in some places than in others. But this control is the nature, and the promise, of connected mobility, the key to cleaner, safer, cheaper, and faster movement. The political fights ahead will focus not just on the extent of this control, but also on who’s in charge. Governments are sure to jostle with businesses large and small, and the crucial factor will be data.

In coming years, practically every conveyance will be linked to networks. Most already are. But in Los Angeles, as we’ll see in Helsinki, the data travel in different streams. The subway counts its riders, as do dockless bike companies like Lime. The phone companies can track the movements of their users, as can Google and Facebook. When autonomous cars hit the roads in growing numbers, each one will gush thick rivers of data.

Yet at this point, no one has access to the entire span of mobility data. This is perhaps the ultimate treasure in the coming era. Whoever controls the data will be in a position to manage movement, and to build businesses on it. LA took a first step in 2019, establishing data specifications for bike-share and scooter services. This will allow officials to track their coverage, and coordinate with public transit. This common data standard is now dubbed MDS, for mobility datasets.

The key to controlling networked mobility is data. But who will own it? Could one dominant player, perhaps a company like Google, become the de facto mobility platform?

The strategy in the LA government is for the city to control the data, and to share it with other players on a need-to-know basis. From Reynolds’s point of view, who else can claim to be looking out for everyone?

Transit officials in LA have in fact been working on optimizing traffic for decades. Take an elevator down four levels beneath city hall, pass through a series of security barriers, and you’ll find yourself facing walls of TV screens in the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control Room. Set up for the 1984 Olympics and originally funded by the federal government, it provides video feeds on hundreds of intersections and problem spots in LA. Back in 1984, the data analysis was primitive: human beings looked at TVs and saw traffic jams. The tools they had to respond were also unrefined. They could lengthen red or green lights where they saw problems, or in serious cases dispatch a traffic cop to the scene.

In the modern version, the surveillance network has spread to 4,700 intersections. In addition to images, sensors send in detailed reports on the traffic conditions: the number of vehicles passing, their speed, the flow of pedestrians. An AI engine churns through this information and attempts to optimize the flow, with a priority for mass transit. If a Metro bus, for example, is running behind schedule through East Hollywood, the computers can automatically orchestrate the lights on North Vermont Avenue to hurry it along.

Over time, the system will attempt to orchestrate the movement of growing numbers of vehicles, public and private alike. Autonomous cars, for example, will be sent along the most efficient paths and rerouted at a moment’s notice. Traffic lights will flash routing instructions to other cars, as well as to cyclists, and even to pedestrians.

When it comes to surveillance and control, as we’ll see in Dubai and Shanghai, this is still kids’ stuff. But unlike those cities, where government control has long been a fact of life, LA is attempting to manage millions of people who associate driving with freedom, who often view government with suspicion, if not contempt—and who can rebel at the polls against officials who rub them the wrong way.

ON THE BUSY pedestrian walkway in the oceanside municipality of Santa Monica, a black electric scooter, a Bird, is leaned against a palm tree. The Bird company, a hometown start-up, launched its business one autumn night simply by littering hundreds of its scooters throughout the eight square miles of Santa Monica, from its Ferris-wheeled pier all the way to the Brentwood town line. Residents who stopped the next morning to inspect these two-wheeled apparitions noticed a link to a smartphone app. Many downloaded the Bird app that very morning and started activating the scooters with their phones. (As a condition in the rental agreement, they vowed to wear bicycle helmets, but residents broke that promise en masse.) Paying a dollar for each ride, plus fifteen cents a minute, they were zipping around town with very few questions asked, other than “Will it get me there?” The answer was a resounding yes.

The day after the Bird scooters descended on Santa Monica, the company’s founder, a round-faced young man named Travis VanderZanden, reached out on LinkedIn to the mayor of Santa Monica, Ted Winterer, according to an account in the Washington Post. He invited him to drop by Bird’s headquarters. It was just a few blocks away. There they could discuss Bird’s mobility strategy for the region.

First, the mayor told him, they had a few legal issues to discuss. After all, Bird had never asked for authorization, much less discussed safety issues, sidewalks, or parking with the city. The company hadn’t said boo.

It didn’t take long to recognize a familiar pattern. VanderZanden, it turned out, was a former executive at both of the ride-sharing powerhouses, Lyft, and more significantly, Uber. The practice at Uber was to launch the service first and hammer out the legal details later. This had an impeccable logic. Once a mobility start-up gained lots of riders, it could attract millions of dollars from venture funders. Then it could use that money to hire armies of lawyers and make peace with the cities—to get legal. The key was to come to these negotiations as a popular and newly rich powerhouse, and not a supplicant.

