But—like me—America’s most car-centric metropolis is trying to prepare for life after cars. This will be hard: L.A. County is larger in size than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and more populous than 41 U.S. states. The city’s urban configuration has long existed to serve the personal automobile, as have almost a century of L.A. social mores. LA CoMotion may have been about showing off the dazzling array of new technology that might help the city get there, but it was also an opportunity to measure the stubborn gap between L.A.’s current needs and its future shape.

Life after cars, if and when it arrives, might mean something a little different for Los Angeles. Unlike its older, denser Eastern counterparts, this was never really a compact, walking city to begin with. By the time the city reached any real size, it already had an impressive streetcar system. At the dawn of the 1880s, the same decade that saw L.A.’s first electric streetcars, there were a mere 11,093 souls living in the fledgling pueblo. The Pacific Electric and the Los Angeles Railway streetcar systems entered service in 1901 and soon offered extensive coverage of the nascent metropolis.

It was this early mass-transit system (for a time, the most extensive in the nation) that helped power L.A.’s sprawl and single-family character. Paid for by real-estate companies, the streetcars were intended not just to connect outlying suburbs, but also sell them to prospective homeowners. The city’s growth, as the transit historian Ethan Elkind put it in his book Railtown, “occurred haphazardly, driven by real-estate interests rather than by good urban planning.”

The narrative of the Big Bad Auto Companies dismantling L.A.’s beautiful electric-railway system to boost car sales (immortalized in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) is not entirely true. Yes, the advent of the automobile hastened the system’s demise, but that story was all but written decades before the rails themselves were pulled up. One out of every eight Los Angeles residents had their own car in 1915—that’s when the national mean was one car per every 48 residents, according to Scott L. Bottles’s classic Los Angeles and the Automobile. By 1925, every other Angeleno had a car. The automobile really conquered Los Angeles in the 1920s. And car culture has arguably been the most powerful driving force of L.A. life in the near-century since—in large part because of the city’s early-adopter embrace of a then-emerging technology.

The rhetoric of the future is nothing new in Los Angeles, a city as much sold into being as it was shaped. But the new ideal life now being advertised is far more city-driven than suburban, with urban mobility suddenly edging out grassy yards and space as the answer to L.A.’s social ills.