271–280 of 689 posts
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Well, letting people build homes near jobs so the distances traveled are shorter (or walked, or cycled) also helps.
So, change jobs and buy/sell your house? Switching costs are high, even as rentors. (Moving Costs, Deposits)
- In Dallas, all arterials are six-lane divided highways, and even a large chunk of our collectors are four-lane divided highways. Bidirectional turn lanes are virtually nonexistent. In the LA area, very few surface streets are divided, with only Orange County making heavy use of divided highways, and bidirectional turn lanes are used all over the place. Bidirectional turn lanes slow down traffic, and divided highways help prevent accidents. LA should kill the turn lanes and start installing medians.
- North Texas has spent most of the 21st century retiring its old cloverleaf interchanges and replacing them with five-level stack interchanges, which are more efficient and allow traffic to flow through faster. Is LA doing that?
- Virtually all freeways in Texas have frontage roads equipped with Texas U-turns [0]. You don't see that in California.
- In the Dallas area, most tech companies are located in the suburbs, and virtually all companies moving their HQ to Texas from out of state are building their campuses in the suburbs too. LA, on the other hand, insists on stuffing most of their tech industry in the Westside. Let's get these companies out of the city and into the SFV, OC, SGV, and Inland Empire.
- Sadly, LA is screwed because of its natural boundaries. The mountains may be pretty, but they get in the way of commuting. I don't think there's anything that can be done about that. Palmdale and the area north of it is the future of development of Los Angeles County... just make sure it's self sufficient so nobody has to commute across the mountains.
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> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people, or kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a dude, I bet women feel even more so. One of the ways to improve the public transit, as a whole, is to make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit. Consider New York, for instance, wh…
Driving and parking in New York is so incredibly difficult and expensive compared to mass transit, especially the subway. In the cities where that is the case, there isn't the same class division between those who drive and those who take mass transit. In LA, it is exactly the opposite: mass transit is incredibly difficult, slow, and in some cases more expensive than driving. How can you "make people of all socioecon…
Or, actually, just tear up the parking lots. You can do it by taxing under-utilized land.
It's obviously never going to happen, so people will keep spending ~$3-5,000/year on vehicles, and ~$1,000-2000/year on parking, for the dubious privilege of spending up to two hours a day in traffic. On the bright side, if you live that far from work, your housing is probably cheap.
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…
I actually rode the buses in LA for about 2 years (Westside to UCLA). Adding more buses, and I mean a LOT more buses (10x), may actually work. However, the issue with LA buses is not the frequency or the timing of transfers, it is the city and the people themselves. LA is not meant for buses, it is meant for cars. That means you'll have to tear up a lot of road-way to get the proper street design for 10x the buses. Anyone that has lived in LA knows that major road construction is nearly unending and yet is horrific at the same time. Doing that kind of work will not be just 'normal' expensive, but you'll also have to pay for the massive corruption issues along with it. There exists no political willpower to do so and it is unlikely to come about anytime soon as voter participation in LA is abysmal (1 voter for ~50k residents).
Also, have you ridden the Big Blue Bus on an August Tuesday in 90+ degree heat at 5 pm? You will discover the surprisingly rank nature of the human body's ability to produce truly nauseous smells and leave them on the seats. The bums man, they are just plain smelly and stabby and awful. The bums prevent most unaccompanied women from even considering taking the bus, they really are that bad. LAPD gives exactly 0 shits about the bums as long as they don't actually try to kill you. You ever make the mistake of getting onto a piss bus? Whatever is left of that dying human being in the far back seat just makes for horrific smells that will not come out of your clothes, you really have to throw them out. I learned that lesson only once. I was not late to work, but I should have been. You just have to skip that bus and be an hour late or come in smelling of death itself.
So most single women just take their cars. It is a far safer way to get about town.
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Here's hoping that NY, LA, and other major US cities adopt "Old Parisian" urban planning methods. Wishful thinking.
Because housing is so cheap in Paris.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
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Here's hoping that NY, LA, and other major US cities adopt "Old Parisian" urban planning methods. Wishful thinking.
Because housing is so cheap in Paris.
Paris has a set of issues like any major city but when it comes to managing urban density it does it broadly better than LA, for that matter so does New York.
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I'm certainly not writing mass transit off but I've simply never seen it work in practice. I know that my 7 minute commute is well over an hour by bus. I'd rather just pay the aforementioned tolls than waste 2 hours of my day on a bus, every day. That would add up to years of my life wasted pretty quickly. I'm far more hopeful for self driving cars than mass transit.
> I'm certainly not writing mass transit off but I've simply never seen it work in practice. You've never been to New York, London, Tokyo? Or any 0.5m+ city in Europe or Japan?
[1] https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/secret-project-...
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London sounds terrible to live in, way too many people.
Commuting at rush hour can be pretty awful in just about every major city--New York, London, Paris, Tokyo... I wouldn't call any of those places terrible but, yes, there are a lot of people and it can be pretty mobbed if you try to travel at peak times.
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It may be cheeper to build, though that is questionable. It is cheeper only because it takes advantage of existing roadway, but if you factor in the root cost of all of the existing infrastructure it uses than there's not much of a difference in cost between steel+gravel and concrete is there? In any case, over time the price of the busses goes up steeply. You need to replace a bus after 20 years, where-as trams last…
> there's not much of a difference in cost between steel+gravel and concrete is there? There is a difference, because a pure asphalt track is easy to lay, and especially easy to rework. Train tracks, especially those running in asphalt (shared road between cars and trams), have a host of problems: 1) It's really expensive to build them - trains weigh a LOT and the rails need adequate foundations 2) It's really expens…
3) I know that they have to sweep the tracks, (Modern trams actually have brushes installed in the front) but when you have tram lines with a tram comming through once every two minutes at rush hour, carying thousands of people in a day it hardly seems like a large expense to have an old man in red overalls come in at night sometimes an polish and sweep out the tracks.
4) I know, this sucks. Especially when there is an illegally parked car, forcing you to lane change.