LA doesn't have a traffic problem. People just have overly high expectations.
As someone who has also lived and commuted in lots of cities around the world, LA just doesn't have that much of a problem.
What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15 miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an hour (I'm using as reference Downtown LA to Santa Monica at 9am, typically takes 35 to 1h 5min according to google maps). Good luck in London, Paris, NYC or Tokyo never mind Delhi or Beijing.
The line made famous by clueless that everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes is completely true, with the caveat being, so long as you don't drive during traffic. This reality is what people are comparing their rush hour commute to, they know that if they are lucky enough to avoid traffic they will get there in 20 minutes, but when they hit bad traffic it takes an hour. (Obviously I'm ignoring stuck on the 405 for 5 hour nightmare stories here, I'm just talking about day to day driving.)
LA is a victim of having too good a car infrastructure, it allows people to make ridiculous commuting decisions and get away with it the majority of the time. Adding more traffic infrastructure just makes the problem worse. People can drive from further away and save money on their housing and they will. They'll also work in places that are further away, the problem is as much about where businesses are located as it is about where people live.
I don't know. I am from europe and visited a few north american cities in the past, including LA. No or bad public transport was the norm but LA was a whole other level. You get out of the airport and there is a endless line of car rental places after each other. That makes it clear to you that you won't get far without a car. Going into the city or out takes you on a ridiculous wide highway which is basically a permanent traffic jam. And in general it seems like a car is a first class citizen in this city. (As you said, so much car infrastructure.) So wierd. If it isn't for work I would not go there ever again I guess.
Yes car is king in LA. In recent years though Lyft/Uber have changed the game a lot. I'd say it's cost effective to not have a car at this stage, especially when you add in the cost of parking.
It depends on what you mean by LA. LA itself actually has fairly decent public transit (by US standards, not NYC, but by nearly every other city) -- the RapidBus busses are actually fairly rapid (they can control stoplights so they always hit green) and the Metro is quite nice where it goes.
I'd rather be anywhere in Seattle or Portland trying to use mass transit rather than in LA, its so spread out due to zoning (requiring abundant, unused parking, and limiting building height) and all of my past experiences there have been piss poor with mass transit in LA. San Diego is slightly better, but it has the same issue as LA with zoning.
I do not think I could reliably take the bus to work in LA or San Diego, whereas in Seattle or Portland I grew up riding it and I know I'll get there reliably.
Interesting that you mention San Diego. I used to live there and actually took the bus to work. But I'd say mass transit is actually better in LA (which I would use while visiting) than SD. In San Diego, busses came generally only once an hour and most stopped running after 7:30pm making it impossible to use them to go somewhere after work. LA buses generally ran all day and every 15-30 minutes. which made them much more convenient.
If it runs less often than every 15 minutes, then its not a major bus line, and your in a suburban slum. Or, possibly your local transit agency has decided lifeline service to the suburban slums/gricklegrass is more important than urban transit, in which case its time to get the management canned.
Serving suburban slums with mass transit will never provide effective transit, nor is it financially feasible for most of these areas to maintain their infrastructure long term, usually they are underwater 5x to 6x in terms of maintenance funds needed to keep the current level of infrastructure afloat.
Richer areas may be able to make it work past the 50 year mark for a few decades more, but poorer areas (Detroit, Flint, and good chunks of Texas) are literally letting their infrastructure fall to bits as the tax base can't support it.
San Diego itself (where I lived, near UCSD) is a "suburban slum" in terms of density. I now live in an actual suburb of Washington DC and it is far more dense than San Diego (as well as being on both the DC Metro and commuter rail lines)
LA is actually very suitable for public transit: it's a city with multiple, reasonably dense urban centers. The greater LA as a whole is also pretty dense, denser than NY metro area. And the city is investing like crazy in new transit infrastructure. Give it 20 years and, at least in the central parts of LA metro, it will be much more convenient to move by transit.
I said greater LA, whereby, to be precise, I meant Los Angeles metro area. The density of LA metro is 2,702.5ppl/km2, compared to 2,053.6ppl/km2 for NY metro. LA metro is denser by a good margin.
NY metro area includes a lot of very sparse suburbs. LA is mildly dense all over.
You're not really looking at the right information there. Your top 5 cities are in single-digit km^2. For comparison, Yorkville, at 1.29 km^2, in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has 60,349 persons/km^2.
Whenever I go to LA, it seems like an urban slum with no significant development of note (above 6 story) in most of LA. Its as though the land is worthless, even Oceanside has taller buildings than Long Beach or Riverside, and Oceanside is literally the middle of nowhere California!
With that low density style of development, your not going to be able to justify a rail line that can move 20k people an hour, as there aren't enough people who can get to a station to feed it.
I blame LA's zoning that keeps it as an urban slum. Dezone the city and you'd see areas around existing mass transit densify over the next decade.
Its an hour from anywhere (about even time wise in my experience, whether heading to San Diego or Long Beach), has a beautiful coastline, but there is a gang war currently raging there and it is a rural small town, and that is how it operates (alongside the county gov't in North County).
Hell, there was a murder last week not a block from where I walked daily when I was there a few weeks ago. Had a window get smashed there too a few months back. IMO, Seattle is safer (just gotta keep the crack heads from breaking my windows in Chinatown :P).
Every large city has car rental places by the airport. That is where they are. It doesn't signify. I'm sure there are people who wouldn't like to visit your home town either.
I travel a lot for work and LA/OC is consistently the only city where I bother to get a rental car. Most places I'd want to go are far away from each other and public transit is often stigmatized and underdeveloped. I went to high school in orange county and the public bus took about an hour and a half to go about 10 miles.
I live in San Francisco and gave my car to my family after a year or so of rarely driving it. Two years later and I can't really justify purchasing another.
London, Paris, NYC and Tokyo all have a comprehensive subway system and light rail covering the extended metro area. For many parts of LA, driving (or taking a bus through terrible traffic) is the only option.
New York's public transit commuters have some of the worst commute times in the country, at 7.5-11 hours/week (45 minutes each way on the low end).
For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1]
Public transit mitigates the environmental and public safety effects of traffic, but the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" problem is much worse with public transit (even rail).
And no, that time is not reusable for reading, working, etc. unless you're so far out on the line (or your system is so "wastefully" overprovisioned) that getting a seat at rush hour is a realistic possibility. It's just as "gone" as it is for drivers in gridlock. So I'd rather lose less time, and that means driving (or making more money to afford higher rent closer to the center).
If we want to design cities for ideological gratification (like SF) anything goes. If we want to design cities for low housing prices and low commute times, well, the worst case for freeway sprawl (LA) is beating the best case for walkable subway utopia (NY) by 20 minutes/day.
I completely disagree about the reusability of time. I live in Boston and my commute on the train is only about 20 minutes, but that's plenty of time to read a few pages or catch up on the news. I see plenty of commuters reading books as well, so I'm definitely not a special case. Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard...
It's not hard, and I see 10-20 people per train car on the R going between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I've seen people standing and reading kindles in body-to-body crammed trains.
I do that every day when commuting to work :). The tram I take is sometimes pretty crammed, and yet we figure out how to use a Kindle in these conditions without being a problem to other passengers.
I must live on another planet, because the idea of "getting in a few pages" while standing in a crowded train is not appealing. I guess it's better than staring into space for 30 minutes, but I'd hardly call it recaptured time. AudioBook in my own car while in traffic is miles more appealing.
I spend about 15 minutes every morning and evening on the tube (London). I usually get a seat, but if not it's a non-sardine style standing journey with tolerable personal space levels.
Apart from the odd occasion when I miss my stop because distracted, reading is perfect for making the journey fly by. I wouldn't want to try anything serious because the block of time is too small, but "mere" fiction is wonderful.
Sometimes I'll play on my phone instead, or just close my eyes and semi-snooze listening to music. If I could park in central London and the traffic was light I still probably wouldn't choose to take my car there and back. Which is a pretty cool place to be imo
It certainly depends. In LA's metro system, they play a constant stream of announcements (often at ear-splitting volume). Even reading is difficult unless you get lucky and the system's broken.
> Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard...
I can read a book or a newspaper while in a tramway or a bus only if I'm standing up, otherwise I get car sickness. I very rarely choose to sit down when using public transport for exactly this reason (strangely enough I can read while sitting down when riding the train).
I took the commenter to mean getting work done. Like, your long commute isn't made up by the fact you can sit and code on the train ... because odds are you can't sit. I actually now live outside Boston and good luck getting a seat on the commuter rail to do real work, unless you live far out on an early stop.
I'm going to have to disagree with the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" comment. I'd rather spend an hour and a half on a bus to work where I can take calls and work from my laptop/read a book/nap or whatever, than spend 45 minutes sitting in and/or dodging traffic where I am getting NOTHING done.
Granted, if the bus is packed it can be difficult or impossible to get anything useful done also.
There's a special circle in hell for people taking calls in a crowded bus. Though to be fair it's several layers above the circle for people taking calls in a bathroom stall.
I'd hardly call my calls intrusive, a simple "What's the problem" followed by an explanation and a cursory "I'm on it." is usually all that the rest of the bus hears. Are you all really that precious?
People shouting in to their phones however... I feel like it's the kind of person with zero self awareness or care for their external, social impact that ruin it for the rest of us :P
I get motion sickness, and have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell.. I'd rather be in my car enjoying music and/or taking calls. Also, I happen to like about a half hour or so of driving, as it is enough distraction to let work thoughts fall away.
A half hour isn't so bad, 45 minutes (more with traffic) both ways was getting pretty stale. As for the motion sickness, I'm certainly not implying the bus is for everyone, just wanted to speak up for those of us who have a role for it to fill in their commute :)
I'd absolutely take sitting for an hour in my own car over sitting on a bus. I get to control my own temperature, volume and smell - plus I get to listen to loads of audiobooks.
I never said it was for everyone but since you mentioned it, public transport where I live very rarely smells but I will agree that it can get too cold under some of the air con vents and having visited New York recently (I'm assuming you're American, apologies if you aren't) I totally understand not wanting to partake in the stank lottery.
As a tall person, I can't drive more than 30 minutes without needing a break for my legs. Stop-and-go traffic is especially hellish because I have to keep my feet on the brakes the whole time. Not a pleasant experience by any means.
Some manufacturers solved this problem as well - in my car(Mercedes) you can tap the brake with your foot when stopped and the car will hold the brakes until you press the accelerator again. So in stop and go traffic you don't have to keep your feet on the brakes. But yeah, I can see being uncomfortable as an issue.
New Yorkers can commute via public transit from much further; I have friends who take NJ transit up to NYC from philly. LA transit is a joke, so commute times naturally bound at its tiny reach.
Or to put it another way, at least you have the option of commutes. I much prefer my 7 hour a week commute from Oakland into SF to a slightly shorter drive. And although the bay bridge is a joke during rush hour, you can still grab the bus and read the whole time.
Good point, but keep in mind that New York's subway is old and antiquated. Inefficient connections, overcrowded lines, and a lack of maintenance are a major part of longer commute times.
Also remember that New York is a set of islands. This already puts it at an efficiency disadvantage.
Berlin and Munich are two cities that come to mind with excellent public transport and great commute times. Most people commute in less than 30 minutes even from less central areas.
> For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1]
This data is from 2014 at best. I would wager the situation is a lot worse now especially given the construction that has happened or is happening (e.g. widening the 405 or the new metro line being built by the airport).
Sure, but travelling on those systems takes a long time. When I lived in London a 1 hour commute was seen as totally normal. That was by train and I had a very direct single overground train to take (Kentish town to Chiswick if I remember).
20 minutes standing on a violently accelerating and decelerating train while strangers' bodies are touching you is much more fatiguing than 2 hours at a standstill in a car (BART is far and away the worst part of every workday, while even the slowest trips to Monterey or Tahoe are a blast, but maybe that's just me).
> BART is far and away the worst part of every workday
BART is loud, rattly, screechy, wobbly, and generally feels like it could fall apart any moment. I wonder if even third world countries are able to produce trains that bad. But in developed parts of the world, trains are quiet and clean and run smoothly.
In general when Americans say they don't like public transit, they mean they don't like American public transit, because it is so badly done in America.
Sure, public transit can be done well. You can also offer guaranteed seating for a price, which changes the experience entirely. I'd love to spend the first and last hour of my workday on an Amtrak-like train (assuming it had reasonable on-time performance).
The proposal here isn't to do public transit better, though. It's to get more people to use the existing, shitty public transit by pricing them out of driving.
Two hours at a standstill makes my head explode. I appreciate the biodiversity here. Also if you can possibly take a transbay bus they are usually better for me than Bart during rush hour. Just as fast and more comfortable.
That's definitely not the London commuter experience. Almost every train is crowded, and there's a very low chance that you'll get to sit on many trains. At some stations it's difficult to even board a train. Plus most trains don't have air conditioning. It's far from comfortable, but most of the time it does the job.
There is a wider variety to the London commuter experience than that experienced by people who don't actually live in London; sorry that you seem to be stuck on what I guess to be Southern, but if you are taking the tube it is not bad and on some lines can be quite pleasant. There is also a great bus system where you can almost always find a seat. London commuting is a dream compared to my prior one-hour each way drive via 85 & 101 in the valley.
Interesting to have that comparison. I've never done a regular drive to work (I currently take the tube). My journey right now is ok, but I've commuted in London for over 10 years, and experienced some very uncomfortable journeys. Try changing lines at a major station, and you experience the worst of it.
>What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15 miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an hour
It takes thirty minutes to go a mile in traffic where I'm at (West LA, near Brentwood and Santa Monica).
Then an hour to go 5 miles in any direction on the 10 or 405.
I just moved to LA (westwood) from Beijing last August. The traffic here is so light in LA compared to Beijing, and the air is really clean as well. In Beijing, it could take me a couple of hours to get home on 4th ring, 3rd ring was worse! And the traffic didn't disappear at 7PM, maybe 8 or 9.
Which direction? I live near you and regularly commute to the South Bay. It usually takes under half an hour to go 20 miles on 405. If you live and work on the wrong traffic pattern (ex. live in South Bay, commute north) then yes, you're going to have a bad time. If you move somewhere where your commute is against traffic then it's really not bad at all.
I think a half hour for 1 mile is definitely the exception not the rule. I could see it happening if there was a major accident blocking all of the lanes of the freeway but thats about it. For surface streets I think traffic dissipates much quicker unless you are talking about a specific choke point like crossing the 405 or getting on the freeway.
Can confirm. Would take me ~15 minutes to go from 405/Santa Monica to go get coffee in Brentwood at that Starbucks that's by all those italy like shops(it's been over a year and half since I moved so spacing on the street)
Delhi is a bad example. I'm not saying Delhi's traffic is any better. You have an alternative to driving. Delhi has some respectable public transit. The Delhi metro is rapidly growing and expanding to cover every facet of the city.
If you want to truly experience terrible traffic please come to Bangalore. It'll take an hour to cover just 5 miles, if you are lucky. One of the absolute worst cities to commute. The public transit is laughable at best. The Bangalore Metro, once it becomes fully operational sometime in March-April 2017 might do some good.
I'll sit in LA traffic for an hour any day, as compared to sitting in Bangalore traffic even for 15 mins. The road rage is unfathomable.
Starting 2011,I used to go to Bangalore once a year. The number of trees cut down, the number of new cars on the road, and the terrific traffic all boggled my mind. Car after car of software engineers, probably perfectly pleasant to work with, would just lay on the horns despite knowing perfectly well that the first car was stopped at a red light. If I ever go back to India, Bangalore is the first city that's off my list of places to live in.
That is just plain stupid, short of being a giant asshole, you don't lay on the horn cause someone respected a light/stop sign. Sounds like a city to avoid.
> The line made famous by clueless that everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes is completely true, with the caveat being, so long as you don't drive during traffic.
Another way to interpret this is: nowhere you want to go is ever < 20 min. from your current location. This includes places like grocery stores or other neighborhood locales because even though they are close, traffic can still make a half-mile commute take 20 min.
If you have a half-mile commute that takes 20 minutes by car and you regularly do that commute by car, I don't think that traffic is the biggest problem in your life.
You can walk a half mile in 20 minutes, never mind biking. Why do people drive that short of distances in CA? Even if it's for groceries, bring a backpack and shop more frequently.
I've lived in LA my whole life, its only been in the last 4 years or so I haven't had to have a car. I live by the redline and just use the train system. With the expo line the reach of the train system is really amazing if you remember what it was like to drive through brutal traffic to get from say hollywood to santa monica.
I think my record was 3.5 hours from Brentwood to Long Beach on a Friday evening. I got a job in OC and then they kept giving me assignments on the west side. (How is there no train parallel to 405?)
I guess that's the difference that the OP isn't accounting for; It's not that downtown is crowded at rush hour - It's like a billion square miles of solid cars from 6am-10am and 1:30pm to 7pm. (The freeway might be OK at lunch time, but streets sure aren't)
The guy talking about Beijing... What a dystopia. How many years until LA is like that?
I don't think so actually. In my experience eastbound 10 backs up about half an hour after westbound 10.
In my experience the morning commute is not as bad as the evening. SM to DT in the evening is easily 2 hours. Heck, it can take an hour to get out of SM. This is because commuting traffic mixes with beach/tourism/other.
The other problem is there is no "rush hour" as the grandparent implies. LA is constantly bad, whereas places like the Bay Area have distinct rush hours.
Measurably false, LA has the worst traffic in the world.
>The average [LA] driver wasted 104 hours sitting in gridlock.... New York motorists spent 89 hours on average...San Francisco...83 hours on average in 2016.
For example, if I moved to NYC I wouldn't even bother buying a car because the traffic is so bad. I'd spend 0 hours in gridlock per year, but the traffic is still terrible.
You then proceed to list only US cities to back up your claim, disregading GP's point that other countries have much, much worse traffic in their biggest cities.
According to Google Maps[0], driving 15 miles through Tokyo (going through several high-traffic areas) seems to take 1h15.
Agreed that if businesses aren't properly spread out, then rush hour traffic will always be bad. What else can you expect if your city effectively shrinks to 1/10th its size every day at 9 AM and 6 PM?
So strange enough that route made no sense (it made a Y). What options did you pick? Switched to the train and it said 36 minutes. Switched back to car and it was 35 minutes (18.5km) and the route had corrected itself. You did something wrong. I lived in Tokyo and the routine in the link you shared is not correct.
I made a multi-point route from Ikebukuro to.... iidabashi, then akihabara, then roppongi area, then down to shinagawa. It was mainly to get the 15 mile requirement while driving through downtown areas.
So it's a half an hour for this start and end point, but that's mainly because they're both on the border of the "city center" (Yamanote line).
I live just outside the center (to the north, Ouji-Kamiya), and my workplace is just outside the city center (to the south, Naka-meguro), and it takes me about an hour door-to-door to cut across the city (50 minutes station to station), with 2 transits.
This is probably the longest possible way to cut across the city in public transportation, but I think you can expect 45 minutes to cut across in general, given transits.
The other problem is that the center is less than 15 miles in diameter, so a bit hard to get the same "feel" as LA for the comparison.
I just got back from my first trip to LA and my impression is the same. I stayed with a relative in Venice, met a friend in Silver Lake, and went downtown the next day. The amount of travel was pretty crazy. I'm from Chicago and traveling 15 miles is pretty much going from the far North Side to the far South Side, a trip that no one would make just for brunch.
An analogous LA day in Chicago feels like it would be brunch in Schaumburg, coffee with a friend in Gary, Indiana and dinner in Winnetka.
Maybe I'm way off, I was only there for three days, but that was what I took away from the trip.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough: my impression of LA is that what is considered a "normal" commute/travel time there is actually quite large and more that what might be considered normal in other cities.
The true solution to LA traffic will never happen. And that solution is buses. But not the current underfunded system that barely limps along. A massive number of buses, like 5x the current number. And combined with tolls for cars to get cars off the road. The large number of buses is critical because it greatly reduces wait time between transfers. It also allows adding express bus lines between major areas. But buses have a really bad reputation in LA. They are trying to build more rail which doesn't have the bad reputation, but that will always have the last mile issue.
Since the bad reputation of buses will likely never go away, it seems rail + uber pool/lyft line might be an alternative. It won't be as good, but could be good enough. I wish there was a company other than uber/lyft which focused on just this first/last mile issue for rail. Or maybe the metro here could just start a service like that themselves. Something like Rail Pool to get people from/to the rail stations. It combines the best of both transports (the rail covers 90% of the trip, the extensive road network is used for the first and last miles).
There's a middle ground between buses and rail: building defacto rail lines by transforming far-left lanes and middle dividers into dedicated bus tracks and semipermanent bus stations.
Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011) highlights the TransMilenio bus system, which serves the city of Bogota. It specifically covers elevating the experience and status of taking the bus by adopting positive aspects of rail systems: covered waiting areas, dedicated transit lanes, more reliable service. Except it's less expensive to implement and more flexible.
Bus themed solutions would definitely be an improvement over LA's status quo.
However a better idea would be to reduce the need to travel long distances by building denser. LA roads are super wide right now, so the easiest way to raise density would be by putting buildings in the middle of the road, leaving a Really Narrow Street (tm) along either side. Ground floors of new buildings could be commercial, upper floors residential. (Some LA roads are so wide we could put 2 or more blocks of Really Narrow Streets in the space consumed by a single car-oriented surface street).
This would reduce housing prices by bringing a crazy amount of inventory online, and would greatly lower maintenance expenses by severely curtailing the number of square feet of publicly-funded roads, traffic lights, signage etc. If we structured this correctly, the city could make a giant pile of money in both land sales and new real estate taxes. Maybe they could then use the surplus money to build a real train system or just reduce taxes. Lastly, there would obviously also be large environmental benefits such as smog reduction, CO2 emission reductions etc.
Yes, I realize this will never happen, and yes, I realize I'm proposing turning LA into old Paris. Old Paris is great, we should copy it more.
