In 1981, a young writer named David Brodsly described the Los Angeles freeway as one of the city's indispensible metaphors, “one of the few parts capable of standing for the whole.”
He argued that the freeway had expanded “the realm of the accessible” for drivers in Southern California — that it was a powerfully democratic force, in essence — and lent “a new clarity” to a vast metropolitan region that newcomers had long found illegible and tough to grasp.
For Brodsly and other writers of the 1970s and 1980s, the freeways were far more than a way of getting around.