Imagine how much more expensive living in LA will be. Instead of fixing their god awful public transit (like NYC) they want to punish people for using the only reliable mode of transportation?
How are you going to get people to invest in public transit without getting them out of their cars?
LA is hands down the worst major metro area I've been to when it comes to transit, and getting people off the roads will only improve that situation—carpooling, public transit, biking, and hell WALKING are all better options.
"the poor people" is such a wide brush. How about it would make middle class people think about their budgets carefully and only drive when really needed.
LA is 35 miles long. What would the walking commute of 10 million people look like?
So you're suggesting that instead of fixing the problem (public transit) they should start whipping people so that the rich can drive on their traffic-free roads?
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy. A sensible toll would be something anyone who can afford to own a car can be expected pay.
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy
But that's exactly what it accomplishes. Further pushing the poor into poverty punishing the commute to a minimum wage job in a part of town they can't afford.
Not to mention that the very same person will sometimes WANT to pay a toll for an uncongested lane. Running late for an interview? Maybe $15 is worth it to go 70mph for 20 miles at 8:30 AM.
The long tail very often has to "ride on fumes" until payday. Unless the tolls are literally cheaper than the fuel cost of idling in traffic, the result will be to punish those uppity poor for imagining they could afford a car (which they could previously afford, if just barely).
Some people don't have any room in their budget for anything! Any time you charge people $N for something that used to cost $0, the poor get hit the worst and the rich don't get affected at all.
Ehh idk. I've lived in a couple major cities, and moved here to LA in 2015. It's not as terrible is it might seem on the surface. One of the major differences that sets Los Angeles apart from other cities is that people tend to live quite far from work because of housing costs and geography. I'm fortunate that I can take the bus (for now) and often take the Expo Line downtown to go to Kings games, but I know a lot of people that live in Playa or El Segundo and work in downtown, or even the Valley. That just isn't a realistic option for them. I think people have to see Public Transit as a reliable replacement before we introduce some forcing mechanism for them to sell their vehicle.
I think LA is probably a market that most uniquely fits for self driving cars (depending on whatever business model emerges for those things). Thing is, I can't imagine the special kind of road rage that'll emerge when you're driving on the 405 and look to your left and right and see a completely empty vehicle.
By far the most efficient mechanism humanity has ever come up with for distributing scarce resources (such as room on freeways) are free markets. The article is 100% correct that pervasive tolls are the only effective and fair way to reduce what has become monumentally oppressive traffic congestion in LA.
Tolls are a monopoly granted by the government, which makes it the opposite of a free market. The real result of a free market would be private roads or highways that would compete against each other for tolls. Neither are a great solution. Simply throwing more public transportation at the problem isn't going to help either.
If LA wants to improve their traffic problem, they need to address the root cause: bad urban planning and zoning laws. Where people work and where people live are in completely different areas of the city, requiring you to commute. They need to make local traffic easier (ie: not force you onto the freeway) and they need to reduce the need to drive all over the city every single day.
People will use free highways until they're at capacity. Throwing more public transportation at the problem does increase the number of people that can travel down the freeway, but it won't reduce traffic because any car taken off the highway by a driver switching to public transit will be replaced by another driver taking up the commute.
No. You are thinking about it wrong. By making it cost prohibitive for the poors to move around we will be able to concentrate their populations into designated "bottom feeder" neighborhoods allowing us to more effectively rob them of basic public services like education, healthcare, and potable water.
I think based on the rest of the context that was kind of the point - to drive home the "screw these people" attitude that policies like this would spring from.
sigh I am surprised how much I misread that comment. I think I just saw 'the poors' and I didn't properly read the rest of the comment at first glance.
I figured this comment carried enough satire to not need explanation. He was using an offensive tone to carry over the implicated apathy that city planning has on the impoverished.
You forgot regressive forms of taxation. So increase the street sweeping to 3x a week in the bottom-feeder neighborhoods, and issue 3x the number of street sweeping violations.
Hyperbole aside, when you see gentrification in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, one has to wonder how numbered are the days of LA's poor neighborhoods.
The metro isn't that bad. I commuted from Hollywood to Torrance by metro/bus daily for a few years. The metro fare cost me more than gas actually but staying off the 110 was golden.
They're already paying for it. The injustice is that even people too poor to drive pay an undue amount. Sit on the packed 720 crawling down Wilshire blvd at rush hour and realize those people have just as much right to get around. I need to find the source but a few years ago, more people got down Wilshire in buses during rush hour than in cars, yet the condo canyon folks screamed and wailed about the prospect of a bus lane.
The argument for public transportation in Los Angeles is a continuing theme...and it is also one that is nonsensical in the context of this city.
The city of Los Angeles, and by that I mean the sprawling megalopolis it really is, simply isn't built for public transportation. A fundamental shift in urban design of massive proportions would have to occur for mass transportation to make dent here.
In order to affect this massive re-modelling of the city one would have to use eminent domain laws to force millions of people to sell their properties and move. You would literally have to displace millions of people in order to build the required roadways and infrastructure that would allow a shift towards mass transit. This, of course isn't only unthinkable, it's impossible.
Take the "simplest" (in quotes because I am being sarcastic about the actual simplicity) of all problems: Where do you park your car?
Mass transit isn't going to reach into every suburban neighborhood. And, no, people are not going to ride bicycles. If we want an Amsterdam-like bicycle culture we would have to displace even more people. And then you'd have to build massive bike parking lots like the one next to Centraal station in Amsterdam.
People would need to drive a cars to a parking lot somewhere. Millions of people. There is no space to build these parking lots and the required rail in/out pathways without destroying whole neighborhood en-masse.
Once you get to work you'd have to be able to get from the station to your workplace. Once again, if we want this to be within walking or biking distance of most businesses we would have to tear-up whole neighborhoods in order to enable the tentacles of a mass transit infrastructure to get close enough.
And then there's the cost. I won't even bother trying to estimate it. What's the cost of buying-up, I don't know, 100,000 homes? Include both the real estate and legal costs ('cause there would be tens of thousands of lawsuits). And, once all homes are acquired and millions displaced, what's the cost of construction.
Nah, LA isn't suitable for mass transit in the spirit of many European cities. The comparison is futile.
What we could do is try to encourage --over time-- a spreading out of centers of employment. This can be done NY style by offering no taxes for ten years for the relocation or startup of businesses in designated areas. There's a huge focal point of businesses in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor that creates massive traffic flows from as far away as 50 miles in every direction. That's the problem.
Most of those businesses don't need to be there. Why some flock to that corridor is somewhat incomprehensible to me other than there might be lack of space availability or zoning issues much outside that region.
It's a tough problem. Not sure tunneling is the solution either.
They don't even need to say no taxes in certain areas. All that has to be done is allow other uses in residential areas. An area that previously just had loads of houses could then have a commercial building. Businesses would do it because it is much cheaper than building in zoned commercial or leasing in a skyscraper. Just alter zoning laws and it would be much better.
Baloney. Just add a bunch of buses, with exclusive bus lanes covering their whole route. Choose the initial routes so they'll at least break even.
Bam, you have a good public transit system that is much faster than private cars due to being immune to traffic, and you didn't have to confiscate any property, build anything expensive, or do anything else exciting or risky.
Everyone's obsessed with rail, and rail is nice, but if you already have roads rapid bus transit makes more sense in the short run
You must not live in Los Angeles. If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably. In some places you can't due to the topology of the roads.
Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
There are no good mass transit solutions in Los Angeles. I've lived here long enough to see and analyze what is happening from multiple vantage points. We lived by the beach, desert, inland and in a couple of valleys. It's a mess. This megalopolis did not evolve to be mass transit friendly.
I say this with sadness because there's nothing I'd like more than not to own a car. I am simply being a realist on this one.
> If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably.
Really? Because all those lanes that have been added over the years don't appear to have made a big difference.
Also, the lane would be replaced with something amazing angelinos have never seen before -- a transport mode way faster than any other. With all the people choosing to use that bus, there'll be less car traffic. Saving half an hour has a way of turning excuses like "the bus is crowded" into jelly.
(Also, if it turns out you're right, lane rules and hours can be adjusted immediately with just a little paint or a sign. This is not risky.)
> Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops
Um, don't use the freeway then, except where it's genuinely more direct. Then you don't have to take lanes away anyway.
> at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
Are you kidding? There's so much space in wasted parking lots for individual businesses, or even street space on these huge wide roads, any of which could be reclaimed.
> You must not live in Los Angeles.
Correct! If I did, I'd be afflicted by the same sad disease as you, lack of imagination.
Fact is, we make it work here in metro NYC, which is as big and sprawled out as LA -- probably more actually. If we can do it, so can you. (Note that by metro NYC I don't mean manhattan and the like, I mean to emphasize the outer parts, the 4 boroughs and 3 detached counties (Westchester, Bergen, Hudson) surrounding manhattan.
I invite you to come tour outer NYC, and see what you think
And we all know the people who can't afford to pay tolls can definitely afford the cost of moving which includes losing their likely rent-controlled apartments.
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 traffic will be solved. This will eliminate the necessity of having a car allowing for increased taxes on car ownership, reducing traffic on the roads.
True ride-sharing could also help, and sooner than self-driving cars. Uber and Lyft talked about matching departing commuters in real-time, which would greatly reduce the inflexibility that makes traditional carpooling so unpleasant. I'm not sure why that never took off.
I'd guess because people would rather have the certainty of getting to work in 1.5 hours, rather than wait for a stranger to pick them in a semi-determined block of time (or pick up a stranger in the same) for a 1 hour commute.
Waiting and hoping that the person who promised to pick you up will actually do so seems annoying and nerve-wracking. "Sorry, boss, I know I'm late again, but a complete stranger was 30 minutes late picking me up today, and then decided to stop for donuts on the way to work."
> rather than wait for a stranger to pick them in a semi-determined block of time
I think the idea is that it's supposed to match you in real-time and give GPS updates, just like regular Uber and Lyft. That is, it's not like BlancRide in Canada (which has been struggling) where you schedule in advance, have blocks of time, etc.
> Waiting and hoping that the person who promised to pick you up will actually do so seems annoying and nerve-wracking
Unlike most carpooling services, Lyft and Uber have strong reputation mechanisms that can greatly reduce this. You can always fall back on a taxi or normal Uber for couple times a month when the driver is flaky.
Sorta. Unlike a normal Uber driver, the carpool driver (1) specify their rough route, (2) can decline riders without penalty, and (3) isn't paid as much (basically enough to cover gas, I think). But yes, the pick-up/drop-off interface was supposed to be more or less the same.
I've taken Uberpool for longish distances around LA (mostly between ~Beverly Hills and the Valley), and it suuuuucks. Having to get off the freeway and get back on to pick up people adds a ton of time to commutes that aren't that long from the LA perspective.