By old Paris, I assume you mean the area inside the Peripherique? Apart from Montparnasse Tower the building heights inside the Peripherique are limited to seven floors. This has the same effect as San Fran on restricting the density of the inner city, which means most people can't afford to live there and put up with....long commutes.
I spent three months working in Paris and many of the younger people lived further out and had a 45min - 1hr commute by public transport or driving.
The link you posted talks about narrow streets, this is true in some areas of the city, but Paris also has many wide boulevards.
The traffic during peak hour was pretty bad - the French driving on the footpath meme has some truth to it.
Also old Paris can be like it is because the CBD is located just outside the Peripherique at La Defense.
Bus Rapid Transit expansion is a near-term fix that can happen in a year or two. Rezones and construction to densify a city take longer. I don't think these two solutions are incompatible - they address the problem at different time scales.
Zoning is inherently racist, designed to keep the poor and working class out of areas of the city. It stunts economic growth to boot, and should be done away with entirely.
That being said, the roadways are public property, and should be redesigned to be on a road diet, but building structures in the middle is perhaps not the best idea. Parkifying some sections, expanding others into plazas (while infilling parking to densify) and selling the edges of the roadway to new development so it may be denser would be better approaches.
Not sure where you're going with the "zoning is racist" comment - I'm not talking about redlining here. In places like Seattle, much of the city is still zoned single-family, which is exclusionary to the poor and working class.
The rezones happening in our city boost the building density permitted in most of the city while requiring that some of that extra capacity be dedicated to low-income units. It's net positive for those in need of affordable housing and lets developers build bigger, which hardly hurts the economy.
Dedicating units to low income housing means you've failed to build enough units despite demand, and zoning is likely at fault. Whether it be height caps or parking minimums jacking up the price, they need to go.
Agreed that lack of units is at fault. This kind of mandatory affordable housing is an attempt to mitigate displacement within neighborhoods dealing with gentrification. In my case, this is Seattle, which has no parking minimums, but has suffered from too many single-family zones and not enough dense zoning. The rezones are an attempt to correct these issues.
Seattle needs to dezone MLK, Interbay and other major transit corridors and allow these areas to densify. The transit is there, and the property is either empty parking lots or 1 story slum commercial as the zoning restricts the area to a certain use. These areas should be replaced with dense, mixed use development.
We can have $800 apartments inside the city if we so choose, but with zoning forcing developers to build skinny dual towers and similar, we are forcing the minimum apartment price skywards.
No, the areas will still have restrictive height caps that will stave off tall buildings per that HALA overview doc, we need these areas de-zoned, not rezoned.
I feel like you're letting great be the enemy of good, but we can agree to disagree. With few exceptions, all cities have zoning to keep some consistency and continuity within neighborhoods. Within that frame, I'm happy the city is pursuing "larger than normal" upzones and converting some SF zoning to mixed-use.
Its a temporary bandaid though, that is the issue. With a lack of zoning, like we had not even 100 years ago, we'd have much more core development, and it'd prevent much of the extremely destructive single family home infill that is occurring.
Zoning adds risk to projects and creates an overheated housing market, where the cost of housing is land cost, construction costs, & zoning cost plus whatever the seller can get thanks to the artificially constrained supply.
"They aren't making more land" is entirely due to zoning ensuring most of the city is underdeveloped.
Paris has a set of issues like any major city but when it comes to managing urban density it does it broadly better than LA, for that matter so does New York.
I'm now back in Australia, and despairing because my small city is putting in a light rail solution when a bus rapid transit option would be so much cheaper, given our low ridership. But buses aren't cool. :(
Which city is doing LRT? These can be more cost-effective in the long run at certain ridership levels, plus they're usually a better experience for the passenger.
I don't think it's a bad idea as such, particularly if you consider it planning ahead for projected growth, but there are a lot of much larger cities in Australia that could use the same money more usefully.
Building a BRT in Canberra now would be kind of pointless, since traffic jams are essentially non-existent, making ordinary buses rapid enough already.
When I lived in Canberra a year ago I noticed some backed up traffic in peak time near EPIC - however I realised there was only one car lane in each direction, and one bus lane in each direction.
I don't agree that we should always build more roads if there is traffic, but building a light rail solution when the bottleneck is one congested car lane each way seems a bit unusual.
Is it even still on any rail network? I know it use to be way at the top on the Cityrail posters but a quick check now and it looks like it's been replaced with a coach service.
I'm sitting right next to where they've been drilling on Devonshire street for the past 4 months to move a power cable to central station!
I've taken busses through Sydney for years, and to be honest, I'm really hoping the LRS does what they promise it will, because the bus system here is so bad.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, one-third of buses will still be required when the light rail starts operating in 2019 due to insufficient capacity, rising to 80% of current buses by 2031!
True, but if we built any other sort of infrastructure (water, sewage, electicity) that operated at above over 100% capacity from day one, wouldn't we consider a solution with more capacity?
With the light rail already blowing out as of November last year from $1.6bn to $2.1bn [1] I can't help but think of the merit of heavy rail.
My understanding is heavy rail is very expensive, but how much more? I haven't been able to find a comparison of a heavy rail design on this route.
The general idea (open-access busway) works well, but guided buses specifically do not, since you combine all the disadvantages of rail (expensive, compatible vehicles) with the disadvantages of the bus (much lower capacity, much higher labor requirement, etc.) Brisbane is a much better example of this: http://humantransit.org/2009/05/brisbane-a-short-tour-of-the...
This has been done in the York Region adjacent to metro Toronto. Unfortunately, transit fares are quite high there and usage is low because of infrequent service. The lesson here, I guess, is that if you build it, there really isn't any guarantee that they will come. IE, there's still a cultural shift involved in convincing a car-centric culture to adopt transit en masse.
If you need statistics for the maximum people this system can take, you can ask the municipality of Istanbul. They also can't increase the number of buses because of congestion. Here is a well-known joke about it: http://imgur.com/5ZFMoMZ
I disagree that the reputation of buses is the reason why more people don't take them in LA. Driving in traffic might be bad, but taking a bus in that same traffic is usually even more inconvenient, efficient and less economically viable.
Taking a bus within the same city has never been a problem and these routes are typically pretty full. However, once you're going from one city to another, within LA county, the added time of transfers and making dozens of stops on city streets really starts to add up. A trip that might take 45 minutes by car sitting in traffic could easily take 2+ hours by bus. Nobody who values their time would choose the bus option if they can afford a car.
People don't avoid the bus because many of the passengers are downtrodden. Many of the passengers are downtrodden simply because anyone who isn't chooses the quicker more efficient option of driving.
The buildout of rail and the addition of more express buses I agree will help alleviate a lot of traffic issues. Buses can be the solution to the last mile issues. But like you said, there needs to be a lot more of them to cut down on waiting time.
How often do you take the Big Blue Bus? People really do drive so they do not have to deal with the bums. Those guys can be really violent and smelly some days.
Buses in the LA region have a bad reputation because of other bus passengers. If you ride the bus you might have to sit next to someone who smells bad or plays loud music or acts out in inappropriate ways. That's why everyone who can afford it drives their own car: to be alone. The reputation would improve if they could get more "regular" people riding, but it's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg problem.
Have you seen the central line at rush hour in London? It's horrendous[1]. We are talking >7people per sqm, plus significant waits to even get on the trains. But yet, 100k+s use it every day of all socioeconomic backgrounds. I'd imagine mostly middle class/upper middle class professionals.
Why?
1) Traffic is terrible. It will take 1hr+ to do a journey the central line does in 15-20m.
2) Even if you want to drive, parking costs around $1500/month in the square mile.
3) On top of that, you have the congestion charge for entering central London (£11.50/day - soon to be £25/day if you have a particularly polluting vehicle).
You're looking at about $2000/month if you want to drive, which takes 4x as long and costs about 15x more than the train.
This is what happens when you price effectively for the externalities of traffic congestion. People will switch to transit en masse, and 'loud music' will not be seen as a problem.
[1]this also means there is the political will to build massive transit infrastructure, like crossrail, which will relieve the central line at a cost of around $20bn.
Commuting at rush hour can be pretty awful in just about every major city--New York, London, Paris, Tokyo... I wouldn't call any of those places terrible but, yes, there are a lot of people and it can be pretty mobbed if you try to travel at peak times.
Many cities (including London) have peak fares for transit, trains, etc. The problem is that if you're a typical commuter you probably don't have a lot of control over your schedule. If you're asking why don't companies do this, why would they? If anything, they probably prefer people to be in the office at the same time.
London hasn't adequately priced the externalities of traffic congestion. Air quality is still rather poor by European standards! The more recent changes are well overdue, but still don't go far enough.
Air quality is poor because the UK government gave tax breaks to diesel vehicles in an attempt to cut carbon emissions. But they didn't realize at the time how harmful diesel particulate emissions are.
Oxford Street is packed with black cabs, they always seemed smellier to me. I used to work in Zone 4, and there'd be lines of them outside the station, with engines idling all day, next to the "Buses must switch off engines while on stand" signs.
The new taxi regulations are a welcome improvement [1], but they're weaker than they should be. Why are Euro IV cars still allowed as new taxis? Why is it only voluntary for >10 year old vehicles to be replaced? No doubt it was the best deal Kahn etc could get, but it's disappointing that London/Britain can't do better.
The buses[2] at least, are all Euro 4 standard or better, with the majority Euro 5 or better, i.e. made since 2010.
While I do empathise that people are making a living, I look forward to the day when the black cabs are gone. The amount of pollution they put out is awful.
Pedestrianisation of Oxford Street seems to be inching up the agenda. One of the big political objections is that buses are the only disabled-accessible public transport to that area but once Crossrail is operational that will no longer be true.
The buses still have to go somewhere though - the huge number of routes along Oxford Street is not about serving Oxford Street per se so much as about getting them across town. Honestly I'd be surprised if buses were the big source of pollution though - the fleet is quite modern and many of them are hybrids that deliberately run electric-only through the most polluted areas.
I have sat next to plenty of people who "smell bad or play loud music or act out in inappropriate ways" in London or NYC. The differentiating factor (for me at least) is that those cities provide a legitimate service level with public transit that can get me to almost any place in their city in a reasonable time frame. That allows more "regular" people to forgo cars completely in favor of public transit. In LA it is much more difficult to live without a car and rely totally on public transit. Therefore many have already invested in a car. This makes the choice between using that car over public transit for any individual trip much more slanted in favor of using your car.
Am I horrible person to want higher end trains again (like there used to be)? So I can pay double but have the confidence that my fellow passengers have jobs and families they care about and don't have voices in their head. Does this make me a bad human to want this?
if you seek reassurance that your wants are shared by millions of other people, look out the window of your car at all the other folks who buy and fuel their own, expensive private cars so that they can sit in traffic in LA rather than sit in traffic in buses in LA.
Everyone is selfish to some extent. Your view probably makes you more selfish than people who would be happy to ride a train with every class - but still less selfish than people who insist on a private car. Up to you what level of selfishness makes someone a bad person.
Bad is subjective. Implicitly in this, you want to pay money to avoid seeing the problems of other people instead of seeking to fix them. That might be worth thinking about.
There's no easy fix. Americans pay more than enough money in taxes alone for the problems to be handled better. The issue is political, legal, and cultural; and it's systemic. There are plenty of countries that treat their mentally ill populations more humanely while also maintaining much cleaner and more comfortable public spaces.
I don't see what's wrong in pointing out the obvious. If public transit organizations are prevented from even recognizing the issue because of misguided shaming, they sure as heck won't lure more drivers to public transit. And we can't expect people to fix all the world's problems before we allow them to address their immediate issues.
In my opinion the best long-term solution to poverty and mental health (which are often related) is technology. I could quit my job and dedicate my life to being a social worker or to working for charities, and those would be good and noble things to do. But I firmly believe that an affluent global society where the essentials in life are so cheap that they are essentially (if not literally) free is the best way to fix those problems.
So, I think by being a technology working I am doing my small part in helping, and I don't think not wanting to feel threatened on my commute contradicts that.
I think the long term vision for the future free of these problems is an interesting conversation to have. The challenge inherent in getting there is being aware there is a problem and working towards fixing it.
By advocating for legislators and public administrators to hide the problem from their constituents, you create a situation where "out of sight, out of mind" takes the pressure off the government to solve the problem at all.
This is independent of personal occupation or hobbies. I'm not impugning your goals of solving the problem through your career in technology. It's about enforcing the accountability of the people who have the ability to make the changes to solve the problems at scale.
How is he, personally, going to fix those problems? Those problems are only "fixable" (or ameliorated) by societal action, which basically means you need government social services.
As far as we know, he might vote for candidates who promote such social services at every election. But there's nothing he can do if the politicians don't do what they promise, or other voters vote for politicians who work against this goal.
Problem is, in LA at least, the bus and the car are about the same amount of time. Maybe a smidge longer for the bus. So most people that can afford to will take a car to avoid the cranksters, shockingly rude bus patrons, and the chance of a 'piss bus' on their way home.
A bus anyway in LA is substantially longer than driving. LA traffic is so annoying that a lot of people would likely take the bus if it was faster.
If there were 10x more busses, and I could pay $10 for an all day pass, I'd take the bus every other day. Especially if the higher cost limited those who unfortunately use mass transit as temporary shelter. (And find some alternative temporary no strings attached shelter for them.)
Depending on traffic, the bus is typically about the same, maybe 5 minutes more on the hour long ride I took for 2 years under the 405 everyday. You have to add in the time it takes to find parking for your car, which a bus does not do. Yes, some days are worse, some are better, but for me it was about the same for a hour+ commute.
Something needs to be done about the bus lanes then. Buses should drive in dedicated lanes, that's the whole point. If you are stuck in traffic on a bus then something isn't right.
In LA, there are little to no bus lanes. Trying to introduce them is nonsense. You'd have to rip up the sidewalk too make the room. If you try to convert the street into having just one bus lane each way you have now converted 2/6 lanes into bus lanes, sometimes 2/4 lanes. The car traffic already extends for blocks/miles if you are trying to get onto the 405 from the Westside, bus lanes would extend it to a third to twice as long as it is. People would flat ignore the bus lane too, probably a Beemer driver. And if you think that the cops are going to ticket anyone, you have never driven in LA traffic at rush hour. You could kill 10 people in broad daylight, as long as you did not cause gridlock, and the LAPD could care less. LA is just plain super messed up with traffic from a structural level. New developments can be more dense, and many are. But if your job, your kids' schools, your spouse's job, and your grocery stores are not within walking distance (and are suuuuper stable) then you must have a car as the system currently is. These problems are not going to go away anytime in the next decade to half century.
Which only works if you can reduce traffic by an equivalent amount. Hence the congestion fees. The fee should clear up the lane AND pay for the bus to drive in the lane. Obviously, if there is no (reasonable) tariff that would actually make people not drive or change commute hours, then all you did was make it expensive to live in LA, while the public transit didn't improve. There is always a risk of that in the case of LA. But it might be worth trying at least.
> These problems are not going to go away anytime in the next decade to half century.
I completely agree - I think cities that are structurally messed up like LA have a long way to go, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that can be done. The question is what drives these changes. I think tolls, new zoning regulation, expanded public transit etc all have to be done, and no one action will solve the problem.
The problem is bus lanes are hopelessly inefficient, because there aren't enough buses to fully utilize them. And if you are stuck in traffic in anything then something isn't right.
If you want to spend resources to make buses more attractive, start by eliminating fares.
> The problem is bus lanes are hopelessly inefficient, because there aren't enough buses to fully utilize them
That means there is a lot of capacity to add buses without causing congestion in the bus lanes. That's good.
Obviously it might be tempting to say "look we can't sacrifice one lane of 4 here to buses when cars are jammed bumper to bumper in the other 3 lanes" but that's how bus lanes work. With too few buses, they are just an ineficcient demonstration to the people in cars that they really should be riding the bus.
> If you want to spend resources to make buses more attractive, start by eliminating fares.
If petrol taxes, parking and tolls are high enough, then the buses are already almost free in comparison. Whether it costs $0 or $4 to ride the bus to work shouldn't matter - if parking, gas and tolls are 10 times that for one day of driving. Eliminating fares is one way of making the bus relatively cheaper compared to cars - but there is very little room there. The room to increase the cost of driving is almost infinite and it can be tweaked with gas taxes, congestion fees and parking costs.
Btw: do people in US metro areas usually pay to park at work in inner cities? If metro area parking is a taxable comp then that's also a cost (e.g. if my marginal tax rate is 50% and free parking would be valued at $100 so I'd be taxed $50 per day for that benefit).
> That means there is a lot of capacity to add buses without causing congestion in the bus lanes. That's good.
Only if you actually add the buses, and people actually ride them, neither of which is a given.
> Obviously it might be tempting to say "look we can't sacrifice one lane of 4 here to buses when cars are jammed bumper to bumper in the other 3 lanes" but that's how bus lanes work.
That's the problem.
> With too few buses, they are just an ineficcient demonstration to the people in cars that they really should be riding the bus.
That only works if they can ride the bus.
The problem in most of the US is that you have a big congested highway, and then you get off the highway and drive another five or ten minutes on side streets to your destination.
You can't just tell those people to ride the bus, there aren't regular buses on the side streets because there isn't enough traffic there to justify them. And a bus that only takes you to the edge of the congested highway and then leaves you with an hour walk to your destination is useless.
> Whether it costs $0 or $4 to ride the bus to work shouldn't matter
It does matter to the tune of $4, and eliminating fares increases efficiency because you don't have to pay for a fare collection infrastructure, as opposed to bus lanes which dramatically decrease it because you're paying the full cost of a lane and then wasting most of it.
> if parking, gas and tolls are 10 times that for one day of driving
Stop trying to make driving worse. First you have to make the alternatives to driving better, and as soon as you do that, you don't need anything else.
Nobody actually likes driving to work, the only reason anybody does is that the alternatives are broken and terrible.
In order to make driving as bad as the alternatives without making the alternatives better, you would literally end up causing people and companies to move out of the city to avoid the expense. It's the same logic as arguing that burning down the city will reduce traffic congestion. Even if it does, that doesn't make it a good idea.
> The problem in most of the US is that you have a big congested highway, and then you get off the highway and drive another five or ten minutes on side streets to your destination.
> there aren't regular buses on the side streets because there isn't enough traffic there to justify them
That is the usual problem. But it's usually possible to have freeway buses connect to local buses that drive around an area. Driving around nearly empty buses might seem like a bad idea - but it's the best idea there is when people aren't in a car (because they just jumped off the train or freeway bus). A second solution is having people drive a short distance on local roads from their home to a public transit hub such as a train station, if there is no bus to take them near their homes - The problem is that once you get off a train or freeway bus you might not be at your destination. But that's where public transit can't solve the problem. Zoning and building also needs to change. Without that, people might still have to walk 30 minutes to the office.
The situation where a company puts up an office with a large parking in an "office park" (or whatever it's called) which might be 15 minutes from the closest public transit is the root of the problem. Since people have to use the car to their office anyway, they wouldn't be using the bus even if it existed, as you point out.
So the solutuion has to be in both ends: offices and housing needs to be in denser, more walkable areas, for example. I don't think the traffic problems in LA can be solved without fundamentally changing how and where people live and work.
> But that's where public transit can't solve the problem. Zoning and building also needs to change. Without that, people might still have to walk 30 minutes to the office.
This is my point. There is no amount you can add to the cost of driving that will get people to take a bus to a place the bus doesn't go.
And once you build high density office space next to a train station, people will take the train all on their own without any need to waste resources collecting regressive and privacy-invasive road tolls.
yes. i agree. and transit policing to enforce basic regulations (like not trashing, vandalizing, noise polluting the space) is too expensive. police are just too expensive. so we don't have enough of that sort of regulatory enforcement.
Buses have a bad reputation compared to other modes of transit because they're so easily re-routable. A political whim could shut down a whole bus route in a day, leaving commuters stranded. Rail signals long-term investment, and neighborhoods will grow around rail because they can guarantee it'll be there for years to come.
It's more than that. At a personal level buses offer you all the disadvantages of mass transit with a side benefit of all the disadvantages of automobile travel. The only reason you would take a bus in Los Angeles is because you don't own a car.
Much of that could be fixed with enough investment, but we're talking a huge investment.
Don't forget that rail (usually) has its own right-of-way.A badly planned bus system is never faster than driving; you're stuck in the exact same traffic. Rail (especially subway or Rapid Transit) though, automatically has the benefits of BRT... it doesn't get stuck in traffic.
Also when looking at e.g. Light Rail that goes on the road (like Muni's LRVs) you should consider the socioeconomic factors - the bus is looked down as for poor people in a way rail transit isn'. (Which is why, for instance, the NX is a thing; people wanted and got a specially painted bus while the N was undergoing renovations so they wouldn't be on the "common people" bus.)
Remember - a "regular" bus is never faster than driving.
> Buses have a bad reputation compared to other modes of transit because they're so easily re-routable.
I've always thought that was an advantage for buses. With rail, you have to plan it to go through areas that are not only popular now, but will be popular in 30 years. If some neighborhood suddenly becomes the happening place 10 years from now, you have to build a whole new, expensive line. But with buses, you can just add a new route.
> With rail, you have to plan it to go through areas that are not only popular now, but will be popular in 30 years
It's more like, with rail, you build the line, and if it's a useful line then the neighborhood around it will become popular. In NYC throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, they built rail lines through farmland and the (medium/high density) neighborhoods followed. In LA, we're seeing better rail access revitalize areas like DTLA (or at least contribute to it). It's always a hard sell building rail lines through areas already connected by highways/roads, but if we watch LA over the next few decades we'll see what happens.
If you build a bus route into the middle of somewhere, even a good/reliable one, it probably wont change the neighborhood or stimulate nearly as much development. But hey, now you have a bus line. I used to ride one from my suburban high school in upstate NY into the small city's downtown, and it was fine.
It's an advantage for the transit agency. It's a disincentive for people who wish to structure their daily life around public transit over the long term. Thus, a rail line will usually bump your property value much higher than a bus line.
This article[1] has some info and citations and makes my point a bit more clearly.
