Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 689 posts

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#481

Post by hermitdev »

wa2flq wrote: post #423
tomjakubowski wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? All the office buildings are in one central place. No! The defining feature of the LA megapolis is that the offices and workplaces are not all in one central place. Just within LA County, there are major business districts in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, Burbank, Pasadena, Warner Center, Playa Vista, downtown, Westwood, Century City, … it goes on and on. As Human Transit says, Los Angeles is a "vast c…

There is significant reverse commute and congestion from Chicago into the suburbs The travel times are typically longer than the conventional flow. Suburb to Suburb mass transit is bus but challenging for long transits. There are only two major ring type highways. Attempts to get a suburban ring "STAR" train or outer Chicago "Circle" Loop line never get past the study stage.

I'm one such commuter. I go from western Chicago burbs to north. There is no legit public trans option. It's 3 hours one way for what takes me 30 mins in no traffic.

What i really hate is the variability. Good days its 30 min. Bad days, may be over 2 hours. And, you cant always tell before you get on the road.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#482

Post by hermitdev »

wa2flq wrote: post #423
tomjakubowski wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? All the office buildings are in one central place. No! The defining feature of the LA megapolis is that the offices and workplaces are not all in one central place. Just within LA County, there are major business districts in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, Burbank, Pasadena, Warner Center, Playa Vista, downtown, Westwood, Century City, … it goes on and on. As Human Transit says, Los Angeles is a "vast c…

There is significant reverse commute and congestion from Chicago into the suburbs The travel times are typically longer than the conventional flow. Suburb to Suburb mass transit is bus but challenging for long transits. There are only two major ring type highways. Attempts to get a suburban ring "STAR" train or outer Chicago "Circle" Loop line never get past the study stage.

I'm one such commuter. I go from western Chicago burbs to north. There is no legit public trans option. It's 3 hours one way for what takes me 30 mins in no traffic.

What i really hate is the variability. Good days its 30 min. Bad days, may be over 2 hours. And, you cant always tell before you get on the road.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#483

Post by timthelion »

sctb wrote: post #476
timthelion wrote: post #316

One time I was crossing the street, and I almost got hit by some white asshole in his car, going way too fast. Actually, that happens all the time. That's why I always start shooting my machine gun at anything within 50 meters that moves.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815933 and marked it off-topic.

Did you read what I was replying to? Perhaps you should mark that as off topic as well if you are going to prevent my reply.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#484

Post by ng-user »

reillyse wrote: post #427

LA doesn't have a traffic problem. People just have overly high expectations. As someone who has also lived and commuted in lots of cities around the world, LA just doesn't have that much of a problem. What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15 miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an hour (I'm using as reference Downtown LA to Santa Monica at 9am,…

Seriously, there are worse cities than LA. Toronto has arguably the worst traffic in North America [0]

[0] - http://oppositelock.kinja.com/the-busiest-highway-in-north-a...

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#485

Post by fian »

avn2109 wrote: post #204
kkitay wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a middle ground between buses and rail: building defacto rail lines by transforming far-left lanes and middle dividers into dedicated bus tracks and semipermanent bus stations. Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011) highlights the TransMilenio bus system, which serves the city of Bogota. It specifically covers elevating the experience and status of taking the bus by adopting positive aspects of rail systems: covered…

Bus themed solutions would definitely be an improvement over LA's status quo. However a better idea would be to reduce the need to travel long distances by building denser. LA roads are super wide right now, so the easiest way to raise density would be by putting buildings in the middle of the road, leaving a Really Narrow Street (tm) along either side. Ground floors of new buildings could be commercial, upper floors…

By old Paris, I assume you mean the area inside the Peripherique? Apart from Montparnasse Tower the building heights inside the Peripherique are limited to seven floors. This has the same effect as San Fran on restricting the density of the inner city, which means most people can't afford to live there and put up with....long commutes.

I spent three months working in Paris and many of the younger people lived further out and had a 45min - 1hr commute by public transport or driving.

The link you posted talks about narrow streets, this is true in some areas of the city, but Paris also has many wide boulevards.

The traffic during peak hour was pretty bad - the French driving on the footpath meme has some truth to it.

