I would love to use LA public transport but it’s simply not usable to get most places I want to go. I live a block away from an expo line and I can’t even make it all the way to little Tokyo without making a transfer. Getting to West Hollywood via the metro is basically not possible.
The only solution to this problem is a lot more lines
Exactly. And if it can get you where you want to go, you have to transfer through multiple buses or taxis. The hassle kind of burns you out and you just want something simpler. Unlike other cities, there's not a whole lot in downtown that I need to visit on a regular basis. Most of what I want to do is peripheral to the actual city of LA. Everything is so spread out, and there really isn't much we can do to undo that at this point. We're never going to be the pedestrian paradise that is San Francisco. (I don't want to live in SF again, but boy was it nice to be able to walk and take light rail everywhere)
I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.
- Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA.
- Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question.
It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem.
2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80.
3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty.
I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
Your experience and GPs are definitely valid, but I will say that there are many different San Franciscos if you try out places that aren't downtown or the Mission.
The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great food, services, etc in walking distance).
If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights.
Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its neighborhoods.
I hear ya. I still live in the Bay Area (bought a place, so my costs for housing are fixed), and I can't believe the insane policies we have. It drives me mad--you have an electorate that constantly complains about the high cost of housing, and also blocks any reforms that create more housing.
And unfortunately, the votes to solve the problem are slowly moving out of state...
Why did you live in SF just to do a long distance commute every day? If it's for the city feel on the weekend, isn't it easier to commute in on the weekend...
yeah - saw that a lot in bay area. Not that CO / Denver has great transit, but their solution is to have transit police on every train. They check tickets/passes and do rounds. Which does seem to reduce this...
The issue with LA is the low density sprawl. It would simply be cost prohibitive to build and run a public transport infrastructure that would cover such a large area and transport you around quickly. At least with today's technologies and costs.
If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
Isn't it just as cost-prohibitive to build and run a private transport infrastructure? Consider the cost of all the overbuilt roads, the cars on those roads, the human life wasted in traffic...
Yet, LA has obviously done so.
Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
Agreed. I don't think the current situation is better.
Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach.
Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
> However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach.
And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
If you look at an actual density map, LA is actually a lot denser than you give it credit for. There is no technical reason transit cannot get 40% of the population to work in a reasonable amount of time compared to driving. However in order to get there LA needs to invest in a lot more buses in dedicated lanes, and trains - both of which are not cheap. Don't forget to account for the overhead. In the long run it would be cheaper for everybody in LA if that investment was made, but in the short run a large investment is needed.
It doesn't help that transit costs 4x-7x as much to build in the US vs Spain. It also doesn't help that nobody cares about good investments - republicans hate transit and won't invest in anything if they can avoid it. Democrats love the idea of transit and waste a lot of money on slow, expensive lines to nowhere that nobody rides thus proving the republicans right that transit is a bad investment.
Prioritize dense, mixed-use development within ~.5 miles of transit hubs. Every new subway/light-rail station should include rezoning with a focus on a livable mix of commercial, residential, and retail.
Remove parking minimums. Let the market determine how much parking is available and how much it costs. Plentiful, free parking is not a right.
Remove single-family zoning (allow accessory dwelling units and duplexes in existing SFH zones).
None of this will work overnight. It will take years. But, the basic goal is to make living near work achievable and desirable.
Buses don't do well on suburban roads, they can't make the corners and clearance isn't always there. There's also little room for stops on many two-lane streets. So buses are limited to main multi-lane avenues. For most cities in Southern California in order to just get on a bus is a long walk from inside a big housing tract.
Once in LA itself the buses have the same problem of not being able to really drive on the smaller side streets so they're limited to the big avenues. That makes them slightly better than LA's trains but still a pain for a majority of riders. LA doesn't have the space in most places for dedicated bus lanes with above-grade platforms.
Note that LA has lots of bus lines but commuting on them is tedious and slow. Getting where you need to go usually requires several transfers then travel on foot to your actual destination. For most commutes it takes at least as long as driving.
> Buses don't do well on suburban roads, they can't make the corners and clearance isn't always there.
Shuttle buses (24-28 occupants) do quite well on twisty suburban roads. Those same roads often have curbside parking, and delimiting a 30-foot stretch of road as a bus stop is not going to seriously hamper that.
It costs about $100/hour to run a bus. A small bus only saves a small amount from that cost. If there is any possibly of filling the small bus you should always run the larger bus. If money is not infinite you will prefer to run a larger bus less often (though the more often you run the bus the better up to 5 minute headway)
Those are retail prices for me renting a shuttle bus, not wholesale fleet-wide ones.
In Vancouver, the cost to operate regular buses, per revenue-hour (time the bus is carrying passengers) is ~$120/hour. The cost of operating shuttle buses is ~$70/hour. [1] This is because smaller buses use less gas, are cheaper to maintain, and have better labour utilization (Time the driver spends on the clock driving passengers, versus time the driver spends on the clock waiting around, switching routes, etc.)
And this is operational costs. Capital costs are another huge factor, that's not accounted for in the operational numbers. It costs a lot more to order an 80-passenger bus (And even more so for a trolley), then it does a 24-passenger one.
Also, this is only anecdotal, from being a rider, but I'm pretty sure that shuttle-buses both perform better in congested environments, and cause less traffic congestion (As they have a much better power-to-weight ratio, better acceleration and breaking, a smaller turning radius...)
$120 canadian is about $90 US, so Vancouver is doing cheap by US standards. The tiny city I live in reports $102/hour, but I think this is both operative costs and amortized capital costs. You can see the numbers in the reports at https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd (if you can find them).
The capital costs of the bus isn't that much different over the lifespan of a bus. If you need a large bus at all, then it is cheaper to buy one large bus than both the large and small. Small buses cost less mostly because the drivers don't have to be as well trained - I'm not sure I want that difference.
Shuttle buses are well and good but few if any of the cities around LA have them. They also don't go deep into sprawling housing tracks so there's still issues of first/last mile of a commute. Where they're available they're not available in an effective volume.
I'm not saying LA should be this way, it just is this way. The suburban sprawl makes most of Southern California a shit show for public transit. Cities with effective public transit tend to have higher population densities at least more concentrated commercial areas. In SoCal (tired of typing it out) places where jobs are located are distributed all throughout the sprawl. There's no real "downtown" where all the jobs are located.
It also doesn't help that due to earthquake and fire codes it's rare to see mixed zoning in much of California. So few neighborhoods with ground floor commercial/retail and upper floor residential zoning.
> It would simply be cost prohibitive to build and run a public transport infrastructure that would cover such a large area and transport you around quickly. At least with today's technologies and costs.
Bus Rapid Transit is super cheap and you can have the lines run anywhere. You just have to be willing to give up lanes of traffic.
I don't think it is so simple. I live in LA and can't practically use public transport to commute, but I've lived in less dense cities that have far more effective public transport because the routes are designed better. LA's bus routes feel almost randomly placed, I'm used to having bus routes deliberately serving as feeders to train routes, and timing the schedules so that buses arrive for a swift transfer and you are never waiting.
On my commute to work I see buses from half a dozen different agencies, the fact that every individual city in the metro area seems to run its own bus service is probably another piece of the problem.
What OP said. Just to throw out an example, if you want to get from Culver City (somewhat night-spotty place, and lots of new companies sprouting up) to Encino (somewhat affordable place on the other side of the hills, where rent won't completely kill you)?
That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses.
That doesn't really qualify as public transportation.
Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA.
The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"
Yea but people in the rest of the country would be blown away by the travel times by car as well. Irvine to Santa Monica leaving at 7:30am is 2.5 - 3 hours. Total distance 45 Miles? You can drive from Kansas City to Omaha in roughly the same time
Yeah but you won't pass as many people.
The density of SoCal is high but it is spread out which defeats public transportation.
Maybe once we get some kind of automated bus system and bus lanes this could be less of a hassle but I doubt it.
You're wildly exaggerating. It takes just about 20 minutes to get from Culver City to the end of the line in Santa Monica. It doesn't even take an hour to traverse the entire Expo Line between DTLA and Santa Monica, about fifty minutes.
If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes.
You're being down voted by people with no actual experience using LA metro rail.
It does take a long time to get from Santa Monica to Pasadena by rail due to the multiple transfers. They're working to make that a single transfer and the new line alignments should start in 2 to 3 years.
For a lot of areas the one available bus only goes downtown for example to get from glendale to burbank can take 5 hours on the bus going through several buses to get downtown then you take the redline to north hollywood and have another series of buses up to burbank, meanwhile by car burbank is 15 minutes away from glendale.
Not only that, the time to take public transport is way worse than driving. If it were a 5-15 minute difference to get from point A to point B, OK, I would do it. But for me, I can get to/from work in ~20 minutes. I could also take the bus and it would be 50 minutes one way. That means an extra hour out of my day to take public transportation. I have too much going on to lose an hour a day. The extra time spent in traffic is obviously not as bad as the extra time spent on public transit, so why would I take it?
The Regional Connector project, responsible for the giant holes currently in the streets of Little Tokyo, will directly join the Expo and Gold lines together, which will solve many of these "west Downtown/east Downtown" transfer issues. Due to open in 2022.