Agreed, and that's always very important. I'm just skeptical of how high the density of use would have to be for this to make sense; and even then, LA just may be unconducive to this kind of an infrastructure. As people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, making the freeways necessary conduits to get anywhere in a timely manner just screws up getting around period.
If the HOV lane is gridlocked, that means the price to use the HOV lane is not high enough. Keep raising the toll until traffic in the HOV lane moves at the desired speed.
They set a max price on those lanes because otherwise poor people would get stuck in even worse traffic while rich people would be able to move quickly. That's already true but they are trying to minimize the disparity between rich and poor.
You could also make the argument that a rich persons time is worth less because they can afford to hire people to do what poor people have to do themselves, like clean the house or go shopping or drive their kids around. They are also more likely to have a job that can be done from home.
By "price", you point out that California "HOV" lanes... aren't.
"Carpool/HOV" lanes have been political toys from the start. A true carpool means more than one would-otherwise-be driver per vehicle. A minority of HOV lane users in CA have more than one licensed driver. The rest are "kidpools", "hybrids" (which, for all but the first 10-30 miles on a charge are less efficient than non-hybrids), "non-polluting vehicles" (pure electrics, CNG, fuel cell), buses, and government vehicles.
Such lanes are now as crowded as conventional lanes more often than not.
Actual trip reduction could be obtained by limiting HOV use to actual carpools (>1 licensed driver) and buses with passengers, and narrowing their hours of exclusivity a bit.
By "price", you point out that California "HOV" lanes... aren't. Those with the means (and those who defraud) can drive solo all they like.
"Carpool/HOV" lanes have been political toys from the start. A true carpool means more than one would-otherwise-be driver per vehicle. A minority of HOV lane users in CA have more than one licensed driver. The rest are "kidpools", "hybrids" (which, for all but the first 10-30 miles on a charge are less efficient than non-hybrids), alternative-fuel vehicles (pure electrics, CNG, fuel cell), buses, and government vehicles. Alternative-fuel vehicles also don't help fund roads via gasoline/diesel taxes.
Such lanes are now as crowded as conventional lanes more often than not.
Actual trip reduction could be obtained by limiting HOV use to actual carpools (>1 licensed driver) and buses with passengers, and narrowing their hours of exclusivity a bit.
Depends on the HOV lane. The Fastrak lanes on the 110 south of downtown are regularly moving at 45+ mph, regardless of the state of the other lanes. There are two HOV lanes each direction, often separated by grade.
Here's my idea: Rather than high-occupancy lets make the left lane a guaranteed-speed lane. The rule is that all cars in the lane move at 80 mph. If you can't merge in or out of the lane is such a way that no one else has to brake, then you're not allowed to merge. You're not allowed to slow down unless there's an emergency and those will be rare because users will be required to maintain their vehicles in top condition and crashing is strictly prohibited.
This will dramatically increase the throughput of the lane and will inescapably lead to an increase in usage. But the increase will naturally be capped around 20k cars per hour per lane.
To make it work, you'll need precise data about conditions far ahead and far behind. You'll also need an inescapable enforcement mechanism or the system will succumb to cheating. The good news is that very soon many cars will be covered in sensors, networked and able to implement the concept.
I don't actually think the concept is a good one (it's unworkable without a level of automation at which you'd have much better alternatives) but the exit problem is already frequently addressed with HOV/bus lanes—have dedicated left-sode exits so they don't need to cross the slower lanes to exit.
I agree advanced automation would be needed to maximize capacity. A basic system only needs cruise control, lights and cameras installed at the merge points and a transponder like fasttrak that monitors your speed and automatically fines you if you hit the brakes.
Adaptive cruise control, lane assist, higher standards of maintenance and driver skill don't seem like too much to ask of a select group of people and vehicles licenced to use the lane and would help to maximize capacity and minimize incidents without getting too futuristic.
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.
"Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads."
It then goes on to sort-of suggest that despite this new pain the net benefit will be better for "working-class" people......somehow. No thoughts were offered on how to keep the toll revenue from just padding out civil servant pensions and benefits while the traffic and roads muddle on.
As I understand it, the idea is that if you're already collecting sales and gasoline taxes to pay for roads, collecting the same amount of money through tolls instead isn't any more regressive (it replaces one regressive tax with another), plus it cuts down on traffic.
On the other hand, replacing income tax with tolls really would be regressive.
(But I don't know enough about taxes to say if that's really true.)
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.
The other way we pay for roads is through sales taxes (aka the most regressive tax). At least tolls are use-based, rather than on the general population.
> 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.
I'm not sure what the technical term would be, but I think it's less about false equivalence but more that saying that other things are bad doesn't justify making another bad thing.
"This proposed policy will make things worse, but there are other policies that make things worse, so therefore this policy cannot be criticized on those grounds".
Use taxes such as highway tolls are among the most economically efficient ways to raise revenue to maintain and improve public goods. Since most tolling is electronic now, it's straightforward to provide a means-tested toll credit for people who would otherwise have trouble paying for their portion of the use of the expressway.
I think you need one more twist. If I'm poor, and I have a means-tested toll credit, then I have no incentive not to use the toll road. That is, the economic incentives you're trying to create don't apply to the poor. (Unless by "credit" you mean "I get to keep the cash if I don't use it", in which case my objection does not apply.)
This definition of "tax" is wrong at best, precisely backwards at worst. Most people don't own real estate, yet they still call it "property tax". Most people didn't die this year, yet they still call it "estate tax". Most people don't smoke, yet they still call it "cigarette tax". In every case, the people's representatives have found some group they can shake down on the people's behalf.
Sure, so when the police come to help you we should charge you a per-visit fee. It will be small, something poor people can't afford but rich people can afford easily, like $50. If you can't afford it, they won't go after the criminal who hurt you.
It's not regressive because charging someone to use something (like police services) is not a tax, after all.
The very point is that right now roads are paid by taxes, which are progressive, and people are suggesting replacing them with fees, which are regressive (without some additional scheme to account for this). A better solution would be subsidizing all public transit so it is free, which is progressive, not regressive. But will never solve the problem because it only incentivizes the poor to use transit.
If we stop subsidizing roads or make public transit free/cheaper then roads will be for the rich only, and public transit I'm sure will have millions poured into it and flourish. The government is, after all, historically very responsive to needs and pain points that are only felt by the poor and minorities.
We need to provide funding for transit first. We need to get middle-upper class people riding it, people who vote, are white, donate to political campaigns, know powerful people, etc which specifically means making it fast, efficient, reliable. Look at places like DC and NYC and SF/bayarea where middle-class businessmen take transit because it's the easiest, most efficient method and is fairly reliable.
I think the idea is that sales and gasoline taxes are already used to pay for roads and are already regressive, so you're replacing one regressive tax with another, which is (perhaps) no worse than before.
On the other hand, if you're replacing income tax with tolls or just raising tolls without lowering other taxes, then it would be regressive.
The bastion of socialism, France, has mostly-toll freeways (they also have non-toll routes nationale and routes départementales in addition to more local routes communales)
Of course, they do also actually plan their roadways nationally and region-wide whereas in the US, it seems "city planning" is an oxymoron.
The notion that road pricing is a regressive tax on the poor smacks of elitism. The hidden message seems to be "poor people don't have anywhere important to be." But lower income people were surveyed an they in fact desired road pricing just as much--if not more than--any other population segment because of the need to efficiently travel to multiple jobs and daycare sites efficiently, for instance.
It reminds me of the "poor people shouldn't have nice things" superiority complex that breeds thoughts like "poor people shouldn't buy smartphones and flatscreens!", when those things are quite inexpensive compared to actual ongoing expenses of rent and food. And there are many factors other than road pricing, such as cost of vehicle, fuel, and parking.
Planners generally aim for a utilitarian investigation of the effects. Tolls impact individual trips, but are also shown (in certain use-cases, like congestion charges) to improve traffic flow and increase transit use - time spent stuck in traffic increases fuel use and pollution, and slows everyone's average time per trip. In the extreme traffic case of overflowing gridlock, as often happens in developing-world megacities, everyone loses.
The arguments are very similar around taxes on cigarettes or soda: A painful measure that may save money or improve health outcomes in the long-term. In the end, it's just one more tool that has to be used judiciously.
I doubt this has any effect, rich people don't care, poor people can't afford to move somewhere else. Public transport is the only effective approach to reducing the congestion.
Only if people use it. I don't have a source easily at hand, but I have read about how people are willing to fund public transit via tax increases, but those same people rarely ever use it.
The problem as I see it is that we force everyone onto the freeway. Need to get somewhere a few miles from here? They make it very difficult to get there without getting onto the freeway.
There was some point in the last 30 years where city designers decided the best way to handle local traffic was just to force everyone onto the freeway. It's horrible.
There should instead be a reasonable main grid of smaller (2 lane max) low stop count streets such that I can get across town without getting on the freeway.
A large number of small roads can handle a lot more traffic than a small number of large roads.
Maybe we should also consider the concept of mass transit? The increased likelihood of injury or death from increased transit time in automobiles alone is a health hazard.
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.
NYC is an abnormality in the US, but it's certainly better than almost all the rest of the cities in the states. Western Europe also has fantastic mass transit that definitely works in practice.
Self-driving cars are, unfortunately, an expensive half-assed solution to transportation in the US.
Buses (And really, any at-grade transportation that has to share the road with cars) are, unfortunately, not mass transit. 7 minutes vs an hour sounds atrocious.
LA is getting better with mass transit. The problem is it's not running 24 hours. It shuts down around 1am so you it's not really good for doing things at night like in NYC.
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.
Also need more train tracks!
Fix those problems people will ride transit way more. Thats the way to solve the traffic problem.
24hr service would be very expensive, but it seems that they should run the transit services until a little after the majority of bars and clubs close. It was nice here in Boston when they ran the T until a little past 2AM; they've since pulled that back to 12:30 or so. It can be kind of a pain, but Uber/Lyft are well established here.
It's certainly usable for that in LA, where last call is also 2am. I believe every train runs until 2 or 3 AM (on Fridays/Saturdays), and starts back up again by 5. Not quite 24 hours(except on NYE, when they don't stop), but still very usable.
Because it's much more important to address the needs of late night partiers than nurses, convenience store clerks, and so forth who have work shifts at odd hours.
From a NorCal perspective, that is sad because BART stops around 12:30, seven days a week. But I suppose there are MUNI lines that run all night, which is slightly better.
> 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, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.
Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
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 socioeconomic classes take transit" in that scenario?
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.
> On the bright side, if you live that far from work, your housing is probably cheap.
