The Commute: California Edition

The Pentagram Applied — Part 2: Transportation

How the State That Invented Car Culture Made Sure You’d Never Escape It

Los Angeles once operated the largest electric railway system in the world.

I need that sentence to land before anything else, because nothing that follows makes sense without it. The city synonymous with gridlock, the city that taught America to worship the automobile, the city where the freeway is a cultural institution and the commute is a lifestyle… once moved its people on over a thousand miles of electrified track. Pacific Electric’s Red Cars connected Santa Monica to San Bernardino, Long Beach to San Fernando. At its peak, the system ran more than 2,000 daily trains. Fully electrified. Pollution-free. Built in 1901.

That was the barn.

What happened to it is the sign.

In The Commute, I mapped the Transportation pillar as it operates nationally — the deliberate design of American geography around the automobile, the streetcar dismantlement, the true cost of the car measured in time and health and opportunity. Every mechanism I named applies in California. The difference is that California didn’t just inherit the national pattern. California authored it. This is where the freeway was perfected, where the suburb was mythologized, where the automobile became not just transportation but identity. The car culture that trapped the rest of the country was prototyped here.

Then sold back to us at the highest markup in the nation.

Let’s start at the pump.

California’s average gas price sits at roughly $5.93 per gallon. The national average is about $4.17. That’s a 42% premium for the privilege of fueling up in the fourth-largest economy on earth. In some counties, the gap is worse. Mono County — near Yosemite, beautiful and remote — has the highest average gas price of any county in the United States. One woman there told CNN her local station charges $7.50 a gallon. She gets around town in a golf cart because she can’t afford to drive.

In the fourth-largest economy on earth. A golf cart.

Why is California gas so expensive? The components stack like a layer cake of extraction. California has the highest state gasoline tax in the nation at 71 cents per gallon. On top of that: a carbon tax unique to California that adds another 20 to 25 cents. Regulations requiring cleaner-burning fuel formulations that add 25 more. A Low Carbon Fuel Standard surcharge. Cap-and-trade pass-through costs. Each one justified individually by environmental policy. Stacked together, they form a toll structure that would be comical if it didn’t hit hardest the people who can least afford it — the workers commuting from the Inland Empire because the Housing pillar priced them out of everywhere closer to their jobs.

And those are just the policy costs. The market costs compound them. Multiple California refineries have closed in recent years, cutting domestic gasoline supply precisely when demand remains high. Fewer refineries means less competition. Less competition means higher wholesale prices. Higher wholesale prices pass through to you — standing at the pump in Riverside, watching the number climb past $80 on a tank that used to cost $45, calculating whether you can afford to drive to the job that doesn’t pay enough to live near.

The Subterfuge Principle: if the environmental motive were genuine, the state that mandates electric vehicles would have made the electricity to charge them affordable. It didn’t. NEM 3.0 gutted rooftop solar. Rates are double the national average. The gas is the most expensive in the country. The electricity is the most expensive on the mainland. The exits from both sides of the energy-transportation loop are bricked up. You pay what they tell you to pay, whether the fuel is gasoline or electrons.

Rewind.

Pacific Electric’s Red Cars were not some quaint trolley novelty. They were a sophisticated, profitable interurban rail network that shaped the development of the entire Los Angeles basin. Henry Huntington built the system starting in 1901 and it became, according to multiple historical accounts, the world’s largest operator of electric railway passenger service. The tracks didn’t just move people — they built communities. The rail network determined where housing was constructed, where commerce emerged, where the dots on the map connected into a city.

Between the 1940s and early 1960s, the system was dismantled. The story of how is contested — some call it a conspiracy, some call it market evolution, historians argue over the proportional blame owed to General Motors, National City Lines, Pacific City Lines, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, and the Automobile Club of Southern California. What is not contested is the outcome.

GM and its allied companies were convicted under the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1949. The mayor of Los Angeles testified before the Senate in 1974 that GM, through its subsidiaries, “scrapped the Pacific Electric and Los Angeles streetcar systems leaving the electric train system totally destroyed.” The last Red Car made its final run on April 9, 1961. The last Yellow Car ran in March 1963. The tracks were pulled. The rights-of-way were paved. The freeways were laid on top of the routes.

Here is the part that should make your jaw tighten: the 1930s freeway planners originally intended to include interurban rail tracks in the center median of each new freeway. The plan was never implemented. The freeways were built for cars only. The rail infrastructure that had served millions was replaced by asphalt that served… the companies that sold cars, gasoline, and tires.

