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

Can confirm. Would take me ~15 minutes to go from 405/Santa Monica to go get coffee in Brentwood at that Starbucks that's by all those italy like shops(it's been over a year and half since I moved so spacing on the street)

You can walk a half mile in 20 minutes, never mind biking. Why do people drive that short of distances in CA? Even if it's for groceries, bring a backpack and shop more frequently.

> has fairly decent public transit (by US standards)

If LA has public transport like SF, I'd expect rapid transit to downtown, Santa Monica, Venice and Hollywood straight from LAX [1].

[1] With everything covered in human poop because LA is now SF.

Why do we drive?

- Unaffordable housing. If you are able to be a homeowner, you'll most likely live further away from where you work and not have as many travel options.

Median individual income: $28k; Median house price: ~$600k.

I personally think the market is inflated but I have no idea how or if it will crash.

- Unaffordable rents. You find a great place to live, that you can afford, that might be rent control, and it doesn't make monetary sense to move elsewhere. Or you just can't afford to (like if you work in SM/Venice).

- Geography. For example, look at The Valley. If you have to come into central LA, your options are pretty limited. If you wanted to use good public transit, there's an express bus and the stunted Red Line. Not much of the rest of the Valley is served.

There are of course other reasons but I think these are main drivers. I think dedicated bus lanes could alleviate these issues but, when I asked someone at Metro about that, she skirted the issue by saying there are no plans to widen any streets in LA. Which I'm ok with - I'd prefer to see some of them reduced or reconfigured. It seems their focus is mainly on rail. Sadly, it's also still focused on a hub-and-spoke system pointing downtown instead of something more nodal around other job centers/geography.

Tolls aren't going to help. They're only going to be another nickel or dime to help overwhelm the poor and middle class here. As someone else pointed out, it's not going to be an issue for Mr. Audi and Mrs. Land Rover to pay them, but when Jose and Juanita come over to cut their lawn and babysit their kid, they will suffer.

And Jose and Juanita, and all the rest of us already suffer each time there's a new measure to increase sales tax to pay for public transit so that we can hopefully, maybe, one day have a decent, less dangerous, less stressful way to get around. I'm not super-familiar with all the consequences of Prop 13 but I'm assuming that because the city can't extract it's fair share of tax revenue from the housing stock that that is why everything is based on sales tax increases.

At least Measure S was voted down yesterday.

The trouble is the only thing our state and cities ever do is widen freeways, and that never works. The core of the problem is traffic management, which technology can solve without added tolls. (It's the same with city streets. There is absolutely no reason in 2017 why we should ever hit more than one or two red lights in intra-city travel.) It's just that the state and city governments seeem truly oblivious to any new ways of thinking about the problem.

Tolls are regressive and will have a greater impact on poor people who have to commute to work. Second, public infrastructure is paid for by by both taxes and use fees/licenses/fines. That's a bit different from a utility. If the feds and state gave me back the money for the roads I've already built, I'd be fine switching to a pay-as-you-go model. Another consideration: This state is already funneling too many public funds to private toll road operators — to the tune of billions of dollars. I'd really hate to see more of my money go to people who are already charging the public way too much for setting up booths on the roads I paid for and charging me to drive on them.

As a side note, I've always thought California was leaving some big revenue opportunities on the table by not issuing special licenses for high-speed driving and creating high-speed lanes for people with those licenses. It would be a neat experiment. We could try it out on the 15 between LA and Las Vegas, were people are driving 100 anyway.