And that's exactly why things are the way they are. Shockingly, given the choice, most people would happily trade a long commute for the ability to spread out and not pay through the nose for the privilege of being crammed on top of other people.
Only because the costs of that lifestyle are socialized - either someone else pays them, or you can't opt out.
Surburban sprawl is unsustainable, but is paid for by new development, parking is free, or cheap, highways aren't tolled, costs of pollution aren't factored into your bill at the pump... When you live in the city, you still pay these costs, but you don't get to reap any of the benefits.
> 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, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.
It doesn't work that well. NYC subways are disgusting, especially in the summer. And you can't prevent citizens from utilizing public resources just because they smell bad or are uncouth.
> Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
We just passed a proposal allocating over $1 billion to house the homeless. I think that qualifies as a solution.
Better enforcement is a good idea. Seems to be worth the money.
Or carry concealed permits. You'll have to repeal California's action that requires all new semi-auto's to have a unique firing pin. But then you don't have to worry traveling.
I carry. I keep odd hours in a small town. I walk every night .25 miles to my office at 8 PM and then back again around 2 AM. Never had any problem (probably the same as most people on the train). If I do, I've got protection.
Um, no. The crazy people won't care, the gangbangers will be better armed and generally in a group, and the single mugger will now take your wallet AND gun AND may shoot you if he gets the drop on you instead of just taking your wallet.
> in a small town
It shows. Your assessment of the probability of crime and how you will interact with it is completely wrong.
Actually for the small town I'm in, muggings occur at night between 12 AM and 3AM. My office is down an unlit blind alley. As a result I carry a flashlight and a gun. Should be fairly good at defense. Also train to draw quickly for both. Light stuns; shot stops.
For the gangbangers, they don't really like to involve civilians in a gun fight. They save that for only the most extreme circumstances in territory protection/expansion. Honestly, not too afraid of them. A woman would benefit from a revolver in that situation. That's what my wife carries: Ruger LCR. No hammer so easy to pull from a purse (which is carried crossed over her). If she can't pull from the purse, she'll fire within it (taking the flash burn over rape, for example). In this instance the revolver will operate without catching the purse like a semi-auto would. At that point, they'd most likely run given the noise and possible loss of their friend.
As for the crazies, the point isn't to prevent them from being crazy by themselves. That's their right. It's to defend yourself if they turn that on you. When we go hiking, I carry a gun knowing the gators don't care. Doesn't mean it's useless.
'bsder you seem pretty confident here, despite the fact that everything you've said contradicts what I've heard from LEOs and other trained firearms users.
One wouldn't expect press-ganged children ("If you find yourself involved in a gang...") and independent law-abiding adults to face identical situations.
However, it is true that many situations don't call for firearms, and knowing when and how to de-escalate are really the first things an armed citizen should know. Discretion is the better part of valor, keep it in your pants, etc.
> despite the fact that everything you've said contradicts what I've heard from LEOs and other trained firearms users.
Really?
1) Muggers
The LEO's I deal with are normally "Just give them your wallet and phone. Do not fight back."
Now, admittedly, most of this advice is from the US and being near big cities. In the US, we don't tend to have kidnappings--normally muggers will take your wallet and phone and run unless you are stupidly in some dangerous area.
2) Gangbangers
Generally will leave you alone unless it is a target of opportunity. However, teenagers are stupid and can consider truly bizarre things "disrespect". Combine this with drugs and you can get some exceptions.
3) Crazy/homeless
Generally the stuff they do never rises to the level of "I can shoot him" until it's too late for you to react.
And, this is, in fact, the crux of the situation. By the time the situation escalates to the level of "I am legally allowed to shoot this person" the situation is often too far gone for the gun to be helpful.
Now, I'm not a tiny female, so I don't present a "target of opportunity". However, women are more often the victim of the gun in the house from their partner than from random strangers.
Finally, my only interactions with concealed carry in my family are accidents where someone almost got shot unintentionally. Nobody in my extended family has ever had to use a gun to defend themselves, but there have been a handful of mishaps (thankfully, nobody harmed).
The statistics are against concealed carry except in fairly exceptional circumstances (jewelers, for example).
Certainly, a wallet (or a jewel!) isn't worth anyone's death, even a criminal's. One doesn't carry in order to defend a wallet. Any decent person would gladly lose $100 and some credit cards, not to have a death on her conscience. A criminal should know, however, that by violating the norms of polite society, he places himself in a fraught situation. It's very easy to cross the line between credibly threatening property and credibly threatening safety.
One carries in order to defend lives. One's own life, the lives of family, and if the situation warrants the lives of other innocent people. It's true that defending life with deadly force will get one in trouble in some jurisdictions. That's why it's better to live in the vast majority of jurisdictions where justified uses of deadly force prompt handshakes rather than criminal charges.
Deadly force absolutely must get one in trouble, in order to determine whether the force was appropriate or not. That much we owe to the deceased and their family.
The best jurisdiction is one where it's hardly considered necessary to carry arms, or use deadly force. Gun ownership and the murder rate (and gun murder rate) seem roughly correlated here:
This is "guilty until proven innocent". That isn't how law is supposed to work. We are supposed to assume that the force was appropriate. Of course, this doesn't mean we don't bother investigating, but the proper assumption is that a person is innocent.
In states that endorse "innocent until proven guilty", the police won't even lock you up or take your gun if you can make a plausible claim to have properly used force.
When the force is appropriate, we owe nothing to the deceased and their family. The deceased was a hazard, and the family set that hazard loose upon society. They owe us:
I see that your article does not distinguish legal gun ownership from illegal gun ownership. I suspect that "murder" might not be the obvious. (suicide? shot by cop? vehicular homocide?) Medical care varies greatly by state, changing survival odds. You may also be making a backwards assumption about cause and effect: people in places with lots of murder might feel a greater need to have a gun.
The LEOs you've dealt with are clearly not Florida sheriffs from non-urban counties. Brevard County sheriff Wayne Ivey is well-loved for his stance on the matter: good people should be prepared to shoot bad people. His department offers a tactical shooting course. BTW, this is a "Stand Your Ground" state, so there is no duty to retreat or otherwise let an evildoer control you.
I try to imagine a San Francisco or Berkeley police chief telling people to shoot bad people dead. It's... not working. :-)
This. The homeless crazy problem has gotten much worse with the introduction of spice. They were much more harmless before but now you don't know when one will just start stabbing you without warning.
Also doesn't help that now everyone has expensive cell phones which attract thieves.
Once I was telling my friend about how I saw a woman pass out and start seizing on the subway at 5pm on a weekday. I pressed the emergency call button and people were all staring daggers at me, how dare I delay the train. My friend then said he had the same experience at 11pm at night and he was worried about physical violence.
It also doesn't help that the sheriffs only bother to stand at the turnstiles checking tickets and if you want to evade the fare, you just can just run.
What's spice? I'm assuming you're not talking about the substance from Dune, but following up with knife combat makes me wonder a little. Quick googling says it can refer to synthetic weed. I struggle to imagine something like that turning people violent.
"Synthetic weed" is a misnomer. Spice/K2/etc. are plant material that has been soaked with one or more "research chemicals" in clandestine manufacturing facilities. The research chemicals are drawn from a pool of partially identified but poorly understood substances that have very little in common with cannabinoids.
It's a crapshoot what chemical a spice user will end up ingesting and it may be a completely different compound than the last time they used the stuff.
> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people
This is pretty true. I'm an occasional metro/bus rider, and I'd guess I've been on more rides where there's someone with a clear mental health issue than rides without. And while most of those occasions it's benign, something everyone can ignore... for enough of them it's been intense enough people on the car/bus have been clearly uncomfortable and it wasn't clear confrontational behavior wasn't going to escalate into violence.
I could imagine some people would decide never to ride again.
Enforcement is probably only part of the puzzle, though. We have the same problem with other public spaces (say, libraries) because we don't have any coherent or effective policy for dealing with people who are suffering from mental illness. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's no straightforward market-based solution to that problem (to an even higher degree than traffic).
When the system is used mainly by society's outliers, this is what you see. When most everyone uses the bus/train/library, this problem - while still existing - is greatly reduced by having a very much lower outlier ratio.
I have to agree with the homeless bit, ride on the red line and after a certain point it becomes a mobile homeless shelter. Have heard stories of the blue line, and I'm just glad I don't need to ride that one often at all.
Sympathetic to those without a home, but it almost makes one want to never ride on the metro or bus again. Which is especially hard since I have no other means of transportation.
Ok fountain and venice are not going to save anybody from the free ways. People know about side streets, they're not really that much help. This problem isn't going away just like the cities revenue problem which is the only reason this is happening.
Elon Musk: “Without tunnels, we will all be in traffic hell forever. I really do think tunnels are the key to solving urban gridlock. Being stuck in traffic is soul-destroying. Self-driving cars will actually make it worse by making vehicle travel more affordable".
> The problem as I see it is that we force everyone onto the freeway. Need to get somewhere a few miles from here? They make it very difficult to get there without getting onto the freeway.
This applies to many American cities, but not really most of LA. The relatively grid-like nature of the surface street network + the level of highway congestion makes short trips do much better on surface streets most of the day.
Of course, the flip side is terrible surface street congestion (to to go east from Santa Monica to UCLA at end-of-day rush hour... or south to LAX on Lincoln). But it reflects that LA's street planning is in many ways much more like an "old" city than a "new" one with lots of intentionally-confusing local road routing and consistent, easy routing to the highways instead.
But when every street going west->east or north->south is backed up, whether they're 1 lane or 3-to-4, I'm not sure there's any room for a denser grid of narrower streets, or that it would improve much.
LOL the same arguments where used in Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg, worked for a few months, the traffic is worse again. It was just a great lie for the the public to finance other prestige projects.
Exactly this is just another way to squeeze citizens.
If you consider how much we pay in taxes, as Americans we really don't get bang for the buck.
Our taxes are hidden behind sales taxes, service charges, tolls, included in fuel, it really adds up.
The toll thing is especially egregious IMO, considering there had been very little investment in this type of infrastructure and now we have to pay because the people who mishandled funds are long gone.
Houston has flex tolling on it's main lanes. On our biggest freeway with 10+ lanes in each direction two are dedicated to tolling with a price that ranges from $1 to $8 each way.
During peak hours the $8 toll makes almost no difference. The lanes remain just as jammed and on average you only save 5-10 minutes (less than 10% of the drive time) over the total length of the tollway.
Obviously this isn't exactly scientific reporting but the toll road authority in Houston is big business to the tune of 700 million/year in toll fees. They won't facilitate access to data if it results in a negative impression.
> Obviously this isn't exactly scientific reporting
It doesn't need to be. Link to the local paper. There's a lot of misinformation being used today. It's not new, but we have the resources to verify things now. We need due diligence, not pontification.
