Automobile Club of Southern California
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The Automobile Club of Southern California was founded December 13, 1900 in Los Angeles as one of the nation's first motor clubs dedicated to improving roads, proposing traffic laws and improvement of overall driving conditions.
Within a decade of its creation, the Auto Club was a driving force toward construction of the Ridge Route, the first highway through the Tehachapi Mountains and San Gabriel Mountains to directly link Los Angeles and Bakersfield. The completion of the Ridge Route literally saved the State of California from being split into two separate states at the mountains.
In the 1920s, the Auto Club sent teams of cartographers to survey the state's roads not only for the production of maps, but to create a uniform signing system. The Auto Club posted thousands of porcelain-on-steel traffic signs throughout the state and continued to do so until the State of California took over the task in the early 1950s. The signs were produced by a local company that manufactured porcelain-on-steel bathtubs. A few of these signs remain in service today, though they are extremely rare.
That same decade also saw the construction of the Auto Club's main office on the corner of Figueroa Street and Adams Boulevard. Designed by architect Sumner P. Hunt and built in the style (and scale) of an 18th Century Spanish cathedral, the building now serves as the Los Angeles district office. The club's headquarters are now in Costa Mesa.
From its opening to just after the start of the Second World War, the building's courtyard served as the site of the Auto Club's annual outdoor festivals which promoted motor vacations and camping. The US military requested that the events be halted after the start of the war and were never revived. During the course of the war, the Auto Club became an active participant in scrap rubber and metal drives and printed numerous posters for the war effort. Among them were messages reminding drivers of the national 35-mile-per-hour (56-km/h) speed limit during wartime and to encourage "giving servicemen a lift" whenever one encountered one in uniform hitchhiking for a ride.
Today, the Automobile Club of Southern California is one of California's largest insurance companies and provides coverage for homes, recreational vehicles and watercraft as well as cars and trucks. Affiliated with the American Automobile Association or "AAA," membership is still required but comes with benefits such as free maps, free travel planning, free emergency roadside service, free speedometer testing and free DMV services. Members also receive monthly copies of Westways, a popular magazine devoted to California travel and history that started as Touring Topics in 1909. District offices stretch from Chula Vista near the international border with Mexico to the small Central California town of Porterville.
Beginning in 1995, the Auto Club began an expansion program that involved the purchase or management of several other AAA-affiliated motor clubs across the country. To date, these include AAA Hawaii, AAA New Mexico, AAA Texas, AAA Northern New England (serving New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine), and AAA Missouri (serving Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and portions of Illinois and Indiana).
Part of this expansion included the restructuring of the Auto Club's organization. Call centers for the Emergency Road Service Program were created. Whereas in the past telephone operators had been housed in the various district offices they were now consolidated to thee locations: Burbank, Long Beach and San Diego. These call centers had been intended only to take service calls from the Southern California area but ultimately began to take calls from all the Auto Club's areas, including Hawaii. A short time later the call center in Irving, Texas began to serve this purpose as well.
This resulted in some criticism from some Auto Club members who complained that the operators in the call centers were inept at their duties because they were not local to the areas the individuals were calling from.
In 1999, The Auto Club moved from being solely a travel broker to becoming a travel provider with its acquisition of the Pleasant Holidays travel company from private ownership. The prior ownership was left in place in a management role for a short transitional period, but today the company is run as a subsidiary of the Auto Club. Under Auto Club management it has been extremely successful and is a tremendous asset to the company's bottom line. Due in part to this acquisition and other shrewd business moves, the Auto Club today is a $3 billion-plus organisation.
In 2003 the Auto Club worked to make their call centers "one-stop shopping" for their members. Not only were the call centers the primary source for emergency road service it now served as general information, insurance and other needs.
From Central California northward, the California State Automobile Association, another AAA affiliate, provides services to ACSC members.
In recent years, the Auto Club has returned to its roots with involvement in auto racing, sponsoring the annual Auto Club 500 NASCAR race at the California Speedway in Fontana, CA.
