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

latimes.com

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

#651

Post by praneshp »

trome wrote: post #605
praneshp wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting 2011,I used to go to Bangalore once a year. The number of trees cut down, the number of new cars on the road, and the terrific traffic all boggled my mind. Car after car of software engineers, probably perfectly pleasant to work with, would just lay on the horns despite knowing perfectly well that the first car was stopped at a red light. If I ever go back to India, Bangalore is the first city that's off my…

That is just plain stupid, short of being a giant asshole, you don't lay on the horn cause someone respected a light/stop sign. Sounds like a city to avoid.

Depends on whether you consider respecting the light a hindrance to traffic or not.

But I did think Bangalore was a little worse than where I'm from, probably because there were more entitled folks.

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

#652

Post by tracker1 »

Neeek wrote: post #545
tracker1 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get motion sickness, and have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell.. I'd rather be in my car enjoying music and/or taking calls. Also, I happen to like about a half hour or so of driving, as it is enough distraction to let work thoughts fall away.

A half hour isn't so bad, 45 minutes (more with traffic) both ways was getting pretty stale. As for the motion sickness, I'm certainly not implying the bus is for everyone, just wanted to speak up for those of us who have a role for it to fill in their commute :)

I understand... I'm just not able to do productive things (looking at a phone/laptop/book) in a moving vehicle, so I would much rather be driving.

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

#653

Post by officelineback »

hermitdev wrote: post #480
wa2flq wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the conditions change so quickly that opening Waze just before you leave doesn't at least give you a ballpark estimate?

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

#654

Post by zjaffee »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #392
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…

> 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…

I disagree that this is what makes LA a prime candidate for mass transit. If you look at NYC, all train lines exist to bring people in and out of manhattan where most people work. In LA you have this massive N+1 problem where you'd need every one of these miniature dense cities to connect to each other miniature dense city by rail.

If that were done, way more people would take public transit, as being able to take a direct route to the place you're going by train would be substancially faster.

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

#655

Post by Touche »

OrwellianChild wrote: post #346
Touche wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I horrible person to want higher end trains again (like there used to be)? So I can pay double but have the confidence that my fellow passengers have jobs and families they care about and don't have voices in their head. Does this make me a bad human to want this?

Bad is subjective. Implicitly in this, you want to pay money to avoid seeing the problems of other people instead of seeking to fix them. That might be worth thinking about.

In my opinion the best long-term solution to poverty and mental health (which are often related) is technology. I could quit my job and dedicate my life to being a social worker or to working for charities, and those would be good and noble things to do. But I firmly believe that an affluent global society where the essentials in life are so cheap that they are essentially (if not literally) free is the best way to fix those problems.

So, I think by being a technology working I am doing my small part in helping, and I don't think not wanting to feel threatened on my commute contradicts that.

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

#656

Post by OrwellianChild »

Touche wrote: post #655
OrwellianChild wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad is subjective. Implicitly in this, you want to pay money to avoid seeing the problems of other people instead of seeking to fix them. That might be worth thinking about.

In my opinion the best long-term solution to poverty and mental health (which are often related) is technology. I could quit my job and dedicate my life to being a social worker or to working for charities, and those would be good and noble things to do. But I firmly believe that an affluent global society where the essentials in life are so cheap that they are essentially (if not literally) free is the best way to f…

I think the long term vision for the future free of these problems is an interesting conversation to have. The challenge inherent in getting there is being aware there is a problem and working towards fixing it.

By advocating for legislators and public administrators to hide the problem from their constituents, you create a situation where "out of sight, out of mind" takes the pressure off the government to solve the problem at all.

This is independent of personal occupation or hobbies. I'm not impugning your goals of solving the problem through your career in technology. It's about enforcing the accountability of the people who have the ability to make the changes to solve the problems at scale.

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

#657

Post by davind3r »

timthelion wrote: post #467
csharpminor wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but what makes a tram better than a bus? I'm genuinely curious. As far as I can tell they're much more expensive per mile, have difficulty on hills, and make the street more dangerous for cyclists. The only advantage trams seem to have is that they don't have the stigma of busses.