The delay is entirely due to private businesses that failed to properly disclose active utility lines. The work to reroute those lines resulted in a 2 year delay.
Same here, I would use it, but then drive to a near station is same as driving directly. I like though that is expanding, so maybe one day I can use it.
If they would just come to peace with removing some parking, they could convert slow bus lines to fast ones through protected lanes, signal priority, and other cheap measures.
Unlikely anytime soon, California transit development is held back by the hippies and soccer moms clamoring for green everything. My city took away a ton of parking from a main road only to add dedicated, environmentally friendly, bike lanes. Nevermind that four cyclists an hour use the lanes tops or that it could have just as easily been a dedicated bus lane and done some actual good for people with jobs. But this way we're encouraging people to, like, take care of themselves man!
I’m on a neighborhood council in LA, and this is not consistently the case. You often see this flip when it comes to supporting denser development, especially where it intersects with removing single family homes or rent controlled apartments. The willingness to remove parking to get some other benefit for the community evaporates. They’re making tradeoffs that make internal sense, but it does mean you don’t just see soccer moms saying no to removing available parking. It’s sometimes hippies vs urban planners.
Fortunately transit doesn't need density nearly as much as long straight lines to run on. If you can just convince your local council put in long through streets every half mile transit can work well in low densities. The much hated cul-de-sacs is fine so long as there are direct walking paths to the through streets so nobody is more than quarter mile from both an easy-west and north-south street with transit.
(Note, in metric countries, go with 800 meters between through streets for 400 meters to a through street - close enough)
In Portland, Oregon, the hippies complain about single-family homes being torn down to make apartments/high-rises while simultaneously complaining about urban sprawl.
They haven't grasped the concept that you have to accept either growing upwards, laterally, or both. You can't have neither.
Bike lanes are good. The easier and safer it is for people to bike, the more bikers there will be. It takes time and additional infrastructure to make it worthwhile.
'Getting around the city' culture is just different here in LA. There's folks in NYC who make half million a year and take the subway several times a day.
In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!
That is one benefit. People who can't drive are stuck with whatever you give them, and will figure out whatever convoluted system required. They all dream of the time/day they can drive. This one is also mandated by law (US ADA) - if you provide any form of public transit you must provide for the disabled. If we ignore the legally required para transit (most expensive) service for those who cannot drive is the cheapest you can get.
There are other benefits that transit can buy. However they are less certain. When you try to attract someone who could drive you have the hard problem of providing service where and when people are to where and when they want to be.
You're going for the wrong side of the chicken/egg.
People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone / read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).
>People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
Very true. There was an aphorism from (I think) the Mayor of Bogota who said something like "I'll consider the city prosperous not when everyone has their own car, but one where even the rich will happily take the train."
> The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general have a bad reputation, it's going to take a long period of sustained good & convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.
> Most people I know would rather ride the train.
One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
> One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.
Caltrain has a lot of trouble because people are constantly driving or walking onto the tracks. BART is either subway or elevated or fenced off between stations.
only better bus routes, preferential treatment for buses, and more routes, will alleviate the issue. light rail is a boondoggle for every city that has it with a combined near hundred billion dollar deferred maintenance tab across the US.
Light rail goes where it is politically beneficial and that rarely aligns where people need it. it the becomes such a money sink that other parts of the mass transit system are short changed to prop it up and in some cases bus routes are made worse in order to cajole people onto rail they don't want to use. then throw in the whole land cost and it just becomes silly, you could always raise the cost ten fold and go underground /s
Light rail is the right investment when the existing buses running every 5 minutes typically have > 80 people on them. Most US routes didn't prove it with the bus first though which means they have no idea if it is true.
There is only other reason to run light rail: you are doing bridge over a route that doesn't have any road bridges and want to ensure drivers won't take the bridge over.
Getting around the city is a totally different problem in LA than NYC. Wikipedia says NYC is 303 square miles (784 square km), and just the city of LA is 469 square miles (1214 square km); but getting around LA doesn't usually mean getting around the incorporated city of LA, it means getting around the whole greater Los Angeles area, which is 33,954 square miles (87,940 square km). That's immense and fixed route transit is just not going to cover very many trips.
That said, the LA MTA trains do seem to get pretty significant ridership, and voter support, so it makes sense to me to keep building them. Some people are able to make it work for them, and I'd guess more people over time will be able to find housing and jobs near enough to the lines that it makes a difference for them.
I doubt it's going to make a significant dent in congestion, but it might bend the curve a bit. If you increase transit capacity, and you don't limit population growth, congestion is going to get worse over time. The LA area in general doesn't have the same general resistance to high density residential as the bay area, and there's also always a lot of single family housing going up on the edges, and of course, nothing stopping people from having more people in a single unit, so population growth seems to be a given.
That's because the trains in LA suck for actually getting anywhere. The city is so spread out and car oriented the trains are useless for most people.
Many train stops in LA proper are at retail/consumer locations rather than commercial centers where most people work. So you take a train into the city and you then need to catch a bus or cab to where you actually need to go. So you skipped some freeway traffic but get stuck in road traffic.
It's more of a pain if you're in the suburbs around LA. Because of the sprawl the trip from your home to a train station isn't a walkable distance. If you take public transit for that portion of your commute you're not seeing any sort of time savings. If you drive to a train station you have all the expenses of a car and the crappy commute time.
Because you basically need a car in most of Southern California you might as well use the freeways. The traffic sucks but at least you have your own radio, AC, and ability to get off and grab a coffee. The sprawl imposes a sort of fixed commute time for any given distance. You might as well be relatively comfortable in that commute.
It also doesn't help that the trains are so terribly slow.
I semi-regularly have to go from San Diego to Orange County. I could put a car at the Orange County terminus point so I'm not impacted by the bad connectivity to the stations themselves.
It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. You'd be better off driving to Solana Beach, except that most of the rush hour traffic issues are between San Diego and Solana Beach. So, once you reach Solana Beach, you might as well drive the rest of the way.
It also doesn't help that parking at Old Town is a disaster--you either get there by 7:00AM or you're not getting parking. Um, if I leave before 7AM, San Diego to Irvine is roughly a 1 hour drive.
On top of that, the train is semi-regularly stopped because someone decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of it. This means that your train is stopped 3+ hours AND YOU CAN'T LEAVE.
12 minutes is a bit fast from San Diego to Solana Beach--even at California freeway speeds that's a 20 mile drive.
Amtrak shows me 29-39 minutes from OLT (San Diego Old Town) to SOL (Solana Beach). I have never seen it that fast--I would estimate 40-60 minutes is the variance. Amtrak moves pathetically slowly until Solana Beach. Maybe something has changed recently, but I'm skeptical. I'm probably going to wind up on the train again this month, so I'll be able to check that.
It's kind of funny, because if I could originate at Solana Beach, the commute would be fine. The Amtrak flies north of Solana Beach (Amtrak shows about 65-75 minutes from Solana Beach to Irvine--and that's actually pretty accurate and just about as fast as driving). The problem is that in rush hour you can't get to Solana Beach--it's basically due north of some of the worst San Diego traffic chokepoints.
> How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak)
There seems to be some synchronization, but the buses go preferentially to downtown and are very slow in other directions. Unfortunately, San Diego Downtown kinda ... sucks. If you want to go east on something like El Cajon Boulevard into interesting areas where your "environmentally conscious" folks probably want to live, the buses take forever--something like 40 minutes to go 8 miles.
Generally if I'm using Amtrak, I'm driving to the starting station and picking up my second car at the ending station. This, of course, means that I'm now an entitled car user complaining about lack of parking. :)
Germany is just as sprawled as a country comes and their public transport is awesome. But then again they invested in it and didn't have the automakers dismantle the rails.
I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in traffic.
Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that.
The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.
I live in Orange County and commute to La Mirada (only ~13 miles away). The bus routes are so inefficient that it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work by bus. Biking would be faster (although significantly more stressful and dangerous). Some areas just need to add more and better routes.
Orange County and the IE are some of the worst public transit in the country. LA's trains/ Metrolink are actually an improvement over sitting on the 10 by quite a bit. The accessibility to the metrolink and the trains have a lot to be desired though in the OC and the IE...
When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).
How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or if there are delays?
In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.
You can't really use the busses in Orange County because of the routes and the traffic. Cars are pretty much required unless you're <5 miles from work, then biking is a decent option.
5 minutes of having a mid-summer sun beating down on you, after you've possibly walked for up to 15 minutes to even get to the stop, can feel like a lot. Especially if you don't know with any confidence that the next bus is coming in 5 minutes.
If you are not confident that the next bus will be there in less than 5 minutes, then my criteria are not met.
It costs about $500,000 to run a bus for a year (every day, 16 hours a day). If you have that extra half a million in the budget you should run another bus someplace (preferably getting some existing route to the under 5 minutes headway). If you don't have that much in the budget but have something spending money on shelters isn't a bad use of money but it is way down on the list of what riders really want.