Also old Paris can be like it is because the CBD is located just outside the Peripherique at La Defense.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#486

Post by memco »

reillyse wrote: post #427

LA doesn't have a traffic problem. People just have overly high expectations. As someone who has also lived and commuted in lots of cities around the world, LA just doesn't have that much of a problem. What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15 miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an hour (I'm using as reference Downtown LA to Santa Monica at 9am,…

> The line made famous by clueless that everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes is completely true, with the caveat being, so long as you don't drive during traffic.

Another way to interpret this is: nowhere you want to go is ever < 20 min. from your current location. This includes places like grocery stores or other neighborhood locales because even though they are close, traffic can still make a half-mile commute take 20 min.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#487

Post by mikegioia »

467568985476 wrote: post #462
closeparen wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New York's public transit commuters have some of the worst commute times in the country, at 7.5-11 hours/week (45 minutes each way on the low end). For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1] Public transit mitigates the environmental and public safety effects of traffic, but the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" problem is much worse with public transit (even rail). And no, that time is not reusa…

I completely disagree about the reusability of time. I live in Boston and my commute on the train is only about 20 minutes, but that's plenty of time to read a few pages or catch up on the news. I see plenty of commuters reading books as well, so I'm definitely not a special case. Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard...

It's not hard, and I see 10-20 people per train car on the R going between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I've seen people standing and reading kindles in body-to-body crammed trains.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#488

Post by memco »

closeparen wrote: post #455
idlewords wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London, Paris, NYC and Tokyo all have a comprehensive subway system and light rail covering the extended metro area. For many parts of LA, driving (or taking a bus through terrible traffic) is the only option.

New York's public transit commuters have some of the worst commute times in the country, at 7.5-11 hours/week (45 minutes each way on the low end). For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1] Public transit mitigates the environmental and public safety effects of traffic, but the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" problem is much worse with public transit (even rail). And no, that time is not reusa…

> For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1]

This data is from 2014 at best. I would wager the situation is a lot worse now especially given the construction that has happened or is happening (e.g. widening the 405 or the new metro line being built by the airport).

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#489

Post by floatrock »

enknamel wrote: post #347
Osiris wrote: post #307

This is just a band-aid. Same with adding buses, lanes, trains, etc. When something goes wrong in software we usually try to resolve it by finding a root cause. There are a lot of cars on the roads. Why? People live far away from their work. Why? All the office buildings are in one central place. Why? ... Etc. The solutions to the root causes, whatever they are, are, unfortunately, a lot more complex and expensive th…

I think LA and the Bay Area are going to eventually go the way of New York where you have huge buildings and residential and business well mixed. Right now the Bay is terrible because the jobs are all in SF, MV, SJ and fairly far from affordable housing. So most people do very long commutes adding in more traffic. I really shouldn't be working with so many people who commute 1-2 hours each way every day because they…

The tech buses were started because google was creating too many jobs with housing being too far away.

Google wanted to expand their campus. Mountain View was concerned about the added traffic on their roads, so they said no. Google then wanted to work with developers to create medium-density housing within walking/biking distance, but mountain view also said no to that ("would ruin the character of the neighborhood"). So the people filling the new jobs can't live nearby and they can't commute in.

Solution? Bus them in on tech shuttles. The thing that's a workaround to political dysfunction and NIMBY'ism is somehow a symbol of the tech industry excess.

Re: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

#490

Post by handedness »

skybrian wrote: post #16
endianswap wrote: post #13

Aren't tolls like this an incredibly regressive tax that further hurts the poor?

The article covers that.

It covers that rather poorly:

Experts have pointed to tolls as a traffic solution for decades, yet building political support for road fees continues to be a challenge — the most common complaint being: "Oh, so only rich people can drive?"

This critique ignores the fact that working Americans often suffer the most severely from the impacts of poor mobility. Working-class parents who are late to pick up their kids from day care, for example, often pay severe financial penalties. Having the option to reach their destination quickly could actually save them money. In fact, experience with dynamic tolling in the United States has shown that people of all income levels use these lanes. This objection also ignores just how inequitable and dysfunctional our current system is. Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads.

So the LA Times defines ≠rich as "working/working-class Americans," and ultimately concludes that "tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but be so do sales taxes, gas taxes, and every other way we pay for roads."

So what's one more regressive tax–"inequitable and dysfunctional"–to the poor?

The LA Times's internally-consistent value system is well-matched by its penetrating insight.

Post reply on HN