SMOGTOWN

You know, that one hour traffic jam, where you traveled 3 miles towards your destination with a faraway stare and a gas gauge heading toward E. You know, where you live in one country and work in another, because that’s where the jobs are … unless that McEconomy management post tantalizes. Incredibly blessed as we are here, the greater Los Angeles area is flunking many of the quality of life criteria. Go to the Southern California Association of Government website and take a look-see.

In the lastest effort to put the brakes on our collective mileage — the L.A. Times reports it’s growing twice as fast as our population — and horizontal lifestyles, Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) has proposed an astonishly important piece of legislation for the global warming age. SB375 would reward metropolitan planning organizations like SCAG (don’t get us going on that agency) with first dibs at politically fragile state transportation funds if cities within their jurisdictions actively work to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The most straightforward path to that? You guessed it. Limit unncessary driving by encouraging “smart growth,” heretofore a buzz word most Californians haven’t understood. One of its tenets is simply boosting employment centers, shopping districts and what-not as close to the people who need them as possible.

Reigning in Southern California’s luxurious and self-consuming lifestyle — what’s a tortuous drive for a big house with a backyard and a mountain view — is hardly a new flash of genius. It traces back all the way to the 1950s, when air pollution literally was swallowing Los Angeles, and some in the smognoscenti suggested making smog a consideration in county and municipal zoning decisions. For all that logic, the economics of subdivisions and frontier real estate was too powerful. Twenty years later, what with San Bernardino and Riverside Counties growing like hotcakes, Gov. Jerry Brown embarked on an even deeper foray to slow down the state’s propensity to build first and ask questions later. His ideas proved more durable than you might realize. We cover all this and more in our fast-approaching book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.

Daryl Steinberg: you are not alone!