10 years ago they had GPS maps on the bus showing your current location, but afaik you couldn't access that when waiting for the bus. There were covered bus stops, just none of the ones I used were. They were only "ok" at marking stops when routes changed. The bus schedule (for the routes I used) was sparse.
So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite at the level of being pleasant.
These days, that kind of thing is offloaded to third-party smartphone transit apps. Most people have working smartphones, and are probably using them while waiting for the bus anyways, so it's more helpful (and cost-effective) than to provide signage at every stop.
It depends. Lots of stops are covered, but lots aren't. Sometimes there's someone sleeping/living on the bench in the covered area. Unlike the train stations, the bus stops don't have any signage showing when the next vehicle will arrive. However there's a phone number you can text to get a list of upcoming buses for your stop with ETA. There's also a website that shows the realtime bus locations. However they don't tell you how full the buses are, so you can spend 10 minutes waiting for a bus that just cruises on by past the stop
Lived on the west-side for a few years in the '10s, so my anecdata may be dated:
The stops are variable in terms of nice-ness. Generally, if there is a shelter (mostly just for lightly falling rain), there is a bum there. Generally, those bums have lived in/about that shelter for a number of years and tend to have mental health problems [0]. Generally, if you an able-bodied male, you should be alright around them during the day. If the stop has no shelter, it's like any other patch of sidewalk.
The Big Blue Busses were mostly ok for commuting. You'd get to work about 10 min later, so with waiting, you spend about another 30 min/day commuting. Most of the time, the busses had sitting space even during commute hours, but not always. You can't count of getting work done on the bus and having a seat the whole way. Also, if your plans have to change in the middle of a Tuesday (your kid gets sick at school, dentist appointment, etc), likely you have to go all the way home to grab your car and then drive to the shindig. That said, I was a LOT calmer than my co-workers that drove in. LA traffic is terrible.
Busses were intermittent and not always on time. So you have to plan for that. Sometimes the piss bus would come along and then you're an hour late, so that sucked.
Generally, if you have to be at work on time, have kids, or are female, taking the bus on the west-side is going to be very very tough to finagle.
[0] The vast majority of homeless people in LA are in vehicles/tents and are trying to stay out of the public view (MANY horrible reasons for this). If you want to help out your fellow homeless citizens, and they NEED the help, here is a good run down: https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/22/16911052/homeless-count-volu...
Please donate time or money, these organizations are saints.
My route (704 along santa monica blvd on the west side) has a mix of shaded or uncovered stops. That bus is pretty reliably tracked by google maps and other transit apps. I get delayed less than once a month. They're actually about to merge the express and local lines into more frequent, slightly farther spaced routes, so it's supposed to change to every 10 minutes or so.
My timing is usually flexible, so I can absorb one delay a month, but when I'm in a hurry (like today), I'll just string together two buses (1 to 4) if the 704 doesn't show. I've taken ubers in a pinch before, but way less than once a month.
I lived on the east side and my job offered a free transit pass. It was a 15m drive for me or a single bus. My car broke down fairly often and I tried to give public transit a shot. The single bus took an hour and arrived every 30m. I was often standing during busy times and we'd all talk about the loud, likely mentally ill people, who caused disruptions. I'd often work later than the busses would run.
Biking had similar hazards when trying to use it as an alternative.
Almost all of those downsides still exist in places with great public transit, it's just the incentives compared to the alternatives are better. LA needs more incentives; continue investing in public transit, incentivize it, and disincentivize driving.
No, in places with great transit people with a 15 minute drive have at most 20 minutes on the bus and for some it is only 10 minutes on the bus. Of course where transit is great people also move to live near the right line, so the 1 hour trips like you see still exist - but those are different neighborhoods where you rarely go.
The universal downsizes I was talking about were dealing with obnoxious riders, having to stand during rush hour, and not always running as late as you need it to. I completely agree with your points.
The big thing I notice is that where transit is good I find having a car to be a chain around my neck. Parking is difficult/expensive to find, it's often just easier to walk to the next thing, and navigating roads/traffic is often difficult.
Almost never deal with crazy people on Munich public transit. That's a combination of a broader swathe of society taking transit here, plus German society doing a better job of taking care of the homeless and mentally ill.
The buses are generally reliable and frequent. Train + bike is comparably fast to driving during rush hour.
The reason mass transit works in Manhattan is that you can have a subway train arrive every five minutes and still have it full of people. The reason you can do that is that Manhattan has more than 25 times the population density of LA County.
To fill the same subway cars in LA would require intervals more than 25 times longer, i.e. more than two hours instead of every five minutes, and then it's garbage and nobody wants to use it. Or, in practice, you only run mass transit along the most popular routes and then the majority of people can't use it because it doesn't go where they're going.
Making it less convenient to drive doesn't really fix that, all it does is make more people miserable, because you make driving worse where no viable alternative to driving is available. The only real way to fix it is to reduce sprawl so that you have more density over less area -- and that's only possible in the long-term, so in the short-term LA is pretty screwed for traffic. But that's no excuse to not be working on the long-term solution.
The density of the LA MSA is 2,744/sq mi, the New York MSA is 4,432/sq mi. The average commute in each area is only about 1 mile longer in LA (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...) And yet, there are vastly different commute patterns. (And still over half of people in the NY MSA commute by car). It's not at all clear that density plays nearly as much a role in this as you suggest.
That's not a good baseline for comparison. The MSA you're looking at covers a much bigger area, lumping in parts with lower population density which, no surprise, don't all have subways every five minutes that the GP was referring to:
comparing MSAs is more apples-to-apples than comparing manhattan to LA county, which is roughly what was being done. an MSA bounds the totality of the economic reach of a city, which more-or-less coincides with the commute boundaries.
LA (the city) is relatively dense (medium-high density) compared to its cursory reputation of being low density.
but public transit here is imperfect, to be sure. it's good if you live near a train line, and not so good if you have to depend only on buses. LA metro and LADOT are trying to change that, but it's a frustratingly slow process. micro-mobility options (e-scooters, e-bikes, car share, etc.) help.
It's definitely more apples-to-apples for some statistical comparisons, but as a New Yorker it really does feel ridiculous to include Beacon and the Hamptons in to the equations when considering density for a subway system. Those places are hours away in the suburbs.
Density of city limits would maybe be more appropriate when talking about subway service or LA's light rail. So that'd be about 8,092/sq mi for LA and 28,491/sq mi for NYC. Maybe MSA would make sense for things like commuter rail, which runs something like every 20 or 30 minutes (hourly on weekends) for Metro North.
Money presumably. The fact that it's comically expensive in per mile costs, in some cases nearly $1 billion/mile[1] in LA, in addition to maintenance costs would just nuke the ideas.
To some degree this is a zero sum game. Bus lanes are pretty magical in that they make the buses faster than the cars and reduce road capacity to reduce induced demand. Plus they're cheap because the infrastructure is just paint.
Bus lanes are hot garbage. Their mechanism of operation requires them to not actually solve the problem, because if they actually reduced traffic congestion then the buses wouldn't be faster anymore.
And "induced demand" is a misnomer. Existing congestion suppresses existing demand, which comes back when you relieve some of it. You need to find better ways to satisfy the demand, not find ways to further suppress it.
The best way to do that is to increase density, because that both makes mass transit more viable on its own terms (more frequent trains and they're still full) and decreases the number of miles people have to travel because things are close together.
Or you could just run the subways in LA more often/not full. Then the experience would be enjoyable and living near the lines would become more desirable, and the more people take the transit and then oh look spread starts to contract a bit and your long term plan is starting to materialize!
It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.
Operating mass transit when it isn't full serves no purpose. The entire point of mass transit is that it's more efficient than cars when it's full -- when it's not full it's less efficient. A bus carrying the same number of people as a car takes up more space and uses more fuel, and requires a driver which makes it dramatically more expensive when amortized over that number of people.
> It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.
Of course you do. Trains replace buses in the places with enough density to justify them. You don't build a train in a place that would only see it half full, you just run a bus there which holds half as many people.
The problem is most of these places can't even fill a bus every ten minutes because everything is so spread out. You need more taller buildings first.
I once did the LA transit ride from Thousand Oaks to Pasadena and back entirely by transit (40 mi one way by driving, transit was more circuitous than that). More frequently, I would take Thousand Oaks to Hollywood or Thousand Oaks to DTLA transit trips. The Red and Gold lines seem quite reasonable. Though short of something I would want to take daily given that I lived far away, it was still a lot less exhausting than trying to drive from Santa Monica to the other side of 405 during the afternoon. Now I’m in a different city and take transit daily.
They also report that under 17% of trips are for work, which is surprisingly low and seems like too much noise to learn much about the distribution of peak hour commuting distances.
If I had a five mile commute, I would use surface streets. Congested highways are full of people going far enough in roughly that direction that even the congestion plus the first/last mile is faster than countless stoplights on the direct route.
> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc.
After thinking about this a moment, you might realize that this mostly just makes life harder and more miserable for the poor, disabled, etc. Most people don't have a plausible option to change their mode of transportation--they just have to suffer.