Whether you call it conspiracy or market forces, the result is identical: a city that once moved on electricity now crawls on gasoline. The most car-dependent metropolitan region in the Western world was not born that way. It was made that way. By specific entities. For specific profits. At the specific expense of the people who now sit on the 405 for an hour each morning, burning

$5.93-per-gallon

fuel, wondering why nobody ever built a train.

Somebody did build a train. Somebody tore it out.

The California commute is not just long. It is structurally long — designed into the geography by a housing market that pushes workers further from their jobs with every passing year.

California cities claim seven of the ten worst commute spots in the country. Los Angeles averages over 30 minutes each way, with travel times running 50% longer during rush hour. The Bay Area’s Contra Costa County averages 38 minutes. Over 12% of California workers spend more than 60 minutes each way getting to work. That’s not a commute. That’s a part-time job.

The phrase researchers use is “drive until you qualify.” It describes what happens when the Housing pillar — which we’ll get to — prices workers out of the neighborhoods where their jobs are. You can’t afford to live in Los Angeles proper, so you move to the Inland Empire. Riverside. San Bernardino. Moreno Valley. The median home price drops from $900,000 to $550,000. You gain square footage. You gain a yard. You gain a monthly payment you can survive.

You lose your life to the freeway.

Over 500,000 San Bernardino County residents work outside their county. More than 222,000 of them commute to Los Angeles County. Every morning, a quarter-million people climb into cars and drive west because the economy put the jobs in one place and the houses they could afford in another. The average one-way commute for San Bernardino residents is nearly 33 minutes — and that’s the average, pulled down by the people who work locally. The super-commuters pushing into LA proper from Riverside or Stockton or Tracy are clocking 60, 75, 90 minutes each way.

A UCLA study found that only 4% of lower-wage workers — those making less than $1,250 per month — worked in neighborhoods where affordable housing existed near low-wage jobs. Four percent. The other 96% face a daily choice: impossible rent near work, or impossible commute from somewhere they can afford. The pentagram doesn’t just hold. In California, it squeezes.

Now calculate the cost the way I laid it out in The Commute.

Time. A California worker commuting 35 minutes each way — slightly above the state metro average — burns 303 hours per year. That’s twelve and a half days. Gone. Not paid. Not productive. Not leisure. Donated to the space between the house they could afford and the job that doesn’t pay enough to live closer. At $25 an hour, that’s $7,583 of uncompensated labor. At $50 an hour, it’s $15,166. The commute is a second job. It pays nothing. It costs everything.

Fuel. At $5.93 a gallon and 25 miles per gallon, a 50-mile round-trip commute burns two gallons a day. Ten gallons a week. Forty gallons a month. That’s $237 per month in gasoline alone — $2,849 per year — just to get to work. In Oklahoma, the same commute costs $1,563 in gas. The California premium: nearly $1,300 per year. For the same miles. The same labor. The same time. Different pump.

Health. Sedentary commuting correlates with obesity, hypertension, chronic back problems, anxiety, and depression. A 10-mile one-way commute is associated with greater risk of heart disease, according to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The commute damages the body. The Health Care pillar charges you to repair it. The pillars feed each other. You are the feed.

Stack them. A California worker commuting from the Inland Empire to an LA job — a scenario so common it has its own research literature — is losing $15,000+ per year in uncompensated time, $2,800+ in fuel, untold thousands in vehicle depreciation and maintenance, and measurable deterioration in physical and mental health. All of it invisible. None of it on the pay stub. The company that employs them doesn’t absorb the commute cost. The state that created the housing imbalance doesn’t absorb it. The utility that charges $5.93 a gallon doesn’t absorb it. The worker absorbs all of it. Every morning. Every evening. Until they can’t.

California’s answer to the car problem has been… more dependency on different cars.

The state has mandated that all new cars sold by 2035 must be zero-emission vehicles. The environmental logic is sound. The extraction logic is familiar. An electric vehicle requires electricity — and California electricity costs double the national average. An EV requires charging — and California’s public charging costs 46 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it one of the most expensive states to charge in the nation. An EV purchased under the assumption that rooftop solar would offset charging costs now sits in the driveway of a homeowner whose solar export credits were slashed 75% by NEM 3.0.

The state mandated the car. The state made the fuel expensive. The state gutted the program that would have made the fuel free.

This is the Transportation pillar and the Energy pillar interlocking in real time. You can see the gears mesh. The EV mandate drives you from gasoline dependency to electricity dependency. NEM 3.0 ensures the electricity dependency remains… a dependency. The meter follows you from the pump to the plug. The institution changes shape. The extraction doesn’t.