> Several scholars have described Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as an attractive modal transit option (R. B. Diaz and Schneck 2000; Levinson et al. 2002; Polzin and Baltes 2002; Vuchic 2002). The attributes favoring BRT are its lower capital cost relative to other modes (such as fixed rail) (US GAO 2001) as well as its implementation and operational flexibility (Jarzab, Lightbody, and Maeda 2002).
> There is limited evidence about the relationship between land values and BRT (Rodriguez and Targa 2004; Johnson 2003). Similarly, traditional bus service is rarely considered when discussing the impact of transit on housing costs. In their review of the literature, Hess and Almeida (2007, p. 1043) explain that “…property values near bus routes have only modest gains, if any, from transit proximity, because most bus routes lack the permanence of fixed infrastructure.”
...
> In North America, the relationship between accessibility to BRT and land values is only examined by a handful of studies focusing on bus priority treatments (high-occupancy vehicle (HOV)-bus lanes) and transit ways. In an early study, (Knight and Trygg 1977) examined HOV-bus lanes in Washington, DC, California, Seattle, and Florida. They relied on previously published reports, interviews, aerial photographs, and other secondary sources available at the time to conclude that exclusive bus lanes incorporated into highways appear to have no impact on either residential or commercial development. A later study by Mullins, Washington, and Stokes (1990) found that the BRT in Ottawa, Canada, appeared to have some effect on land development in areas surrounding stations. A review of studies from Houston, Texas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and San Francisco, California conducted by Rodriguez and Targa (2004), revealed that bus transit had no impact on either residential or commercial development. A hedonic analysis applied to Los Angeles’s BRT, one year after its initiation, did not detect any evidence of benefits to nearby multi-family parcels (Cervero and Duncan 2002a). Recent work by a UCLA student, however, found that Los Angeles’ Orange Line (BRT) had an effect on the neighborhood real estate market. In between 2000 and 2012, areas near the Orange Line (BRT) fixed-guideway saw median rent increase by 25% compared to 15% in the control area, renter occupied units increased by 9% compared to 0% in the control area, and home value increase by 47% compared to 34% in the control area (Brown 2014). No significant differences in median income or household vehicle ownership were found, however other demographic characteristics (growth, education, and race) were found to significantly change.
> Rodriquez and Targa (2004) suggest that these mixed results could be partially explained by the BRT’s lack of fixed guideways, as well as the cross-sectional research design and the newness of the service. Indeed, a study of a 25-year old bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Pittsburgh found a significant price premium for homes selling near the BRT line (Perk and Catala 2009). The implication is that where a BRT system can bring lasting improvements in accessibility on par with a fixed rail transit system housing markets may respond accordingly.
That land values don't increase as much near impermanent infrastructure isn't surprising; this still doesn't explain why people would use it less while it's there. And in any case, this data doesn't distinguish between your theory and the theory that buses are less desirable for other reasons.
I should've prefaced my post with "from an urban planner or potential [permanent] resident's perspective." The opinions of current residents are likely formed by the set of different reasons mentioned in other posts.
Any data to back up that theory? The alternative theory that rail drives neighbourhood growth and has better long-term political safety is more plausible to me.
Not that I disagree but it's no less backed up than the theory you support.
Do you have any experience with busses? Was that experience "great"? For example, have you lived in Hong Kong, which I understand is a Bus city? I live in Prague, and the trams are great. It is a 100% better experience than driving. Smooth, quiet, usually plenty of leg room. Doesn't smell. The busses, however, are hell. That low key vibration of the motor, the smell of the gass, the cramped spaces, the steps, all add up to a horrible experience.
I think a lot of people in the US associate mass transit with sociallism and associate socialism with "everyone should live like the dirt poor live". But come to Prague and ride the trams, and you will find that mass transit can be a luxury item.
> I think a lot of people in the US associate mass transit with sociallism and associate soccialism with "everyone should live like the dirt poor live".
No, it's because busses in the US are actually full of dirt poor people. I know it sounds cruel, but given the choice, most Americans would rather drive than sit next to dirty, smelly homeless people and also have to listen to shouting matches, sit in close proximity to fist fights, etc. Oh, and did I mention that they're rarely on time? Busses in the US are legitimately not a pleasant experience, it's really that simple.
I'm not saying they are. I am simply giving an example, Prague, where things are very different. Here, you don't have to suffer to be eco, you choose to go by tram because it is legitimately better.
I've had some good bus experiences, in Mexico City and KunMing I've ridden in nice clean busses with dedicated lanes and raised platforms for easy entry/exit[1]. It's near as nice as rail and from what I understand quite a bit cheaper to build
It may be cheeper to build, though that is questionable. It is cheeper only because it takes advantage of existing roadway, but if you factor in the root cost of all of the existing infrastructure it uses than there's not much of a difference in cost between steel+gravel and concrete is there?
In any case, over time the price of the busses goes up steeply. You need to replace a bus after 20 years, where-as trams last 50-60 years. Prague is replacing their Tatra T3 [1] trams from the 60s, not because they are worn out (they still run like new) but because they are more dangerous in accidents for the driver (they have no crumple zone and worse brakes) and because they don't have wheel chair access. Other, poorer cities have even older trams that still run fine. When they upgrade, those old machines aren't scrapped, but are sold to more eastern ex-soviet contries as working vehicles and actually put into service there. When was the last time you road in a 50 year old bus?
> there's not much of a difference in cost between steel+gravel and concrete is there?
There is a difference, because a pure asphalt track is easy to lay, and especially easy to rework.
Train tracks, especially those running in asphalt (shared road between cars and trams), have a host of problems:
1) It's really expensive to build them - trains weigh a LOT and the rails need adequate foundations
2) It's really expensive to maintain them - you can't just go with a miller over the asphalt, because there are, obviously, the rails themselves but also delicate wiring for positioning/switch controls, signalling etc.; also, in most cases there are no alternate routes, which means you have two weeks of no service at all where a bus might just be re-routed one parallel street away.
3) It's really expensive to keep them operational: unlike with rised rails, street-level sunk rails act as sinks for everything from ordinary dirt from leaves to stones idiots place in the rail or stuff that falls into the rail from improperly secured vehicles.
4) They're friggin' dangerous hazards for bicyclists! I can't count the number of falls and crashes I had due to being forced to escape into a sunken rail.
5) Idiots with huge trucks or who are not careful when operating stuff like lifters or excavators near the overhead wiring. Happens surprisingly often that someone accidentally damages or destroys overhead wiring.
One real problem with Pragues tram system though, is that we use island stops (stops that are in the middle of the street, so you have to cross a lane to get to the tram stop). You can see why this is bad in this map of pedestrian collisions and deaths https://samizdat.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?a... The blue and yellow bubbles are pedestrian injuries, the red ones deaths. You see that along the grey lines (tram lines) there are clumps of injuries and deaths, those are where the tram stops are. So far, we haven't found a great way to solve this, except to put fencing up to discourage people from jumping out into the street to catch the tram...
On 2) you say "which means you have two weeks of no service at all". Well in Prague, we just use busses when the tram line is being repaired. Its like a downgrade. "Oh, tracks are being worked on, I'll have to take the x6 bus rather than the 6 tram." It sucks, but its far better than using busses all the time ;). And of course, you might think that it is wastefull to have a host of busses just waiting around to be turned into "replacement lines" for metro and tram and other busses that break down, but it is really usefull. And when there is a big event at the convention center at the edge of the city, those busses get used then too. So its not wasteful at all.
3) I know that they have to sweep the tracks, (Modern trams actually have brushes installed in the front) but when you have tram lines with a tram comming through once every two minutes at rush hour, carying thousands of people in a day it hardly seems like a large expense to have an old man in red overalls come in at night sometimes an polish and sweep out the tracks.
4) I know, this sucks. Especially when there is an illegally parked car, forcing you to lane change.
> Well in Prague, we just use busses when the tram line is being repaired. Its like a downgrade.
Yeah, we do that in Munich too, but it sucks real hard. Especially when the replacement buses are also in the same traffic jam created by the construction site... and all the replacement buses cost big money these days, given that there are nowhere near enough bus drivers to serve the demand.
ad 3) Yeah of course, but it's still a huge cost factor ;)
ad 4) I know someone who carries self-made stickers with penis stencils. He places these on idiot car owners' cars.
We made paper stickers reminding people that they are illegally parked and we place them on the wind sheild. If it rains, then the person will spend a good 15 minutes getting the gunk off.
Taken the bus occasionally in Melbourne and Brisbane. Brisbane went hard core for buses even giving them separate roads/overpasses to take in some sections and it was very efficient and also heavily used. Melbourne is more mixed and the trains and trams are definitely used more than buses. The bus system wasn't scary, but it is underutilized in the suburbs and just as crowded in the inner city as other options. But with much longer wait times.
The biggest problem with mass transit in most of the US isn't "socialism" it's that everything is so spread out that it's impossible to make it economical. The attitude is kind of a way to help people ignore the fact that alot of people can't drive and have trouble getting around to where they need to go with the way the cities are set up. I think the best solution I've seen is for the city to contract for minibuses or other transport to help pickup some of the people. But that only works because they are often disabled and get special funding to get transport that can pick them up.
I agree and dissagree. I lived in Kirkland(outside of Seattle) and spent time in LA. LA would really benefit from a real tram system. It is not too spread out for it, and it is a great candidate, because so much of it is just shitty strip mall and parking lot, that simply bulldozing half the city and building something decent along with a tram line would be a good idea. Kirkland, not so much. Too much suburb, you are right. But despite the spread of many american cities, there is still a hole lot of urban core, which is desparately lacking any sort of real mass transport infrastructure, and too often I hear eletist sentiments as being the reason not to build real infrastructure.
Ironically, a kind of anticapitalism, unionism, plays a big role in this. Unions in the construction industry have played a big role in making prices in the US higher than they should be, though even this cannot be the entire explanation. Prague has its corruption, I like to think of it as being a %20 tax on all government projects, but still we manage to do things for prices that are reasonable, even within the context of our economy. And the price of concrete aint any cheeper here than it is anywhere else, and the Czech Republic is far less wealthy than America. Somehow, America has learned to oscify itself to the point where it is less capable of building real infrastructure than the average eastern european deap state protodemocracy, it is really strange.
I used to code on a bus-commute in germany, i honestly must say i liked it more then driving around in a car. Its quiet, you can focus, and its the perfect length to create a feature.
The problem with buses is they attract those who are no longer allowed to drive (alcoholics, drug-addicts) - but overall.
Kinda related to what you talk about, one problem is that lots of buses are just old. In Massachusetts, over the past year or so the MBTA has been rolling out new buses that are comfortable, smoother, rather quiet, and more energy efficient than the older buses. I'd actually argue that our bus system is far better than our train system.
I wonder if it's a feedback loop sort of issue. The buses are old and crummy -> people avoid the bus -> bus modernization is deprioritized -> buses get older and crummier. If a city invests in buses that don't feel like an afterthought, then perhaps more people would use them.
Yeah, I hear you, and agree. My point is more just that buses nowadays don't have to be a miserable experience if cities are willing/able to pay for it.
There are wayyyyy too many problems with public transportation in the US that stem from decades of car-centric urban and suburban growth. It seems like nobody wants to pay for public transit development and maintenance around here.
Sorry, but what makes a tram better than a bus? I'm genuinely curious.
As far as I can tell they're much more expensive per mile, have difficulty on hills, and make the street more dangerous for cyclists. The only advantage trams seem to have is that they don't have the stigma of busses.
There are several reasons. I'll devide them into to groups.
Fundamental reasons:
1) The tram is a heavy vehicle running on rails and uses heavy spring shocks with one degree of freedom of movement (to tilt side to side). The bus is a light vehical with softer shock springs which have 360 degrees of freedom of movement. That is, that the bus can shake up/down, side to side, forwards/backwards and anything inbetween. This is the biggest difference. It is much more comfortable to be in a stable vehicle than one that rocks like a boat. You can read much more easilly on a tram than on a bus.
2) Related to the first reason, the tram has no rocking caused by breaking, as the forward/backwards up/down rocking motions are impossible due to the restriction of movement caused by the rails and the weight of the vehicle
3) The fact that the wheels are hard means that it is much more efficient.
4) Tram cars are significantly wider than busses and therefore have much more comfortable inside spaces.
5) Since the rails are always in the same place, you can design a tram with almost no gap between the platform and the floor of the tram, so that a person in a wheel chair/with a stroller can ride in without any ramp!!!!
6) Due to the heavy build of the tram, and the fact that there is no internal combustion engine or batteries that would wear out, trams last cca 3x longer than busses. This will always be the case. It is like the difference in lifespan between a brick house and one made of mud.
7) The wheel wells of the tram are shorter, making for a much more open, less awquard space.
8) Due to the width, stability, and length of the tram, it is possible to walk to the other side of a non-crouded tram to get away from an alcholic person.
Non-fundamental reasons:
1) Electric is better than deisel. Deisel busses are noisy, vibrate, and make toxic fumes which give many people nausia. (this isn't fundamental to busses, you can have trolley busses, or electric ones)
2) Trams have much larger windows/more window space making for a less claustrophobic ride.
3) Trams use a cellphone based tracking software for determining which stop they are at, which makes for very very smooth audio indications of where you are. The anouncment system on busses is manually controlled and sometimes the bus driver forgets to announce a stop. We even have digital reader boards with the amount of time it will take the tram to arrive, and those numbers are accurate. For busses this system also exists, but it is worse.
4) On rainy days, the bus comming into the bus stop may splash you with mud, trams never do that.
5) The trams have closed cabins for the drivers, meaning that stupid tourists cannot be tempted to ask the drivers for directions, thus delaying the journey and causing everyone stress.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! I definitely agree that trams offer a better rider experience.
However, I'd argue that these benefits are outweighed by their prohibitive cost. According to the American Public Transportation Association it's roughly $30-$70m per mile, as opposed to $3-$30m per mile for busses. For example, with the $133m spent on Cincinnati's 3.6 mile tram line, you could have purchased about 300 electric busses.
Additionally, trams in the U.S. usually end up running in lanes that are also occupied by traffic, which means that they have to start/stop much more frequently and can't achieve the speed/efficiency that many european trams can.
There are several reasons. I'll devide them into to groups.
Fundamental reasons:
1) The tram is a heavy vehicle running on rails and uses heavy spring shocks with one degree of freedom of movement (to tilt side to side). The bus is a light vehical with softer shock springs which have 360 degrees of freedom of movement. That is, that the bus can shake up/down, side to side, forwards/backwards and anything inbetween. This is the biggest difference. It is much more comfortable to be in a stable vehicle than one that rocks like a boat. You can read much more easilly on a tram than on a bus.
2) Related to the first reason, the tram has no rocking caused by breaking, as the forward/backwards up/down rocking motions are impossible due to the restriction of movement caused by the rails and the weight of the vehicle
3) The fact that the wheels are hard means that it is much more efficient.
4) Tram cars are significantly wider than busses and therefore have much more comfortable inside spaces.
5) Since the rails are always in the same place, you can design a tram with almost no gap between the platform and the floor of the tram, so that a person in a wheel chair/with a stroller can ride in without any ramp!!!!
6) Due to the heavy build of the tram, and the fact that there is no internal combustion engine or batteries that would wear out, trams last cca 3x longer than busses. This will always be the case. It is like the difference in lifespan between a brick house and one made of mud.
7) The wheel wells of the tram are shorter, making for a much more open, less awquard space.
8) Due to the width, stability, and length of the tram, it is possible to walk to the other side of a non-crouded tram to get away from an alcholic person.
Non-fundamental reasons:
1) Electric is better than deisel. Deisel busses are noisy, vibrate, and make toxic fumes which give many people nausia. (this isn't fundamental to busses, you can have trolley busses, or electric ones)
2) Trams have much larger windows/more window space making for a less claustrophobic ride.
3) Trams use a cellphone based tracking software for determining which stop they are at, which makes for very very smooth audio indications of where you are. The anouncment system on busses is manually controlled and sometimes the bus driver forgets to announce a stop. We even have digital reader boards with the amount of time it will take the tram to arrive, and those numbers are accurate. For busses this system also exists, but it is worse.
4) On rainy days, the bus comming into the bus stop may splash you with mud, trams never do that.
5) The trams have closed cabins for the drivers, meaning that stupid tourists cannot be tempted to ask the drivers for directions, thus delaying the journey and causing everyone stress.
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I think you live in a different Prague than I do, or you don't travel near the city centre often. When I tried to use trams in summer, they were full of people, so much I couldn't move, smelling and incredibly hot. I was very happy when my car finally got fixed. Yes, there are a lot of problems with driving (parking, one-way roads, ...), but it's much more comfortable, so much, that the discomfort caused by traffic is next to none.
That is true only for heavy rail (commuter trains). But light rail (trams, or perhaps called streetcars in American English) can have stops as often as buses.
> But light rail (trams, or perhaps called streetcars in American English) can have stops as often as buses.
I have a hard time justifying trams/streetcars over buses. They largely seem equivalent except that buses are more flexible since they're not bound to a set of tracks. For example, if a car crash or other obstacle blocks the tram tracks, the trams have to wait for the obstacle to be cleared. A bus can just go around it.
Buses can (and do, in some places) carry transponders to give them signal priority, just like trams. They can even be given dedicated lanes. And trams don't really carry more passengers per square meter than buses do. The one advantage trams have that I can see is that they avoid the weird cultural stigma that buses tend to carry here in the US.
If you have less than 1000-1500 passengers per hour, buses can work fine. You cannot stuff much more than 100 passenger per bus, and you cannot run buses much more frequently than once per 5 minutes, otherwise the buses tend to cluster and not stay on schedule. (The first bus stops at all stops to pick up all passengers, and the next bus gets less passengers and starts to catch up on the first.)
You can stuff 200-300 passengers into a tram, and a single driver can also drive two linked units, so we're up to 500 passengers. So a single line with 5 minutes intervals can serve up to 6000 passengers per hour.
Trams are more comfortable for the passenger, as the ride is smoother. It's on rails, so no bumps, and acceleration/deceleration generally doesn't have abrupt jerks.
On the other hand, buses are far more flexible; a minor glitch like an accident or someone unloading their moving goods stops a tram on the street totally, because it absolutely doesn't go round any obstacle. Buses do.
It's very small still, of course, but seems to progress without major problems. (They make a point about the exceptional arrangement for the risky investment, i.e. the municipal company bought and operates these buses themselves; normally they just organize the procurement of transport services from private companies who own the buses and hire drivers.)
I would say building out a comprehensive subway/commuter rail network will make a much bigger difference. Being able to park your car at the nearest suburban station's parking garage and taking the train from there will make it so that cars/buses are only a "last mile" mode of transport.
Not to mention, trains are a way more space efficient way to move people, and aren't at the mercy of traffic jams caused by car accidents, construction, and bottlenecks. Granted, this hasn't completely solved the traffic problem in the NYC metro area, but without it, traffic would be a nightmare, and having the option to bypass it is great.
The fact that I can take a 15 min walk to my suburban town's train station, take it to Jamaica, Queens, transfer to the Airtrain and arrive at JFK airport without ever stepping foot in a car is something every city needs. Also, buses are notoriously unreliable schedule-wise, and people dont like having to wait in bad weather (not as much of a problem in LA) for it to arrive.
I really like that idea. The last mile issue in LA really is a problem, trying to cross streets is like playing Frogger and that would help a lot.
I actually rode the buses in LA for about 2 years (Westside to UCLA). Adding more buses, and I mean a LOT more buses (10x), may actually work. However, the issue with LA buses is not the frequency or the timing of transfers, it is the city and the people themselves. LA is not meant for buses, it is meant for cars. That means you'll have to tear up a lot of road-way to get the proper street design for 10x the buses. Anyone that has lived in LA knows that major road construction is nearly unending and yet is horrific at the same time. Doing that kind of work will not be just 'normal' expensive, but you'll also have to pay for the massive corruption issues along with it. There exists no political willpower to do so and it is unlikely to come about anytime soon as voter participation in LA is abysmal (1 voter for ~50k residents).
Also, have you ridden the Big Blue Bus on an August Tuesday in 90+ degree heat at 5 pm? You will discover the surprisingly rank nature of the human body's ability to produce truly nauseous smells and leave them on the seats. The bums man, they are just plain smelly and stabby and awful. The bums prevent most unaccompanied women from even considering taking the bus, they really are that bad. LAPD gives exactly 0 shits about the bums as long as they don't actually try to kill you. You ever make the mistake of getting onto a piss bus? Whatever is left of that dying human being in the far back seat just makes for horrific smells that will not come out of your clothes, you really have to throw them out. I learned that lesson only once. I was not late to work, but I should have been. You just have to skip that bus and be an hour late or come in smelling of death itself.
So most single women just take their cars. It is a far safer way to get about town.
> have you ridden the Big Blue Bus on an August Tuesday in 90+ degree heat at 5 pm?
So the buses in LA don't have air conditioning?
> The bums
It seems a bit uneconomical, if a population 10k smelly homeless prevents a population of 1+ million people getting to their work comfortably and efficiently.
> It seems a bit uneconomical, if a population 10k smelly homeless prevents a population of 1+ million people getting to their work comfortably and efficiently.
It is indeed. Clearly something has broken down somewhere. But do you have any proposal for a politically-acceptable way to resolve it?
You are right. I messed up here. The voter turn out in LA is typically ~10% of the population. Garcetti got ~6% of the population to vote for him in '13.
100% agreed. Coming to LA from Toronto, the biggest disappointment was the bus frequency. Toronto transit has some big problems, but on most routes you can get a transfer within 5-10 minutes.
When you need to transfer on the LA Metro, it's normal to wait up to half an hour for the connecting bus. If you have to transfer multiple times, it's not feasible to make that part of your daily routine so you are forced to take your car.
That'd be ideal... But while the data says "more public transport", ideology is pushing the other way, and nowadays I feel like people adhere more to ideology than data.
