1960 SoCal Auto Club Map of L.A. Freeway System

This is a 1960 map of the existing and proposed freeway system in the Los Angeles area compiled by the Automobile Club of Southern California. It is a snapshot of a period when infrastructure construction was racing to keep pace with explosive regional population growth.

A Blueprint for Car Culture

This map shows the developing freeway network of the Los Angeles metropolitan area in the period of highest population growth in the postwar era. Although the (sub)urban sprawl of L.A. has expanded far beyond the scope of this map, the network depicted here to a large extent corresponds to the freeways extant in Los Angeles today. A sense of the frenetic pace of freeway construction is given by the shaded areas showing new or completed construction just between May and August 1960. Particularly important was the difficult construction undertaken on the San Diego Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass, connecting Santa Monica and the San Fernando Valley. This area saw the most intense population growth, with the number of residents quintupling between 1945 and 1960.

Verso Content

The verso (back) includes a list of statistics including the costs associated with building the freeway system. Most of these freeways retain their names, though they have been incorporated into the U.S. interstate or California state highway system and assigned a corresponding number. For example, the San Diego Freeway, often classified as the busiest freeway in America, is now officially I-405, while the Santa Monica and San Bernardino Freeways were incorporated into I-10. Some of the disparate bits of freeway shown here were eventually connected, though they were not formally planned at the time of publication. For example, the Glendale Freeway was completed as proposed here and extended to La Canada, where it intersected with the Foothill Freeway (mentioned on the verso but not on the map), which was extended from San Fernando to Pasadena in the 1970s, linking with proposed route east of Pasadena to form I-210.

How L.A. Got Its Freeways

This feverish road construction of the 1950s and 1960s was the result of an intersection between two major developments: booming population growth in Southern California and the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The population of L.A. country nearly tripled between 1940 and 1960, in large part because of the influence of the U.S. military. Conscripts from throughout the country travelled through Southern California during World War II and liked what they saw. After the war, programs to help veterans gain an education and buy a house coincided well with the abundance of land and a degree of preexisting infrastructure. Southern California is also home to many military bases and an early leader in ancillary industries, such as oil, aviation, and rocketry.

Freeway growth has continued in the L.A. region since 1960, but local opposition and lawsuits have held up several projects. In a particularly well-known example, the extension of the Long Beach Freeway (I-710) has been under consideration and debate since the 1950s. However, today the route exists exactly as shown here, with a 'gap' between Pasadena and Alhambra, just north of the intersection with the San Bernadino Freeway. This dispute is the source of a bizarre scene near downtown Pasadena, where a partially completed, disused highway with fenced-off construction equipment has sat frozen in time for years, waiting for the approval of an extension of the freeway that is unlikely to ever come.

Publication History and Census

This map was compiled by the Engineering Department of Automobile Club of Southern California. It appears to be distinct from two similar maps published in 1960 by the same organization: titled 'Automobile road map of metropolitan Los Angeles' and 'Freeway system, Los Angeles and vicinity.' A map with the same title as this dated to 1962 is held in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but the 1960 edition is not known to exist in any institutional holdings and has no known history on the market.