Beyond that, these "improvements" often don't even benefit their intended targets. I currently live in a city that has this "make it harder" smug in spades. Ironically, the resulting improvements have made it a scarier place to walk and bicycle, due to the attention overload induced on drivers.
As the saying goes: God save us from people that only mean well...
It's obviously hard to tell by looking in windows, but there's plenty of poor and/or disabled people riding the bus and already dealing with the problems you think removing cars would give them.
Indeed. But "make it harder" isn't about them (it won't change their behavior). It's rather about the poor and disabled for whom public transportation isn't their best option. It's a message from the elite telling them that their suffering doesn't count.
> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.
FWIW these are actually NIMBY policies. NIMBYs don't like it when people drive cars on their streets.
The article completely misses the point of public transit.
Transit is NOT about reducing congestion. Induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) clearly means that some people will driving so long the congestion is within their tolerance level.
Public Transit is all about giving choices to people AND enabling people to get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of congestion.
For my family, I have been fortunate enough that the last 15 years or so I have been able to take public transit to my jobs. This has enable my family to use a single car and save tens of thousands. This is significant money for me and even more significant for someone making less than I do.
Public transit enables workers to keep more of what they earn because they don't have to spend money on gas, car repairs, and they don't have surprise expenses related to driving all the time.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here.
Adding capacity doesn't cause demand. "Induced" demand is just latent demand that became measurable when we reduced the backpressure in the system, and it ends as soon as we adequately serve all the latent demand we have. But that probably costs more per capita than a car, so we aren't voting to do it.
Exactly. And I think it helps workers get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of being underpaid.
Light rail in Houston increased the time spent in traffic since it was intended to bring people who can't afford cars or taxis into the central business district, it was built at ground level consuming right-of-way, and ended up noticably obstructing the flow of traffic that was there before. The rail was not built as any kind of a substitute for very many established automotive commuters at the time, and it still does not take many cars off the road.
When waiting at a traffic signal for the train to pass, you notice how many fewer people make it across the intersection on the train compared to how many do it in their cars before you get the green light yourself.
Even in times of low traffic, patrol cars are known to slow down the flow of cars in order to induce congestion. They do it because when there are so many cars on the freeway, it’s safer if the vehicles move along slowly.
It seems that with our current infrastructure, even if we could reduce the number of car users it would not be by such a margin that it would become safe enough to not have these “traffic breaks”.
The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every 4-5 years.
It's just anecdotal, but I often saw it done in LA; weekly to monthly. Since I would get stuck in them I'd often seem them start or end them. I never once saw any correlation to road debris or emergency services.
Any staging for construction or emergency services were done with a slow moving truck dropping cones or flares put down in a zipper-like fashion, corralling cars into open lanes or into exits.
Yeah I see that kinda stuff at least a few times a year in the Bay Area. There's so much detritus on the roads I imagine they're just trying to remove the biggest of the hazards.
> The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every 4-5 years.
I've seen "traffic breaks" done to catch motorcyclists. Completely stops traffic with hundreds and hundreds of cars just to catch one guy speeding - not really worth it imo. Sometimes it's for debris but see plenty of pulling over too...
I can't read the article, but am very curious about how they accounted for overall growth.
That new Expo Line tends to be pretty packed at rush hour. But that east/west commute continues to get more crowded overall. There have been ever-more apartments and offices opening up along that line for the past 6+ years, so it's no surprise traffic gets worse too.
Most of the article is behind a paywall so I couldn't read the whole thing. I hate the argument I often hear that "more lanes were added, time spent in traffic hasn't changed." As long as ridership is up, throughput increased while latency stayed the same.
A public transit system takes decades of investment to see fruition. This really clicked for me when I was in London and saw a sign saying a transit stop was closed for the next 3 years. That has to be detrimental for the businesses, people renting, and real estate owners who were established there. A business lease averages 3-5 years. So you'd need zoning laws to change, real estate to be built, a business owner willing to commit to 3-5 years, and foot traffic and commerce.
I can't imagine any infrastructure project that would improve traffic--only a recession.
I consider The Economist to be a high-brow, high-status publication, but when I see them misspelling in the title, I have to reconsider. “Loth” is not a word. “Loathe” is the word they’re looking for.
That is expected, as any transit planner can tell you. Transit only makes a difference to traffic at the very edges of rush hour. For every person who gets out of their single occupancy car there is enough space for one person to leave just a little latter and still make it in time, which in turns leaves their space for someone else until finally you are out of rush hour entirely and there is nobody to take that time/space slot.
Or to put it a different way: everybody wants to arrive to leave at 7:30am and arrive at 8:00am. (you can subtract a few minutes from the leave time for people who live close to work). Anybody working some other schedule (who has a choice of when to work) is doing it because they are avoiding traffic. Thus if transit makes traffic a little better someone on the edge will adjust their schedule to account for that and bring traffic back to where it was.
Until you get to a city where rush hour lasts for 15 minutes transit will not make a measurable difference in time spent in traffic.
In general yes, but in this case the trains are not being used:
> Even as its budget has expanded, the number of people actually using public transport in la has collapsed. Total ridership is down almost a quarter since 2013. Three in four Angelenos travel to work on their own in a car, the highest figure ever.
Recently stayed in a hotel in LA that had a direct view onto a light rail station. (Cool!) I glanced out the window from time to time over several days and never saw a single train. That suggests that they're not running often enough to be useful to real people.
Train, bus, whatever--if I have to wait longer than eight minutes on average, it's useless.
(And don't even get me started on the geniuses that decided that light rail shouldn't have an LAX terminal.)
wow so they forced everyone to find alternate means, i.e. cars for a good number of them, and then expected them to come back after 9 months of car habits?
I feel like the edges of rush hour in LA have turned into a very wide band. There are enough people that have worked out a flexible start and end time which basically makes your commute time the same if you leave anytime between 7am-10am.
Maybe they should just let the public transit riders ride for free?
Those people will then bear with the hassles of using public transportation for the rest who needs to use their cars. The city might even see a surge in commerce, from people who can go to distant locations via public transit, that they wouldn’t otherwise bother going to by car.
Generally not. Most people are willing to pay a little for it, and people who pay for their service are harder to justify cutting service to when times get tight.
I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have taken 15 minutes by Lyft. About twenty minutes of that was spent walking and waiting in <40ºF weather, not a big deal if you're properly dressed, but I know that's something many people will not tolerate if they have a choice. Ten minutes of it was apparently due to unreliable service; Google Maps had me get off to make a connection and but quickly rerouted me to get back on the same line I was on (luckily high frequency, hence only 10 minutes lost) because the next bus on the connecting line was half an hour away.
I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood.
I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.
This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are under 30 minutes: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. Just 7% of public transit commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S. public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5% take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public transit): https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell....
I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
> Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care.
I agree with the appeal, but I've always found the biggest issue with this dream is the need for utter stability. If you quit your job, you might end up with a new one at an office 30 minutes down the highway. If your partner works, it's even harder to keep two commutes low. If you move with each new job, you may have to uproot your kid and send them to a new school.
Commute time is mostly a function of metro area population, not mode of transportation. Half of South Korea's population is in the Seoul metro (which has a huge population), so the average commute time is very high.
Compare NYC to LA: LA is driving dominant and has the longer commute time, despite a smaller population than NYC.
It's not about population but rather density. LA's big public transit problem (outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies) is actually one of zoning and building.
> outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies
Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have.
A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway. I know people who would rather have their fingernails removed without anesthesia than do drive the 405 in rush-hour traffic. I might include myself in that group.
Who gives out building and business permits? Car companies? No. The city, the county, the State. Why do they allow such concentration? OK, maybe concentration makes sense at some level. Why, then, do they allow concentration where they do? One look at the map --particularly if armed with traffic pattern familiarity-- instantly tells you it isn't a good idea to pile-up so many businesses in these areas.
So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design. We could use public transportation but it would take me somewhere in the range of two to three hours longer per day to go almost anywhere and come back. Sorry, my time is far more valuable than that. And, to complete the picture, this means spending somewhere in the range of six hours per day coming and going from the aforementioned tech centers. And then you have to work 8 to 10, if not 12, hours per day.
I said a lot of things there, which part isn't true, that it would take me six hours to take public transport to some parts of Los Angeles from where I am?
With regards to the myth of car companies driving or forcing urban development in a place like Los Angeles (really, think about that for a moment), here's the most complete research on Los Angeles mass transport I have ever found:
There are an array of interconnected competing interests that drive the evolution of a city or region. For example, good union jobs building highways, suburban home developments and driving buses (one train = one conductor; 100 buses = 100 union jobs), etc.
No, car companies are not that powerful. Los Angeles did this to itself over a very long period of time and for a number of reasons not having much to do with this fable of a car company promoted car culture. The simplest explanation is: It just happened.
This isn't unlike the internet, which just exploded at one point and it is what it is. If we had to design it from scratch today with the benefit of hindsight we would likely change quite a few things. Same with cities. You get what you get, unless someone early enough had enough vision or was naturally restricted in some way to take a more favorable path.