You may need to Google that article title and click through to read it but it outlines that even at $7 each way the price wasn't high enough so now it's $10 each way (not $8 as I stated.) Even so, the $3 price hike has done little to ease congestion.
Clearly the only scientific thing would be to have different tolls on different weekdays. Monday: $25, Tuesday: $10, Wednesday: $17, Thursday: $50, Friday: $31. Now you can see which price eases congestion the most!
I would still argue that prices should be set however high whereas to eliminate congestion, even it is seems "too high", simply because there is a limit to how many lanes can be constructed and no amount of lanes can eliminate congestion due to induced demand. Then we must allow market forces to occur such that development and lifestyle patterns change, which takes time. Might as well bite the bullet now.
It would have been worth quoting from this article, since it shows what nonsense the original claim about Sweden was.
"When Stockholm, Sweden introduced a "congestion tax" to discourage driving in the center of town, traffic eased and the pollution level dropped by between 5 and 10 percent.
There was one other result that was unexpected, but welcome nonetheless: The rate of asthma attacks among local children decreased by nearly 50 percent, according to a Johns Hopkins University economist's study of the tax and its impact."
The author says "we've tried density" to fix traffic. It's just not true. Also trying public transportation means it should be useful enough to be used: when I was in LA that wasn't the case.
> The reason that electrical power and air travel don’t fail every time they get crowded is that we raise prices to manage demand.
Air travel and electrical power:
(1) Are easier to add capacity for during times of peak demand
(2) Actually do fail (even though tolled!) when demand exceeds capacity (brown/blackouts for electrical power, cascading delays easily exceeding those for ground traffic when weather knocks down capacity).
On top of that, it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free -- gasoline and associated taxes are immediate costs for every mile driven, and most people know at some level that each mile also has an additional total cost in terms of insurance and impact on maintenance/lifetime of the vehicle.
And people still choose to make it more expensive in the form of higher-end (and often lower MPG) automotive purchases.
If there's a solution to the traffic problem, instead of attempting to make driving particularly more expensive, it probably involves:
(a) make other transportation options more affordable in terms of reach, time, and money
(b) making the housing market more liquid and affordable, so people can more easily choose locations convenient to their living activities
People do know that it costs to drive a car but the cost is hidden in some sense. I think few people actually calculate how much driving really costs. When I drive 10 miles I don't think to myself that it's going to cost me $5.40 (using IRS mileage rate). Gasoline taxes do not come close to paying for the road system. I remember when gas hit around $5 a gallon in the U.S. some years ago people did think about driving cost a lot more.
I suspect if the costs were more apparent people would be more apt to support public transportation and reconsider their driving habits.
The marginal cost per mile is probably significantly lower (and will vary by vehicle) but I agree with your basic point. I expect that people would be a lot more inclined to combine errands etc. if they had to literally pay per mile.
When dreaming up new ways to tax cars, please bear in mind that wear on roadways from vehicles is proportional to miles driven times per-axle weight to the fourth power.
A gas tax is already proportional to miles driven times vehicle weight times a fuel efficiency factor.
Congestion, on the other hand, is a more difficult thing. Vehicle length certainly plays a factor, as well as width, acceleration, and braking distance. Number of passengers is an obvious factor. Trip routing efficiency has a role. I really don't expect local legislators to understand the mathematics of traffic. If they don't commission a study by traffic experts, and do exactly what those experts recommend, they might just end up making things worse.
You haven't added the external cost to society -- accidents, pollution, congestion and so on.
A study in Copenhagen found that the total cost (personal + to society) of cycling 1km was 8¢, versus 50¢ for driving, or 89¢ for driving at peak times. (That includes 16¢ given back to society in fuel tax.)
The low cycling figure is mostly due to the positive benefit to society of a healthier population (reduced healthcare costs, offset by slightly increased state pension costs when people live longer).
"Accident costs are founded in market values, and comprise public services (police, rescue and treatment), the loss of net productivity, premature deaths, minor and major injuries, and the cost of material damage. Costs are calculated in comparison to number of accidents related to cars/bicycles, and interpolated by the number of km driven/cycled. Accidents entail a cost of Euro 0.022/km for driving and Euro 0.106/km for cycling (COWI and Køpenhavns Kommune, 2009; Transportministeriet, 2010). Even though accidents involving cyclists entail lower material damage costs, overall costs are higher, as cyclists are more exposed and hence affected by accidents. As outlined by Transportministeriet (2013), there remains considerable uncertainty regarding average accident costs for cyclists."
I doubt the cost of treatment is recovered from road insurance policies in Denmark.
(Also NB this is urban driving at 50km/h, the accident cost of extra-urban driving may be higher.)
ghaff alluded to this, but there is also a disconnect between the cost at point of use and the sunk cost when it comes to cars. If you live somewhere where there are poor transit options, you must buy a car. Once you own a car, each additional mile is cheap, considering the conveience - gas taxes be damned.
It follows that converting a car-based city to a transit one necessarily takes away resources from the people who have sunk high costs into their acquisition of a car. That population almost always objects to transit-oriented development.
I agree tolls aren't the end all solution. However, if that revenue was explicitly applied to making public transit better/more accessible/more affordable, I'd be all for it. Alas, we don't live in such a world and I'm sure the tolls would just be spent elsewhere.
1) is completely false. If you have a entirely full airport at peak like LAX, JFK or LHR, how do you add more flights? The marginal cost of more flights is another runway or terminal building, which is (tens) of billions of dollars.
The same problem exists within electricial grids. Providing 'peaker' plants which are only used 5% of the time are incredible expensive. cf how expensive electricity got in california when Enron shut these plans down intentionally in summer.
Demand response [0] is an interesting solution to the electrical grid problem; utilities will pay customers (usually large commercial customers) to use less energy during periods of peak demand (which allows the utility to build fewer plants, so everybody wins).
Not really. Firstly, planes need to be spaced after takeoff more if they are larger (eg a A380 will require more spacing than a 747). This cuts the capacity gain somewhat.
Secondly, not all gates can take larger aircraft.
Thirdly, larger aircraft take a lot more time to turn around than smaller ones (fewer doors per passenger). Which means your gates are tied up for longer.
> it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free
Driving isn't free, but the costs you mention are all part of the cost to the person choosing to drive. That person has presumably incorporated these into their decision of whether or not to drive.
A congestion tax (or dynamic toll) is an attempt to internalize the external costs that a driver imposes on others; when I get in the car and drive, I slow everyone else on the road down, but without a toll (or an expectation of altruism toward random strangers), that won't affect my decision making at all. The goal of a toll is to make the cost of choosing to drive equal to the sum of the costs it imposes on everyone, not just the driver.
The danger of this pricing scheme is that people that can't travel on their ideal commute times hit the road earlier in the morning. They then realise that if they set off another half hour earlier they would breeze in on practically empty roads. So then a lot of people start doing this, leaving the house at 6 a.m. for some epic 50+ mile commute. So then the next step is to leave a 5.30 a.m. to beat the traffic, the traffic that people of their ilk generated. What next, start your working day at 3 a.m.?!?
So this means everyone has neighbours banging car doors, revving engines and doing disruptive stuff at some very early hour. The whole world gets noisier. And all so that some people with cars can sit at their office desks doing stuff they could have done at home.
If a bunch of homeless drug addicts made a similar amount of noise at such anti-social hours then they would be dealt with by the police, the police would make it clear to them how anti-social they have been. Office worker, with some spreadsheets and emails to do, they are given a free pass on the noise and other pollution at an un-godly hour.
Another thing that any big city should do is get people to swap jobs for something more local. I personally work local to my home and ride my bike in, but there are plenty of colleagues who come in from the far side of town, they have to go through the city centre or round some ring road, taking more than 3 hours out of their day, every day.
My bike ride home is so enjoyable I have no idea how long it takes, never had the need to look at the time whilst on the commute, no need to look at a phone either or read one of those 'free' newspapers. I wish more people could have a commute like mine, which is a gentle saunter along the river bank with the joggers, dog walkers and other people 'not imprisoned by the commute' and actively enjoying the great outdoors.
So how could a city get more people like me able to live and work locally, never adding to the burden on the roads or trains? Job swaps. There is probably someone doing a similar job to oneself a short distance from home. This person probably lives on the far side of town where you work. So what if you could swap jobs with that person, so both of you get 2-3 hours of life back, every day?
A city with all the records of who pays what taxes for what could do the match-making, saving everyone who takes up the scheme a lot of time, giving their lives back.
Ultimately we pay for the roads regardless. The point of a toll is simply to make that payment a visible use tax. You can pay at the pump, pay on 4/15, pay with your Fastrak, it's all the same and then all taxes are fungible.
I would like to but I do not think this will improve LA traffic. It will divert it somewhat. Improving infrastructure won't help either; as the opinion piece points out, that's been tried.
Ultimately, LA has to either get people out of their cars or they have to get more people into their cars.
One thing I'd love is an Uber quality app for transit. It would unify transit systems. Maybe it could tell about overcrowding (6:30 first train out of Fullerton to Union Station was packed to the gills). Maybe it could be unified with Uber/Lyft/Yellow.
Metrolink is not that app. SmartRide is not that app. Amtrak is not that app.
I really, really hope this happens to all of LA's freeways (or really all highways in the world)!
It'd be cool if they could even do different pricing for different lanes (e.g. Left lane is $X/mi, 2nd lane is .6X/mi, 3rd lane is .3X, the rest are free).
I also wonder what the algorithm is they use for pricing. I remember reading something about the 110/10 HOT lanes that they were targeting no slower than 45 mph or something? It might be smarter to target max revenue instead though. Like every 30 minutes you raise or lower the price depending if you made more or less money in the last 30 minutes after doing the same thing.
This is what is done in Minnesota. Pricing is dynamically adjusted every 3 minutes to keep traffic flowing at a minimum of 45mph (in practice more like 60+mph). When there is more traffic, the toll is priced higher. Electronic sensors monitor the traffic density and tolls are changed every three minutes. The best part is, it works!
Wow, I hadn't heard of this! Very interesting. Trying to find more info about this but not finding it on Minnesota DOT (the MnPASS site doesn't have results data) or other sites. Can you share a link?
What about the poor? LA for most parts, against popular belief, is a pretty homogenous city when it comes to wealth, sure you have Beverly Hills and Malibu but LA is so vast that majority of it doesn't feel secluded. Now if you toll the non-wealthy (the rich will not notice the toll) you remove that dynamic, that headline should really say let's remove more poor people from the freeways.
> 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.
With any Pigouvian tax[1] you encounter the problem of progressivity. The answer is to make sure that the tax revenues are directed towards making it easier for low income people to have better transit options. Whether that means improved transit systems or income based toll exceptions, it's relatively easy to offset the detrimental impacts that tolling may put in place.