There are several reasons. I'll devide them into to groups. Fundamental reasons: 1) The tram is a heavy vehicle running on rails and uses heavy spring shocks with one degree of freedom of movement (to tilt side to side). The bus is a light vehical with softer shock springs which have 360 degrees of freedom of movement. That is, that the bus can shake up/down, side to side, forwards/backwards and anything inbetween. T…

Non-code-block for easy reading:

There are several reasons. I'll devide them into to groups. Fundamental reasons:

1) The tram is a heavy vehicle running on rails and uses heavy spring shocks with one degree of freedom of movement (to tilt side to side). The bus is a light vehical with softer shock springs which have 360 degrees of freedom of movement. That is, that the bus can shake up/down, side to side, forwards/backwards and anything inbetween. This is the biggest difference. It is much more comfortable to be in a stable vehicle than one that rocks like a boat. You can read much more easilly on a tram than on a bus.

2) Related to the first reason, the tram has no rocking caused by breaking, as the forward/backwards up/down rocking motions are impossible due to the restriction of movement caused by the rails and the weight of the vehicle

3) The fact that the wheels are hard means that it is much more efficient.

4) Tram cars are significantly wider than busses and therefore have much more comfortable inside spaces.

5) Since the rails are always in the same place, you can design a tram with almost no gap between the platform and the floor of the tram, so that a person in a wheel chair/with a stroller can ride in without any ramp!!!!

6) Due to the heavy build of the tram, and the fact that there is no internal combustion engine or batteries that would wear out, trams last cca 3x longer than busses. This will always be the case. It is like the difference in lifespan between a brick house and one made of mud.

7) The wheel wells of the tram are shorter, making for a much more open, less awquard space.

8) Due to the width, stability, and length of the tram, it is possible to walk to the other side of a non-crouded tram to get away from an alcholic person.

Non-fundamental reasons:

1) Electric is better than deisel. Deisel busses are noisy, vibrate, and make toxic fumes which give many people nausia. (this isn't fundamental to busses, you can have trolley busses, or electric ones)

2) Trams have much larger windows/more window space making for a less claustrophobic ride.

3) Trams use a cellphone based tracking software for determining which stop they are at, which makes for very very smooth audio indications of where you are. The anouncment system on busses is manually controlled and sometimes the bus driver forgets to announce a stop. We even have digital reader boards with the amount of time it will take the tram to arrive, and those numbers are accurate. For busses this system also exists, but it is worse.

4) On rainy days, the bus comming into the bus stop may splash you with mud, trams never do that.

5) The trams have closed cabins for the drivers, meaning that stupid tourists cannot be tempted to ask the drivers for directions, thus delaying the journey and causing everyone stress. reply

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

#658

Post by drewbug01 »

officelineback wrote: post #653
hermitdev wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the conditions change so quickly that opening Waze just before you leave doesn't at least give you a ballpark estimate?

Yes, actually. Crashes, for example, can't be predicted via Waze and periodically f* up your commute in an epic way. And they happen very quickly and the effects ripple through the system equally quickly.

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

#659

Post by SippinLean »

MSM wrote: post #646
SippinLean wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measurably false, LA has the worst traffic in the world. >The average [LA] driver wasted 104 hours sitting in gridlock.... New York motorists spent 89 hours on average...San Francisco...83 hours on average in 2016. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/02/20/los-angeles-n...

Not sure this is measuring the same thing. For example, if I moved to NYC I wouldn't even bother buying a car because the traffic is so bad. I'd spend 0 hours in gridlock per year, but the traffic is still terrible.

Not if you're driving over a bridge during rush hour. There's plenty of gridlock in NYC. It's on this list.

Owning a car in NYC is mostly prohibited by cost (including parking), vs taking the subway

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

#660

Post by CorvusCrypto »

P3R3 wrote: post #10

The article falsely assumes that the HOV lane has spare capacity. During rush hour here all lanes are equally clogged, and sometimes the HOV lane is actually slower than the other 4 lanes. The only way to fix LA traffic with current infrastructure is self driving car pools. If/when they can get to the point in which they are safer than normal drivers, and safe for the riders (crime inside of self driving cars) LA tra…

I drive every day on the 101 and deal with the worst of the worst for >20 miles each way. I was hoping someone would mention this!

This toll plan is foolish at best and detrimental otherwise. We need incentives for car pools bad! Last count (I carpool and for fun we sometimes count cars' occupants because traffic is always a discussion) out of 46 cars we saw only 2 with multiple occupants. This is the major problem.

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