EDIT: I stand corrected. I just checked with Google Maps. There is NO way to take public transport of any kind. Well, at least Google can't solve the routing problem. I think there might be a way if I took something like three buses to get close to where I might be able to reach light rail. Plain and simple, Los Angeles didn't evolve to favor mass transportation.
> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.
> The scholar Sy Adler once wrote, plain and simple, that everything Snell suggested about transit in Los Angeles "was wrong."
> A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway.
That's a reason why mass transit in LA doesn't work now, not how it came to be that way.
You seemed to have stopped reading before I literally said the current problem was zoning and building (aka urban planning). I lived in LA myself and have felt the length of a trip taking the expo line all the way in/out and how it isn't a viable commute. The sprawl of LA renders the bus system nearly useless as well.
> Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have.
> So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design.
Urban planning doesn't exist in isolation, it is shaped by those in power at the time, in every city. The motor industry absolutely was a power player that had a vested interest in pushing urban planning towards a vision of a city that meant cars coming in from suburbs instead of dense urban areas where public transit would actually be effective. LA is not alone in this within the US. Of course they weren't the only factor, a good example being white flight hitting cities pretty hard as well. But to say the car industry was not involved is 100% false.
> Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[3] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland.
I mean city life isn't for everyone but I personally love dense urban cities and you can 100% have a great QOL there, especially when well designed. I live in NYC and would point to Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Amsterdam among others. A lot of the negatives that can come with dense urban areas are bad execution that can sometimes even be fixed within one city. Montreal for example does a great job solving for lack of green space.
I love cities for availability of so many things quickly, diverse people and cultures that can only really be accomplished with large numbers of people, large social pools, high arts density, public transit so no need for a car, etc. If you're looking for a large space to live in, a backyard, lots of nature, then most cities won't hit that. Just depends on values but neither is wrong.
I love cities like NYC, London, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires and others. Los Angeles is very different. The ideas that work elsewhere don’t work here, which is a darn shame.
> Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
Personally, I find you need some kind of minimum time separation from work, otherwise you don't get the sense of separation between work and home life. I had a 5 minute walk from my house as a work commute once, and I much prefer my 30 minute bus ride today, because by the time I get home I'm in "home mode".
The main issue with transit time in the US is that American cities have made intentional policy decisions that result in land uses being far apart and sprawling areas, so a nonstop car trip is the only reasonable option. But everyone making nonstop car trips doesn't scale, which is why the Lincoln and Holland have hour-long waits into the tunnels more often than not.
Tunneling could let nonstop car trips scale. If the Boring company can produce a similar improvement in tunneling costs that SpaceX is on launch costs, it could be a reality.
Graded ramps are high capacity but take up a lot of space since the grade can't be all that steep.
Elevators don't take up a lot of space but are really slow, and have worse reliability issues due to the moving parts.
How many spots on the surface exist that you could just take a chunk out of for either? Most land in existing cities is already being used for buildings or roads or sidewalks.
IE a subway. Which works well for trains. No need to call them cars or buses, since they never leave the guide way and there are advantages to trains in fix route situations
They can leave far out in the suburbs and other areas of low density and then switch in areas of high density. This would be something new. Hard to realize but a hybrid of the current system that can be the best of both.
That's what subway stations are today. They are absolutely massive to move people quickly in and out, and are the main component of subway building costs.
Remote worker here. I struggled with the same problem when my commute went from 20 minutes to 20 steps. I've found the best way is to stay in my office, log out of my computer, and read for 20 minutes. I don't have the hassle/expense of a commute, and I get an education every day. It's not bad.
I think this is all correct, but I'd just encourage people to think through the tradeoffs in play. Nothing can compete on time with an extensive point-to-point road network. But a city designed that way is going to be less healthy, harder to walk or bike in, more polluted, noisier, more spread out, and with far more transportation-related deaths and injuries.
This. When I lived in Phoenix, my wife worked 30 miles south of downtown. I worked 20 miles north of downtown. Fortunately, we both loved the older neighborhoods downtown and schools weren't a factor at that time in our lives. If they had been, we would have lived 5 miles from her job and I would have had a two hour commute each way or needed to find another job closer to home.
It works roughly the same. Depending on the form of transit and the duration other in-flight options become viable as well (nintendo switch, smartphone games, web browsing, sometimes even working on laptop, etc)
I lived in Austin just before the advent of Lyft and Uber, and was thus stuck using the bus from time to time. I found the bus service in Austin to be unusually slow by US standards due to the abnormal number of wheelchair users.
It does, if you're going from Leander/Cedar Park to downtown it's useful. It takes about the same amount of time as driving in rush-hour, but without the bs.
Texas generally sees public-transport as something for poor people and the state is full of armchair libertarians..
Yep, that's almost the only scenario it covers, along with commuting from east Austin to the Domain.
I was at a lecture recently about the things cities do right and wrong when planning public transit, and the speaker used Austin's rail system to illustrate what happens when cities route public transit around political opposition. The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable, and Austin's Red Line is the perfect example: it barely sticks its nose into one side of downtown and then manages to dodge the capitol area, the university, and the dense residential neighborhoods of north Austin. Even the station that seems intended to serve the Domain is actually a ten minute walk from it, twenty minutes to most of the shops and restaurants.
I mean its not like they really had much of a choice for the route. They didn't build new tracks, just reused old existing tracks and built stations along the way.
I lived in Austin when they were voting to build the rail line and there was so much opposition that they never would have been able to get funding for any serious development of new tracks. There was a proposal for a while to run trains up Mopac, along the train line in the middle of the highway there, but apparently that wasn't possible because there is too much freight traffic on that line.
> The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable
That actually wasn't the case either. The original proposal was for a roughly $2 billion project, and while it had lots of support in the central city the suburbs voted against it.
In the end they got the proposal passed, but with a drastically reduced budget, and were only able to spend about $100 million to build a rail system. So they just slapped together the red line on existing rail tracks
They could have found the money if people weren’t opposed to the route the money would have enabled. The university was very strongly opposed, NIMBY residents in north Austin were opposed to having nearby transit, and lots of people who owned or rented commercial land along the route were opposed because businesses would lose a lot of business during construction. Many of the people who were opposed found cost to be a convenient grounds for opposition, and the cheaper alternative happened to conveniently coincide with making the least number of people upset.
Haha yeah, I rememeber the NIMBY's in North Austin. I was living out near the Domain area back then, so I was glad to at least get the Kramar station. Honestly the biggest shame is still no rail line out to Austin Bergstrom.
This is a real problem, and hard to raise without coming off (or being accused) as an insensitive clod.
The number of handicapped and mentally ill / incapacitated users who take public transport is a really big problem when combined with a system's stated need to serve everyone equally.
They take up stopping time, slow the bus down, antagonize other riders, which leads to people not wanting to take the bus, making it seen more and more a transport mode of the dysfunctional. Then depriving it of funding, and into a spiral of decline. On a train or bus, you can't allow 1 person to delay 50 or 200 by multiple minutes during every ride.
People who take public transport (the poor, those with no alternative) are the very people whose time is precious and wasting it with delays is really irresponsible.
There needs to be a way to handle the outlier cases who slow the system down, to maintain confidence and reliability of the system for the bulk majority of passengers.
I'd go with selfish ableist asshole over insensitive clod.
The reason it's hard to raise this "real problem" without coming off that way is being you are absolutely just being an ableist asshole. Yeah it's a real problem that people who have trouble walking or traveling need to get around. Sorry that's mildly inconvenient. Maybe you should just quit being lazy and walk.
"Ableist"? Go off back to your ridiculous PC college fantasy world and leave the solving of real problems to people who want to actually make things better.
Breaking the site guidelines like this is not ok here, regardless of whether another user broke them. We've had to warn you about this in the past. Continuing to post like this will get you banned, so please don't.
Edit: it also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not ok, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for (curiosity and thoughtful conversation). We ban such accounts, so please stop.
Your edit -- is this a cut and paste admonition that you send to anyone? I think if you look at my previous contributions, they are far from "ideological" and in fact contribute a lot of information. In a previous moderation, you took the position that pointing out the flaws in someone's argument was a personal attack. That is a concerning use of moderation discretion. On this above post, I concede that I was not being respectful to the person who was being so snarky and angry to begin with.
I certainly post this sort of moderation comment to anyone who I see breaking the rules, but I try not to copy and paste them. Inevitably they are pretty repetitive though.
It always feels like the other person started it and did worse, which is why you need to follow the site guidelines regardless of what the other person does. I don't mean 'you' personally, of course. We all do.
I didn't read your account history closely, so it's possible it wasn't primarily ideological. But to stay on the right site of the guidelines, make sure that you're using this site for intellectual curiosity, not arguing with political enemies. That's important, and when people do that as intended, their comments take on a different quality that is more conducive to curious, thoughtful conversation.
You know, I spent several minutes on that comment trying to figure out how to talk about this diplomatically, eventually just gave up and tried to talk simply.
What I wish I had added was, "this is fine, it's worth it, my convenience is not actually important." So, sorry about that.
Since you've done nothing but break the site guidelines since the last time we asked you to stop, it seems clear that you don't want to use HN as intended, so I've banned the account.