I just think A) we have to be honest that is only a tax on the poor B) then have the rich pay in a different way, maybe it should be a limit on duration of travel or miles by humans, ie. no matter what car you drive or who drives you you're not allowed to travel more than x number of miles/day. (this is beginning to sound really odd)
Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using a vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than N miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds if you use your car very little during a month.
Another option could be a centralized "smart-driving" app, that would act as a hybrid between self-driving and manual driven cars. Each driver could be given "hints"/instructions, and measured on their compliance rate. The reward would be a measurable improvement in travel time. For instance, if 80% of the cars on a block were using this app, preference could be given to hold a signal light green longer for them. Drivers would see a benefit, and that would be their only impetus to comply with its directions (slow down, turn left here, park and wait 5m, etc). Someone who never listened to the thing would be kicked off. Soon with enough users , you could organize mini "convoys" of cars travelling through the city (say, all cars slow from 65 to 60mph for 2 miles, so that the offramp signal could be ready and green at the exact moment of their arrival and kept green for the whole convoy) and attempt to optimize travel for them or give them other perks such as free parking. It wouldn't solve all problems, but it would encourage cooperative behavior on the roads which may go a long way to easing congestion.
despite your snark, yes we would. I dont know LA very well, but obviously the public transit system is broken and the reasons are probably very complex. So yes, a cooperative app telling you which lane and speed to select would be a form of public transportation, using one's own vehicle.
> Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using a vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than N miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds if you use your car very little during a month.
Don't know if LA is anything like SF, but here, the poorer you are, the longer your commute is, generally. So this scheme would simply penalize people who already can't afford to live close to work.
Good point, I forgot about that. I had it backwards thinking wealthy people had more latitude to choose better jobs further away from home, whereas the (non-driving) poor are more stationed in their neighborhoods. I agree 100% though.
Driving technology is 100 years old. The article doesn't discuss at all what technology solutions need to be deployed in order to make dynamic tolling possible. Sure, it just a matter of having all cars in the LA region be fitted with RFID. But I'll claim that with people behind the wheel that it just won't work. Let's just focus on the correct long-term solution of getting rid of the steering wheel.
The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way. That might not sound unreasonable, but nearly the entire commute was freeway driving, which should have been much faster.
I don't know if tolls are the answer, but it's probably worth a try. Also massively expanding the metro system would be fine with me. LA needs to try whatever it can to solve the traffic problem. Traffic makes living in LA a huge drag and I found that friends often wouldn't bother to get together even on weekends because the traffic and parking are just so unpredictable.
> The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way.
Amateur! :-) My Bay Area commute is ~50 miles and takes around 2-2.5 hours each way, all freeway. If tolls ended up being a significant cost of living expense, it would actually have the effect of making me move even farther away to an area I can afford taking the extra cost of tolls into consideration.
I'd be all for expanding public transport though. Currently no form of PT can beat 2-2.5 hours for me.
You poor soul...a 2+ hour commute each way is just mind-blowing. I worked with some people who did those kind of commutes and I don't know how they did it (especially because we were doing minimum 10 hour days). I would spend or sacrifice pretty much any amount of money not to do a 2+ hour commute.
Problem with LA is that we build horizontally and not vertically. We keep adding more homes in suburbs and not building up in the cities that have the jobs. There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot transit village(on a rail line too). Today we're voting on initiative that prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more expensive and traffic will get worse.
To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
But why is this the case? Largely because land use (powerful local zoning + low holding costs for land) incentivizes sprawl over infill.
Consider cities that do better for transit by building upward. This is usually a case of a more sane zoning system, like in Tokyo[0], or ownership residing in the municipality, like Hong Kong.[1]
Fun fact: most zones in LA County require developers to build parking on a per-bedroom basis, so they tend to build ~2.5 stalls per unit, and most of the time that ends up being subterranean. That'll add ~$100k in development costs per unit right off the bat. They can sell the stalls individually (I believe) but because of the economics of the market it just doesn't make sense to build anything but luxury. That one rule is a significant cause of both sprawl and car addiction here, as well as more negative trends in housing availability.
Edit: If people are interested, here's the list of zoning requirements for Residential Zones in Los Angeles County.
Residential (and commercial) parking minimums need to be abolished. Set parking maximums if you must impose some rules, and then allow the market to settle on appropriate amount of parking for a new development.
I'm sure there's some research on this somewhere, but parking minimums have got to be one of the most distortive policies to ever emerge in urban planning.
Contributing factor: American cities are young enough they haven't had to pay for infrastructure replacement without bail-outs in the form of income from new construction that hasn't faced a replacement cycle yet, or the federal government.
To 'fix' the problem, the problem shouldn't be created in the first place. Require less cars and make people not need to go places all the time for a daily routine.
Adding stuff isn't a scalable solution. After you hit building height economics limits, you'll still have to fan out, and at the same time, having more people stuffed together in a smaller area makes for more people-problems, like foot traffic, air, water, sewage, trash, power, networking. At the same time you'll have more people needing things to do, like entertainment and work, which they will then all need to do around the same place, making everything worse.
Universal mass transit, and multiple smaller clusters instead of mega cities is scalable. But that's not what people seem to want, and thus problems get created and here we are.
Mass transit is much cheaper to build and maintain as density increases. Assume every building has 4 vs. 40 stories, now consider how many homes / jobs / shops are within 0.2 miles of a subway stop. Further, how many subway stops you need to pass on the average trip. That's the real benefit to building up, walking simply becomes more effective.
I live walking distance from a metro station that recently was added in West LA, and it's been interesting to watch properties nearby being bought, improved, and turned over. Value around the station is being stimulated by the presence of the station itself. Increased density is going to follow it, not lead it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. If you start building your transport lines connected to areas that are already high vitality/value, then what you've effectively done is reduce the "distance" between every stop along the line and those key areas.
Let's not add commercial value, this is about solving real problems, not making money. The constant mixing of those two is what creates problems in the first place. There is no problem in having a an economical positive impact with a solution, but not solving a problem purely because it would "only" solve problems for many people instead of also making a ton of money is a bad way to live (at least, that's what it looks like).
You seem to have misunderstood my point. As density increases it is easier to build subway stations because the value measured in terms of money or units of abstract social benefit goes up proportionally to density.
That does not imply subway stations should not be built in low density areas, it is just an observation that as density increases subway stations are easier to build.
Your completely right. If housing was much cheaper, everyone would be able to move closer to their jobs and traffic would decrease significantly. Compare 5 mile commute vs 50 mile commute -> almost 10 times less aggregate traffic.
Significantly improved housing situation => Less Traffic
> Problem with LA is that we build horizontally and not vertically.
This is an often repeated statement that is a myth. Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the US.
> There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot transit village(on a rail line too).
IMO, this is the root of the problem. Areas like Koreatown and Hollywood are against adding more density despite it being the area that naturally should be the most dense. It has a variety of mass transit options, is in a central location served by multiple freeways, and is where many people work.
> Today we're voting on initiative that prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more expensive and traffic will get worse.
To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
If that measure passes, it'll prevent the development of housing for the homeless and waste the $1 billion we voted to allot for that proposal. The proposal was brought forward by the head of the AIds Healthcare Foundation who has a history of sponsoring ballot proposals more for publicity than anything else.
> This is an often repeated statement that is a myth. Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the US.
Source? I would think both NYC and SF would be dramatically denser. A quick google supports this assumption. LA is ~5000 people / mile^2 and NYC is ~27,000 people per mile^2.
Many people are not comfortable with the social environment of large >20-unit housing developments. The thing is, it's relatively easy to take full advantage of a 55-foot zoning ceiling (higher than nearly all of LA and most of SF as well) with buildings that have five or fewer units and entrances on the outside (possibly from a balcony). The reason large projects account for such a large proportion of units in development has a lot to do with the regulatory environment and high fixed costs of putting up a building (especially fees) which create barriers that can only be overcome by the kinds of large projects that most people don't like.
Parking requirements don't help, although I suspect that housing without parking tends to be a temporary residence; once the occupant can afford a car, they start trying to move. Building housing without parking is better if people can still own cars in spillover parking, but actually building spillover parking runs into the NIMBY problem where nobody wants to live near it. As a result the market for standalone parking spaces is extremely constrained and that's unlikely to change.
It's true that some people are just anti-growth but there are legitimate concerns being aired about the way that development seems to be going. Since the housing market is emphatically not free it's easy to see how the normal tendency of the market to give people what they want could be stymied and result in discontent. I started to think this way when, after about two years of pro-housing activism in San Francisco, I realized that:
- a lot of housing projects are opposed by the very sort of people they're supposed to be helping
- a lot of those people seem to be unhappy about the lifestyle the project offers them, or they find it unacceptable ("no pets, no smoking") and conclude they're being "pushed out" as "undesirables".
I can't deny that those are legitimate concerns. After all, I like pets and smoking. I also drive a car. How can I possibly ignore people who are mad that they're not allowed to have pets or smoke and it's becoming very hard to own a car? And this is why I say "people are not comfortable with the social environment". There are other concerns: noise, and low-noise requirements. Some people hate noise. Other people love to make noise. Should we plan for them to be separated by four inches of drywall? Is that even planning? Furthermore, poor people might benefit from collectivism, but they still like individualism. It's not surprising, considering our cultural history and capitalist economy, and the tendency of primates to imitate the behavior of high-status primates, that people like to "own" things and distinguish themselves and are turned off by the rhetoric of "community" (the trendy euphemism for "apartment building") and public spaces, especially when it comes time for them to find somewhere to live. It's easier to be an existentialist in an attic than an apartment. And it's these concerns that have made renting bearable in the first place: a lot of tenant's rights law has ultimately been justified by the American ideal that a person should be secure in their dwelling. That's not something I'd like to see go away.
The truth is, the majority of anti-housing advocates are not very good at economics and they don't really understand why the current policies are failing them. You can't figure out how to help people without figuring out how to help whiny, selfish, stupid people, because that's literally all of people. If the pro-growth side of the table continues to expect lifestyle to just happen while all the regulations focus on the numbers game, it's not going to happen, and people are still going to be mad at us. They have a good reason to be mad. They just don't know what to do about it.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] threadLA is hands down the worst major metro area I've been to when it comes to transit, and getting people off the roads will only improve that situation—carpooling, public transit, biking, and hell WALKING are all better options.
So you're suggesting that instead of fixing the problem (public transit) they should start whipping people so that the rich can drive on their traffic-free roads?
I think LA is probably a market that most uniquely fits for self driving cars (depending on whatever business model emerges for those things). Thing is, I can't imagine the special kind of road rage that'll emerge when you're driving on the 405 and look to your left and right and see a completely empty vehicle.