The day that Bird launched in Santa Monica, VanderZanden was still bankrolling the company with just a small round of angel funding. But that changed quickly. Within weeks he had attracted $15 million in VC money, and another $100 million soon after that. By early 2018, when the company agreed to pay a $300,000 fine to the city, its valuation topped $1 billion. By that point, the Santa Monica fine was something Travis VanderZanden could have jammed into a tip jar. He had an enthusiastic customer base, a plan to expand nationally, and a fearsome fortune. Cities would take him on at their own peril.

This model extends throughout the tech economy. Giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have behaved like jumbo versions of Bird. They start by providing valuable services to billions, at low cost or for free. Largely unencumbered by government regulations in their early years, they go on to build market capitalizations bigger than entire industrial economies. In a Vice News feature, Euwyn Poon, cofounder of the San Francisco scooter company Spin, called this “innovating on the regulatory side.”

What’s more, because of the services they provide, these tech companies are often more popular than governments, more trusted, and widely viewed as essential. It’s often when something goes wrong—when their autonomous machines kill someone, or a tech platform is used to spread lies or hack an election—that governments can start to regulate them. But by that point, the tech companies can fight back, with their legions of customers, advertising might, and armies of lobbyists.

This build-first, fix-later model could spell catastrophe in the mobility revolution, and especially in car towns like LA. Seleta Reynolds envisions autonomous pods, pimped out as rolling lounges, carrying people on joyrides at low prices. These pods could be small bars or restaurants, game pods with virtual reality hookups, even smoking chambers offering rich selections of California’s legal marijuana. The skies could be black with drones, some of them flying across the Santa Monica Mountains just to pick up tacos or a roll of toilet paper.

If governments fail to assert their control with taxes and regulations, cheap, ubiquitous mobility services could overwhelm the entire region, much the way the automobile did.

STILL, AFTER A century of the automobile monoculture, the region’s mobility revolution also offers opportunities to tackle some of LA’s toughest challenges, including homelessness. According to Zillow, the real estate database company, a median-earning family in Southern California must pay a staggering 46.7 percent of its income to rent median-valued housing. This is the highest such rate in the country. Some 130,000 households can no longer afford this expense and are transient or homeless. The most vivid display of this scourge is the sprawling LA tent city known as Skid Row. It occupies a square mile between downtown and the Arts District and is home to some ten thousand people in wretched conditions.

As we mentioned earlier, the physical structure of LA favors cars, in many ways, over people. But as Angelenos find other ways to move around, many of them will be left with a legacy of the automobile age: the garage. Steven Dietz, a leading venture capitalist based in Santa Monica, recently launched a start-up called United Dwelling. The business plans to convert unused garages into affordable housing. With the right incentives, he says, this could dramatically expand the housing supply within LA, reducing its century-old sprawl.

It doesn’t even have to wait for the air taxis, speeding underground trains, or other wonders of the coming age of mobility. Not long ago, Dietz, who also teaches at the University of Southern California, had his students knock on doors in LA to find out what people kept in their garages. In a study of seven hundred residences, all of them with two-car garages, only 8 percent of homeowners kept their cars in the garage. “The rest of them parked in the driveway and used the garage to store their stuff,” he says, laughing.

“This could work,” says Mayor Garcetti, back at his office. He does some quick math. “We have five hundred thousand single-family homes in LA,” he says. “If ten percent of them could convert their garages, that would be fifty thousand new housing units.”

The real estate opportunity extends far beyond family garages. The Los Angeles International Airport, known as LAX, is currently building a parking garage with 4,500 badly needed spaces. But as travelers find different ways to reach the airport, from Metro and ride-shares to flying taxis, those parking spaces might go begging. With an eye to that shift, says Justin Erbacci, chief innovation officer at LAX, the new parking lot is designed to be converted to either retail space or housing. “We’re making flat floors and higher ceilings,” he says. Instead of building the ramps inside the building, Erbacci’s team placed them on the outside, where the erstwhile garage, when the time comes, can shed them.

This is what the mobility revolution has in store for LA. It’s a real estate story, as it always has been. The value of each piece of land, and the use for it, depends largely on how people can get there, and where they can go. This was the case in the era of streetcars, and again in the century dominated by the automobile. Once more, changing mobility is poised to reshape life and geography in Southern California.