The true solution to LA traffic will never happen. And that solution is buses. But not the current underfunded system that barely limps along. A massive number of buses, like 5x the current number. And combined with tolls for cars to get cars off the road. The large number of buses is critical because it greatly reduces wait time between transfers. It also allows adding express bus lines between major areas. But buse…
At once the singularly most politically and practically incorrect assessment of LA traffic issues. How did this get top comment?
I'll agree with you in one key way: it's less ridiculous than Elon Musk's obsession with tunnels. It's a lot less ridiculous than Nolan Bushnell's obsession with self driving cars. Both fundamentally don't get how far away those solutions are from meaningful implementation. More busses, critically, could be added tomorrow, if we wanted to.
Yet others have already pointed out that buses have a bad reputation. It's only partly because of poor performance like you say. I'll put it more plainly: Los Angeles is a deeply racially segregated city, in ways that the bourgeois in California rarely admit. It's a travesty but it's also reality.
And some people characterize bus reputation as a chicken and egg problem: good riders improve the reputation, but they won't get on board when the reputation is bad. Those commenters don't understand how deeply entrenched racial segregation is in Los Angeles and how naive they sound. They're comparing Los Angeles to cities like London and New York, with huge metro systems, repeating popular whataboutist memes. They don't realize that London and New York have merely had more time to develop segregation underground.
Busses have fundamental inefficiencies, like slow patrons, that are basically uncorrelated with the number of busses on the road. And like any transport, capacity tends to get filled. And then we've all seen simulations of how bus transport falls apart due to one vehicle on a line getting behind—called bunching up[1].
I wrote to LA Dept. of Transportation years ago[2], and they characterized the problem then (and now) as fundamentally political: "Such issues require legislation." California and Los Angeles have voting systems that are good for solving many kinds of issues, but transportation is not one of them.
In my opinion, increasing licensing requirements, like disqualifying many current drivers from using freeways or vehicles entirely, would at least reduce deaths on the road. [3, 4, 5] Fewer accidents, as a side effect, could reduce congestion.
[1] E.g. http://setosa.io/bus/ [2] https://gist.github.com/doctorpangloss/a71db50d371e914a5d4f5... [3] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/1/56.short [4] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/198945 [5] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437502...