I think there's some good signs here in LA. People know the situation is bad and we need more public transport. During the last election, a new measure passed to increase sales tax to fund more rail. Tax measures here require 66% to pass and it's kind of incredible that many people want to increase their taxes. It shows how dire the situation is and people here recognize it.
The direction for the metro here is massive investment in more rail. But to really fully utilize that, they need to fix the first/last mile issue. They are trying with bike sharing, more dense housing, etc. But those are too slow and just don't have enough impact. LA doesn't have to be a car city, but it will always be a road city. We need to work on connecting that road network to the rail. Buses could've been the solution, but won't happen due to bad reputation. Uber/Lyft could try with their car pooling service, but there's a conflict of interest working with rail because it decreases revenue for them since rail would take a big chunk of the distance traveled. Short distance carpooling is a potential good solution and I hope some startup here or the metro does something about this. This kind of first/last mile carpool + rail solution also has potential in other cities that are investing in rail (like Seattle, Denver, etc.). If it works well, it could become the model for transportation in US cities.
Well, buses and rail attack the congestion problem on the demand side, while tolls attack the problem on the supply side. So they're really complementary.
There's not a lot of point to instituting tolls unless you have an viable alternative for people to use, which isn't the case in Southern California. Well, unless the point is to raise money.
That is a very interesting point and it sounds like a similar situation occurs in parts of Texas. Without an efficient urban grid (walkable, cycleable), or a practical car alternative, like rail, buses, the outcome may be you can set prices however high, but people will still pay because there is no other option.
I would still argue that prices should be set however high whereas to eliminate congestion, even it is seems "too high", simply because there is a limit to how many lanes can be constructed and no amount of lanes can eliminate congestion, and then we must allow market forces to occur such that development and lifestyle patterns change, which takes time.
You might like Sao Paulo. Its like LA but smelly-er and full of buses. In Sao Paulo there's no need to hurry to hop on your bus before it leaves the stop because another one will arrive immediately. Same deal with the metro. Trains arrive and depart every 90 seconds during rush hour.
Do an image search for tráfego em sao paulo site:.br if you're curious how that's working out for them.
This applies only to more or less "central" locations. Buses to the city outskirts are still infrequent and, during rush hour, will still be stuck in traffic.
Metro is good, but it is nowhere near 90 seconds - specially with the long stops in between stations.
Those aren't mutually exclusive: tolls are a way to force a lot of people to economize at once, which can create the critical mass needed for a functioning bus ecosystem, which could even include private buses.
Yes, tolls make only sense when there is an alternative to driving. When people have no other choice than to drive nothing will change with tolls. Tolls are basically an artificial added cost to driving. However ideally the public transport system should be designed in such a superior way that people would switch without artificial punishment for driving.
If that's so, then fares on public transport are basically an "artificial added cost".
Roads are enormously expensive both for construction and maintenance, and in most places AFAIK fuel taxes and vehicle registrations do not cover that cost, so they are being subsidised by the general taxpayer.
I didn't meant the actual cost (as in Dollars) for the infrastructure but the associated disincentive. Collecting toll would certainly increase tax justice by relieving the general taxpayer. But that wouldn't solve the traffic problem because people will still need to travel somehow.
As a frequent LA bus rider, I agree that the biggest problem is simply the infrequency of service. I can deal with the ride being bumpy, or sitting next to crazy people on occasion. Even the slowness and frequent stops don't bother me. When you subtract time for parking, your trip takes not much longer than driving, especially when traffic is slow.
But 20 minutes between each bus during rush hour is just indefensible. It's not a viable transit system, it's just a last ditch option. When two buses get bunched together, now it's suddenly 40 minutes. Throw in a transfer and things can get ridiculous.
The Red Line train comes every 13 minutes but at least it actually comes when it says it will (most of the time). The bus is scheduled to come every 15-20 but in practice it's more like two come five minutes apart and then you wait 25-30 for the next one.
> They are trying to build more rail which doesn't have the bad reputation, but that will always have the last mile issue.
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and hardly ever have to take the bus to get anywhere. In the city center, there is usually a subway or S-Bahn station within 500m.
Buses are the worst form of public transport due to low capacity, low efficiency and large exposure to delays from individual transport (no personal car can hold up rail) with the resulting scheduling issues and low customer satisfaction.
Buses are one of those solutions that look great on paper. Proponents of buses point to flexibility of routing, lack of new infrastructure installation, cost, etc. It's very difficult to argue with any of their points.
And yet, bus transit is invariably a dismal experience, simply the worst. I think it's because a bus gives you the worst of both worlds — the stop and go headaches of personal automobiles, and the forced interaction with strangers on trains. (This isn't a real problem on a train, however, because one can usually simply walk away from an unwanted interaction.)
This interpretation assumes that buses don't have their own right-of-way. Give buses their own lane, and suddenly they start looking like very cheap, quick-to-implement light-rail substitutes...
No, they still have terrible capacity. Does nobody do basic math anymore?
And having bus lanes, which can still be blocked, does not make them cheap light-rail. You also need to upgrade all lights at intersections to allow the bus to override the current signal.
I'm not sure I understand the "terrible capacity" argument. An articulated bus can seat 50-60 people without standing passengers. Are you suggesting that a light rail train holds more? This seems like a solvable problem - just run buses at twice the frequency, no? The point is the right-of-way prevents them from getting stuck in traffic without having to lay expensive off-grade track.
Until some bum sits on the rails lines just on the other side of where it crosses the surface road throwing god-knows-what about at 4:30pm as they have taken to recently at the Bundy crossing. This causes massive gridlock and has made the westside much worse in terms of traffic since the light-rail went in.
I had envisioned a van-based system for the last-mile rail problem. It's a more comfortable ride than a bus, and since you're focusing on short routes you should have pretty low latency with the vans, which fixes the "transfer issue" where transferring between two transit lines can add 15+ minutes to your commute. Van drivers are significantly cheaper than bus drivers, since a normal drivers' license can be used for up to 15 passengers in most states (you probably still want to vet them).
I've been semi-expecting to see UberVAN pop up actually. It doesn't seem like the kind of idea strange enough that nobody else would think of it.
> And that solution is buses. But not the current underfunded system that barely limps along
That's why a good toll system should fund the public transit. The higher you set the tolls, the more buses you can offer to those who find it too expensive.
If you think that money from tolls is actually going to go to buses and improved public transit and not just into some Bel-Air businessman's brother's pocket, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
I know things are done differently in America, but the profit from London's congestion charge is invested in public transport by law. For at least the first few years, it was entirely spent on improvements to buses -- giving much more capacity, and faster journeys due to the reduced congestion.
This is also true here, but someone has to build or design those improvements to buses. The contract will typically go to someone's brother's shell company or something, especially in California. The approach to the Golden Gate Bridge cost a million dollars per foot of road. Yes, seismic this-and-that, environmental reports, noise studies, etc, but the corruption is just rampant in Cali.
Won't happen in the EU. It's forbidden for any public entity to give a contract such as this one without tendering it. Certainly not a perfect system, but it counteracts corruption pretty well.
At once the singularly most politically and practically incorrect assessment of LA traffic issues. How did this get top comment?
I'll agree with you in one key way: it's less ridiculous than Elon Musk's obsession with tunnels. It's a lot less ridiculous than Nolan Bushnell's obsession with self driving cars. Both fundamentally don't get how far away those solutions are from meaningful implementation. More busses, critically, could be added tomorrow, if we wanted to.
Yet others have already pointed out that buses have a bad reputation. It's only partly because of poor performance like you say. I'll put it more plainly: Los Angeles is a deeply racially segregated city, in ways that the bourgeois in California rarely admit. It's a travesty but it's also reality.
And some people characterize bus reputation as a chicken and egg problem: good riders improve the reputation, but they won't get on board when the reputation is bad. Those commenters don't understand how deeply entrenched racial segregation is in Los Angeles and how naive they sound. They're comparing Los Angeles to cities like London and New York, with huge metro systems, repeating popular whataboutist memes. They don't realize that London and New York have merely had more time to develop segregation underground.
Busses have fundamental inefficiencies, like slow patrons, that are basically uncorrelated with the number of busses on the road. And like any transport, capacity tends to get filled. And then we've all seen simulations of how bus transport falls apart due to one vehicle on a line getting behind—called bunching up[1].
I wrote to LA Dept. of Transportation years ago[2], and they characterized the problem then (and now) as fundamentally political: "Such issues require legislation." California and Los Angeles have voting systems that are good for solving many kinds of issues, but transportation is not one of them.
In my opinion, increasing licensing requirements, like disqualifying many current drivers from using freeways or vehicles entirely, would at least reduce deaths on the road. [3, 4, 5] Fewer accidents, as a side effect, could reduce congestion.
Buses just make it easier for you to be uncomfortable. We need to eliminate the need for long commutes not make long commutes more sustainable. We should not be spending 10+ hours a week just on commuting.
This is just a band-aid. Same with adding buses, lanes, trains, etc. When something goes wrong in software we usually try to resolve it by finding a root cause.
There are a lot of cars on the roads. Why?
People live far away from their work. Why?
All the office buildings are in one central place. Why?
... Etc.
The solutions to the root causes, whatever they are, are, unfortunately, a lot more complex and expensive than adding lanes or tolls. However, knowing the root cause allows us to implement policies and laws that can incentivize behaviors to address the root cause in the long term.
For example, change zoning laws for a better mix of commercial and residential within smaller areas.
Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to prefer jobs closer to their home. Tolls on major highways rather than smaller streets can be part of this.
Provide free public transit in areas that meet requirements of commercial/residential mix.
These are just ideas. I don't know the real root causes, but a single policy won't help unless it's part of a comprehensive plan to reduce the NEED to travel and travel long distances.
> Why? All the office buildings are in one central place.
No! The defining feature of the LA megapolis is that the offices and workplaces are not all in one central place. Just within LA County, there are major business districts in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, Burbank, Pasadena, Warner Center, Playa Vista, downtown, Westwood, Century City, … it goes on and on. As Human Transit says, Los Angeles is a "vast constellation of dense places." [1]
This feature actually makes Los Angeles a prime candidate for mass transit. In highly centralized "hub and spoke" metropolises like Chicago, packed trains rush towards the city center all morning, while no one travels the reverse direction. In the afternoon, the situation is flipped. This is an inefficient use of transit infrastructure.
There is significant reverse commute and congestion from Chicago into the suburbs The travel times are typically longer than the conventional flow.
Suburb to Suburb mass transit is bus but challenging for long transits. There are only two major ring type highways. Attempts to get a suburban ring "STAR" train or outer Chicago "Circle" Loop line never get past the study stage.
I'm one such commuter. I go from western Chicago burbs to north. There is no legit public trans option. It's 3 hours one way for what takes me 30 mins in no traffic.
What i really hate is the variability. Good days its 30 min. Bad days, may be over 2 hours. And, you cant always tell before you get on the road.
Yes, actually. Crashes, for example, can't be predicted via Waze and periodically f* up your commute in an epic way. And they happen very quickly and the effects ripple through the system equally quickly.
One other thing. If you get on at 22nd street, headed north on 294, past the Cermack toll (and 290/Roosevelt ramps), you have no exit available for about 8 miles. So, you're committed. And, once you've made it that far, you might as well stick it out, because it'll open up to 80-90 mph as soon as you get past the Touhy toll about 2 miles away.
Yup, happened again this morning for me. Same spot as last week. North bound accident between the Ohare Oasis & the 90/190 exit ramps. 2 lanes blocked. 40 minute estimate from when I left at 8am turned into 70 minutes by the time I arrived at work.
In addition to what drewbug stated: I check traffic before I leave. If I'm lucky, there's a stated 10 minute delay due to a single accident. By the time I get to where the accident was, there's been 3 more. In my 25 mile commute, it's common that I see at least 4 accidents each way. See my other comment, by the time you're on the highway, due to the routes, it's a waste to reroute, mostly due to lack of off ramps.
I disagree that this is what makes LA a prime candidate for mass transit. If you look at NYC, all train lines exist to bring people in and out of manhattan where most people work. In LA you have this massive N+1 problem where you'd need every one of these miniature dense cities to connect to each other miniature dense city by rail.
If that were done, way more people would take public transit, as being able to take a direct route to the place you're going by train would be substancially faster.
Most of these have to do with inefficient use of land, and ultimately can be aided with the big kahuna of fixes: a land value tax.[0] It would work to push back against restrictive zoning policies (holding costs of land go up), and would create a virtuous cycle of land values being invested back into local infrastructure, resulting in higher land values (you can get transit for free).
Donald Shoup (the author of "The High Price of Free Parking", namechecked below), has written extensively about how LVT would improve urban land use, as has Chuck Marohn (of Strong Towns, whose "Growth Ponzi Scheme" is namechecked below.)
In fact, few things seem to have a stronger consensus than LVT among economists and urban planners. Then why don't we have it?
In short, it shows the limitation of Pareto Optimality―to enact a LVT, the returns to landowners would be limited, which creates a very active special interest. Sob stories result when land is used more efficiently―people are generally moved by tales of the Old Poor Widow who can't possibly consider moving out of her ranch house that she's lived in for 40 years.
The problem with the prototypical Old Poor Widow (she lives in a million-dollar home in an excellent neighborhood, how sad) is that she votes in every local election.
The people who benefit from density -- the young, the renters -- don't vote. Well, they vote every four years in the high-drama national electoral-college reality show, but that doesn't matter. And the people working service jobs who have to commute in from far away couldn't vote for local candidates who would benefit their interests even if they wanted to, because of course they don't live there.
Politicians know that if they enact a land value tax, the elderly who lucked into amazing homes will vote them out of office. This won't change unless renters start voting for their interests.
Well, how do we get the young to vote in every election? How do we get the 25 year old barista to care about their community when they've been transient since they were 18? And I mean consistently, not just every four years.
Among my peers there was so much political activity in the weeks after the national election. Unfortunately, it's already slowed down to a trickle after everyone has outrage fatigue. None of my friends want to even mention politics at this point.
It creates a trade-off between living in high-infrastructure areas (cities) and paying for the infrastructure directly or indirectly through your taxes, or living in low-infrastructure areas (rural) and saving on your taxes.
A related question is―why do we so frequently build new development out on the edge of a city (sprawl), and why do we so rarely build up development in the heart of a city (infill)? The latter would seem wiser, as the city already has an infrastructure system to build upon. Why don't we do this, instead choosing to bring the infrastructure out to where it isn't?
The answer is related to the lack of a LVT―it's cheaper to consume marginal land for near-free and improve it than to utilize supermarginal land to its highest use, due to the return that landowners expect for it. (For an extreme example, consider why Walt Disney chose to buy swampland in Florida rather than expand his development in Anaheim.) The same payment to landowners is what prevents the extension of public transit: the government may invest in this infrastructure, but the benefits go to land values near the improvements. Stiglitz formalized this effect in the 1970s[1].
I think LA and the Bay Area are going to eventually go the way of New York where you have huge buildings and residential and business well mixed. Right now the Bay is terrible because the jobs are all in SF, MV, SJ and fairly far from affordable housing. So most people do very long commutes adding in more traffic. I really shouldn't be working with so many people who commute 1-2 hours each way every day because they cannot afford to live any closer to their work.
The tech buses were started because google was creating too many jobs with housing being too far away.
Google wanted to expand their campus. Mountain View was concerned about the added traffic on their roads, so they said no. Google then wanted to work with developers to create medium-density housing within walking/biking distance, but mountain view also said no to that ("would ruin the character of the neighborhood"). So the people filling the new jobs can't live nearby and they can't commute in.
Solution? Bus them in on tech shuttles. The thing that's a workaround to political dysfunction and NIMBY'ism is somehow a symbol of the tech industry excess.
> Because they're not paying for the cost of the road capacity they're using.
Suppose it costs $3000/month for an apartment near where you work, because supply is constrained by bad zoning regulations etc. If it costs $1500/month + $400/month travel expenses to live an hour's drive away, lots of people will do that instead. If you add $1100/month to the cost of driving to discourage that, all that happens is that the $3000/month apartment goes up to $4000/month because you've increased demand for closer housing but not supply. If there is no housing for people to move into, there is no price that will get them to move into it.
But if you increase the supply of no-commute housing then people will immediately move into it independent of the cost of road capacity, because landlords don't want empty apartments so the price will fall to the level that causes the new units to be occupied.
If you add $1100/month to the cost of driving to discourage that, all that happens is that the $3000/month apartment goes up to $4000/month because you've increased demand for closer housing but not supply.
That's not all that happens. You also see an increase in the population living close to work (even without zoning changes, you'll have more people living in the same set of units) and employees demanding higher wages for working in inaccessible parts of town, and companies responding by moving offices to places where they can get cheaper workers (i.e., places which are more accessible).
> You also see an increase in the population living close to work (even without zoning changes, you'll have more people living in the same set of units)
Everyone gets squeezed into a tin can in probable violation of zoning and fire codes, when instead we could build nice new housing for everyone.
> employees demanding higher wages for working in inaccessible parts of town
Which some of them would get but it would only go directly to rent. Which prices the existing occupants without higher wages out of the space, and makes high housing costs even stickier because landlords never like to see rent decrease and now have more incentive and resources to fight against it.
> companies responding by moving offices to places where they can get cheaper workers (i.e., places which are more accessible).
Another way of saying less density and more sprawl.
Yes, this. Also, maybe those people who drive so far into offices to sit at a desk all day clicking buttons in a web app... Maybe those people don't need to be driving into an office at all. Or maybe just one day a week. Or, if you can't trust your employees to work from home, maybe there should be neighborhood working spaces where you can have a supervisor with your employees as they click buttons in a web app, but do so only a couple of miles from their house.
Regarding everyone who thinks LA offices are not centralized... think Tokyo. It's multiple cities connected at the hip. LA never ends between them, and is actually worse for traffic because people need to travel through them.
Like Tokyo, LA would be perfect for more trains. But like Tokyo or NY, the evolution of which becomes a city where cars become either a luxury or an impossibility.
This is great when the ride is clean and on time, which is why I would hate to see LA end up like NY.
But then again, if it's too convenient, you end up being pushed in by men wearing white gloves, at least during rush hour.
That's why co-working spaces are awesome. It's not working from home, but it's not going to work either.
Traffic in Tokyo is much worse because freeways are few and far between in Japan (and with very, very expensive tolls). I have to take the local roads if I go anywhere, so a 10km drive ~6 miles takes about 30-40 minutes. When I lived in Berkeley, I could get to downtown SF in under 20 minutes with no traffic, and even with traffic it would take about 40 minutes.
> All the office buildings are in one central place.
That fact is what makes traffic manageable in places like NYC or Chicago. It allows building rail infrastructure that can move a ton of people in every morning and a ton of people out every evening. Commuting patterns where offices are spread out in different places (e.g. in the D.C. metro area where people will commute from one suburb to another) are worse, because it makes no sense to have rail between all the random suburbs people commute to/from.
> Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to prefer jobs closer to their home.
Your suggestion would have the opposite effect -- if you increase the cost of commuting, people will commute further to find cheaper housing to make up for the cash you just took away from them. If a person can't afford to live near their job already, taking more money from them (by taxing their commute) just makes all housing less affordable to them.
(There should probably be a "Paradox" label for this. It's a commonly cited argument that sounds plausible, but isn't)
Encouraging more work from home might be a good start. However I can't see this being the solution for everything obviously (how is one to work from home as a prep cook?). However there seems to be a lot of opportunity to expand work from home positions. The last few jobs (mostly office related) I held could have been work from home while saving the company money by being able to cut on office space. Meh, then there's the argument "well they don't work as well at home", which could be countered by financial incentives/perks. Overall it would be nice to see a shift an attitudes regarding work from home. Less commuters then at least would make it easier for the prep cook or whomever who's needs are physical appearance to get to work easier. But of course, most people like to be around people and work from home is away from people which is to many anti-social and thus looked down on. I think that's the real reason for the deeper issues around it.
> Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to prefer jobs closer to their home.
Or perhaps impose such high state taxes/ local body taxes that the people simply leave the town, state or even better the country! Just kidding. This is a very heavy handed solution that hurts a lot of people and especially poor, minorities and vulnerable groups.
Roads, Vehicles and Gas has far too many alternative uses and this sort of tax gives broad powers and worse more money to state which will then be used to enforce drug war and other bullshit laws. Above suggestion deeply hurts poor and vulnerable minorities who have to travel a lot for work. This is like shooting someone in chest because breast cancer was detected.
A toll however is a far better solution. A toll applied only on specific routes on specific times will directly change the traffic pattern and will have much greater consequences over longer time.
A toll is a bad solution. You can't just slap a toll on drivers and expect the free market to provide them with an alternative. No do that and they'll hate you and start doing malign things at the ballot box.
The solution is increasing the subsidies for public and mass transit. Problem with lack of transit in California can be summarized by three names; Governor Deukmejian, Governor Wilson, and Governor Schwarzenegger. They represent a 28 year period of under investment in public transportation.
> A toll however is a far better solution. A toll applied only on specific routes on specific times will directly change the traffic pattern and will have much greater consequences over longer time.
That's a good point. I'm trying to say that it needs to be combined with additional policies (that may not even be transportation policies) that are all aimed at reducing the NEED to travel, especially long distances.
Sure, lets do a hole lot of stuff, costing billions, and moving businesses around, involved lots of planning and disruptions, and may not even work.
Or lets just introduce tolls, something that is proven to work, is easy to do, and raises funds to help fix the issue by improving roads and public transport.
The real problem is how impossible it is to get remote work in LA, employers here demand onsite even when it hurts the project, its very hard to get remote work living in La as most employers are looking for remote employees in cheaper cost of living areas.
If having everyone onsite hurts the project, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with that project.
The problem in LA is that VCs and founders have money to live by the ocean, so they start companies near the ocean.
If an LA startup is stunted by its inability to hire, that startup should move downtown where trains can deliver a workforce from distant suburbs and the surrounding counties of Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Ventura.
I have to travel 6 hours a day to get to work and back but my employer doesn't let me work remote, not even 1 day a week, attitude is its hard for everyone to get here and the harder the location is to reach, the better.