Even if you're right on the underlying issue, being this much of an asshole on HN poisons what little community we actually have here, and that is more important. If you change your mind and decide you want to use the site in the intended spirit—e.g. with respect for others, even when they're wrong—you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
Well there is: a separate system for the disabled. It's better for the average user--it speeds up the system. It's better for the disabled--the handicapped van comes directly to their house to pick them up and takes them directly to their destination.
Toronto handles this in part with a separate fleet of buses for wheelchair users. It’s effectively a taxi service with the same cost as a bus fare. It’s not perfect, it has to be booked in advance and times / availability can be unpredictable, but it is there.
You can argue that it's not the "fault" of mass transit, but anyway you don't have to plan as much for taking an Uber, giving it an advantage over the bus.
Walking and waiting for connections is inherent to taking the bus. There's nothing gained from planning things tightly when service isn't predictable. In fact, I think it would be a mistake to even think of buses in my city as having a schedule. They just have a rough frequency.
Any reduction in commute time due to new infrastructure, capacity increases, new technology, or other improvements, always proves temporary, as average commute times in large population centers gradually converge to Marchetti's Constant:
In the words of Bertrand Russell: "Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area -- effectually cancels out the gain."[a]
Another way of looking at it, building transit doesn't get anybody to work faster, but it does allow you to scale population density, which in turn allows you to build more housing for a region that may be in a housing crunch.
If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour.
Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.
One of the wild things in Smil's "Energy and Civilization, a History" is that cars generally don't do better than walking if you factor in the hours spent working to pay for the expenses of owning and operating the car. Your total miles travelled per hour spent is roughly the same!
While there seems to be a lot of comments suggesting that no-one uses the LA metro because it's too short and too inconvenient, ridership statistics suggest otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr... points out that LA is the 9th most used subway system in the US, with riders/mile of subway beating out both the Washington DC Metro and Chicago's L, which are the 2nd and 3rd most heavily used subway systems. So while most of the commenter's here do not find it useful, about 140,000 people per day do use it, despite it being only 17 miles long.
I live in Culver City and go to work to Santa Monica using the expo line, and its perfect. But I do understand the routes do not cover important areas. There's still a big gap around West Hollywood for ex.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadThe only solution to this problem is a lot more lines
I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.
Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
- The rampant homelessness and mental illness
- Cost of living
- Feces and urine everywhere
- Lots of rats and cockroaches
- Rotting garbage in the streets
- Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA.
- Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question.
It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem.
2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80.
3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty.
I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great food, services, etc in walking distance).
If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights.
Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its neighborhoods.
And unfortunately, the votes to solve the problem are slowly moving out of state...
If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
Yet, LA has obviously done so.
Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach.
Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
It doesn't help that transit costs 4x-7x as much to build in the US vs Spain. It also doesn't help that nobody cares about good investments - republicans hate transit and won't invest in anything if they can avoid it. Democrats love the idea of transit and waste a lot of money on slow, expensive lines to nowhere that nobody rides thus proving the republicans right that transit is a bad investment.
Prioritize dense, mixed-use development within ~.5 miles of transit hubs. Every new subway/light-rail station should include rezoning with a focus on a livable mix of commercial, residential, and retail.
Remove parking minimums. Let the market determine how much parking is available and how much it costs. Plentiful, free parking is not a right.
Remove single-family zoning (allow accessory dwelling units and duplexes in existing SFH zones).
None of this will work overnight. It will take years. But, the basic goal is to make living near work achievable and desirable.
Once in LA itself the buses have the same problem of not being able to really drive on the smaller side streets so they're limited to the big avenues. That makes them slightly better than LA's trains but still a pain for a majority of riders. LA doesn't have the space in most places for dedicated bus lanes with above-grade platforms.
Note that LA has lots of bus lines but commuting on them is tedious and slow. Getting where you need to go usually requires several transfers then travel on foot to your actual destination. For most commutes it takes at least as long as driving.
Shuttle buses (24-28 occupants) do quite well on twisty suburban roads. Those same roads often have curbside parking, and delimiting a 30-foot stretch of road as a bus stop is not going to seriously hamper that.
In Vancouver, the cost to operate regular buses, per revenue-hour (time the bus is carrying passengers) is ~$120/hour. The cost of operating shuttle buses is ~$70/hour. [1] This is because smaller buses use less gas, are cheaper to maintain, and have better labour utilization (Time the driver spends on the clock driving passengers, versus time the driver spends on the clock waiting around, switching routes, etc.)
And this is operational costs. Capital costs are another huge factor, that's not accounted for in the operational numbers. It costs a lot more to order an 80-passenger bus (And even more so for a trolley), then it does a 24-passenger one.
Also, this is only anecdotal, from being a rider, but I'm pretty sure that shuttle-buses both perform better in congested environments, and cause less traffic congestion (As they have a much better power-to-weight ratio, better acceleration and breaking, a smaller turning radius...)
[1] https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Documents/about_translink/g...
The capital costs of the bus isn't that much different over the lifespan of a bus. If you need a large bus at all, then it is cheaper to buy one large bus than both the large and small. Small buses cost less mostly because the drivers don't have to be as well trained - I'm not sure I want that difference.
This worked because shuttlebus service was slowly ramped up year over year.
The small buses are solely used for last mile suburban routes, the large buses for anything else.
I'm not saying LA should be this way, it just is this way. The suburban sprawl makes most of Southern California a shit show for public transit. Cities with effective public transit tend to have higher population densities at least more concentrated commercial areas. In SoCal (tired of typing it out) places where jobs are located are distributed all throughout the sprawl. There's no real "downtown" where all the jobs are located.
It also doesn't help that due to earthquake and fire codes it's rare to see mixed zoning in much of California. So few neighborhoods with ground floor commercial/retail and upper floor residential zoning.
Bus Rapid Transit is super cheap and you can have the lines run anywhere. You just have to be willing to give up lanes of traffic.
On my commute to work I see buses from half a dozen different agencies, the fact that every individual city in the metro area seems to run its own bus service is probably another piece of the problem.
They're usually placed due to politics, not maximal utility.
That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses.
That doesn't really qualify as public transportation.
Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA.
The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"
If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes.
Timetables: https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_15...
Also, the travel times are as predicted by maps. And it matches my in-person experience. But I'm glad you told me my experiences are completely wrong.
It does take a long time to get from Santa Monica to Pasadena by rail due to the multiple transfers. They're working to make that a single transfer and the new line alignments should start in 2 to 3 years.
Santa Monica is 45 to 55 min from downtown by rail, depending on game traffic.
https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/
Bussing much less so.
(Note, in metric countries, go with 800 meters between through streets for 400 meters to a through street - close enough)
They haven't grasped the concept that you have to accept either growing upwards, laterally, or both. You can't have neither.
In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!
There are other benefits that transit can buy. However they are less certain. When you try to attract someone who could drive you have the hard problem of providing service where and when people are to where and when they want to be.
People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone / read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).
Very true. There was an aphorism from (I think) the Mayor of Bogota who said something like "I'll consider the city prosperous not when everyone has their own car, but one where even the rich will happily take the train."
And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general have a bad reputation, it's going to take a long period of sustained good & convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.
> Most people I know would rather ride the train.
One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.
Light rail goes where it is politically beneficial and that rarely aligns where people need it. it the becomes such a money sink that other parts of the mass transit system are short changed to prop it up and in some cases bus routes are made worse in order to cajole people onto rail they don't want to use. then throw in the whole land cost and it just becomes silly, you could always raise the cost ten fold and go underground /s
There is only other reason to run light rail: you are doing bridge over a route that doesn't have any road bridges and want to ensure drivers won't take the bridge over.
That said, the LA MTA trains do seem to get pretty significant ridership, and voter support, so it makes sense to me to keep building them. Some people are able to make it work for them, and I'd guess more people over time will be able to find housing and jobs near enough to the lines that it makes a difference for them.
I doubt it's going to make a significant dent in congestion, but it might bend the curve a bit. If you increase transit capacity, and you don't limit population growth, congestion is going to get worse over time. The LA area in general doesn't have the same general resistance to high density residential as the bay area, and there's also always a lot of single family housing going up on the edges, and of course, nothing stopping people from having more people in a single unit, so population growth seems to be a given.
Many train stops in LA proper are at retail/consumer locations rather than commercial centers where most people work. So you take a train into the city and you then need to catch a bus or cab to where you actually need to go. So you skipped some freeway traffic but get stuck in road traffic.
It's more of a pain if you're in the suburbs around LA. Because of the sprawl the trip from your home to a train station isn't a walkable distance. If you take public transit for that portion of your commute you're not seeing any sort of time savings. If you drive to a train station you have all the expenses of a car and the crappy commute time.
Because you basically need a car in most of Southern California you might as well use the freeways. The traffic sucks but at least you have your own radio, AC, and ability to get off and grab a coffee. The sprawl imposes a sort of fixed commute time for any given distance. You might as well be relatively comfortable in that commute.
I semi-regularly have to go from San Diego to Orange County. I could put a car at the Orange County terminus point so I'm not impacted by the bad connectivity to the stations themselves.
