Smoglandia: Smog checks, diamond lanes and leaf blower bans work, but a dark cloud comes from D.C.

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Even if you weren’t around Los Angeles in 1992, you’ve heard of Rodney King, the man whose videotaped beating at the hands of the LAPD put a match to the ensuing riots.As sometimes destructive protests broke out after police were acquitted, King made his celebrated plea, “Can we all get along?” But who remembers what he said after that? It was this: “I mean, we’ve got enough smog in Los Angeles, let alone to deal with setting these fires and things.”Smog.It’s embedded in L.A.’s brain.

For good reason.From up in the space shuttle, in 1983, astronaut Sally Ride could see the pollution blotting out her Los Angeles hometown.Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.’s historic battle with smog.Brian Wilson, the creative genius of the Beach Boys, once recorded an impassioned riff about smog, singing “This poison that we breathe has such an effect on overall body and mind … I opened up my bathroom window today and I almost choked to death … ” And in 1975, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles recorded perhaps the only smog-themed love song: “The sky is gray when the smog fills the air/Hiding the light that shines through your hair.”Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author and president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, moved here from Chicago as a teenager, and it took him “a long time to realize, wait a minute, there are actually mountains there.” The smog season regularly did a number on our mile-high mountains, wrapping them in a brown cloak of invisibility until wind and rain swept the sludge away.It can’t be said that we threw everything in our power at smog, but we have tried some novel notions; some worked and some didn’t.Diamond lanes.

At 7 a.m.on March 15, 1976, the fast lane of a dozen miles of the Santa Monica Freeway opened to buses and rush-hour carpoolers only.

The woman who was blamed for them wasn’t sworn in as Caltrans’ new chie...