If LA wants to improve their traffic problem, they need to address the root cause: bad urban planning and zoning laws. Where people work and where people live are in completely different areas of the city, requiring you to commute. They need to make local traffic easier (ie: not force you onto the freeway) and they need to reduce the need to drive all over the city every single day.
Am I the only person who found the phrase 'the poors' offensive? I'm genuinely asking.
Poe's law appears to be in effect here.
Hyperbole aside, when you see gentrification in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, one has to wonder how numbered are the days of LA's poor neighborhoods.
I would walk the final leg because Torrance Transit is never on schedule.
i see no real point in trying to convince them otherwise, since... you know, they don't live here.
The city of Los Angeles, and by that I mean the sprawling megalopolis it really is, simply isn't built for public transportation. A fundamental shift in urban design of massive proportions would have to occur for mass transportation to make dent here.
In order to affect this massive re-modelling of the city one would have to use eminent domain laws to force millions of people to sell their properties and move. You would literally have to displace millions of people in order to build the required roadways and infrastructure that would allow a shift towards mass transit. This, of course isn't only unthinkable, it's impossible.
Take the "simplest" (in quotes because I am being sarcastic about the actual simplicity) of all problems: Where do you park your car?
Mass transit isn't going to reach into every suburban neighborhood. And, no, people are not going to ride bicycles. If we want an Amsterdam-like bicycle culture we would have to displace even more people. And then you'd have to build massive bike parking lots like the one next to Centraal station in Amsterdam.
People would need to drive a cars to a parking lot somewhere. Millions of people. There is no space to build these parking lots and the required rail in/out pathways without destroying whole neighborhood en-masse.
Once you get to work you'd have to be able to get from the station to your workplace. Once again, if we want this to be within walking or biking distance of most businesses we would have to tear-up whole neighborhoods in order to enable the tentacles of a mass transit infrastructure to get close enough.
And then there's the cost. I won't even bother trying to estimate it. What's the cost of buying-up, I don't know, 100,000 homes? Include both the real estate and legal costs ('cause there would be tens of thousands of lawsuits). And, once all homes are acquired and millions displaced, what's the cost of construction.
Nah, LA isn't suitable for mass transit in the spirit of many European cities. The comparison is futile.
What we could do is try to encourage --over time-- a spreading out of centers of employment. This can be done NY style by offering no taxes for ten years for the relocation or startup of businesses in designated areas. There's a huge focal point of businesses in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor that creates massive traffic flows from as far away as 50 miles in every direction. That's the problem.
Most of those businesses don't need to be there. Why some flock to that corridor is somewhat incomprehensible to me other than there might be lack of space availability or zoning issues much outside that region.
It's a tough problem. Not sure tunneling is the solution either.
Bam, you have a good public transit system that is much faster than private cars due to being immune to traffic, and you didn't have to confiscate any property, build anything expensive, or do anything else exciting or risky.
Everyone's obsessed with rail, and rail is nice, but if you already have roads rapid bus transit makes more sense in the short run
You must not live in Los Angeles. If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably. In some places you can't due to the topology of the roads.
Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
There are no good mass transit solutions in Los Angeles. I've lived here long enough to see and analyze what is happening from multiple vantage points. We lived by the beach, desert, inland and in a couple of valleys. It's a mess. This megalopolis did not evolve to be mass transit friendly.
I say this with sadness because there's nothing I'd like more than not to own a car. I am simply being a realist on this one.
Really? Because all those lanes that have been added over the years don't appear to have made a big difference.
Also, the lane would be replaced with something amazing angelinos have never seen before -- a transport mode way faster than any other. With all the people choosing to use that bus, there'll be less car traffic. Saving half an hour has a way of turning excuses like "the bus is crowded" into jelly.
(Also, if it turns out you're right, lane rules and hours can be adjusted immediately with just a little paint or a sign. This is not risky.)
> Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops
Um, don't use the freeway then, except where it's genuinely more direct. Then you don't have to take lanes away anyway.
> at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
Are you kidding? There's so much space in wasted parking lots for individual businesses, or even street space on these huge wide roads, any of which could be reclaimed.
> You must not live in Los Angeles.
Correct! If I did, I'd be afflicted by the same sad disease as you, lack of imagination.
Fact is, we make it work here in metro NYC, which is as big and sprawled out as LA -- probably more actually. If we can do it, so can you. (Note that by metro NYC I don't mean manhattan and the like, I mean to emphasize the outer parts, the 4 boroughs and 3 detached counties (Westchester, Bergen, Hudson) surrounding manhattan.
I invite you to come tour outer NYC, and see what you think
And the conversation stops here. Thanks.
I have no idea how effective it will be, or whether the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages.
Waiting and hoping that the person who promised to pick you up will actually do so seems annoying and nerve-wracking. "Sorry, boss, I know I'm late again, but a complete stranger was 30 minutes late picking me up today, and then decided to stop for donuts on the way to work."
I think the idea is that it's supposed to match you in real-time and give GPS updates, just like regular Uber and Lyft. That is, it's not like BlancRide in Canada (which has been struggling) where you schedule in advance, have blocks of time, etc.
https://blancride.com/
> Waiting and hoping that the person who promised to pick you up will actually do so seems annoying and nerve-wracking
Unlike most carpooling services, Lyft and Uber have strong reputation mechanisms that can greatly reduce this. You can always fall back on a taxi or normal Uber for couple times a month when the driver is flaky.
"Carpool/HOV" lanes have been political toys from the start. A true carpool means more than one would-otherwise-be driver per vehicle. A minority of HOV lane users in CA have more than one licensed driver. The rest are "kidpools", "hybrids" (which, for all but the first 10-30 miles on a charge are less efficient than non-hybrids), "non-polluting vehicles" (pure electrics, CNG, fuel cell), buses, and government vehicles.
Such lanes are now as crowded as conventional lanes more often than not.
Actual trip reduction could be obtained by limiting HOV use to actual carpools (>1 licensed driver) and buses with passengers, and narrowing their hours of exclusivity a bit.
"Carpool/HOV" lanes have been political toys from the start. A true carpool means more than one would-otherwise-be driver per vehicle. A minority of HOV lane users in CA have more than one licensed driver. The rest are "kidpools", "hybrids" (which, for all but the first 10-30 miles on a charge are less efficient than non-hybrids), alternative-fuel vehicles (pure electrics, CNG, fuel cell), buses, and government vehicles. Alternative-fuel vehicles also don't help fund roads via gasoline/diesel taxes.
Such lanes are now as crowded as conventional lanes more often than not.
Actual trip reduction could be obtained by limiting HOV use to actual carpools (>1 licensed driver) and buses with passengers, and narrowing their hours of exclusivity a bit.
This will dramatically increase the throughput of the lane and will inescapably lead to an increase in usage. But the increase will naturally be capped around 20k cars per hour per lane.
To make it work, you'll need precise data about conditions far ahead and far behind. You'll also need an inescapable enforcement mechanism or the system will succumb to cheating. The good news is that very soon many cars will be covered in sensors, networked and able to implement the concept.
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.
"Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads."
It then goes on to sort-of suggest that despite this new pain the net benefit will be better for "working-class" people......somehow. No thoughts were offered on how to keep the toll revenue from just padding out civil servant pensions and benefits while the traffic and roads muddle on.
On the other hand, replacing income tax with tolls really would be regressive.
(But I don't know enough about taxes to say if that's really true.)
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.
> 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.
Is this false equivalence?
"This proposed policy will make things worse, but there are other policies that make things worse, so therefore this policy cannot be criticized on those grounds".
Wat.
Added: that's exactly what the article links to, oops. I read the article in reader mode (because it blocks adblockers) and failed to notice.
The fee to ride the bus/train is not called a tax, why would this be any different?
Roads need to stop being subsidized, it's the only thing that's going to give mass transit a chance to actually compete.
We're talking about two things at the same time: 1) A method to reduce traffic, 2) A method to move money from people into toll-road owners.
Systematically transferring money from the overall population to a subgroup is generally thought of as a tax.
It's not regressive because charging someone to use something (like police services) is not a tax, after all.
The very point is that right now roads are paid by taxes, which are progressive, and people are suggesting replacing them with fees, which are regressive (without some additional scheme to account for this). A better solution would be subsidizing all public transit so it is free, which is progressive, not regressive. But will never solve the problem because it only incentivizes the poor to use transit.
If we stop subsidizing roads or make public transit free/cheaper then roads will be for the rich only, and public transit I'm sure will have millions poured into it and flourish. The government is, after all, historically very responsive to needs and pain points that are only felt by the poor and minorities.
We need to provide funding for transit first. We need to get middle-upper class people riding it, people who vote, are white, donate to political campaigns, know powerful people, etc which specifically means making it fast, efficient, reliable. Look at places like DC and NYC and SF/bayarea where middle-class businessmen take transit because it's the easiest, most efficient method and is fairly reliable.
On the other hand, if you're replacing income tax with tolls or just raising tolls without lowering other taxes, then it would be regressive.
Of course, they do also actually plan their roadways nationally and region-wide whereas in the US, it seems "city planning" is an oxymoron.
It reminds me of the "poor people shouldn't have nice things" superiority complex that breeds thoughts like "poor people shouldn't buy smartphones and flatscreens!", when those things are quite inexpensive compared to actual ongoing expenses of rent and food. And there are many factors other than road pricing, such as cost of vehicle, fuel, and parking.
The arguments are very similar around taxes on cigarettes or soda: A painful measure that may save money or improve health outcomes in the long-term. In the end, it's just one more tool that has to be used judiciously.
Switching costs are high, even as rentors. (Moving Costs, Deposits)
> Public transport is the only effective approach
I think that is going to change very soon. If you had some lanes dedicated to self-driving cars, that convoy could vastly increase traffic density.
There was some point in the last 30 years where city designers decided the best way to handle local traffic was just to force everyone onto the freeway. It's horrible.
There should instead be a reasonable main grid of smaller (2 lane max) low stop count streets such that I can get across town without getting on the freeway.
A large number of small roads can handle a lot more traffic than a small number of large roads.
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.
Buses (And really, any at-grade transportation that has to share the road with cars) are, unfortunately, not mass transit. 7 minutes vs an hour sounds atrocious.
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-...
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.
Also need more train tracks!
Fix those problems people will ride transit way more. Thats the way to solve the traffic problem.
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, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.
Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
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 socioeconomic classes take transit" in that scenario?
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.
Yeah, your house probably cost ONLY 500k-1mil!
And that's exactly why things are the way they are. Shockingly, given the choice, most people would happily trade a long commute for the ability to spread out and not pay through the nose for the privilege of being crammed on top of other people.