Many of my colleagues commute 2+h/day. That's 10-14h/week.
Most everyone at work communicates via phone and email most of the time.
Why are we not all tellecommuting but instead burning fossil fuels while waiting in traffic, risking our lives twice a day and actively speeding up an irreversible climate change that will take away everything we care about?
in LA, all the office buildings are not in one central place. all the jobs are not in one central place.
the patterns are not so easily discerned. the traffic is not so easily predictable. people often express surprise about how the traffic "was horrible and it was three o'clock in the morning on a Sunday", etc.
if there is a single main problem, it is that there are too many cars for the available road and freeway space and too many people feel compelled to get into those cars and drive absolutely anywhere at any particular time because public transport is usually too slow and uncomfortable (being confined, mostly, to the same congested roads).
> if there is a single main problem, it is that there are too many cars for the available road and freeway space and too many people feel compelled to get into those cars and drive absolutely anywhere at any particular time
Exactly. The focus on improving traffic should be on addressing WHY people feel compelled to drive long distances throughout the day. Are they going to work, shopping, entertainment, etc?
The closer you can bring things to where people live, the less need there would be to get in your car and drive long distances.
Public transportation is the most effective in cities that are the most diverse; i.e, not large blocks of residential surrounding large blocks of commercial.
Even where I live, a city of about 65k, there are residential districts that have >2,000 homes, 1 major shopping district, and two smaller shopping districts. Freeway exits are all at the three shopping districts, which causes all traffic to funnel from the freeway into a very small commercial area before spreading out into the residential neighborhoods. And visa-versa, if you want to get onto the freeway from your home, you get pushed into the same funnel before you can get to the freeway.
The city plan appears to be specifically designed to funnel 65,000 people through shopping districts no matter whether the people need to shop or are just trying to get out of the city (freeway).
The problem is that mixed use doesn't necessarily lead to any of this. People want to live where they want to live, which is not necessarily next to work. Exhibit A of this is Tokyo, which despite being very dense, very mixed-use, extensive public transport, tolled highways, expensive vehicle registration, etc., is still commuting hell.
Which commute are you referring to? My experience in Japan is very limited but my impression was that the mixed-use, and extensive public transport options led to some of the efficient transport I've ever encountered. Perhaps you're referring to strains on capacity during peak times?
I'm sure he's referring to the fact that, while there is an extensive and efficient rail system, it's nonetheless pretty uncomfortably packed during the times when people commute.
One of my favorite little-known tidbits of Los Angeles traffic history is the Alweg monorail proposal in 1963. The Alweg Monorail Company offered to finance and build a 43 mile monorail system, which would be repaid with MTA revenues. The proposal got derailed when Standard Oil lobbied heavily against it.
I'm convinced that if this proposal had gotten approved and built, the trajectory of public transportation in Los Angeles would have been significantly different, and the city would probably have a very efficient and extensive monorail system now. Los Angeles seems to be the perfect place for a monorail - it can be built around existing structures and doesn't require underground tunneling. I'm not sure that Los Angeles would be a 'car city' now if we had started building this monorail system 50 years ago.
Problem with LA is that we build horizontally and not vertically. We keep adding more homes in suburbs and not building up in the cities that have the jobs. There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot transit village(on a rail line too). Today we're voting on initiative that prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more expensive and traffic will get worse.
To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
But why is this the case? Largely because land use (powerful local zoning + low holding costs for land) incentivizes sprawl over infill.
Consider cities that do better for transit by building upward. This is usually a case of a more sane zoning system, like in Tokyo[0], or ownership residing in the municipality, like Hong Kong.[1]
Fun fact: most zones in LA County require developers to build parking on a per-bedroom basis, so they tend to build ~2.5 stalls per unit, and most of the time that ends up being subterranean. That'll add ~$100k in development costs per unit right off the bat. They can sell the stalls individually (I believe) but because of the economics of the market it just doesn't make sense to build anything but luxury. That one rule is a significant cause of both sprawl and car addiction here, as well as more negative trends in housing availability.
Edit: If people are interested, here's the list of zoning requirements for Residential Zones in Los Angeles County.
Residential (and commercial) parking minimums need to be abolished. Set parking maximums if you must impose some rules, and then allow the market to settle on appropriate amount of parking for a new development.
I'm sure there's some research on this somewhere, but parking minimums have got to be one of the most distortive policies to ever emerge in urban planning.
Contributing factor: American cities are young enough they haven't had to pay for infrastructure replacement without bail-outs in the form of income from new construction that hasn't faced a replacement cycle yet, or the federal government.
To 'fix' the problem, the problem shouldn't be created in the first place. Require less cars and make people not need to go places all the time for a daily routine.
Adding stuff isn't a scalable solution. After you hit building height economics limits, you'll still have to fan out, and at the same time, having more people stuffed together in a smaller area makes for more people-problems, like foot traffic, air, water, sewage, trash, power, networking. At the same time you'll have more people needing things to do, like entertainment and work, which they will then all need to do around the same place, making everything worse.
Universal mass transit, and multiple smaller clusters instead of mega cities is scalable. But that's not what people seem to want, and thus problems get created and here we are.
Mass transit is much cheaper to build and maintain as density increases. Assume every building has 4 vs. 40 stories, now consider how many homes / jobs / shops are within 0.2 miles of a subway stop. Further, how many subway stops you need to pass on the average trip. That's the real benefit to building up, walking simply becomes more effective.
I live walking distance from a metro station that recently was added in West LA, and it's been interesting to watch properties nearby being bought, improved, and turned over. Value around the station is being stimulated by the presence of the station itself. Increased density is going to follow it, not lead it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. If you start building your transport lines connected to areas that are already high vitality/value, then what you've effectively done is reduce the "distance" between every stop along the line and those key areas.
Let's not add commercial value, this is about solving real problems, not making money. The constant mixing of those two is what creates problems in the first place. There is no problem in having a an economical positive impact with a solution, but not solving a problem purely because it would "only" solve problems for many people instead of also making a ton of money is a bad way to live (at least, that's what it looks like).
You seem to have misunderstood my point. As density increases it is easier to build subway stations because the value measured in terms of money or units of abstract social benefit goes up proportionally to density.
That does not imply subway stations should not be built in low density areas, it is just an observation that as density increases subway stations are easier to build.
Your completely right. If housing was much cheaper, everyone would be able to move closer to their jobs and traffic would decrease significantly. Compare 5 mile commute vs 50 mile commute -> almost 10 times less aggregate traffic.
Significantly improved housing situation => Less Traffic
Many people are not comfortable with the social environment of large >20-unit housing developments. The thing is, it's relatively easy to take full advantage of a 55-foot zoning ceiling (higher than nearly all of LA and most of SF as well) with buildings that have five or fewer units and entrances on the outside (possibly from a balcony). The reason large projects account for such a large proportion of units in development has a lot to do with the regulatory environment and high fixed costs of putting up a building (especially fees) which create barriers that can only be overcome by the kinds of large projects that most people don't like.
Parking requirements don't help, although I suspect that housing without parking tends to be a temporary residence; once the occupant can afford a car, they start trying to move. Building housing without parking is better if people can still own cars in spillover parking, but actually building spillover parking runs into the NIMBY problem where nobody wants to live near it. As a result the market for standalone parking spaces is extremely constrained and that's unlikely to change.
It's true that some people are just anti-growth but there are legitimate concerns being aired about the way that development seems to be going. Since the housing market is emphatically not free it's easy to see how the normal tendency of the market to give people what they want could be stymied and result in discontent. I started to think this way when, after about two years of pro-housing activism in San Francisco, I realized that:
- a lot of housing projects are opposed by the very sort of people they're supposed to be helping
- a lot of those people seem to be unhappy about the lifestyle the project offers them, or they find it unacceptable ("no pets, no smoking") and conclude they're being "pushed out" as "undesirables".
I can't deny that those are legitimate concerns. After all, I like pets and smoking. I also drive a car. How can I possibly ignore people who are mad that they're not allowed to have pets or smoke and it's becoming very hard to own a car? And this is why I say "people are not comfortable with the social environment". There are other concerns: noise, and low-noise requirements. Some people hate noise. Other people love to make noise. Should we plan for them to be separated by four inches of drywall? Is that even planning? Furthermore, poor people might benefit from collectivism, but they still like individualism. It's not surprising, considering our cultural history and capitalist economy, and the tendency of primates to imitate the behavior of high-status primates, that people like to "own" things and distinguish themselves and are turned off by the rhetoric of "community" (the trendy euphemism for "apartment building") and public spaces, especially when it comes time for them to find somewhere to live. It's easier to be an existentialist in an attic than an apartment. And it's these concerns that have made renting bearable in the first place: a lot of tenant's rights law has ultimately been justified by the American ideal that a person should be secure in their dwelling. That's not something I'd like to see go away.
The truth is, the majority of anti-housing advocates are not very good at economics and they don't really understand why the current policies are failing them. You can't figure out how to help people without figuring out how to help whiny, selfish, stupid people, because that's literally all of people. If the pro-growth side of the table continues to expect lifestyle to just happen while all the regulations focus on the numbers game, it's not going to happen, and people are still going to be mad at us. They have a good reason to be mad. They just don't know what to do about it.
> Problem with LA is that we build horizontally and not vertically.
This is an often repeated statement that is a myth. Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the US.
> There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot transit village(on a rail line too).
IMO, this is the root of the problem. Areas like Koreatown and Hollywood are against adding more density despite it being the area that naturally should be the most dense. It has a variety of mass transit options, is in a central location served by multiple freeways, and is where many people work.
> Today we're voting on initiative that prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more expensive and traffic will get worse.
To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
If that measure passes, it'll prevent the development of housing for the homeless and waste the $1 billion we voted to allot for that proposal. The proposal was brought forward by the head of the AIds Healthcare Foundation who has a history of sponsoring ballot proposals more for publicity than anything else.
> This is an often repeated statement that is a myth. Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the US.
Source? I would think both NYC and SF would be dramatically denser. A quick google supports this assumption. LA is ~5000 people / mile^2 and NYC is ~27,000 people per mile^2.
> The reason that electrical power and air travel don’t fail every time they get crowded is that we raise prices to manage demand.
Air travel and electrical power:
(1) Are easier to add capacity for during times of peak demand
(2) Actually do fail (even though tolled!) when demand exceeds capacity (brown/blackouts for electrical power, cascading delays easily exceeding those for ground traffic when weather knocks down capacity).
On top of that, it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free -- gasoline and associated taxes are immediate costs for every mile driven, and most people know at some level that each mile also has an additional total cost in terms of insurance and impact on maintenance/lifetime of the vehicle.
And people still choose to make it more expensive in the form of higher-end (and often lower MPG) automotive purchases.
If there's a solution to the traffic problem, instead of attempting to make driving particularly more expensive, it probably involves:
(a) make other transportation options more affordable in terms of reach, time, and money
(b) making the housing market more liquid and affordable, so people can more easily choose locations convenient to their living activities
People do know that it costs to drive a car but the cost is hidden in some sense. I think few people actually calculate how much driving really costs. When I drive 10 miles I don't think to myself that it's going to cost me $5.40 (using IRS mileage rate). Gasoline taxes do not come close to paying for the road system. I remember when gas hit around $5 a gallon in the U.S. some years ago people did think about driving cost a lot more.
I suspect if the costs were more apparent people would be more apt to support public transportation and reconsider their driving habits.
When dreaming up new ways to tax cars, please bear in mind that wear on roadways from vehicles is proportional to miles driven times per-axle weight to the fourth power.
A gas tax is already proportional to miles driven times vehicle weight times a fuel efficiency factor.
Congestion, on the other hand, is a more difficult thing. Vehicle length certainly plays a factor, as well as width, acceleration, and braking distance. Number of passengers is an obvious factor. Trip routing efficiency has a role. I really don't expect local legislators to understand the mathematics of traffic. If they don't commission a study by traffic experts, and do exactly what those experts recommend, they might just end up making things worse.
You haven't added the external cost to society -- accidents, pollution, congestion and so on.
A study in Copenhagen found that the total cost (personal + to society) of cycling 1km was 8¢, versus 50¢ for driving, or 89¢ for driving at peak times. (That includes 16¢ given back to society in fuel tax.)
The low cycling figure is mostly due to the positive benefit to society of a healthier population (reduced healthcare costs, offset by slightly increased state pension costs when people live longer).
"Accident costs are founded in market values, and comprise public services (police, rescue and treatment), the loss of net productivity, premature deaths, minor and major injuries, and the cost of material damage. Costs are calculated in comparison to number of accidents related to cars/bicycles, and interpolated by the number of km driven/cycled. Accidents entail a cost of Euro 0.022/km for driving and Euro 0.106/km for cycling (COWI and Køpenhavns Kommune, 2009; Transportministeriet, 2010). Even though accidents involving cyclists entail lower material damage costs, overall costs are higher, as cyclists are more exposed and hence affected by accidents. As outlined by Transportministeriet (2013), there remains considerable uncertainty regarding average accident costs for cyclists."
I doubt the cost of treatment is recovered from road insurance policies in Denmark.
(Also NB this is urban driving at 50km/h, the accident cost of extra-urban driving may be higher.)
The marginal cost per mile is probably significantly lower (and will vary by vehicle) but I agree with your basic point. I expect that people would be a lot more inclined to combine errands etc. if they had to literally pay per mile.
ghaff alluded to this, but there is also a disconnect between the cost at point of use and the sunk cost when it comes to cars. If you live somewhere where there are poor transit options, you must buy a car. Once you own a car, each additional mile is cheap, considering the conveience - gas taxes be damned.
It follows that converting a car-based city to a transit one necessarily takes away resources from the people who have sunk high costs into their acquisition of a car. That population almost always objects to transit-oriented development.
> it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free
Driving isn't free, but the costs you mention are all part of the cost to the person choosing to drive. That person has presumably incorporated these into their decision of whether or not to drive.
A congestion tax (or dynamic toll) is an attempt to internalize the external costs that a driver imposes on others; when I get in the car and drive, I slow everyone else on the road down, but without a toll (or an expectation of altruism toward random strangers), that won't affect my decision making at all. The goal of a toll is to make the cost of choosing to drive equal to the sum of the costs it imposes on everyone, not just the driver.
1) is completely false. If you have a entirely full airport at peak like LAX, JFK or LHR, how do you add more flights? The marginal cost of more flights is another runway or terminal building, which is (tens) of billions of dollars.
The same problem exists within electricial grids. Providing 'peaker' plants which are only used 5% of the time are incredible expensive. cf how expensive electricity got in california when Enron shut these plans down intentionally in summer.
Demand response [0] is an interesting solution to the electrical grid problem; utilities will pay customers (usually large commercial customers) to use less energy during periods of peak demand (which allows the utility to build fewer plants, so everybody wins).
Not really. Firstly, planes need to be spaced after takeoff more if they are larger (eg a A380 will require more spacing than a 747). This cuts the capacity gain somewhat.
Secondly, not all gates can take larger aircraft.
Thirdly, larger aircraft take a lot more time to turn around than smaller ones (fewer doors per passenger). Which means your gates are tied up for longer.
I agree tolls aren't the end all solution. However, if that revenue was explicitly applied to making public transit better/more accessible/more affordable, I'd be all for it. Alas, we don't live in such a world and I'm sure the tolls would just be spent elsewhere.
Collecting money via tolls has a higher administrative cost compared to collecting money via the gas tax [1]. The infrastucture to collect the gas tax is already in place. In contrast, there are a lot of things that need to be done before tolls can be put in place (legal, contracting, setting up collection points, etc). Plus, the public-private partnerships that some governments get into for these types of toll roads don't always work out [2] [3] [4]
It would make a lot more sense to just raise the gas tax to achieve the same effect.
I wish it was that simple. Raising the gas tax isn't the solution. The gas tax will not work for to much longer because it doesn't accurately correlate to the number miles traveled.
- A old compact car from 2007 may only get 20 mpg while a new car from 2017 may get 40 mpg.
- Someone would a plug-in hybrid such as a Chevy Volt may only fill up their tank once every few months as they start off with a 50 mile battery range each morning.
- And those with pure electrics like a Tesla do not get taxed at all.
Raising the gas tax also unfairly punishes the lower income bracket who often drive older vehicles with worse MPG.
Is that a bad thing? There is a reason the government subsidizes pure electric cars and requires car manufacturers to make electric cars (albeit they only do it to meet the quota).
I understand it's going to punish those who really can't afford a decent car, but for ~$4000 in the bay area you can get a pretty decent used car that will get you 30+ mpg.
Any car that's sitting in stop and go traffic isn't going to get nearly the mileage they would get when driving at free flow highway speeds. As the vehicle fleet transitions to higher mileage vehicles, the gas tax can be adjusted to compensate based on overall usage and the number of registered vehicles.
And making those adjustments would cost far less money compared to setting up additional tolls or a VMT based taxation scheme.
That is true, but a similar effect can be achieved via stop and go traffic that occurs under congested conditions. Gas mileage, for most vehicles, drops when that occurs.
The article falsely assumes that the HOV lane has spare capacity. During rush hour here all lanes are equally clogged, and sometimes the HOV lane is actually slower than the other 4 lanes. The only way to fix LA traffic with current infrastructure is self driving car pools. If/when they can get to the point in which they are safer than normal drivers, and safe for the riders (crime inside of self driving cars) LA traffic will be solved. This will eliminate the necessity of having a car allowing for increased taxes on car ownership, reducing traffic on the roads.
True ride-sharing could also help, and sooner than self-driving cars. Uber and Lyft talked about matching departing commuters in real-time, which would greatly reduce the inflexibility that makes traditional carpooling so unpleasant. I'm not sure why that never took off.
I'd guess because people would rather have the certainty of getting to work in 1.5 hours, rather than wait for a stranger to pick them in a semi-determined block of time (or pick up a stranger in the same) for a 1 hour commute.
Waiting and hoping that the person who promised to pick you up will actually do so seems annoying and nerve-wracking. "Sorry, boss, I know I'm late again, but a complete stranger was 30 minutes late picking me up today, and then decided to stop for donuts on the way to work."
> rather than wait for a stranger to pick them in a semi-determined block of time
I think the idea is that it's supposed to match you in real-time and give GPS updates, just like regular Uber and Lyft. That is, it's not like BlancRide in Canada (which has been struggling) where you schedule in advance, have blocks of time, etc.
> Waiting and hoping that the person who promised to pick you up will actually do so seems annoying and nerve-wracking
Unlike most carpooling services, Lyft and Uber have strong reputation mechanisms that can greatly reduce this. You can always fall back on a taxi or normal Uber for couple times a month when the driver is flaky.
Sorta. Unlike a normal Uber driver, the carpool driver (1) specify their rough route, (2) can decline riders without penalty, and (3) isn't paid as much (basically enough to cover gas, I think). But yes, the pick-up/drop-off interface was supposed to be more or less the same.
I've taken Uberpool for longish distances around LA (mostly between ~Beverly Hills and the Valley), and it suuuuucks. Having to get off the freeway and get back on to pick up people adds a ton of time to commutes that aren't that long from the LA perspective.
Agreed, and that's always very important. I'm just skeptical of how high the density of use would have to be for this to make sense; and even then, LA just may be unconducive to this kind of an infrastructure. As people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, making the freeways necessary conduits to get anywhere in a timely manner just screws up getting around period.
If the HOV lane is gridlocked, that means the price to use the HOV lane is not high enough. Keep raising the toll until traffic in the HOV lane moves at the desired speed.
By "price", you point out that California "HOV" lanes... aren't.
"Carpool/HOV" lanes have been political toys from the start. A true carpool means more than one would-otherwise-be driver per vehicle. A minority of HOV lane users in CA have more than one licensed driver. The rest are "kidpools", "hybrids" (which, for all but the first 10-30 miles on a charge are less efficient than non-hybrids), "non-polluting vehicles" (pure electrics, CNG, fuel cell), buses, and government vehicles.
Such lanes are now as crowded as conventional lanes more often than not.
Actual trip reduction could be obtained by limiting HOV use to actual carpools (>1 licensed driver) and buses with passengers, and narrowing their hours of exclusivity a bit.
They set a max price on those lanes because otherwise poor people would get stuck in even worse traffic while rich people would be able to move quickly. That's already true but they are trying to minimize the disparity between rich and poor.
You could also make the argument that a rich persons time is worth less because they can afford to hire people to do what poor people have to do themselves, like clean the house or go shopping or drive their kids around. They are also more likely to have a job that can be done from home.
Depends on the HOV lane. The Fastrak lanes on the 110 south of downtown are regularly moving at 45+ mph, regardless of the state of the other lanes. There are two HOV lanes each direction, often separated by grade.
I drive every day on the 101 and deal with the worst of the worst for >20 miles each way. I was hoping someone would mention this!
This toll plan is foolish at best and detrimental otherwise. We need incentives for car pools bad! Last count (I carpool and for fun we sometimes count cars' occupants because traffic is always a discussion) out of 46 cars we saw only 2 with multiple occupants. This is the major problem.
Here's my idea: Rather than high-occupancy lets make the left lane a guaranteed-speed lane. The rule is that all cars in the lane move at 80 mph. If you can't merge in or out of the lane is such a way that no one else has to brake, then you're not allowed to merge. You're not allowed to slow down unless there's an emergency and those will be rare because users will be required to maintain their vehicles in top condition and crashing is strictly prohibited.
This will dramatically increase the throughput of the lane and will inescapably lead to an increase in usage. But the increase will naturally be capped around 20k cars per hour per lane.
To make it work, you'll need precise data about conditions far ahead and far behind. You'll also need an inescapable enforcement mechanism or the system will succumb to cheating. The good news is that very soon many cars will be covered in sensors, networked and able to implement the concept.
I don't actually think the concept is a good one (it's unworkable without a level of automation at which you'd have much better alternatives) but the exit problem is already frequently addressed with HOV/bus lanes—have dedicated left-sode exits so they don't need to cross the slower lanes to exit.