What about public transit? What about the trains California keeps promising to build?

LA Metro has expanded significantly. The system is larger and more useful than it was 20 years ago. Credit where it’s earned. Bay Area’s BART carries hundreds of thousands of riders. Metrolink connects counties. Caltrain moves Silicon Valley workers. These systems exist, they function, and for the people they serve… they serve.

For the vast majority of Californians, they are irrelevant.

California’s commuters still overwhelmingly drive alone. Public transit, carpooling, and alternative modes combined account for barely one-fifth of total commutes — and that share has been declining since 1980. Single-occupant vehicle use has grown by 5.5 million workers since then. The reason is structural, not behavioral. The transit system takes you where the lines go. The sprawl takes you everywhere else. If your job is on the rail line and your home is near a station, transit works. If your job is in a suburban office park and your home is in a subdivision… you drive. Alone. Burning $5.93 gasoline. On a freeway built over the tracks that once would have carried you.

California’s high-speed rail project — the one that was supposed to connect LA to San Francisco in under three hours — has become a generational punchline. Approved by voters in 2008 with a $10 billion bond. Original completion date: 2020. Current status: a segment under construction in the Central Valley, costs ballooned to over $100 billion in estimates, no projected completion date that anyone takes seriously. The project that was supposed to liberate Californians from the car has itself become a monument to the forces that prevent liberation. Regulatory complexity. Environmental review timelines. Cost overruns. Political dysfunction. The same institutional machinery that makes every other partial exit difficult made this one… a joke. A very expensive joke that you are paying for in bond debt.

The exits from The Commute still apply in California. Live where you work. Work remotely when possible. Bicycle, e-bike, motorcycle. Buy used, pay cash, learn maintenance. Carpool. Build community-owned ride-sharing cooperatives.

The shit you take to exit is heavier here. Living where you work means affording the Housing pillar in a job-rich neighborhood — which in California means $900,000 in LA, $1.2 million in the Bay Area, numbers that make the exit theoretical for most workers. Remote work is viable for knowledge workers and irrelevant for the service, trades, agriculture, and healthcare workforce that keeps the fourth-largest economy actually running.

The e-bike is a real exit for some. Cheaper than a car. No fuel cost. No insurance. Faster than traffic in urban cores. California’s weather makes year-round cycling possible in most of the state. The shit is safety — American roads were designed for GM’s products, not for your two wheels — and distance. If the Housing pillar pushed you 40 miles from your job, an e-bike isn’t solving it.

Strategic vehicle ownership remains the horse stance. Buy used. Pay cash. Maintain it yourself. Drive it until the frame rots. The institutional contempt for the person in the old car is real — the dealerships, the financing companies, the insurance actuaries, the advertisements that equate your vehicle with your value all want you in a new car, with a payment, with full coverage, with a depreciating asset financed at 7% for 72 months. Ignore them. The car is an access fee. Pay the minimum. Let the meter collect as little as possible.

The closed loop, once more.

Transportation in California is inseparable from Housing. The commute exists because you can’t afford to live near work. Housing costs are inseparable from Energy — the electricity and gas bills that determine whether the housing you found is actually survivable. Energy costs in California are inseparable from the regulatory apparatus that raises rates while gutting solar incentives. And the Transportation pillar feeds back into Energy — every gallon burned, every kilowatt charged, flows through the same institutional tollbooths.

You can’t exit Transportation without navigating Housing. You can’t navigate Housing without managing Energy. You can’t manage Energy without understanding the regulatory capture that sets the rates. Every line of the pentagram connects. Every exit runs into another entrance.

This is not a failure of planning. This is the plan.

Los Angeles once had a thousand miles of electric rail. San Francisco once ran the largest cable car network in the world. San Diego had its own streetcar system. Oakland. Sacramento. These were cities that moved people without gasoline, without freeways, without the $5.93 premium that now extracts $2,849 per year from every commuter who drives 50 miles a day.

The fourth-largest economy on earth once moved 2,000 trains a day on electrified track. Now it moves its workers in single-occupant vehicles, alone, in traffic, burning imported fuel at $5.93 a gallon, commuting from houses they bought 60 miles away because the economy put the paychecks in one zip code and the mortgages in another.

Those systems were dismantled. The freeways were built on top of them. The cars were sold. The gas was sold. The insurance was sold. The loans were financed. And now the state that authored car culture tells you the solution is a different car — an electric one, charged on the most expensive electricity on the mainland, powered by a grid run by a convicted felon.

Were the commute a necessary feature of a well-designed state, they would not have needed to destroy the system that made it unnecessary.