How the city will fix its traffic jam.

The movie business has accustomed us to thinking of Los Angeles as a dream factory, a place where fantasies are made reality (on soundstages, back lots, and with computers). But these days Hollywood is contracting, and as Los Angeles matures, this sprawling city of 13 million is becoming something besides the entertainment capital: the nation’s mobility lab. Everyone’s involved—the federal government, state, city, private investors, urban planners, architects, and entrepreneurs.

Why? Simple: L.A. must move, but the freeway-enlaced city has reached the limits of its automobile-centric postwar identity. There will always be cars in L.A., just as there will always be aspiring actresses waiting tables and writers banging out screenplays in Southland Starbucks. And for the next few decades, cars will continue to rule. But cars need roads, and here L.A. is up against it. Because there probably won’t be many more new freeways. And there definitely won’t be any more cheap gas—so Angelenos will have to embrace cars that run on something else or adapt to other types of mobility. For the first time in a century, the citizens of Cartown, USA, are starting to confront the future constraints of how they can get from A to B.

I witnessed this new vision earlier this year at SCI-Arc, an architecture school on the eastern edge of downtown, an area that was pretty desolate until about 10 years ago, when the redevelopment of L.A.’s old urban core began in earnest. In response to a county funding measure that would provide $40 billion in transportation capital, the school hosted a competition called “A New Infrastructure: Transit Solutions for Los Angeles.” They received 75 proposals from around the world. According to the rules, “entries were to focus on specific rail extension projects in the city and also take a look at larger-scale, inter-related transit planning challenges in Southern California.”

Some of the winning proposals were extremely innovative, particularly the ones that sought to transform the freeways into rail corridors. But my attention was drawn most relentlessly toward what wasn’t there: cars. In fact, the competition seemed to outline an emerging sensibility among a younger generation of planners and architects focused on Southern California: Let’s look for a way of life without automobiles.

Naive to think that a carless future could be plausible? You bet. But what’s important to take away from transportation fantasias of this flavor is that L.A. is becoming a highly experimental environment, both at the level of master-planning and everyday life. Take the variety of means of movement that a typical Angeleno is exposed to on a typical day. Commuters use rail networks to move in and out of the part of the city reached by the Metro. Buses lumber from Boyle Heights to Venice and from Long Beach to the Valley. Teenagers travel by skateboard. Bikers and inline skaters meander up and down the coast. The canyons are filled with motorcycles. Sailboats, motorboats, and jet skis ply the Pacific. Kayakers head to the Los Angeles River. Light aircraft use the region’s many small airports. Scooters, mopeds, and motorized bikes provide cheap transport on the surface streets. The Mediterranean climate allows for many more options than you might see in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, or even San Francisco.

The point is that L.A. has developed the country’s most vast and diverse transportation matrix. The core of it has been powered by oil, ever since the infamous decision to scrap the region’s electric streetcar network in the 1950s and '60s. Cheap oil, along with stolen water, made L.A. what it is today. Both natural resources are threatened: As of a month ago, I can legally water my yard only two days a week, and I hector my children about saving H₂O in California. But the water crisis isn’t as pressing, for most Angelenos, as the oil crunch, a problem that was brought home last summer, when regular gas shot above $4 a gallon.