I agree advanced automation would be needed to maximize capacity. A basic system only needs cruise control, lights and cameras installed at the merge points and a transponder like fasttrak that monitors your speed and automatically fines you if you hit the brakes.
Adaptive cruise control, lane assist, higher standards of maintenance and driver skill don't seem like too much to ask of a select group of people and vehicles licenced to use the lane and would help to maximize capacity and minimize incidents without getting too futuristic.
The problem as I see it is that we force everyone onto the freeway. Need to get somewhere a few miles from here? They make it very difficult to get there without getting onto the freeway.
There was some point in the last 30 years where city designers decided the best way to handle local traffic was just to force everyone onto the freeway. It's horrible.
There should instead be a reasonable main grid of smaller (2 lane max) low stop count streets such that I can get across town without getting on the freeway.
A large number of small roads can handle a lot more traffic than a small number of large roads.
Elon Musk: “Without tunnels, we will all be in traffic hell forever. I really do think tunnels are the key to solving urban gridlock. Being stuck in traffic is soul-destroying. Self-driving cars will actually make it worse by making vehicle travel more affordable".
> The problem as I see it is that we force everyone onto the freeway. Need to get somewhere a few miles from here? They make it very difficult to get there without getting onto the freeway.
This applies to many American cities, but not really most of LA. The relatively grid-like nature of the surface street network + the level of highway congestion makes short trips do much better on surface streets most of the day.
Of course, the flip side is terrible surface street congestion (to to go east from Santa Monica to UCLA at end-of-day rush hour... or south to LAX on Lincoln). But it reflects that LA's street planning is in many ways much more like an "old" city than a "new" one with lots of intentionally-confusing local road routing and consistent, easy routing to the highways instead.
But when every street going west->east or north->south is backed up, whether they're 1 lane or 3-to-4, I'm not sure there's any room for a denser grid of narrower streets, or that it would improve much.
Maybe we should also consider the concept of mass transit? The increased likelihood of injury or death from increased transit time in automobiles alone is a health hazard.
LA is getting better with mass transit. The problem is it's not running 24 hours. It shuts down around 1am so you it's not really good for doing things at night like in NYC.
Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people, or kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a dude, I bet women feel even more so.
Also need more train tracks!
Fix those problems people will ride transit way more. Thats the way to solve the traffic problem.
> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people, or kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a dude, I bet women feel even more so.
One of the ways to improve the public transit, as a whole, is to make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit. Consider New York, for instance, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.
Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
Driving and parking in New York is so incredibly difficult and expensive compared to mass transit, especially the subway. In the cities where that is the case, there isn't the same class division between those who drive and those who take mass transit.
In LA, it is exactly the opposite: mass transit is incredibly difficult, slow, and in some cases more expensive than driving. How can you "make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit" in that scenario?
Or, actually, just tear up the parking lots. You can do it by taxing under-utilized land.
It's obviously never going to happen, so people will keep spending ~$3-5,000/year on vehicles, and ~$1,000-2000/year on parking, for the dubious privilege of spending up to two hours a day in traffic. On the bright side, if you live that far from work, your housing is probably cheap.
> On the bright side, if you live that far from work, your housing is probably cheap.
And that's exactly why things are the way they are. Shockingly, given the choice, most people would happily trade a long commute for the ability to spread out and not pay through the nose for the privilege of being crammed on top of other people.
Only because the costs of that lifestyle are socialized - either someone else pays them, or you can't opt out.
Surburban sprawl is unsustainable, but is paid for by new development, parking is free, or cheap, highways aren't tolled, costs of pollution aren't factored into your bill at the pump... When you live in the city, you still pay these costs, but you don't get to reap any of the benefits.
> One of the ways to improve the public transit, as a whole, is to make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit. Consider New York, for instance, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.
It doesn't work that well. NYC subways are disgusting, especially in the summer. And you can't prevent citizens from utilizing public resources just because they smell bad or are uncouth.
> Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
We just passed a proposal allocating over $1 billion to house the homeless. I think that qualifies as a solution.
> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people
This is pretty true. I'm an occasional metro/bus rider, and I'd guess I've been on more rides where there's someone with a clear mental health issue than rides without. And while most of those occasions it's benign, something everyone can ignore... for enough of them it's been intense enough people on the car/bus have been clearly uncomfortable and it wasn't clear confrontational behavior wasn't going to escalate into violence.
I could imagine some people would decide never to ride again.
Enforcement is probably only part of the puzzle, though. We have the same problem with other public spaces (say, libraries) because we don't have any coherent or effective policy for dealing with people who are suffering from mental illness. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's no straightforward market-based solution to that problem (to an even higher degree than traffic).
When the system is used mainly by society's outliers, this is what you see. When most everyone uses the bus/train/library, this problem - while still existing - is greatly reduced by having a very much lower outlier ratio.
Better enforcement is a good idea. Seems to be worth the money.
Or carry concealed permits. You'll have to repeal California's action that requires all new semi-auto's to have a unique firing pin. But then you don't have to worry traveling.
I carry. I keep odd hours in a small town. I walk every night .25 miles to my office at 8 PM and then back again around 2 AM. Never had any problem (probably the same as most people on the train). If I do, I've got protection.
Um, no. The crazy people won't care, the gangbangers will be better armed and generally in a group, and the single mugger will now take your wallet AND gun AND may shoot you if he gets the drop on you instead of just taking your wallet.
> in a small town
It shows. Your assessment of the probability of crime and how you will interact with it is completely wrong.
Actually for the small town I'm in, muggings occur at night between 12 AM and 3AM. My office is down an unlit blind alley. As a result I carry a flashlight and a gun. Should be fairly good at defense. Also train to draw quickly for both. Light stuns; shot stops.
For the gangbangers, they don't really like to involve civilians in a gun fight. They save that for only the most extreme circumstances in territory protection/expansion. Honestly, not too afraid of them. A woman would benefit from a revolver in that situation. That's what my wife carries: Ruger LCR. No hammer so easy to pull from a purse (which is carried crossed over her). If she can't pull from the purse, she'll fire within it (taking the flash burn over rape, for example). In this instance the revolver will operate without catching the purse like a semi-auto would. At that point, they'd most likely run given the noise and possible loss of their friend.
As for the crazies, the point isn't to prevent them from being crazy by themselves. That's their right. It's to defend yourself if they turn that on you. When we go hiking, I carry a gun knowing the gators don't care. Doesn't mean it's useless.
'bsder you seem pretty confident here, despite the fact that everything you've said contradicts what I've heard from LEOs and other trained firearms users.
> despite the fact that everything you've said contradicts what I've heard from LEOs and other trained firearms users.
Really?
1) Muggers
The LEO's I deal with are normally "Just give them your wallet and phone. Do not fight back."
Now, admittedly, most of this advice is from the US and being near big cities. In the US, we don't tend to have kidnappings--normally muggers will take your wallet and phone and run unless you are stupidly in some dangerous area.
2) Gangbangers
Generally will leave you alone unless it is a target of opportunity. However, teenagers are stupid and can consider truly bizarre things "disrespect". Combine this with drugs and you can get some exceptions.
3) Crazy/homeless
Generally the stuff they do never rises to the level of "I can shoot him" until it's too late for you to react.
And, this is, in fact, the crux of the situation. By the time the situation escalates to the level of "I am legally allowed to shoot this person" the situation is often too far gone for the gun to be helpful.
Now, I'm not a tiny female, so I don't present a "target of opportunity". However, women are more often the victim of the gun in the house from their partner than from random strangers.
Finally, my only interactions with concealed carry in my family are accidents where someone almost got shot unintentionally. Nobody in my extended family has ever had to use a gun to defend themselves, but there have been a handful of mishaps (thankfully, nobody harmed).
The statistics are against concealed carry except in fairly exceptional circumstances (jewelers, for example).
Certainly, a wallet (or a jewel!) isn't worth anyone's death, even a criminal's. One doesn't carry in order to defend a wallet. Any decent person would gladly lose $100 and some credit cards, not to have a death on her conscience. A criminal should know, however, that by violating the norms of polite society, he places himself in a fraught situation. It's very easy to cross the line between credibly threatening property and credibly threatening safety.
One carries in order to defend lives. One's own life, the lives of family, and if the situation warrants the lives of other innocent people. It's true that defending life with deadly force will get one in trouble in some jurisdictions. That's why it's better to live in the vast majority of jurisdictions where justified uses of deadly force prompt handshakes rather than criminal charges.
Deadly force absolutely must get one in trouble, in order to determine whether the force was appropriate or not. That much we owe to the deceased and their family.
The best jurisdiction is one where it's hardly considered necessary to carry arms, or use deadly force. Gun ownership and the murder rate (and gun murder rate) seem roughly correlated here:
This is "guilty until proven innocent". That isn't how law is supposed to work. We are supposed to assume that the force was appropriate. Of course, this doesn't mean we don't bother investigating, but the proper assumption is that a person is innocent.
In states that endorse "innocent until proven guilty", the police won't even lock you up or take your gun if you can make a plausible claim to have properly used force.
When the force is appropriate, we owe nothing to the deceased and their family. The deceased was a hazard, and the family set that hazard loose upon society. They owe us:
I see that your article does not distinguish legal gun ownership from illegal gun ownership. I suspect that "murder" might not be the obvious. (suicide? shot by cop? vehicular homocide?) Medical care varies greatly by state, changing survival odds. You may also be making a backwards assumption about cause and effect: people in places with lots of murder might feel a greater need to have a gun.
The LEOs you've dealt with are clearly not Florida sheriffs from non-urban counties. Brevard County sheriff Wayne Ivey is well-loved for his stance on the matter: good people should be prepared to shoot bad people. His department offers a tactical shooting course. BTW, this is a "Stand Your Ground" state, so there is no duty to retreat or otherwise let an evildoer control you.
I try to imagine a San Francisco or Berkeley police chief telling people to shoot bad people dead. It's... not working. :-)
One wouldn't expect press-ganged children ("If you find yourself involved in a gang...") and independent law-abiding adults to face identical situations.
However, it is true that many situations don't call for firearms, and knowing when and how to de-escalate are really the first things an armed citizen should know. Discretion is the better part of valor, keep it in your pants, etc.
This. The homeless crazy problem has gotten much worse with the introduction of spice. They were much more harmless before but now you don't know when one will just start stabbing you without warning.
Also doesn't help that now everyone has expensive cell phones which attract thieves.
Once I was telling my friend about how I saw a woman pass out and start seizing on the subway at 5pm on a weekday. I pressed the emergency call button and people were all staring daggers at me, how dare I delay the train. My friend then said he had the same experience at 11pm at night and he was worried about physical violence.
It also doesn't help that the sheriffs only bother to stand at the turnstiles checking tickets and if you want to evade the fare, you just can just run.
"Synthetic weed" is a misnomer. Spice/K2/etc. are plant material that has been soaked with one or more "research chemicals" in clandestine manufacturing facilities. The research chemicals are drawn from a pool of partially identified but poorly understood substances that have very little in common with cannabinoids.
It's a crapshoot what chemical a spice user will end up ingesting and it may be a completely different compound than the last time they used the stuff.
What's spice? I'm assuming you're not talking about the substance from Dune, but following up with knife combat makes me wonder a little. Quick googling says it can refer to synthetic weed. I struggle to imagine something like that turning people violent.
24hr service would be very expensive, but it seems that they should run the transit services until a little after the majority of bars and clubs close. It was nice here in Boston when they ran the T until a little past 2AM; they've since pulled that back to 12:30 or so. It can be kind of a pain, but Uber/Lyft are well established here.
It's certainly usable for that in LA, where last call is also 2am. I believe every train runs until 2 or 3 AM (on Fridays/Saturdays), and starts back up again by 5. Not quite 24 hours(except on NYE, when they don't stop), but still very usable.
Because it's much more important to address the needs of late night partiers than nurses, convenience store clerks, and so forth who have work shifts at odd hours.
I have to agree with the homeless bit, ride on the red line and after a certain point it becomes a mobile homeless shelter. Have heard stories of the blue line, and I'm just glad I don't need to ride that one often at all.
Sympathetic to those without a home, but it almost makes one want to never ride on the metro or bus again. Which is especially hard since I have no other means of transportation.
From a NorCal perspective, that is sad because BART stops around 12:30, seven days a week. But I suppose there are MUNI lines that run all night, which is slightly better.
I'm certainly not writing mass transit off but I've simply never seen it work in practice. I know that my 7 minute commute is well over an hour by bus.
I'd rather just pay the aforementioned tolls than waste 2 hours of my day on a bus, every day. That would add up to years of my life wasted pretty quickly.
I'm far more hopeful for self driving cars than mass transit.
Self-driving cars are, unfortunately, an expensive half-assed solution to transportation in the US.
Buses (And really, any at-grade transportation that has to share the road with cars) are, unfortunately, not mass transit. 7 minutes vs an hour sounds atrocious.
NYC is an abnormality in the US, but it's certainly better than almost all the rest of the cities in the states. Western Europe also has fantastic mass transit that definitely works in practice.
Ok fountain and venice are not going to save anybody from the free ways. People know about side streets, they're not really that much help. This problem isn't going away just like the cities revenue problem which is the only reason this is happening.
Before we ask about methods...has any American city ever fixed a traffic problem?
No, I'm serious: has any city in the US ever had traffic at some (bad) level, implemented some set of new policies, then had traffic drop substantially while maintaining the same population density (i.e. I won't count the abandonment of Detroit.) I certainly don't know of any, which makes me doubtful about anyone's proposals to fix traffic.
Vancouver, BC a "North" American city has had the same traffic volumes entering/exiting its downtown core since the 1960s even though the amount of jobs and people living in the area has massively increased during that time.
This was accomplished by:
1. Never building a freeway and never expanding any road capacity at all. (This is a strong disincentive to drive to downtown)
2. Building rapid transit.
3. Building residential housing in and adjacent to downtown so that people can just walk to work.
She teaches that the key to getting rid of traffic is getting rid of roads. Not everyone buys this theory, but in LA's case, why not try dynamiting the freeways and let's just see if things get better? It's not like they can get any worse.
The account in the book says traffic improved in the neighborhood where they removed the roads. It was a small-scale experiment. Subsequently NYC built a bunch more roads and traffic got worse. True believers point to a cause-and-effect relationship, but cities are complicated so it's hard to be sure.
The ideal plan for Jacobs might be Amsterdam. No cars, no traffic. It's so simple.
Yeah. A lot of people on here tend to elevate Jabobs (who I admire). But her objective wasn't to fit more people in or move more traffic through a space. It was to create a more vibrant city even if that meant that more people couldn't live or work there.
A lot of people who remember Jacobs' preference for cities that don't require cars to get around ignore the fact that she didn't necessarily favor central planning and high rises either.
Traffic may not have improved, but that's measuring the wrong thing. What is important is whether people and goods are moving effectively regardless of the transportation mode.
The Big Dig did significantly improve certain aspects of Boston traffic though traffic certainly didn't drop and I won't pretend the current situation is in any way good.
I'm not sure you're ever going to significantly decrease traffic due to induced demand. Probably the best you can do is cap building and force the construction of alternatives and changes in behavior because past some point traffic can't get worse indefinitely.
LOL the same arguments where used in Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg, worked for a few months, the traffic is worse again. It was just a great lie for the the public to finance other prestige projects.
Exactly this is just another way to squeeze citizens.
If you consider how much we pay in taxes, as Americans we really don't get bang for the buck.
Our taxes are hidden behind sales taxes, service charges, tolls, included in fuel, it really adds up.
The toll thing is especially egregious IMO, considering there had been very little investment in this type of infrastructure and now we have to pay because the people who mishandled funds are long gone.
I would still argue that prices should be set however high whereas to eliminate congestion, even it is seems "too high", simply because there is a limit to how many lanes can be constructed and no amount of lanes can eliminate congestion due to induced demand. Then we must allow market forces to occur such that development and lifestyle patterns change, which takes time. Might as well bite the bullet now.
It would have been worth quoting from this article, since it shows what nonsense the original claim about Sweden was.
"When Stockholm, Sweden introduced a "congestion tax" to discourage driving in the center of town, traffic eased and the pollution level dropped by between 5 and 10 percent.
There was one other result that was unexpected, but welcome nonetheless: The rate of asthma attacks among local children decreased by nearly 50 percent, according to a Johns Hopkins University economist's study of the tax and its impact."
Houston has flex tolling on it's main lanes. On our biggest freeway with 10+ lanes in each direction two are dedicated to tolling with a price that ranges from $1 to $8 each way.
During peak hours the $8 toll makes almost no difference. The lanes remain just as jammed and on average you only save 5-10 minutes (less than 10% of the drive time) over the total length of the tollway.
Obviously this isn't exactly scientific reporting but the toll road authority in Houston is big business to the tune of 700 million/year in toll fees. They won't facilitate access to data if it results in a negative impression.
> Obviously this isn't exactly scientific reporting
It doesn't need to be. Link to the local paper. There's a lot of misinformation being used today. It's not new, but we have the resources to verify things now. We need due diligence, not pontification.
You may need to Google that article title and click through to read it but it outlines that even at $7 each way the price wasn't high enough so now it's $10 each way (not $8 as I stated.) Even so, the $3 price hike has done little to ease congestion.
Clearly the only scientific thing would be to have different tolls on different weekdays. Monday: $25, Tuesday: $10, Wednesday: $17, Thursday: $50, Friday: $31. Now you can see which price eases congestion the most!
The trouble is the only thing our state and cities ever do is widen freeways, and that never works. The core of the problem is traffic management, which technology can solve without added tolls. (It's the same with city streets. There is absolutely no reason in 2017 why we should ever hit more than one or two red lights in intra-city travel.) It's just that the state and city governments seeem truly oblivious to any new ways of thinking about the problem.
Tolls are regressive and will have a greater impact on poor people who have to commute to work. Second, public infrastructure is paid for by by both taxes and use fees/licenses/fines. That's a bit different from a utility. If the feds and state gave me back the money for the roads I've already built, I'd be fine switching to a pay-as-you-go model. Another consideration: This state is already funneling too many public funds to private toll road operators — to the tune of billions of dollars. I'd really hate to see more of my money go to people who are already charging the public way too much for setting up booths on the roads I paid for and charging me to drive on them.
As a side note, I've always thought California was leaving some big revenue opportunities on the table by not issuing special licenses for high-speed driving and creating high-speed lanes for people with those licenses. It would be a neat experiment. We could try it out on the 15 between LA and Las Vegas, were people are driving 100 anyway.
To people who feel pricing roads is wrong because of equity, what about pricing cars, gasoline, transit, parking, etc? Virtually all prices are hard on the poor but there are rarely calls to do away with prices where they already exist. It doesn't make much sense to say that it's equitable to put a tax on gasoline, an input to driving, but not driving itself. Moreover, are we supposed to make all street parking or public parking garages free at all times?
What I see is status quo bias. Driving on a crowded road at rush hour doesn't deserve to be price free any more than a ride on a subway, an hour in a parking garage, a court appointment, the water bill of a publicly owned utility or any of the other commodities for which government charges some price.
It's especially funny to see people complain tolls are big government. Tolls are supported by virtually every conservative think tank. They are central to trump's infrastructure plans.
Lets take average Joe. He can choose to buy a car or not, but he depends on the value roads provide with his life and employment. Does he not have the responsibility to contribute? Police do not arrive by train, we will always need roads, and discrete transport, and they will always benefit everyone, driver or not. Toll only funding just leads to worse basic services, and technical inflation.
Imagine how much more expensive living in LA will be. Instead of fixing their god awful public transit (like NYC) they want to punish people for using the only reliable mode of transportation?
No. You are thinking about it wrong. By making it cost prohibitive for the poors to move around we will be able to concentrate their populations into designated "bottom feeder" neighborhoods allowing us to more effectively rob them of basic public services like education, healthcare, and potable water.
You forgot regressive forms of taxation. So increase the street sweeping to 3x a week in the bottom-feeder neighborhoods, and issue 3x the number of street sweeping violations.
Hyperbole aside, when you see gentrification in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, one has to wonder how numbered are the days of LA's poor neighborhoods.
I figured this comment carried enough satire to not need explanation. He was using an offensive tone to carry over the implicated apathy that city planning has on the impoverished.
I think based on the rest of the context that was kind of the point - to drive home the "screw these people" attitude that policies like this would spring from.
sigh I am surprised how much I misread that comment. I think I just saw 'the poors' and I didn't properly read the rest of the comment at first glance.
They're already paying for it. The injustice is that even people too poor to drive pay an undue amount. Sit on the packed 720 crawling down Wilshire blvd at rush hour and realize those people have just as much right to get around. I need to find the source but a few years ago, more people got down Wilshire in buses during rush hour than in cars, yet the condo canyon folks screamed and wailed about the prospect of a bus lane.
By far the most efficient mechanism humanity has ever come up with for distributing scarce resources (such as room on freeways) are free markets. The article is 100% correct that pervasive tolls are the only effective and fair way to reduce what has become monumentally oppressive traffic congestion in LA.
Tolls are a monopoly granted by the government, which makes it the opposite of a free market. The real result of a free market would be private roads or highways that would compete against each other for tolls. Neither are a great solution. Simply throwing more public transportation at the problem isn't going to help either.
If LA wants to improve their traffic problem, they need to address the root cause: bad urban planning and zoning laws. Where people work and where people live are in completely different areas of the city, requiring you to commute. They need to make local traffic easier (ie: not force you onto the freeway) and they need to reduce the need to drive all over the city every single day.
People will use free highways until they're at capacity. Throwing more public transportation at the problem does increase the number of people that can travel down the freeway, but it won't reduce traffic because any car taken off the highway by a driver switching to public transit will be replaced by another driver taking up the commute.
How are you going to get people to invest in public transit without getting them out of their cars?
LA is hands down the worst major metro area I've been to when it comes to transit, and getting people off the roads will only improve that situation—carpooling, public transit, biking, and hell WALKING are all better options.