It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. You'd be better off driving to Solana Beach, except that most of the rush hour traffic issues are between San Diego and Solana Beach. So, once you reach Solana Beach, you might as well drive the rest of the way.
It also doesn't help that parking at Old Town is a disaster--you either get there by 7:00AM or you're not getting parking. Um, if I leave before 7AM, San Diego to Irvine is roughly a 1 hour drive.
On top of that, the train is semi-regularly stopped because someone decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of it. This means that your train is stopped 3+ hours AND YOU CAN'T LEAVE.
Why would I take the train at that point?
The schedule seems to indicate that it takes 11-12 minutes to get from San Diego to Solana beach. Where is the extra time coming from?
How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak) ?
Amtrak shows me 29-39 minutes from OLT (San Diego Old Town) to SOL (Solana Beach). I have never seen it that fast--I would estimate 40-60 minutes is the variance. Amtrak moves pathetically slowly until Solana Beach. Maybe something has changed recently, but I'm skeptical. I'm probably going to wind up on the train again this month, so I'll be able to check that.
It's kind of funny, because if I could originate at Solana Beach, the commute would be fine. The Amtrak flies north of Solana Beach (Amtrak shows about 65-75 minutes from Solana Beach to Irvine--and that's actually pretty accurate and just about as fast as driving). The problem is that in rush hour you can't get to Solana Beach--it's basically due north of some of the worst San Diego traffic chokepoints.
> How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak)
There seems to be some synchronization, but the buses go preferentially to downtown and are very slow in other directions. Unfortunately, San Diego Downtown kinda ... sucks. If you want to go east on something like El Cajon Boulevard into interesting areas where your "environmentally conscious" folks probably want to live, the buses take forever--something like 40 minutes to go 8 miles.
Generally if I'm using Amtrak, I'm driving to the starting station and picking up my second car at the ending station. This, of course, means that I'm now an entitled car user complaining about lack of parking. :)
I live on the west side and it's a joke.
Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that.
The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.
In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.
It costs about $500,000 to run a bus for a year (every day, 16 hours a day). If you have that extra half a million in the budget you should run another bus someplace (preferably getting some existing route to the under 5 minutes headway). If you don't have that much in the budget but have something spending money on shelters isn't a bad use of money but it is way down on the list of what riders really want.
So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite at the level of being pleasant.
The stops are variable in terms of nice-ness. Generally, if there is a shelter (mostly just for lightly falling rain), there is a bum there. Generally, those bums have lived in/about that shelter for a number of years and tend to have mental health problems [0]. Generally, if you an able-bodied male, you should be alright around them during the day. If the stop has no shelter, it's like any other patch of sidewalk.
The Big Blue Busses were mostly ok for commuting. You'd get to work about 10 min later, so with waiting, you spend about another 30 min/day commuting. Most of the time, the busses had sitting space even during commute hours, but not always. You can't count of getting work done on the bus and having a seat the whole way. Also, if your plans have to change in the middle of a Tuesday (your kid gets sick at school, dentist appointment, etc), likely you have to go all the way home to grab your car and then drive to the shindig. That said, I was a LOT calmer than my co-workers that drove in. LA traffic is terrible.
Busses were intermittent and not always on time. So you have to plan for that. Sometimes the piss bus would come along and then you're an hour late, so that sucked.
Generally, if you have to be at work on time, have kids, or are female, taking the bus on the west-side is going to be very very tough to finagle.
[0] The vast majority of homeless people in LA are in vehicles/tents and are trying to stay out of the public view (MANY horrible reasons for this). If you want to help out your fellow homeless citizens, and they NEED the help, here is a good run down: https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/22/16911052/homeless-count-volu...
Please donate time or money, these organizations are saints.
My timing is usually flexible, so I can absorb one delay a month, but when I'm in a hurry (like today), I'll just string together two buses (1 to 4) if the 704 doesn't show. I've taken ubers in a pinch before, but way less than once a month.
Biking had similar hazards when trying to use it as an alternative.
Almost all of those downsides still exist in places with great public transit, it's just the incentives compared to the alternatives are better. LA needs more incentives; continue investing in public transit, incentivize it, and disincentivize driving.
The big thing I notice is that where transit is good I find having a car to be a chain around my neck. Parking is difficult/expensive to find, it's often just easier to walk to the next thing, and navigating roads/traffic is often difficult.
The buses are generally reliable and frequent. Train + bike is comparably fast to driving during rush hour.
To fill the same subway cars in LA would require intervals more than 25 times longer, i.e. more than two hours instead of every five minutes, and then it's garbage and nobody wants to use it. Or, in practice, you only run mass transit along the most popular routes and then the majority of people can't use it because it doesn't go where they're going.
Making it less convenient to drive doesn't really fix that, all it does is make more people miserable, because you make driving worse where no viable alternative to driving is available. The only real way to fix it is to reduce sprawl so that you have more density over less area -- and that's only possible in the long-term, so in the short-term LA is pretty screwed for traffic. But that's no excuse to not be working on the long-term solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
LA (the city) is relatively dense (medium-high density) compared to its cursory reputation of being low density.
but public transit here is imperfect, to be sure. it's good if you live near a train line, and not so good if you have to depend only on buses. LA metro and LADOT are trying to change that, but it's a frustratingly slow process. micro-mobility options (e-scooters, e-bikes, car share, etc.) help.
Density of city limits would maybe be more appropriate when talking about subway service or LA's light rail. So that'd be about 8,092/sq mi for LA and 28,491/sq mi for NYC. Maybe MSA would make sense for things like commuter rail, which runs something like every 20 or 30 minutes (hourly on weekends) for Metro North.
[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
And "induced demand" is a misnomer. Existing congestion suppresses existing demand, which comes back when you relieve some of it. You need to find better ways to satisfy the demand, not find ways to further suppress it.
The best way to do that is to increase density, because that both makes mass transit more viable on its own terms (more frequent trains and they're still full) and decreases the number of miles people have to travel because things are close together.
It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.
> It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.
Of course you do. Trains replace buses in the places with enough density to justify them. You don't build a train in a place that would only see it half full, you just run a bus there which holds half as many people.
The problem is most of these places can't even fill a bus every ten minutes because everything is so spread out. You need more taller buildings first.
https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips
I don't think we should optimize our cities for that.
If I had a five mile commute, I would use surface streets. Congested highways are full of people going far enough in roughly that direction that even the congestion plus the first/last mile is faster than countless stoplights on the direct route.
After thinking about this a moment, you might realize that this mostly just makes life harder and more miserable for the poor, disabled, etc. Most people don't have a plausible option to change their mode of transportation--they just have to suffer.
Beyond that, these "improvements" often don't even benefit their intended targets. I currently live in a city that has this "make it harder" smug in spades. Ironically, the resulting improvements have made it a scarier place to walk and bicycle, due to the attention overload induced on drivers.
As the saying goes: God save us from people that only mean well...
FWIW these are actually NIMBY policies. NIMBYs don't like it when people drive cars on their streets.
Transit is NOT about reducing congestion. Induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) clearly means that some people will driving so long the congestion is within their tolerance level.
Public Transit is all about giving choices to people AND enabling people to get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of congestion.
For my family, I have been fortunate enough that the last 15 years or so I have been able to take public transit to my jobs. This has enable my family to use a single car and save tens of thousands. This is significant money for me and even more significant for someone making less than I do.
Public transit enables workers to keep more of what they earn because they don't have to spend money on gas, car repairs, and they don't have surprise expenses related to driving all the time.
Public transit is NEVER about congestion.
If the goal is "solving" congestion then:
* ban cars (Market Street in SF, 14th Street in NYC (https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transport...)
* have an economic collapse
* reduce parking options
* congestion pricing
... etc...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Light rail in Houston increased the time spent in traffic since it was intended to bring people who can't afford cars or taxis into the central business district, it was built at ground level consuming right-of-way, and ended up noticably obstructing the flow of traffic that was there before. The rail was not built as any kind of a substitute for very many established automotive commuters at the time, and it still does not take many cars off the road.
When waiting at a traffic signal for the train to pass, you notice how many fewer people make it across the intersection on the train compared to how many do it in their cars before you get the green light yourself.
It seems that with our current infrastructure, even if we could reduce the number of car users it would not be by such a margin that it would become safe enough to not have these “traffic breaks”.
https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8
Any staging for construction or emergency services were done with a slow moving truck dropping cones or flares put down in a zipper-like fashion, corralling cars into open lanes or into exits.
I've seen "traffic breaks" done to catch motorcyclists. Completely stops traffic with hundreds and hundreds of cars just to catch one guy speeding - not really worth it imo. Sometimes it's for debris but see plenty of pulling over too...
That new Expo Line tends to be pretty packed at rush hour. But that east/west commute continues to get more crowded overall. There have been ever-more apartments and offices opening up along that line for the past 6+ years, so it's no surprise traffic gets worse too.
A public transit system takes decades of investment to see fruition. This really clicked for me when I was in London and saw a sign saying a transit stop was closed for the next 3 years. That has to be detrimental for the businesses, people renting, and real estate owners who were established there. A business lease averages 3-5 years. So you'd need zoning laws to change, real estate to be built, a business owner willing to commit to 3-5 years, and foot traffic and commerce.
