Most of the sprawl in L.A. occurred postwar, when roads and ticky-tacky were being built anywhere a bird farted - and about as quick. PE was already a degraded NCL property on its way out. They made no attempt at attracting riders and were in fact discouraging them any way they could. Thus no attraction to build tightly around stations was available.

Most of the Eastbay and central CC county growth occurred before BART opened. Indeed, it was already a traffic choked messy sprawl before BART even got voted in.

The people came anyway! -- IN SPADES!

They plurped their houses anywhere there was a paved road. Usually, developers didn't bother with smaller infill projects, it being more advantageous to build larger projects out in open spaces (farm land). If there was a road out there, they built on it. All this without a second thought as to the capacity of the road - or the true cost of automobile commuting.

For any discussion on this subject to be complete, we must also note one of the more notorious consequences of pre-prop 13 property tax assessment practices. Confiscatory property taxes greatly contributed to sprawl as well. Before prop 13; farms were assessed, based not on the actual usage or zoning of the land; but solely on the assessor's opinion as to its "highest possible use", and that was never agriculture within 50-60 miles of a city.

Agricultural use of land assessed this way could not support the higher taxes being collected as though it were housing land. It was either sell out cheap to some developer, or go bankrupt and loose the land to the tax collector anyway (guess who he then sold it to). So housing tracts tended to go up first on farms that went bust first; resulting in widespread sprawl - sprawl - sprawl, and more sprawl. Of course, the county had already built road out there (all inadequate). Prop 13 ended that especially egregious source of sprawl by regulating the assessor, outlawing such practices.

But By the time BART opened (1971 to 1972), the damage was already done. BART did influence closeby land values, raising them above the surrounding more distant areas. And that did attract smaller in-fill development; which the cities resisted at first. But when they figured out that in-fill was a better alternative than more sprawl (the people were coming no matter what - anyway), the sprawling slowed. That would not have happened without BART.

Now, if BART had been built earlier, and all the way to Brentwood from the get-go, There would still be lots of open farm land out there in between tighter clusters of developement. As it was, there was no BART out there when the area started to grow. There was no economic incentive to build in tight clusters around a train station. The stations were not there to skew the land values accordingly. So more sprawl - sprawl - sprawl!

BTW, the people keep on coming, not because Americans are making too many babies, but almost solely due to emigration; at least according to U.N. studies on world population growth. The U.N. asserts that unlike 3rd world countries, USA and Western Europe birthrates are way too low to even replace themselves. The U.N. report also claimed that this low birthrate is due to "not doing it as much" as in 3rd world countries (we are loosing the evolutionary race guys). So if this is true, virtually all growth here, has to be due to emigration, legal or not.

Until politicians in power no longer need new voters to stay in power (ie. totalitarian gov't); nobody I know of is going to stop this - ever! People around the world want to live here. They will be coming; whether we like it or not; whether we are ready or not. We may as well mitigate the impact the best way we can - and that ain't with more roads and freeways!

OPB