Ehh idk. I've lived in a couple major cities, and moved here to LA in 2015. It's not as terrible is it might seem on the surface. One of the major differences that sets Los Angeles apart from other cities is that people tend to live quite far from work because of housing costs and geography. I'm fortunate that I can take the bus (for now) and often take the Expo Line downtown to go to Kings games, but I know a lot of people that live in Playa or El Segundo and work in downtown, or even the Valley. That just isn't a realistic option for them. I think people have to see Public Transit as a reliable replacement before we introduce some forcing mechanism for them to sell their vehicle.
I think LA is probably a market that most uniquely fits for self driving cars (depending on whatever business model emerges for those things). Thing is, I can't imagine the special kind of road rage that'll emerge when you're driving on the 405 and look to your left and right and see a completely empty vehicle.
LA is 35 miles long. What would the walking commute of 10 million people look like?
So you're suggesting that instead of fixing the problem (public transit) they should start whipping people so that the rich can drive on their traffic-free roads?
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy. A sensible toll would be something anyone who can afford to own a car can be expected pay.
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy
But that's exactly what it accomplishes. Further pushing the poor into poverty punishing the commute to a minimum wage job in a part of town they can't afford.
Not to mention that the very same person will sometimes WANT to pay a toll for an uncongested lane. Running late for an interview? Maybe $15 is worth it to go 70mph for 20 miles at 8:30 AM.
The long tail very often has to "ride on fumes" until payday. Unless the tolls are literally cheaper than the fuel cost of idling in traffic, the result will be to punish those uppity poor for imagining they could afford a car (which they could previously afford, if just barely).
Some people don't have any room in their budget for anything! Any time you charge people $N for something that used to cost $0, the poor get hit the worst and the rich don't get affected at all.
"the poor people" is such a wide brush. How about it would make middle class people think about their budgets carefully and only drive when really needed.
The metro isn't that bad. I commuted from Hollywood to Torrance by metro/bus daily for a few years. The metro fare cost me more than gas actually but staying off the 110 was golden.
The argument for public transportation in Los Angeles is a continuing theme...and it is also one that is nonsensical in the context of this city.
The city of Los Angeles, and by that I mean the sprawling megalopolis it really is, simply isn't built for public transportation. A fundamental shift in urban design of massive proportions would have to occur for mass transportation to make dent here.
In order to affect this massive re-modelling of the city one would have to use eminent domain laws to force millions of people to sell their properties and move. You would literally have to displace millions of people in order to build the required roadways and infrastructure that would allow a shift towards mass transit. This, of course isn't only unthinkable, it's impossible.
Take the "simplest" (in quotes because I am being sarcastic about the actual simplicity) of all problems: Where do you park your car?
Mass transit isn't going to reach into every suburban neighborhood. And, no, people are not going to ride bicycles. If we want an Amsterdam-like bicycle culture we would have to displace even more people. And then you'd have to build massive bike parking lots like the one next to Centraal station in Amsterdam.
People would need to drive a cars to a parking lot somewhere. Millions of people. There is no space to build these parking lots and the required rail in/out pathways without destroying whole neighborhood en-masse.
Once you get to work you'd have to be able to get from the station to your workplace. Once again, if we want this to be within walking or biking distance of most businesses we would have to tear-up whole neighborhoods in order to enable the tentacles of a mass transit infrastructure to get close enough.
And then there's the cost. I won't even bother trying to estimate it. What's the cost of buying-up, I don't know, 100,000 homes? Include both the real estate and legal costs ('cause there would be tens of thousands of lawsuits). And, once all homes are acquired and millions displaced, what's the cost of construction.
Nah, LA isn't suitable for mass transit in the spirit of many European cities. The comparison is futile.
What we could do is try to encourage --over time-- a spreading out of centers of employment. This can be done NY style by offering no taxes for ten years for the relocation or startup of businesses in designated areas. There's a huge focal point of businesses in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor that creates massive traffic flows from as far away as 50 miles in every direction. That's the problem.
Most of those businesses don't need to be there. Why some flock to that corridor is somewhat incomprehensible to me other than there might be lack of space availability or zoning issues much outside that region.
It's a tough problem. Not sure tunneling is the solution either.
Baloney. Just add a bunch of buses, with exclusive bus lanes covering their whole route. Choose the initial routes so they'll at least break even.
Bam, you have a good public transit system that is much faster than private cars due to being immune to traffic, and you didn't have to confiscate any property, build anything expensive, or do anything else exciting or risky.
Everyone's obsessed with rail, and rail is nice, but if you already have roads rapid bus transit makes more sense in the short run
You must not live in Los Angeles. If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably. In some places you can't due to the topology of the roads.
Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
There are no good mass transit solutions in Los Angeles. I've lived here long enough to see and analyze what is happening from multiple vantage points. We lived by the beach, desert, inland and in a couple of valleys. It's a mess. This megalopolis did not evolve to be mass transit friendly.
I say this with sadness because there's nothing I'd like more than not to own a car. I am simply being a realist on this one.
> If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably.
Really? Because all those lanes that have been added over the years don't appear to have made a big difference.
Also, the lane would be replaced with something amazing angelinos have never seen before -- a transport mode way faster than any other. With all the people choosing to use that bus, there'll be less car traffic. Saving half an hour has a way of turning excuses like "the bus is crowded" into jelly.
(Also, if it turns out you're right, lane rules and hours can be adjusted immediately with just a little paint or a sign. This is not risky.)
> Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops
Um, don't use the freeway then, except where it's genuinely more direct. Then you don't have to take lanes away anyway.
> at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
Are you kidding? There's so much space in wasted parking lots for individual businesses, or even street space on these huge wide roads, any of which could be reclaimed.
> You must not live in Los Angeles.
Correct! If I did, I'd be afflicted by the same sad disease as you, lack of imagination.
Fact is, we make it work here in metro NYC, which is as big and sprawled out as LA -- probably more actually. If we can do it, so can you. (Note that by metro NYC I don't mean manhattan and the like, I mean to emphasize the outer parts, the 4 boroughs and 3 detached counties (Westchester, Bergen, Hudson) surrounding manhattan.
I invite you to come tour outer NYC, and see what you think
They don't even need to say no taxes in certain areas. All that has to be done is allow other uses in residential areas. An area that previously just had loads of houses could then have a commercial building. Businesses would do it because it is much cheaper than building in zoned commercial or leasing in a skyscraper. Just alter zoning laws and it would be much better.
Use taxes such as highway tolls are among the most economically efficient ways to raise revenue to maintain and improve public goods. Since most tolling is electronic now, it's straightforward to provide a means-tested toll credit for people who would otherwise have trouble paying for their portion of the use of the expressway.
I think you need one more twist. If I'm poor, and I have a means-tested toll credit, then I have no incentive not to use the toll road. That is, the economic incentives you're trying to create don't apply to the poor. (Unless by "credit" you mean "I get to keep the cash if I don't use it", in which case my objection does not apply.)
Sure, so when the police come to help you we should charge you a per-visit fee. It will be small, something poor people can't afford but rich people can afford easily, like $50. If you can't afford it, they won't go after the criminal who hurt you.
It's not regressive because charging someone to use something (like police services) is not a tax, after all.
The very point is that right now roads are paid by taxes, which are progressive, and people are suggesting replacing them with fees, which are regressive (without some additional scheme to account for this). A better solution would be subsidizing all public transit so it is free, which is progressive, not regressive. But will never solve the problem because it only incentivizes the poor to use transit.
If we stop subsidizing roads or make public transit free/cheaper then roads will be for the rich only, and public transit I'm sure will have millions poured into it and flourish. The government is, after all, historically very responsive to needs and pain points that are only felt by the poor and minorities.
We need to provide funding for transit first. We need to get middle-upper class people riding it, people who vote, are white, donate to political campaigns, know powerful people, etc which specifically means making it fast, efficient, reliable. Look at places like DC and NYC and SF/bayarea where middle-class businessmen take transit because it's the easiest, most efficient method and is fairly reliable.
I think the idea is that sales and gasoline taxes are already used to pay for roads and are already regressive, so you're replacing one regressive tax with another, which is (perhaps) no worse than before.
On the other hand, if you're replacing income tax with tolls or just raising tolls without lowering other taxes, then it would be regressive.
This definition of "tax" is wrong at best, precisely backwards at worst. Most people don't own real estate, yet they still call it "property tax". Most people didn't die this year, yet they still call it "estate tax". Most people don't smoke, yet they still call it "cigarette tax". In every case, the people's representatives have found some group they can shake down on the people's behalf.
> This objection also ignores just how inequitable and dysfunctional our current system is. Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads.
I'm not sure what the technical term would be, but I think it's less about false equivalence but more that saying that other things are bad doesn't justify making another bad thing.
"This proposed policy will make things worse, but there are other policies that make things worse, so therefore this policy cannot be criticized on those grounds".
The other way we pay for roads is through sales taxes (aka the most regressive tax). At least tolls are use-based, rather than on the general population.
The bastion of socialism, France, has mostly-toll freeways (they also have non-toll routes nationale and routes départementales in addition to more local routes communales)
Of course, they do also actually plan their roadways nationally and region-wide whereas in the US, it seems "city planning" is an oxymoron.
Planners generally aim for a utilitarian investigation of the effects. Tolls impact individual trips, but are also shown (in certain use-cases, like congestion charges) to improve traffic flow and increase transit use - time spent stuck in traffic increases fuel use and pollution, and slows everyone's average time per trip. In the extreme traffic case of overflowing gridlock, as often happens in developing-world megacities, everyone loses.
The arguments are very similar around taxes on cigarettes or soda: A painful measure that may save money or improve health outcomes in the long-term. In the end, it's just one more tool that has to be used judiciously.
The notion that road pricing is a regressive tax on the poor smacks of elitism. The hidden message seems to be "poor people don't have anywhere important to be." But lower income people were surveyed an they in fact desired road pricing just as much--if not more than--any other population segment because of the need to efficiently travel to multiple jobs and daycare sites efficiently, for instance.
It reminds me of the "poor people shouldn't have nice things" superiority complex that breeds thoughts like "poor people shouldn't buy smartphones and flatscreens!", when those things are quite inexpensive compared to actual ongoing expenses of rent and food. And there are many factors other than road pricing, such as cost of vehicle, fuel, and parking.
"Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads."
It then goes on to sort-of suggest that despite this new pain the net benefit will be better for "working-class" people......somehow. No thoughts were offered on how to keep the toll revenue from just padding out civil servant pensions and benefits while the traffic and roads muddle on.
As I understand it, the idea is that if you're already collecting sales and gasoline taxes to pay for roads, collecting the same amount of money through tolls instead isn't any more regressive (it replaces one regressive tax with another), plus it cuts down on traffic.
On the other hand, replacing income tax with tolls really would be regressive.
(But I don't know enough about taxes to say if that's really true.)
Experts have pointed to tolls as a traffic solution for decades, yet building political support for road fees
continues to be a challenge — the most common complaint being: "Oh, so only rich people can drive?"
This critique ignores the fact that working Americans often suffer the most severely from the impacts of
poor mobility. Working-class parents who are late to pick up their kids from day care, for example, often
pay severe financial penalties. Having the option to reach their destination quickly could actually save
them money. In fact, experience with dynamic tolling in the United States has shown that people of all
income levels use these lanes. This objection also ignores just how inequitable and dysfunctional our
current system is. Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and
every other way we pay for roads.
So the LA Times defines ≠rich as "working/working-class Americans," and ultimately concludes that "tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but be so do sales taxes, gas taxes, and every other way we pay for roads."
So what's one more regressive tax–"inequitable and dysfunctional"–to the poor?
The LA Times's internally-consistent value system is well-matched by its penetrating insight.
Tolls are just a form of paying people to go away (if you don't take the toll road, you're paid by getting to keep a few dollars in your pocket).
It only reduces traffic for you if you are one of the ones that didn't go away.
If the toll discouraged you, then the traffic problem isn't solved for you; you're taking a bunch of non-toll roads riddled with detours and intersections.
We can't call that a solution to the traffic problem. That's like saying, "we can reduce congestion on this ethernet switch not by better firmware and protocols, but just getting people to stop web surfing and watching videos, and go do something else".
The cost of vehicle ownership is a sizable toll people already pay. Even a beater is $300/mo. for insurance and maintenance, not counting the fuel. We've dumped our second car (2010) to shed about $900/mo. in insurance, maintenance and loan payments.
And then you've got this double-edged sword that Lyft is cheap enough to be competitive with vehicle ownership + parking (for commutes up to about 8 miles), and the Rideshare cars have automatic free access to the HOV lanes. So those people get to ride fast without removing a car from the road as the HOV program intends.
I drive a beater, it cost me $4k 6 years ago. I spend $40/month on insurance in a big city - liability only, about $150 a year on maintenance (2-3 oil changes, plus misc.), and generally have 1 big repair a year that runs me $300-500. All-in-all that's $75-95 a month plus gas. It's really not a huge toll, even for poor people.
I've been riding a road bike for 8 years in LA (4 miles, Santa Monica -> Venice) and it's been great. Yesterday I tried out an electric road bike for the first time to test out a longer commute (14 miles, Redondo Beach -> Venice) and it was great @ 45 minutes mostly on the beach. Not even tired!
Compare that to my test car commute on the 405 from Redondo Beach -> Venice last Monday. Same 45 minutes but much more stress due to merging, bad drivers, people trying to make left turns last minute, etc.
Even though adding tolls is a good idea, it will just make people angry without giving people an alternative. And the alternative has to be there at the time of raising the price for the road use, not 10+ years later (so buses are in, trains are out, maybe in the later phase).
Buses are also a better alternative because of the nature of U.S. suburban areas - the grid layer, low point density housing.
I really, really hope this happens to all of LA's freeways (or really all highways in the world)!
It'd be cool if they could even do different pricing for different lanes (e.g. Left lane is $X/mi, 2nd lane is .6X/mi, 3rd lane is .3X, the rest are free).
I also wonder what the algorithm is they use for pricing. I remember reading something about the 110/10 HOT lanes that they were targeting no slower than 45 mph or something? It might be smarter to target max revenue instead though. Like every 30 minutes you raise or lower the price depending if you made more or less money in the last 30 minutes after doing the same thing.
This is what is done in Minnesota. Pricing is dynamically adjusted every 3 minutes to keep traffic flowing at a minimum of 45mph (in practice more like 60+mph). When there is more traffic, the toll is priced higher. Electronic sensors monitor the traffic density and tolls are changed every three minutes. The best part is, it works!
Wow, I hadn't heard of this! Very interesting. Trying to find more info about this but not finding it on Minnesota DOT (the MnPASS site doesn't have results data) or other sites. Can you share a link?
Please put a toll on the 405. I remember when I was a kid I would drive around for fun, just to get the experience of driving, even in traffic. If it cost even a $1 to get on a freeway I would have stayed off. How many people on a congested freeway would avoid it if it cost anything?
I know this is a regressive tax, but it could be mitigated many ways. You could use the tolls to subsidize buses or registration fees for the poor. Better still: homeless shelters. Tax me please!
Tolls do not reduce traffic. Chicago's (and when I say Chicago, I mean it in the same vein that the author uses "LA", a massive metro area) installation of toll systems in my life here have caused the infrastructure to perpetually be under construction for the last 20 years I've been here.
At best, tolls remove large trucks from the roads - which is not the problem in L.A. Mostly though, they just make the situation worse, and more expensive for users that have little alternative.
The solution is the same as it's always been: stop building areas with car travel as the only option. The little things like bus routes dropping off at a stop that has no sidewalks and no legitimate way to cross a street without a mile long detour for a pedestrian are what make buses not work. The same features that funnel cars into shopping centers disregard the human walking element and make it all but impossible to move in this suburban sprawl.
The physical distances people typically go in one of the most beautiful climates in the country, cooped up in a car, makes me also wonder why there isn't more of a push to create safe cycling routes? I ride 11 miles each way to work here in Chicago, all year, and in the winter extremes it can be occasionally miserable, but one thing I don't have much problem with is safety. I have a path or lane almost my entire commute, and other than the 1 mile of the heart of the loop, it's basically stress free. If I had this safety with LA's climate, I would literally become an evangelist for bike commuting.
Any Houstonian can tell you this is a lie. We have HOV lanes (HOT lanes) which often move at slower speeds than regular lanes because minimum speed limits are not enforceable. You might remember a man getting arrested for driving with his son on a riding lawnmower in a HOV lane before the Super Bowl. Frequently, I've been stuck behind hybrid car drivers who don't want to exceed a certain speed to improve their gas mileage or tourists pointing out landmarks to passengers.
Regular toll roads don't work either. They'll sell you on the idea that they can build more roads by charging drivers who use them. But the tolls never go away. Houston's toll roads have paid for themselves many times over yet toll prices only increase. Once the government has a source of revenue, they'll never let it go.
Across the US, cities are gentrifying, increasing taxes to push the poor people out allowing developers to rebuild neighborhoods, increase the property value, and then resell for profit. This means poor people have to commute into the city for work congesting the roads. Building toll roads just hurts them more.
If you want to cure traffic congestion make inner cities affordable again.
I've never been to LA so I'm speaking from ignorance but some of the objections raised in this thread seem like they have obvious solutions to me.
1) Tolls are regressive. I believe cities in the US have power over some taxation so why not offset the extra cost by reducing another tax? e.g. property taxes in low value areas could be cut, or sales taxes. Alternatively spend all the toll revenue on heavily subsidising public transport so that it is cheap and plentiful.
2) Other cities have had tolls and it did not effect the traffic. Why not just raise the toll until it does effect the traffic? In London the charge for breaking Ultra-Low Emission Zone requirements will be £130/$160 after 2020. Raise the toll to $100 and it will have an effect.
Sounds though that the underlying issue is that LA's urban geography doesn't lend itself to public transport so that whatever you do people will still have to use cars if they want to travel any reasonable distance. Short of undertaking a Shanghai-metro level of construction (from nothing to the world's largest rapid transit system in 20 years.)
In MA ya get a state tax deduction for tolls on your transponder. They also issue special transponders to people who live in certain places where they're dependent on toll roads that mostly carry through traffic; those people get discounts on certain tolls.
Isn't there a well-proven positive (meaning unstable) feedback loop between the increased supply of roads and the demand for them? Is there any way to introduce an effective negative (stabilizing) feedback loop into the system? Congestion pricing is an attempt to do that.
How about introducing some kind of net metering into the system? Not only could people who use the road at peak times be charged a toll, but people who travel off-peak could get a credit. It should be possible for somebody who has an off-peak commute to actually earn a bit of money.
Yes, I'm proposing the transponder-age version of the toll-booth person handing money to the driver.
With respect to Mr. Musk, his tunnelling proposal is nuts: on many things he's good, not this. We did some tunnels in Boston in the 1990s and early 2000s. Caissons! Flooding! Cooling systems to freeze the mud so the buildings near the project don't fall down! Ventilation systems! Rats flushed out by the tunneling projects! Buried utility lines! In LA, several layers of underground storm drains! Cost overruns!
What about the poor? LA for most parts, against popular belief, is a pretty homogenous city when it comes to wealth, sure you have Beverly Hills and Malibu but LA is so vast that majority of it doesn't feel secluded. Now if you toll the non-wealthy (the rich will not notice the toll) you remove that dynamic, that headline should really say let's remove more poor people from the freeways.
With any Pigouvian tax[1] you encounter the problem of progressivity. The answer is to make sure that the tax revenues are directed towards making it easier for low income people to have better transit options. Whether that means improved transit systems or income based toll exceptions, it's relatively easy to offset the detrimental impacts that tolling may put in place.
I just think A) we have to be honest that is only a tax on the poor B) then have the rich pay in a different way, maybe it should be a limit on duration of travel or miles by humans, ie. no matter what car you drive or who drives you you're not allowed to travel more than x number of miles/day. (this is beginning to sound really odd)
> the most common complaint being: "Oh, so only rich people can drive?"
> This critique ignores the fact that working Americans often suffer the most severely from the impacts of poor mobility. Working-class parents who are late to pick up their kids from day care, for example, often pay severe financial penalties. Having the option to reach their destination quickly could actually save them money. In fact, experience with dynamic tolling in the United States has shown that people of all income levels use these lanes. This objection also ignores just how inequitable and dysfunctional our current system is. Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads.
Sounds like a great way to solve other people's problems. I drive through D.C. often enough. Their congestion scheme seems to do little for the schmucks who can't afford to pay.
It makes a hell of a lot of money though. And it's defiantly a help for people driving through.
Having toll lanes don't help with anything. Look at what the 10 freeway don't rush hour. Equally clogged. No form of public transit is going to help with the traffic, it's only going to give people an alternative to avoid traffic.
The problem lies in just bad freeway design. If you look at the 405 North at the 10 intersection. You're going from 6 lanes to 4 and then adding long merging lanes as Santa Monica, Wilshire, and Sunset come up.
Now let's look at the 10 freeway Eastbound past downtown. The freeway immediately splits in 4 with traffic merging into the center. An on ramp in the center of a freeway!? Unless the entire intersection is completely rebuilt traffic will never be fixed because the bottleneck is unavoidable.
"Nobody likes paying for anything they are used to getting for free, and freeway tolls are no exception. But why are we willing to pay for electricity, gasoline or air travel, but not for roads?"
- The author has a false assumption here that roads are free, there are various forms of taxes you are paying to Gov (City, State, Fed) in forms of gasoline tax, DMV registration tax, federal income tax where your dollars are supposed to maintain and develop infrastructure. It's just that Gov is doing a horrendous job managing it. Paying in the form of tolls is a really bad idea specially stupid if you think you are not paying for using roads (freeways etc) at the moment.
I guess the way it is now, property taxes go into a common municipal budget and then a share gets put toward road maintenance, right? I wonder if it would work to reduce property taxes by the amount that's currently spent on roads, and replace it solely with tolls that go into a fund that is dedicated to road maintenance and nothing else. So taxes for everyone would fall by 43% or whatever it is, and only drivers would pay tolls. I suspect it wouldn't work because current property taxes are already insufficient to pay for roads. I still like the idea though.
