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

One of my favorite little-known tidbits of Los Angeles traffic history is the Alweg monorail proposal in 1963. The Alweg Monorail Company offered to finance and build a 43 mile monorail system, which would be repaid with MTA revenues. The proposal got derailed when Standard Oil lobbied heavily against it.

I'm convinced that if this proposal had gotten approved and built, the trajectory of public transportation in Los Angeles would have been significantly different, and the city would probably have a very efficient and extensive monorail system now. Los Angeles seems to be the perfect place for a monorail - it can be built around existing structures and doesn't require underground tunneling. I'm not sure that Los Angeles would be a 'car city' now if we had started building this monorail system 50 years ago.

http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/LA1963.html

Those aren't mutually exclusive: tolls are a way to force a lot of people to economize at once, which can create the critical mass needed for a functioning bus ecosystem, which could even include private buses.

I have sat next to plenty of people who "smell bad or play loud music or act out in inappropriate ways" in London or NYC. The differentiating factor (for me at least) is that those cities provide a legitimate service level with public transit that can get me to almost any place in their city in a reasonable time frame. That allows more "regular" people to forgo cars completely in favor of public transit. In LA it is much more difficult to live without a car and rely totally on public transit. Therefore many have already invested in a car. This makes the choice between using that car over public transit for any individual trip much more slanted in favor of using your car.

Have you seen the central line at rush hour in London? It's horrendous[1]. We are talking >7people per sqm, plus significant waits to even get on the trains. But yet, 100k+s use it every day of all socioeconomic backgrounds. I'd imagine mostly middle class/upper middle class professionals.

Why?

1) Traffic is terrible. It will take 1hr+ to do a journey the central line does in 15-20m.

2) Even if you want to drive, parking costs around $1500/month in the square mile.

3) On top of that, you have the congestion charge for entering central London (£11.50/day - soon to be £25/day if you have a particularly polluting vehicle).

You're looking at about $2000/month if you want to drive, which takes 4x as long and costs about 15x more than the train.

This is what happens when you price effectively for the externalities of traffic congestion. People will switch to transit en masse, and 'loud music' will not be seen as a problem.

[1]this also means there is the political will to build massive transit infrastructure, like crossrail, which will relieve the central line at a cost of around $20bn.

This article[1] has some info and citations and makes my point a bit more clearly.

> Several scholars have described Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as an attractive modal transit option (R. B. Diaz and Schneck 2000; Levinson et al. 2002; Polzin and Baltes 2002; Vuchic 2002). The attributes favoring BRT are its lower capital cost relative to other modes (such as fixed rail) (US GAO 2001) as well as its implementation and operational flexibility (Jarzab, Lightbody, and Maeda 2002).

> There is limited evidence about the relationship between land values and BRT (Rodriguez and Targa 2004; Johnson 2003). Similarly, traditional bus service is rarely considered when discussing the impact of transit on housing costs. In their review of the literature, Hess and Almeida (2007, p. 1043) explain that “…property values near bus routes have only modest gains, if any, from transit proximity, because most bus routes lack the permanence of fixed infrastructure.”

...

> In North America, the relationship between accessibility to BRT and land values is only examined by a handful of studies focusing on bus priority treatments (high-occupancy vehicle (HOV)-bus lanes) and transit ways. In an early study, (Knight and Trygg 1977) examined HOV-bus lanes in Washington, DC, California, Seattle, and Florida. They relied on previously published reports, interviews, aerial photographs, and other secondary sources available at the time to conclude that exclusive bus lanes incorporated into highways appear to have no impact on either residential or commercial development. A later study by Mullins, Washington, and Stokes (1990) found that the BRT in Ottawa, Canada, appeared to have some effect on land development in areas surrounding stations. A review of studies from Houston, Texas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and San Francisco, California conducted by Rodriguez and Targa (2004), revealed that bus transit had no impact on either residential or commercial development. A hedonic analysis applied to Los Angeles’s BRT, one year after its initiation, did not detect any evidence of benefits to nearby multi-family parcels (Cervero and Duncan 2002a). Recent work by a UCLA student, however, found that Los Angeles’ Orange Line (BRT) had an effect on the neighborhood real estate market. In between 2000 and 2012, areas near the Orange Line (BRT) fixed-guideway saw median rent increase by 25% compared to 15% in the control area, renter occupied units increased by 9% compared to 0% in the control area, and home value increase by 47% compared to 34% in the control area (Brown 2014). No significant differences in median income or household vehicle ownership were found, however other demographic characteristics (growth, education, and race) were found to significantly change.

> Rodriquez and Targa (2004) suggest that these mixed results could be partially explained by the BRT’s lack of fixed guideways, as well as the cross-sectional research design and the newness of the service. Indeed, a study of a 25-year old bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Pittsburgh found a significant price premium for homes selling near the BRT line (Perk and Catala 2009). The implication is that where a BRT system can bring lasting improvements in accessibility on par with a fixed rail transit system housing markets may respond accordingly.

1: http://iurd.berkeley.edu/uploads/Displacement_Lit_Review_Fin...