Motoring my way very slowly around Los Santos in a submersible turns my mind to the geography of LA.

LA has no natural harbor, the LA/Long Beach port is protected by artificial breakwaters. The natural seaport of the region is San Diego, and indeed SD used to be the power center of SoCal. LA was founded because the seasonal LA river allowed crops to be grown for the nearby missions, and this origin in a command economy meant it didn’t initially develop the market institutions that characterize regional capitals.

What really did it is that when the southern transcontinental railroad was planned it was originally supposed to have its western terminus in San Diego, but state legislators from SF, the Gold Rush-swollen power center of California, feared this would shift power south and redirected it to LA on the premise that such a desert hellscape could never grow into a rival.

The funny thing is that from this to the streetcars (built by land developers to increase the value of their holdings in distant suburbs like Hollywood, then abandoned as unscaleable and unprofitable) to the subways (planned to alleviate gridlock between the eastside and westside, then redirected up into the valley instead because riches vs. poors) to the green line (going from nowhere in particular almost to the airport as a sop to the black neighborhoods cut down for a freeway) to the proposed high speed rail lines (connecting SF and Vegas to like an hour out of town), the development of LA has been almost entirely driven by laying rails in the obviously wrong places.