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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The metro isn't that bad. I commuted from Hollywood to Torrance by metro/bus daily for a few years. The metro fare cost me more than gas actually but staying off the 110 was golden.
Hollywood to Torrance on the metro?! Gosh, how long did that take?
I would walk the final leg because Torrance Transit is never on schedule.
Imagine how much more expensive living in LA will be. Instead of fixing their god awful public transit (like NYC) they want to punish people for using the only reliable mode of transportation?
The city of Los Angeles, and by that I mean the sprawling megalopolis it really is, simply isn't built for public transportation. A fundamental shift in urban design of massive proportions would have to occur for mass transportation to make dent here.
In order to affect this massive re-modelling of the city one would have to use eminent domain laws to force millions of people to sell their properties and move. You would literally have to displace millions of people in order to build the required roadways and infrastructure that would allow a shift towards mass transit. This, of course isn't only unthinkable, it's impossible.
Take the "simplest" (in quotes because I am being sarcastic about the actual simplicity) of all problems: Where do you park your car?
Mass transit isn't going to reach into every suburban neighborhood. And, no, people are not going to ride bicycles. If we want an Amsterdam-like bicycle culture we would have to displace even more people. And then you'd have to build massive bike parking lots like the one next to Centraal station in Amsterdam.
People would need to drive a cars to a parking lot somewhere. Millions of people. There is no space to build these parking lots and the required rail in/out pathways without destroying whole neighborhood en-masse.
Once you get to work you'd have to be able to get from the station to your workplace. Once again, if we want this to be within walking or biking distance of most businesses we would have to tear-up whole neighborhoods in order to enable the tentacles of a mass transit infrastructure to get close enough.
And then there's the cost. I won't even bother trying to estimate it. What's the cost of buying-up, I don't know, 100,000 homes? Include both the real estate and legal costs ('cause there would be tens of thousands of lawsuits). And, once all homes are acquired and millions displaced, what's the cost of construction.
Nah, LA isn't suitable for mass transit in the spirit of many European cities. The comparison is futile.
What we could do is try to encourage --over time-- a spreading out of centers of employment. This can be done NY style by offering no taxes for ten years for the relocation or startup of businesses in designated areas. There's a huge focal point of businesses in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor that creates massive traffic flows from as far away as 50 miles in every direction. That's the problem.
Most of those businesses don't need to be there. Why some flock to that corridor is somewhat incomprehensible to me other than there might be lack of space availability or zoning issues much outside that region.
It's a tough problem. Not sure tunneling is the solution either.
I doubt this has any effect, rich people don't care, poor people can't afford to move somewhere else. Public transport is the only effective approach to reducing the congestion.
The problem as I see it is that we force everyone onto the freeway. Need to get somewhere a few miles from here? They make it very difficult to get there without getting onto the freeway. There was some point in the last 30 years where city designers decided the best way to handle local traffic was just to force everyone onto the freeway. It's horrible. There should instead be a reasonable main grid of smaller (2 lan…
Maybe we should also consider the concept of mass transit? The increased likelihood of injury or death from increased transit time in automobiles alone is a health hazard.
I'd rather just pay the aforementioned tolls than waste 2 hours of my day on a bus, every day. That would add up to years of my life wasted pretty quickly.
I'm far more hopeful for self driving cars than mass transit.
Air travel and electrical power:
(1) Are easier to add capacity for during times of peak demand
(2) Actually do fail (even though tolled!) when demand exceeds capacity (brown/blackouts for electrical power, cascading delays easily exceeding those for ground traffic when weather knocks down capacity).
On top of that, it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free -- gasoline and associated taxes are immediate costs for every mile driven, and most people know at some level that each mile also has an additional total cost in terms of insurance and impact on maintenance/lifetime of the vehicle.
And people still choose to make it more expensive in the form of higher-end (and often lower MPG) automotive purchases.
If there's a solution to the traffic problem, instead of attempting to make driving particularly more expensive, it probably involves:
(a) make other transportation options more affordable in terms of reach, time, and money
(b) making the housing market more liquid and affordable, so people can more easily choose locations convenient to their living activities
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we should also consider the concept of mass transit? The increased likelihood of injury or death from increased transit time in automobiles alone is a health hazard.
I'm certainly not writing mass transit off but I've simply never seen it work in practice. I know that my 7 minute commute is well over an hour by bus. I'd rather just pay the aforementioned tolls than waste 2 hours of my day on a bus, every day. That would add up to years of my life wasted pretty quickly. I'm far more hopeful for self driving cars than mass transit.
So this means everyone has neighbours banging car doors, revving engines and doing disruptive stuff at some very early hour. The whole world gets noisier. And all so that some people with cars can sit at their office desks doing stuff they could have done at home.
If a bunch of homeless drug addicts made a similar amount of noise at such anti-social hours then they would be dealt with by the police, the police would make it clear to them how anti-social they have been. Office worker, with some spreadsheets and emails to do, they are given a free pass on the noise and other pollution at an un-godly hour.
Another thing that any big city should do is get people to swap jobs for something more local. I personally work local to my home and ride my bike in, but there are plenty of colleagues who come in from the far side of town, they have to go through the city centre or round some ring road, taking more than 3 hours out of their day, every day.
My bike ride home is so enjoyable I have no idea how long it takes, never had the need to look at the time whilst on the commute, no need to look at a phone either or read one of those 'free' newspapers. I wish more people could have a commute like mine, which is a gentle saunter along the river bank with the joggers, dog walkers and other people 'not imprisoned by the commute' and actively enjoying the great outdoors.
So how could a city get more people like me able to live and work locally, never adding to the burden on the roads or trains? Job swaps. There is probably someone doing a similar job to oneself a short distance from home. This person probably lives on the far side of town where you work. So what if you could swap jobs with that person, so both of you get 2-3 hours of life back, every day?
A city with all the records of who pays what taxes for what could do the match-making, saving everyone who takes up the scheme a lot of time, giving their lives back.
Imagine how much more expensive living in LA will be. Instead of fixing their god awful public transit (like NYC) they want to punish people for using the only reliable mode of transportation?
No. You are thinking about it wrong. By making it cost prohibitive for the poors to move around we will be able to concentrate their populations into designated "bottom feeder" neighborhoods allowing us to more effectively rob them of basic public services like education, healthcare, and potable water.
Am I the only person who found the phrase 'the poors' offensive? I'm genuinely asking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LA is 35 miles long. What would the walking commute of 10 million people look like? So you're suggesting that instead of fixing the problem (public transit) they should start whipping people so that the rich can drive on their traffic-free roads?
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy. A sensible toll would be something anyone who can afford to own a car can be expected pay.
I would like to but I do not think this will improve LA traffic. It will divert it somewhat. Improving infrastructure won't help either; as the opinion piece points out, that's been tried.
Ultimately, LA has to either get people out of their cars or they have to get more people into their cars.
One thing I'd love is an Uber quality app for transit. It would unify transit systems. Maybe it could tell about overcrowding (6:30 first train out of Fullerton to Union Station was packed to the gills). Maybe it could be unified with Uber/Lyft/Yellow.
Metrolink is not that app. SmartRide is not that app. Amtrak is not that app.