I can't imagine any infrastructure project that would improve traffic--only a recession.
Find a better educated editor, y’all.
Or to put it a different way: everybody wants to arrive to leave at 7:30am and arrive at 8:00am. (you can subtract a few minutes from the leave time for people who live close to work). Anybody working some other schedule (who has a choice of when to work) is doing it because they are avoiding traffic. Thus if transit makes traffic a little better someone on the edge will adjust their schedule to account for that and bring traffic back to where it was.
Until you get to a city where rush hour lasts for 15 minutes transit will not make a measurable difference in time spent in traffic.
> Even as its budget has expanded, the number of people actually using public transport in la has collapsed. Total ridership is down almost a quarter since 2013. Three in four Angelenos travel to work on their own in a car, the highest figure ever.
Train, bus, whatever--if I have to wait longer than eight minutes on average, it's useless.
(And don't even get me started on the geniuses that decided that light rail shouldn't have an LAX terminal.)
Those people will then bear with the hassles of using public transportation for the rest who needs to use their cars. The city might even see a surge in commerce, from people who can go to distant locations via public transit, that they wouldn’t otherwise bother going to by car.
I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood.
I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.
I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
I agree with the appeal, but I've always found the biggest issue with this dream is the need for utter stability. If you quit your job, you might end up with a new one at an office 30 minutes down the highway. If your partner works, it's even harder to keep two commutes low. If you move with each new job, you may have to uproot your kid and send them to a new school.
Compare NYC to LA: LA is driving dominant and has the longer commute time, despite a smaller population than NYC.
Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have.
A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway. I know people who would rather have their fingernails removed without anesthesia than do drive the 405 in rush-hour traffic. I might include myself in that group.
Who gives out building and business permits? Car companies? No. The city, the county, the State. Why do they allow such concentration? OK, maybe concentration makes sense at some level. Why, then, do they allow concentration where they do? One look at the map --particularly if armed with traffic pattern familiarity-- instantly tells you it isn't a good idea to pile-up so many businesses in these areas.
So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design. We could use public transportation but it would take me somewhere in the range of two to three hours longer per day to go almost anywhere and come back. Sorry, my time is far more valuable than that. And, to complete the picture, this means spending somewhere in the range of six hours per day coming and going from the aforementioned tech centers. And then you have to work 8 to 10, if not 12, hours per day.
With regards to the myth of car companies driving or forcing urban development in a place like Los Angeles (really, think about that for a moment), here's the most complete research on Los Angeles mass transport I have ever found:
https://media.metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/pre...
There are an array of interconnected competing interests that drive the evolution of a city or region. For example, good union jobs building highways, suburban home developments and driving buses (one train = one conductor; 100 buses = 100 union jobs), etc.
No, car companies are not that powerful. Los Angeles did this to itself over a very long period of time and for a number of reasons not having much to do with this fable of a car company promoted car culture. The simplest explanation is: It just happened.
This isn't unlike the internet, which just exploded at one point and it is what it is. If we had to design it from scratch today with the benefit of hindsight we would likely change quite a few things. Same with cities. You get what you get, unless someone early enough had enough vision or was naturally restricted in some way to take a more favorable path.
EDIT: I stand corrected. I just checked with Google Maps. There is NO way to take public transport of any kind. Well, at least Google can't solve the routing problem. I think there might be a way if I took something like three buses to get close to where I might be able to reach light rail. Plain and simple, Los Angeles didn't evolve to favor mass transportation.
> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.
> The scholar Sy Adler once wrote, plain and simple, that everything Snell suggested about transit in Los Angeles "was wrong."
That's a reason why mass transit in LA doesn't work now, not how it came to be that way.
You seemed to have stopped reading before I literally said the current problem was zoning and building (aka urban planning). I lived in LA myself and have felt the length of a trip taking the expo line all the way in/out and how it isn't a viable commute. The sprawl of LA renders the bus system nearly useless as well.
> Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have. > So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design.
Urban planning doesn't exist in isolation, it is shaped by those in power at the time, in every city. The motor industry absolutely was a power player that had a vested interest in pushing urban planning towards a vision of a city that meant cars coming in from suburbs instead of dense urban areas where public transit would actually be effective. LA is not alone in this within the US. Of course they weren't the only factor, a good example being white flight hitting cities pretty hard as well. But to say the car industry was not involved is 100% false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
> Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[3] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland.
You are absolutely correct. Sorry. That was dumb.
Yeah, not sure who comes up with the idea of tossing everything within the same 5 square miles (or whatever) and expecting life to be great.
Check out this document I found on LA transportation history, interesting.
https://media.metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/pre...
I love cities for availability of so many things quickly, diverse people and cultures that can only really be accomplished with large numbers of people, large social pools, high arts density, public transit so no need for a car, etc. If you're looking for a large space to live in, a backyard, lots of nature, then most cities won't hit that. Just depends on values but neither is wrong.
Personally, I find you need some kind of minimum time separation from work, otherwise you don't get the sense of separation between work and home life. I had a 5 minute walk from my house as a work commute once, and I much prefer my 30 minute bus ride today, because by the time I get home I'm in "home mode".
The main issue with transit time in the US is that American cities have made intentional policy decisions that result in land uses being far apart and sprawling areas, so a nonstop car trip is the only reasonable option. But everyone making nonstop car trips doesn't scale, which is why the Lincoln and Holland have hour-long waits into the tunnels more often than not.
Graded ramps are high capacity but take up a lot of space since the grade can't be all that steep.
Elevators don't take up a lot of space but are really slow, and have worse reliability issues due to the moving parts.
How many spots on the surface exist that you could just take a chunk out of for either? Most land in existing cities is already being used for buildings or roads or sidewalks.
This metro station being built in Paris is 300,000 cubic meters: http://www.leparisien.fr/val-de-marne-94/villejuif-la-gare-c...
why oh why doesn't that city have light rail…
Texas generally sees public-transport as something for poor people and the state is full of armchair libertarians..
I was at a lecture recently about the things cities do right and wrong when planning public transit, and the speaker used Austin's rail system to illustrate what happens when cities route public transit around political opposition. The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable, and Austin's Red Line is the perfect example: it barely sticks its nose into one side of downtown and then manages to dodge the capitol area, the university, and the dense residential neighborhoods of north Austin. Even the station that seems intended to serve the Domain is actually a ten minute walk from it, twenty minutes to most of the shops and restaurants.
I lived in Austin when they were voting to build the rail line and there was so much opposition that they never would have been able to get funding for any serious development of new tracks. There was a proposal for a while to run trains up Mopac, along the train line in the middle of the highway there, but apparently that wasn't possible because there is too much freight traffic on that line.
> The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable
That actually wasn't the case either. The original proposal was for a roughly $2 billion project, and while it had lots of support in the central city the suburbs voted against it.
In the end they got the proposal passed, but with a drastically reduced budget, and were only able to spend about $100 million to build a rail system. So they just slapped together the red line on existing rail tracks
The number of handicapped and mentally ill / incapacitated users who take public transport is a really big problem when combined with a system's stated need to serve everyone equally.
They take up stopping time, slow the bus down, antagonize other riders, which leads to people not wanting to take the bus, making it seen more and more a transport mode of the dysfunctional. Then depriving it of funding, and into a spiral of decline. On a train or bus, you can't allow 1 person to delay 50 or 200 by multiple minutes during every ride.
People who take public transport (the poor, those with no alternative) are the very people whose time is precious and wasting it with delays is really irresponsible.
There needs to be a way to handle the outlier cases who slow the system down, to maintain confidence and reliability of the system for the bulk majority of passengers.
The reason it's hard to raise this "real problem" without coming off that way is being you are absolutely just being an ableist asshole. Yeah it's a real problem that people who have trouble walking or traveling need to get around. Sorry that's mildly inconvenient. Maybe you should just quit being lazy and walk.
Edit: it also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not ok, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for (curiosity and thoughtful conversation). We ban such accounts, so please stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It always feels like the other person started it and did worse, which is why you need to follow the site guidelines regardless of what the other person does. I don't mean 'you' personally, of course. We all do.
I didn't read your account history closely, so it's possible it wasn't primarily ideological. But to stay on the right site of the guidelines, make sure that you're using this site for intellectual curiosity, not arguing with political enemies. That's important, and when people do that as intended, their comments take on a different quality that is more conducive to curious, thoughtful conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What I wish I had added was, "this is fine, it's worth it, my convenience is not actually important." So, sorry about that.
Even if you're right on the underlying issue, being this much of an asshole on HN poisons what little community we actually have here, and that is more important. If you change your mind and decide you want to use the site in the intended spirit—e.g. with respect for others, even when they're wrong—you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
http://www.ttc.ca/WheelTrans/index.jsp
All regular buses are still wheelchair accessible, but in practice I cannot remember the last time I saw a wheelchair user on a bus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
In the words of Bertrand Russell: "Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area -- effectually cancels out the gain."[a]
See also: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-...
[a] As quoted on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour.
Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.