Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it.
LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere.
LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic.
I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.
Water absolutely shaped Los Angeles's development, and also explains why there are few similarly-scaled cities anywhere near it (San Diego being the principle exception). Los Angeles's watershed extends 1,500 miles eastward, to the front-range of the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River.
That said, Chicago formed as a transportation hub, first based on the Great Lakes and rivers (the Des Plaines connects to the Mississipi), providing a transit point between the middle of the US, from Minneapolis to New Orleans and via the Missouri and Ohio river systems about 2/3 of the continent, to the East Coast via the St. Lawrence Seaway and Erie Canal.
Railroads were built to outlying suburbs by 1850, at which time there were no automobiles at all. Chicago's population as of 1900 exceeded 1 million. Remember that mass adoption of the automobile in the US only began in 1901 with Ford's Model T, and wasn't substantial for another two to three decades.
Los Angeles by contrast had no natural harbour (the San Pedro breakwater was completed in 1910), was largely a ranching and orchard region through the early 20th century, and was by far secondary to San Francisco in importance to California until 1906, the year of the Great Earthquake and Fire.
Following that event, with increased oil exploration in Los Angeles (there remain many operating wells within the city itself), and especially growth during WWII, Los Angeles eventually grew. But it had only 100,000 souls in 1900, surpassing 1 million in 1930, at which point automobile use was strongly established. The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy put an end to what public transit remained from 1938--1950.
Chicago's suburban commuter rail was spared by virtue of the fact that it uses freight rail rights-of-way, which couldn't be dismantled (though some lines did fold, especially after the Interstate Highway System was built). Chicago's El similarly survived though I'm not familiar with the specific history.
LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere.
LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic.
I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.