Surburban sprawl is unsustainable, but is paid for by new development, parking is free, or cheap, highways aren't tolled, costs of pollution aren't factored into your bill at the pump... When you live in the city, you still pay these costs, but you don't get to reap any of the benefits.
It doesn't work that well. NYC subways are disgusting, especially in the summer. And you can't prevent citizens from utilizing public resources just because they smell bad or are uncouth.
> Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
We just passed a proposal allocating over $1 billion to house the homeless. I think that qualifies as a solution.
Or carry concealed permits. You'll have to repeal California's action that requires all new semi-auto's to have a unique firing pin. But then you don't have to worry traveling.
I carry. I keep odd hours in a small town. I walk every night .25 miles to my office at 8 PM and then back again around 2 AM. Never had any problem (probably the same as most people on the train). If I do, I've got protection.
Um, no. The crazy people won't care, the gangbangers will be better armed and generally in a group, and the single mugger will now take your wallet AND gun AND may shoot you if he gets the drop on you instead of just taking your wallet.
> in a small town
It shows. Your assessment of the probability of crime and how you will interact with it is completely wrong.
For the gangbangers, they don't really like to involve civilians in a gun fight. They save that for only the most extreme circumstances in territory protection/expansion. Honestly, not too afraid of them. A woman would benefit from a revolver in that situation. That's what my wife carries: Ruger LCR. No hammer so easy to pull from a purse (which is carried crossed over her). If she can't pull from the purse, she'll fire within it (taking the flash burn over rape, for example). In this instance the revolver will operate without catching the purse like a semi-auto would. At that point, they'd most likely run given the noise and possible loss of their friend.
As for the crazies, the point isn't to prevent them from being crazy by themselves. That's their right. It's to defend yourself if they turn that on you. When we go hiking, I carry a gun knowing the gators don't care. Doesn't mean it's useless.
But I have no idea if that could carry over to guns -- for one thing, they're more difficult to run away from.
[1] http://safe.met.police.uk/knife_crime_and_gun_crime/pressure...
However, it is true that many situations don't call for firearms, and knowing when and how to de-escalate are really the first things an armed citizen should know. Discretion is the better part of valor, keep it in your pants, etc.
Really?
1) Muggers
The LEO's I deal with are normally "Just give them your wallet and phone. Do not fight back."
Now, admittedly, most of this advice is from the US and being near big cities. In the US, we don't tend to have kidnappings--normally muggers will take your wallet and phone and run unless you are stupidly in some dangerous area.
2) Gangbangers
Generally will leave you alone unless it is a target of opportunity. However, teenagers are stupid and can consider truly bizarre things "disrespect". Combine this with drugs and you can get some exceptions.
3) Crazy/homeless
Generally the stuff they do never rises to the level of "I can shoot him" until it's too late for you to react.
And, this is, in fact, the crux of the situation. By the time the situation escalates to the level of "I am legally allowed to shoot this person" the situation is often too far gone for the gun to be helpful.
Now, I'm not a tiny female, so I don't present a "target of opportunity". However, women are more often the victim of the gun in the house from their partner than from random strangers.
Finally, my only interactions with concealed carry in my family are accidents where someone almost got shot unintentionally. Nobody in my extended family has ever had to use a gun to defend themselves, but there have been a handful of mishaps (thankfully, nobody harmed).
The statistics are against concealed carry except in fairly exceptional circumstances (jewelers, for example).
One carries in order to defend lives. One's own life, the lives of family, and if the situation warrants the lives of other innocent people. It's true that defending life with deadly force will get one in trouble in some jurisdictions. That's why it's better to live in the vast majority of jurisdictions where justified uses of deadly force prompt handshakes rather than criminal charges.
The best jurisdiction is one where it's hardly considered necessary to carry arms, or use deadly force. Gun ownership and the murder rate (and gun murder rate) seem roughly correlated here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by...
In states that endorse "innocent until proven guilty", the police won't even lock you up or take your gun if you can make a plausible claim to have properly used force.
When the force is appropriate, we owe nothing to the deceased and their family. The deceased was a hazard, and the family set that hazard loose upon society. They owe us:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee
I see that your article does not distinguish legal gun ownership from illegal gun ownership. I suspect that "murder" might not be the obvious. (suicide? shot by cop? vehicular homocide?) Medical care varies greatly by state, changing survival odds. You may also be making a backwards assumption about cause and effect: people in places with lots of murder might feel a greater need to have a gun.
I try to imagine a San Francisco or Berkeley police chief telling people to shoot bad people dead. It's... not working. :-)
Also doesn't help that now everyone has expensive cell phones which attract thieves.
Once I was telling my friend about how I saw a woman pass out and start seizing on the subway at 5pm on a weekday. I pressed the emergency call button and people were all staring daggers at me, how dare I delay the train. My friend then said he had the same experience at 11pm at night and he was worried about physical violence.
It also doesn't help that the sheriffs only bother to stand at the turnstiles checking tickets and if you want to evade the fare, you just can just run.
"Synthetic weed" is a misnomer. Spice/K2/etc. are plant material that has been soaked with one or more "research chemicals" in clandestine manufacturing facilities. The research chemicals are drawn from a pool of partially identified but poorly understood substances that have very little in common with cannabinoids.
It's a crapshoot what chemical a spice user will end up ingesting and it may be a completely different compound than the last time they used the stuff.
This is pretty true. I'm an occasional metro/bus rider, and I'd guess I've been on more rides where there's someone with a clear mental health issue than rides without. And while most of those occasions it's benign, something everyone can ignore... for enough of them it's been intense enough people on the car/bus have been clearly uncomfortable and it wasn't clear confrontational behavior wasn't going to escalate into violence.
I could imagine some people would decide never to ride again.
Enforcement is probably only part of the puzzle, though. We have the same problem with other public spaces (say, libraries) because we don't have any coherent or effective policy for dealing with people who are suffering from mental illness. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's no straightforward market-based solution to that problem (to an even higher degree than traffic).
Sympathetic to those without a home, but it almost makes one want to never ride on the metro or bus again. Which is especially hard since I have no other means of transportation.
Once you learn the side streets, there's always a faster way when the freeway is backed up.
Can't tell you how many times I almost got run over by such a fine motorist glued to yet another app...
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14391410/elon-musk-tunnels...
This applies to many American cities, but not really most of LA. The relatively grid-like nature of the surface street network + the level of highway congestion makes short trips do much better on surface streets most of the day.
Of course, the flip side is terrible surface street congestion (to to go east from Santa Monica to UCLA at end-of-day rush hour... or south to LAX on Lincoln). But it reflects that LA's street planning is in many ways much more like an "old" city than a "new" one with lots of intentionally-confusing local road routing and consistent, easy routing to the highways instead.
But when every street going west->east or north->south is backed up, whether they're 1 lane or 3-to-4, I'm not sure there's any room for a denser grid of narrower streets, or that it would improve much.
Link to Elon Musk's tunnel plan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk...
> [Tunnels are] the only way we can rid ourselves of the scourge of traffic.
Yeah, well, one day you'll meet induced demand and you'll understand that's a big "nope".
If you consider how much we pay in taxes, as Americans we really don't get bang for the buck.
Our taxes are hidden behind sales taxes, service charges, tolls, included in fuel, it really adds up.
The toll thing is especially egregious IMO, considering there had been very little investment in this type of infrastructure and now we have to pay because the people who mishandled funds are long gone.
During peak hours the $8 toll makes almost no difference. The lanes remain just as jammed and on average you only save 5-10 minutes (less than 10% of the drive time) over the total length of the tollway.
Obviously this isn't exactly scientific reporting but the toll road authority in Houston is big business to the tune of 700 million/year in toll fees. They won't facilitate access to data if it results in a negative impression.
It doesn't need to be. Link to the local paper. There's a lot of misinformation being used today. It's not new, but we have the resources to verify things now. We need due diligence, not pontification.
You may need to Google that article title and click through to read it but it outlines that even at $7 each way the price wasn't high enough so now it's $10 each way (not $8 as I stated.) Even so, the $3 price hike has done little to ease congestion.
I would still argue that prices should be set however high whereas to eliminate congestion, even it is seems "too high", simply because there is a limit to how many lanes can be constructed and no amount of lanes can eliminate congestion due to induced demand. Then we must allow market forces to occur such that development and lifestyle patterns change, which takes time. Might as well bite the bullet now.
"When Stockholm, Sweden introduced a "congestion tax" to discourage driving in the center of town, traffic eased and the pollution level dropped by between 5 and 10 percent.
There was one other result that was unexpected, but welcome nonetheless: The rate of asthma attacks among local children decreased by nearly 50 percent, according to a Johns Hopkins University economist's study of the tax and its impact."
Air travel and electrical power:
(1) Are easier to add capacity for during times of peak demand
(2) Actually do fail (even though tolled!) when demand exceeds capacity (brown/blackouts for electrical power, cascading delays easily exceeding those for ground traffic when weather knocks down capacity).
On top of that, it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free -- gasoline and associated taxes are immediate costs for every mile driven, and most people know at some level that each mile also has an additional total cost in terms of insurance and impact on maintenance/lifetime of the vehicle.
And people still choose to make it more expensive in the form of higher-end (and often lower MPG) automotive purchases.
If there's a solution to the traffic problem, instead of attempting to make driving particularly more expensive, it probably involves:
(a) make other transportation options more affordable in terms of reach, time, and money
(b) making the housing market more liquid and affordable, so people can more easily choose locations convenient to their living activities
I suspect if the costs were more apparent people would be more apt to support public transportation and reconsider their driving habits.
A gas tax is already proportional to miles driven times vehicle weight times a fuel efficiency factor.
Congestion, on the other hand, is a more difficult thing. Vehicle length certainly plays a factor, as well as width, acceleration, and braking distance. Number of passengers is an obvious factor. Trip routing efficiency has a role. I really don't expect local legislators to understand the mathematics of traffic. If they don't commission a study by traffic experts, and do exactly what those experts recommend, they might just end up making things worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox#Traffic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHO_Road_Test
A study in Copenhagen found that the total cost (personal + to society) of cycling 1km was 8¢, versus 50¢ for driving, or 89¢ for driving at peak times. (That includes 16¢ given back to society in fuel tax.)
The low cycling figure is mostly due to the positive benefit to society of a healthier population (reduced healthcare costs, offset by slightly increased state pension costs when people live longer).
Unfortunately, the paper is a MS Word document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.03.006 or https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274097090_Transport...
