Oftentimes when I think about Los Angeles, I think about the fact that you generally have to drive everywhere. And since I have a personal preference for dense and walkable cities, this thought helps me feel slightly less envious about their perfect weather.

Los Angeles is probably the original car city. Here is an excerpt from this excellent post by Brian Potter, where he summarizes a 1987 book by Scott Bottles called, "Los Angeles and the Automobile":

Los Angeles was especially quick to adopt the car. By 1920 Los Angeles had the highest per-capita rate of car ownership in the US, four times more automobiles per capita than the US average, and eight times more than the much-denser Chicago. In 1920, 9 times as many people entered downtown LA via streetcar as via automobile. By 1924, that had nearly equaled.

And interestingly enough, people started using them, almost immediately, to create Uber-like services:

A popular early use of the car for public transit was the jitney. Car owners would pick up passengers (often waiting at streetcar stops) and drive them to their destination for the same price as a streetcar ride (5 cents). Car owners would often simply put their destination in their windshields, and pick up anyone along the way who was headed in the same direction. Because jitney travel was much faster than streetcars, and wasn’t limited to the fixed streetcar routes, jitneys often had better service than streetcars.

Jitney travel first appeared in Los Angeles in 1914, and by November of that year was being used for thousands of trips per day. The jitney quickly spread to other cities. By early 1915, an estimated 62,000 jitneys operated around the country in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Birmingham. As jitney travel became more popular, electric rail companies found that they were losing significant ridership

What this again underscores is just how disruptive the car was -- right from the outset. It was quickly seen as being more convenient, especially in a city like Los Angeles, which wasn't as dense as its counterparts on the east coast.

Sadly, and as Potter suggests in his post, it is not clear that the headwinds facing public transit have changed all that much since the first jitneys started appearing on the streets of Los Angeles a century ago.

There was once a time -- generally in the early 20th century -- when some people used to order their new home from a catalogue.

You would pick the model you wanted and then all of the required materials, along with assembly instructions, would get mailed to you.

Mind you, this was never the most popular way to make a new home. According to Brian Potter, mail-order homes, even at their peak, represented less than 10% of all yearly housing starts in the US.

So arguably, it was never entirely successful as a model. Building a home is tough work, especially without fancy power tools.

Still, it's interesting to think about its relative simplicity: "Here's a bunch of raw building materials and some instructions. Go figure it out. It's like an Ikea bookshelf, except it's your entire house."

Contrast this to what it takes to build new urban housing today. There is a litany of new barriers. It's nowhere near as simple as ordering a kit of parts; so it's no wonder housing is more expensive.

For more on "The Rise and Fall of the Mail-Order Home", check out this recent post