"Accident costs are founded in market values, and comprise public services (police, rescue and treatment), the loss of net productivity, premature deaths, minor and major injuries, and the cost of material damage. Costs are calculated in comparison to number of accidents related to cars/bicycles, and interpolated by the number of km driven/cycled. Accidents entail a cost of Euro 0.022/km for driving and Euro 0.106/km for cycling (COWI and Køpenhavns Kommune, 2009; Transportministeriet, 2010). Even though accidents involving cyclists entail lower material damage costs, overall costs are higher, as cyclists are more exposed and hence affected by accidents. As outlined by Transportministeriet (2013), there remains considerable uncertainty regarding average accident costs for cyclists."
I doubt the cost of treatment is recovered from road insurance policies in Denmark.
(Also NB this is urban driving at 50km/h, the accident cost of extra-urban driving may be higher.)
It follows that converting a car-based city to a transit one necessarily takes away resources from the people who have sunk high costs into their acquisition of a car. That population almost always objects to transit-oriented development.
The same problem exists within electricial grids. Providing 'peaker' plants which are only used 5% of the time are incredible expensive. cf how expensive electricity got in california when Enron shut these plans down intentionally in summer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response
Secondly, not all gates can take larger aircraft.
Thirdly, larger aircraft take a lot more time to turn around than smaller ones (fewer doors per passenger). Which means your gates are tied up for longer.
Driving isn't free, but the costs you mention are all part of the cost to the person choosing to drive. That person has presumably incorporated these into their decision of whether or not to drive.
A congestion tax (or dynamic toll) is an attempt to internalize the external costs that a driver imposes on others; when I get in the car and drive, I slow everyone else on the road down, but without a toll (or an expectation of altruism toward random strangers), that won't affect my decision making at all. The goal of a toll is to make the cost of choosing to drive equal to the sum of the costs it imposes on everyone, not just the driver.
That's true, but completely misses the point. Road access is free, which is what causing congestion on some roads during rush hours.
Any solution to that has to target those specific roads during those specific hours.
So this means everyone has neighbours banging car doors, revving engines and doing disruptive stuff at some very early hour. The whole world gets noisier. And all so that some people with cars can sit at their office desks doing stuff they could have done at home.
If a bunch of homeless drug addicts made a similar amount of noise at such anti-social hours then they would be dealt with by the police, the police would make it clear to them how anti-social they have been. Office worker, with some spreadsheets and emails to do, they are given a free pass on the noise and other pollution at an un-godly hour.
Another thing that any big city should do is get people to swap jobs for something more local. I personally work local to my home and ride my bike in, but there are plenty of colleagues who come in from the far side of town, they have to go through the city centre or round some ring road, taking more than 3 hours out of their day, every day.
My bike ride home is so enjoyable I have no idea how long it takes, never had the need to look at the time whilst on the commute, no need to look at a phone either or read one of those 'free' newspapers. I wish more people could have a commute like mine, which is a gentle saunter along the river bank with the joggers, dog walkers and other people 'not imprisoned by the commute' and actively enjoying the great outdoors.
So how could a city get more people like me able to live and work locally, never adding to the burden on the roads or trains? Job swaps. There is probably someone doing a similar job to oneself a short distance from home. This person probably lives on the far side of town where you work. So what if you could swap jobs with that person, so both of you get 2-3 hours of life back, every day?
A city with all the records of who pays what taxes for what could do the match-making, saving everyone who takes up the scheme a lot of time, giving their lives back.
I would like to but I do not think this will improve LA traffic. It will divert it somewhat. Improving infrastructure won't help either; as the opinion piece points out, that's been tried.
Ultimately, LA has to either get people out of their cars or they have to get more people into their cars.
One thing I'd love is an Uber quality app for transit. It would unify transit systems. Maybe it could tell about overcrowding (6:30 first train out of Fullerton to Union Station was packed to the gills). Maybe it could be unified with Uber/Lyft/Yellow.
Metrolink is not that app. SmartRide is not that app. Amtrak is not that app.
It'd be cool if they could even do different pricing for different lanes (e.g. Left lane is $X/mi, 2nd lane is .6X/mi, 3rd lane is .3X, the rest are free).
I also wonder what the algorithm is they use for pricing. I remember reading something about the 110/10 HOT lanes that they were targeting no slower than 45 mph or something? It might be smarter to target max revenue instead though. Like every 30 minutes you raise or lower the price depending if you made more or less money in the last 30 minutes after doing the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MnPASS
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/howmnpassworks.html
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/pdf/mnpass-existing-and-fu...
http://www.lbjtexpress.com/pricing/how-pricing-is-determined
> 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 let's add yet another burden?
> Americans often suffer the most severely from the impacts of poor mobility.
Wow, somehow my crazy brain interprets this as if you're poor you're probably not as American as the rest of us.
> Working-class parents who are late to pick up their kids from day care, for example, often pay severe financial penalties.
So let's charge them up front so that they can't even afford to drop off their kids at day care?
You missed an important qualifier, there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
Another option could be a centralized "smart-driving" app, that would act as a hybrid between self-driving and manual driven cars. Each driver could be given "hints"/instructions, and measured on their compliance rate. The reward would be a measurable improvement in travel time. For instance, if 80% of the cars on a block were using this app, preference could be given to hold a signal light green longer for them. Drivers would see a benefit, and that would be their only impetus to comply with its directions (slow down, turn left here, park and wait 5m, etc). Someone who never listened to the thing would be kicked off. Soon with enough users , you could organize mini "convoys" of cars travelling through the city (say, all cars slow from 65 to 60mph for 2 miles, so that the offramp signal could be ready and green at the exact moment of their arrival and kept green for the whole convoy) and attempt to optimize travel for them or give them other perks such as free parking. It wouldn't solve all problems, but it would encourage cooperative behavior on the roads which may go a long way to easing congestion.
Don't know if LA is anything like SF, but here, the poorer you are, the longer your commute is, generally. So this scheme would simply penalize people who already can't afford to live close to work.
I don't know if tolls are the answer, but it's probably worth a try. Also massively expanding the metro system would be fine with me. LA needs to try whatever it can to solve the traffic problem. Traffic makes living in LA a huge drag and I found that friends often wouldn't bother to get together even on weekends because the traffic and parking are just so unpredictable.
Amateur! :-) My Bay Area commute is ~50 miles and takes around 2-2.5 hours each way, all freeway. If tolls ended up being a significant cost of living expense, it would actually have the effect of making me move even farther away to an area I can afford taking the extra cost of tolls into consideration.
I'd be all for expanding public transport though. Currently no form of PT can beat 2-2.5 hours for me.
To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
Consider cities that do better for transit by building upward. This is usually a case of a more sane zoning system, like in Tokyo[0], or ownership residing in the municipality, like Hong Kong.[1]
[0] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html [1] http://www.hkclic.org/en/topics/saleAndPurchaseOfProperty/ba...
Edit: If people are interested, here's the list of zoning requirements for Residential Zones in Los Angeles County.
http://planning.lacounty.gov/luz/summary/category/residentia...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVteHncimV0
TIL.
It's called "The Growth Ponzi-Scheme" https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
Adding stuff isn't a scalable solution. After you hit building height economics limits, you'll still have to fan out, and at the same time, having more people stuffed together in a smaller area makes for more people-problems, like foot traffic, air, water, sewage, trash, power, networking. At the same time you'll have more people needing things to do, like entertainment and work, which they will then all need to do around the same place, making everything worse.
Universal mass transit, and multiple smaller clusters instead of mega cities is scalable. But that's not what people seem to want, and thus problems get created and here we are.
I think this makes a lot of sense. If you start building your transport lines connected to areas that are already high vitality/value, then what you've effectively done is reduce the "distance" between every stop along the line and those key areas.
That does not imply subway stations should not be built in low density areas, it is just an observation that as density increases subway stations are easier to build.
Significantly improved housing situation => Less Traffic
This is an often repeated statement that is a myth. Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the US.
> There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot transit village(on a rail line too).
IMO, this is the root of the problem. Areas like Koreatown and Hollywood are against adding more density despite it being the area that naturally should be the most dense. It has a variety of mass transit options, is in a central location served by multiple freeways, and is where many people work.
> Today we're voting on initiative that prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more expensive and traffic will get worse. To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
If that measure passes, it'll prevent the development of housing for the homeless and waste the $1 billion we voted to allot for that proposal. The proposal was brought forward by the head of the AIds Healthcare Foundation who has a history of sponsoring ballot proposals more for publicity than anything else.
Source? I would think both NYC and SF would be dramatically denser. A quick google supports this assumption. LA is ~5000 people / mile^2 and NYC is ~27,000 people per mile^2.
[1] http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-crowded-city-in-...
Parking requirements don't help, although I suspect that housing without parking tends to be a temporary residence; once the occupant can afford a car, they start trying to move. Building housing without parking is better if people can still own cars in spillover parking, but actually building spillover parking runs into the NIMBY problem where nobody wants to live near it. As a result the market for standalone parking spaces is extremely constrained and that's unlikely to change.
It's true that some people are just anti-growth but there are legitimate concerns being aired about the way that development seems to be going. Since the housing market is emphatically not free it's easy to see how the normal tendency of the market to give people what they want could be stymied and result in discontent. I started to think this way when, after about two years of pro-housing activism in San Francisco, I realized that:
- a lot of housing projects are opposed by the very sort of people they're supposed to be helping
- a lot of those people seem to be unhappy about the lifestyle the project offers them, or they find it unacceptable ("no pets, no smoking") and conclude they're being "pushed out" as "undesirables".
I can't deny that those are legitimate concerns. After all, I like pets and smoking. I also drive a car. How can I possibly ignore people who are mad that they're not allowed to have pets or smoke and it's becoming very hard to own a car? And this is why I say "people are not comfortable with the social environment". There are other concerns: noise, and low-noise requirements. Some people hate noise. Other people love to make noise. Should we plan for them to be separated by four inches of drywall? Is that even planning? Furthermore, poor people might benefit from collectivism, but they still like individualism. It's not surprising, considering our cultural history and capitalist economy, and the tendency of primates to imitate the behavior of high-status primates, that people like to "own" things and distinguish themselves and are turned off by the rhetoric of "community" (the trendy euphemism for "apartment building") and public spaces, especially when it comes time for them to find somewhere to live. It's easier to be an existentialist in an attic than an apartment. And it's these concerns that have made renting bearable in the first place: a lot of tenant's rights law has ultimately been justified by the American ideal that a person should be secure in their dwelling. That's not something I'd like to see go away.
The truth is, the majority of anti-housing advocates are not very good at economics and they don't really understand why the current policies are failing them. You can't figure out how to help people without figuring out how to help whiny, selfish, stupid people, because that's literally all of people. If the pro-growth side of the table continues to expect lifestyle to just happen while all the regulations focus on the numbers game, it's not going to happen, and people are still going to be mad at us. They have a good reason to be mad. They just don't know what to do about it.