- Unaffordable housing. If you are able to be a homeowner, you'll most likely live further away from where you work and not have as many travel options.
Median individual income: $28k; Median house price: ~$600k.
I personally think the market is inflated but I have no idea how or if it will crash.
- Unaffordable rents. You find a great place to live, that you can afford, that might be rent control, and it doesn't make monetary sense to move elsewhere. Or you just can't afford to (like if you work in SM/Venice).
- Geography. For example, look at The Valley. If you have to come into central LA, your options are pretty limited. If you wanted to use good public transit, there's an express bus and the stunted Red Line. Not much of the rest of the Valley is served.
There are of course other reasons but I think these are main drivers. I think dedicated bus lanes could alleviate these issues but, when I asked someone at Metro about that, she skirted the issue by saying there are no plans to widen any streets in LA. Which I'm ok with - I'd prefer to see some of them reduced or reconfigured. It seems their focus is mainly on rail. Sadly, it's also still focused on a hub-and-spoke system pointing downtown instead of something more nodal around other job centers/geography.
Tolls aren't going to help. They're only going to be another nickel or dime to help overwhelm the poor and middle class here. As someone else pointed out, it's not going to be an issue for Mr. Audi and Mrs. Land Rover to pay them, but when Jose and Juanita come over to cut their lawn and babysit their kid, they will suffer.
And Jose and Juanita, and all the rest of us already suffer each time there's a new measure to increase sales tax to pay for public transit so that we can hopefully, maybe, one day have a decent, less dangerous, less stressful way to get around. I'm not super-familiar with all the consequences of Prop 13 but I'm assuming that because the city can't extract it's fair share of tax revenue from the housing stock that that is why everything is based on sales tax increases.
I recently attended a transit planning meeting in Austin where they discussed the idea of combining demand driven tolls that provide free access to express buses.
I think this approach provides an excellent alternative to trains (which Austinites keep voting down) because:
- It addresses the issue where buses are slowed down by other traffic.
- It has the potential to convince people to take buses when total travel time is faster than driving and the cost of the toll is too great to use routinely.
- It has a low financial impact on tax payers, making it more likely to be approved.
People have no problem spending $20,000 for a car, $3k/year for insurance, thousands more for gas and maintenance. For some reason, people freak out when anyone tries to add or increase toll roads. If you want to see a comment get epic downvoted, propose a GPS based tolling system to replace the gas tax. Every road is passively tolled so everyone pays for what they use. People freak out, everybody feels entitled to free roads.
Does this article think that Elon Musk is going to donate all the tunnels to the city for free? What he is creating is a network of toll roads, under the city. I'm sure he did his research and saw that adding one lane to the freeway cost 1.6B, and noticed that it was probably a lot cheaper to dig under the city, instead of paying incredibly high prices for land and supports. Billionaires love to act like "This morning I came up with this idea in the shower, and i thought it was cool so I'm going to move forward with it." Lets take a minute and think about some of the moves he's recently made. He has an electric car company, that is developing self driving car technology. He's stated that you could only use the self driving car through "Teslas network" for Uber like service. If tesla has the electric/self driving car market, a vast network of uncongested roads they will essentially have such a competitive advantage in major cities, that you'd be stupid to not use their service. More and more people using "Tesla Uber", will automatically declog the roads until theres a natural balance.
People should pay for what they use. And the price for what they use should go up when demand for it is high.
After all, the most expensive construction is done to satisfy demand when demand is high.
And paying for what you use will spur people to use less of that valuable road space. Alternatives will increase as more people seek to avoid paying the actual costs for they had been using.
Yes, we do pay gas taxes. But that effectively translates into a subsidy for traveling when demand is high. It's not a reality-based price.
Imagine if government provided all the hotel rooms and you always paid the same price. Peak demand would be much higher than it is now. And there would be political pressure to build many more hotel rooms. And this construction would require higher taxes because the additional rooms would be the most expensive to build while also only being used when demand is higher.
Of course, we don't usually think of road space as space we are occupying, just like we occupy a hotel room. But it is.
How would we implement this? Regular commuters could have a fixed price they pay in advance. But they could get paid to delay their trip when traffic is particular bad. And those not planning ahead would pay a spot price, which would go up enough to deter non-planners from traveling and/or convince commuters to delay.
And if there is an uproar about making people pay to get to jobs when they cannot control when they start work, make the employer pay for these workers. If it costs workers more to do a job, the employer will have to pay them more to do it anyway, so why not get the support of those workers who don't understand this reality?
Tolls simply aren't the answer. At best they end up being a regressive tax. $10/day means nothing to someone living in Malibu. It can be a huge deal to someone who comes into Culver City to clean a house.
But the real problem with tolls is that there really is no alternative to driving and it's going to be irresponsible and ineffective to pretend like there is.
Other posters have mentioned the concentration of businesses downtown as a problem but there is some spread. And commercial districts tend to cluster for a reason. Supporting infrastructure, proximity to other businesses and so on.
What LA needs--and any other sprawling city for that matter--is for high density, affordable living close to employment centers such that car ownership may eventually become optional.
This requires changes in zoning (which current landowners will fight tooth and nail) and probably an adjustment to the property tax system to pay for new public transit infrastructure such that the property tax is a function of the land area you occupy inversely proportional to your distance from downtown (and maybe several other important points).
Basically you need to tax people who own large lots close to the city center. This effectively means the rich and again they'll fight it tooth and nail.
Everybody wants to live on a half acre lot (or bigger). They want it to be affordable and close to work. Well that doesn't work in a city of X million people.
Additionally outer areas may need to be treated like commuter towns are in NYC, meaning rail transport from there to, say, downtown where there's essentially just one stop in the "town". Too many stops and it just stops working at anything over, say, 20 miles or so.
Money seems to incentivize people one way or another as I'm exactly like this and I'm sure others are probably too. I hate the toll roads and avoid them even though I can afford them. Lots of times it ends up costing me because I cross a toll road without paying accidentally then get something in the mail, forget to pay it, then end up with some fee. I really really hate toll roads however I can't control if they exist or not. If they are all over, I would really think twice about the type of transportation I take, especially if I didn't want to shell out the dough or had a smaller budget to work with.
Alternatively, the money obtained via the toll roads (basically a tax) should be then funneled to "cheapifying" mass transportation or subsidizing it to be more affordable and a better experience as well so it has greater appeal over just saving money. You then get ying and yang motivation.
This just reminded me of how taxes work, for example, you can shape the way companies pollute by having a carbon tax and promote green by having it subsidized, well, I'm just copying that idea.
The author's thesis depends pretty heavily on drivers having alternatives. I place little faith in the Peak Travel Study -- http://www.travelbehavior.us/Nancy-pdfs/Peak%20Travel%20in%2... -- who in their right mind would drive in rush hour traffic except to work or school -- except for the naive out-of-towner who realized too late they would arrive in The Big City during Rush Hour en route to their ultimate destination?
Moreover, the HOT lane idea, which my city (ATL) has implemented in a couple of places, only reduces traffic in the HOT lane. The other lanes become MORE crowded by the people who prefer to suffer for free.
Once, I think the toll hit $35. If I were heading home, maybe I would pay it; heading to work, not so much.
Why does L.A.'s traffic need fixing? We have some of the slowest freeways in the country, yet everybody manages to get to work. They aren't that bad, even the 10.
Elon Musk says a lot of things. That's no reason to think there's a problem.
Our public transportation isn't that bad either. I agree, our bus system SUCKS in contrast to other states and countries. But the Metro system is actually pretty good. They arrive frequently and have been expanding to new areas. The fact that I can hop on the Gold Line from East Pasadena and take the train all the way to the Natural History Museum, or DTLA, or Santa Monica, or Long Beach is pretty nice.
The problem, if you can even call it one, is in the culture. In LA, we choose to live far away from public transit vessels. It's just what we do; we've chosen to build lots of freeways and we're probably going to stick to that long into the driverless-car revolution. It's also not very hard to find somewhere to live along the Metro line and find a workplace nearby a stop. I've done it a few times. Sure, I'm a programmer but, well, choice is a perk you get from having marketable skills.
As others have said, one thing that keeps many folks away from public transit is the lack of enforcement; without a doubt, you'll have to sit near one or two sleeping homeless individuals any time you take the Red or Purple Lines. They always smell terrible, and average riders often get tired of this. The Gold Line has more enforcement, but I don't recall ever seeing people in orange vests once on any of the other lines. Metro doesn't seem to care.
People in L.A., on average, have it good, and we're spoiled. We should all try living in SF, or NY, or Boston, and then think about complaining about traffic again.
Does anyone know if there are any tax benefits to companies who allow telecommuting in LA? I used to deal with 2 hours of LA traffic per day for my commute and it was absolutely soul crushing. My current company allows telecommuting and even though I'm only 18 miles away, it's a blessing to not to have to deal with LA traffic on a daily basis anymore.
I wanted to read these comments to see whether HN readership was with or against this argument, and instead everyone just decides they have better ideas or different arguments.
For what it's worth, I think this would be a great first start. It's an easy MVP (thinking agile here) to get data and then decide what the next potentially more costly step might be.
Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane. The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'
Tolls do little suppress traffic. They do a lot to divert it as people seek to avoid the toll, as Sydney discovered stupidly when it tried to use road closures to force traffic through privately built inefficient roads (public-private partnerships might as well have been rewritten as "legal corruption").
Ultimately we pay for the roads regardless. The point of a toll is simply to make that payment a visible use tax. You can pay at the pump, pay on 4/15, pay with your Fastrak, it's all the same and then all taxes are fungible.
I would like to but I do not think this will improve LA traffic. It will divert it somewhat. Improving infrastructure won't help either; as the opinion piece points out, that's been tried.
Ultimately, LA has to either get people out of their cars or they have to get more people into their cars.
One thing I'd love is an Uber quality app for transit. It would unify transit systems. Maybe it could tell about overcrowding (6:30 first train out of Fullerton to Union Station was packed to the gills). Maybe it could be unified with Uber/Lyft/Yellow.
Metrolink is not that app. SmartRide is not that app. Amtrak is not that app.
And we all know the people who can't afford to pay tolls can definitely afford the cost of moving which includes losing their likely rent-controlled apartments.
So what happens, for example, with neighboring counties, where there isn't any mass transit? Do they also pay $5/gallon, to help solve LA's problems? Or do they keep current gas prices, and get their roads clogged with Angelenos looking for cheaper fuel?
Gas taxes are state level based at this time. But let's say they become county based. Ensure that taxes are across multiple counties as LA really is a metropolis that spans many counties.
To see the effect you are talking about, you would see it and it has happened, in Primm, Nevada.
Some people make the effort to go get gas past the state line but really, it was never worth their effort.
> But why are we willing to pay for electricity, gasoline or air travel, but not for roads?
Because we already pay for roads through taxes, and car registration fees, and drivers license fees! Meanwhile the money that gets put into tolls doesn't get returned to infrastructure we agree with. It goes into company pockets who then monopolise the roads for decades and providing awful service.
It also penalises the poor; everyone in a BMW/Audi can pay the tolls and travel in comfort but the rest of you need to go to cattle class in the bus. Ummm, subsidised by everyone else of course.
You don't get to make money off of the commons just because you're unhappy that - you know - commoners are using it "too much".
One thing I've noticed about some freeway systems is that they add more lanes, but don't plan correctly. For instance, in my home city, there's a connector that runs from downtown to the main interstate. When the two meet, 8 lanes have to merge into four. This creates a crunch situation, one that it seems LA suffers from as well.
Instead, the lanes should be decreased ahead of time, before the merging occurs. Lanes can be reduced by making the rightmost lane exit-only at upstream exits, or through an upstream merge of the leftmost lane into the lane to its right.
By reducing these two roads to two lanes before the merge, they can completely avoid this crunch.
As an interesting aside, the CHP hates HOT lanes because they are very difficult to enforce. My friend is CHP and he says it's hard to read the lights as the cars pass and then make sure the car has a carpool in it if they skipped the toll.
I always thought HOV lanes were a bit of a joke during rush hour or traffic jams. It's nearly impossible to effectively enforce the rule and there's simply too many people willing to ignore the rule.
They work a little better in LA than elsewhere, but yeah. In LA they have solid lines, so if you see a cop and jump out, they can nail you for jumping the line.
Anywhere else, they can only nail you for the carpool violation if they catch you, but you aren't as suspicious as someone jumping a double yellow.
I'm from Dallas, and I'm considering a move to the LA/OC area in the second half of this year, so I've been doing copious research about what it's like to live in LA. Doing my research, I've noticed some things about the way the LA area is laid out that surprises me, and not in a good way. Dallas has just as much sprawl as LA, but without the ridiculous traffic problems. Perhaps LA can take some inspiration from Dallas here:
- In Dallas, all arterials are six-lane divided highways, and even a large chunk of our collectors are four-lane divided highways. Bidirectional turn lanes are virtually nonexistent. In the LA area, very few surface streets are divided, with only Orange County making heavy use of divided highways, and bidirectional turn lanes are used all over the place. Bidirectional turn lanes slow down traffic, and divided highways help prevent accidents. LA should kill the turn lanes and start installing medians.
- North Texas has spent most of the 21st century retiring its old cloverleaf interchanges and replacing them with five-level stack interchanges, which are more efficient and allow traffic to flow through faster. Is LA doing that?
- Virtually all freeways in Texas have frontage roads equipped with Texas U-turns [0]. You don't see that in California.
- In the Dallas area, most tech companies are located in the suburbs, and virtually all companies moving their HQ to Texas from out of state are building their campuses in the suburbs too. LA, on the other hand, insists on stuffing most of their tech industry in the Westside. Let's get these companies out of the city and into the SFV, OC, SGV, and Inland Empire.
- Sadly, LA is screwed because of its natural boundaries. The mountains may be pretty, but they get in the way of commuting. I don't think there's anything that can be done about that. Palmdale and the area north of it is the future of development of Los Angeles County... just make sure it's self sufficient so nobody has to commute across the mountains.
The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way. That might not sound unreasonable, but nearly the entire commute was freeway driving, which should have been much faster.
I don't know if tolls are the answer, but it's probably worth a try. Also massively expanding the metro system would be fine with me. LA needs to try whatever it can to solve the traffic problem. Traffic makes living in LA a huge drag and I found that friends often wouldn't bother to get together even on weekends because the traffic and parking are just so unpredictable.
> The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way.
Amateur! :-) My Bay Area commute is ~50 miles and takes around 2-2.5 hours each way, all freeway. If tolls ended up being a significant cost of living expense, it would actually have the effect of making me move even farther away to an area I can afford taking the extra cost of tolls into consideration.
I'd be all for expanding public transport though. Currently no form of PT can beat 2-2.5 hours for me.
You poor soul...a 2+ hour commute each way is just mind-blowing. I worked with some people who did those kind of commutes and I don't know how they did it (especially because we were doing minimum 10 hour days). I would spend or sacrifice pretty much any amount of money not to do a 2+ hour commute.
This is a terrible solution. This will disproportionately affect the working poor. Think of all the people who work in Malibu. Hardly anyone who works a service job there live in the 'Bu.
This is effectively a tax on lower income people who had to move away from the city because they couldn't afford it. Buses aren't a good solution, as they double the amount of transit time vs a car. Advocating buses would be another tax on time.
There are no easy solutions LA traffic which is why it remains such a problem. An expansion of the subway system would be a good start, but eminent domain needs to trump NIMBY-ism to keep the costs down.
I moved to LA about a year ago from DC, where the traffic is notoriously bad as well, and I have to say that LA traffic is leaps and bounds worse. I've never seen gridlock like this where you literally DO NOT MOVE. In DC, you'll move maybe a couple inches here and there, maybe average 2-5 MPH in a gridlock. Here, you sit completely still. When you're up to turn left, there's not even room to turn in because everyone jammed the cross section because they've been behind that same like for 30 minutes. I basically just use delivery services for any thing between 4-7pm
My use of roadway space imposes a cost on other drivers because they now have less roadway to use leading to lower speeds. Currently, I do not have to pay for this cost leading me to use more roadway space than may be optimal. Taxing roadway use captures this cost and forces me to take it into consideration when choosing whether to drive.
The author says "we've tried density" to fix traffic. It's just not true. Also trying public transportation means it should be useful enough to be used: when I was in LA that wasn't the case.
Traffic is not a problem per se: commuting time is! Lower traffic is a solution only as long as the others have given up their cars. But what's an empty road good for if I can't use it due to tolls?
On the other side, try and offer me a solution which takes me to work faster than current crowded street, and you won't need any toll to push my car off of the road.
Clarification: "faster" meaning a lower commute time from door to door. Station-to-station doesn't matter, not at all!
LA has a light problem. I don't live in LA, but I have driven there: Why wouldn't they put green arrows to let people waiting to make a left go first? After those people go, then traffic can flow as normal. I remember the light kept turning green, with no green arrow, and I had to keep waiting and waiting until there were almost no cars. Had that left arrow been there, this could have cleared up traffic along with the 20 cars waiting behind me to make a left as well.
Isn't the biggest problem with tolls the regressive impact it has on residents? What do you do for people who can't get to work because they can't afford tolls?
I'm not sure I see this working, unless you toll every road or have a hidden toll by enforcing a local gasoline tax. Surface roads are a very viable way to make relatively long journeys in LA when the freeways are jammed.
When I fly into LAX and head to Studio City, I take La Cienega, Fairfax, Fountain, and Cahuenga.. it's so much faster than than the freeway unless it's night or weekend. ("Take Fountain" is even a cliche in Hollywood.)
why do people keep comparing LA to any other city in the world?
that's the same logic of: my life is a mess, but my neighbour's is worse, so I'm pretty alright.
I do think traffic is one of the main issues in our society because we still have the same mentality about cars as we had 50y ago (or more). They should never be a priority, we're a collective not a bunch of singulars, so investing in good public transportation and keeping private cars out of the main areas of interest should be the norm. This way of living messes up with our health and life quality.
Here in Lisbon, Portugal, people complaint everyday about traffic and how much time they spend on it..even public transportation is a mess because it's schedules and quantity aren't that good. Fortunately, 2 years ago, I switched to riding my bicycle for 50min (each way) everyday. The commute is by the river and there's no description for how better my life got.
But I recognise we can't all do that, so at least we should invest in good public transports and keep cars out of the cities so we can just walk a little bit once we got out of the train, metro, bus, whatever or even bring our bicycles to make this easier.
We will always be as lazy as possible if we allow ourselves to drive the car everywhere.
Let's just stop thinking that the car are the solution for need, it should never be. Cars and highways mess up our health, nature, landscapes, life quality, noise, etc. etc.
(I was in Washington D.C. for 2 months and hell I was about to get crazy just from the noise of cars and for the incapacity of being able to roam freely by foot.. there were cars EVERYWHERE, huge roads everywhere. I honestly think that cities like that aren't made for people who live or work there.)
Driving technology is 100 years old. The article doesn't discuss at all what technology solutions need to be deployed in order to make dynamic tolling possible. Sure, it just a matter of having all cars in the LA region be fitted with RFID. But I'll claim that with people behind the wheel that it just won't work. Let's just focus on the correct long-term solution of getting rid of the steering wheel.
Educating drivers could have a large impact as some of the issues are caused by the drivers themselves and has nothing to do with the volume of vehicles moving at a certain point in time. If somehow we are unable to educate people which would be the cheapest form of a fix, autonomous vehicles would basically do the same thing. (merging, vehicle spacing, gawking, etc...) Sorry no data to back these claims up.
Reason Foundation (obviously coming from a market/privatization point of view) did a series of videos about these types of problems.
TL;DR:
Tolls make sense in the situation of "only highways" regardless. You can make high-speed toll lanes/highways on/along side the existing highways (and put buses there too).
Those who can afford the tolls pay for the speed feeding more money into the system. Those who cannot pay more than they already do through gas tax and such, deal slower traffic, but that traffic should be lessened due to people paying for higher speed and hopefully on more buses. There's additionally higher funding available to spend on increasingly
Current highways are effectively the tragedy of the commons, which is where semi-private/public-private partnership toll roads could alleviate the problem. Certain transit systems have pros and cons depending on area, and for places like LA it is likely that at least for now highways should be the focus of additional spending.
I'll leave the arguments to the videos, some are quite long (45+ min talks by policy experts). Mostly passing along in case others are interested, particularly those who might have strong opinions to the contrary (e.g.: the 'rail or bust' folks) I've enjoyed the rail system in Europe, but the conditions here are very different so its important to not let one's perfect ideal be the enemy of making something failing significantly better in a bang/buck sense.
The danger of this pricing scheme is that people that can't travel on their ideal commute times hit the road earlier in the morning. They then realise that if they set off another half hour earlier they would breeze in on practically empty roads. So then a lot of people start doing this, leaving the house at 6 a.m. for some epic 50+ mile commute. So then the next step is to leave a 5.30 a.m. to beat the traffic, the traffic that people of their ilk generated. What next, start your working day at 3 a.m.?!?
So this means everyone has neighbours banging car doors, revving engines and doing disruptive stuff at some very early hour. The whole world gets noisier. And all so that some people with cars can sit at their office desks doing stuff they could have done at home.
If a bunch of homeless drug addicts made a similar amount of noise at such anti-social hours then they would be dealt with by the police, the police would make it clear to them how anti-social they have been. Office worker, with some spreadsheets and emails to do, they are given a free pass on the noise and other pollution at an un-godly hour.
Another thing that any big city should do is get people to swap jobs for something more local. I personally work local to my home and ride my bike in, but there are plenty of colleagues who come in from the far side of town, they have to go through the city centre or round some ring road, taking more than 3 hours out of their day, every day.
My bike ride home is so enjoyable I have no idea how long it takes, never had the need to look at the time whilst on the commute, no need to look at a phone either or read one of those 'free' newspapers. I wish more people could have a commute like mine, which is a gentle saunter along the river bank with the joggers, dog walkers and other people 'not imprisoned by the commute' and actively enjoying the great outdoors.
So how could a city get more people like me able to live and work locally, never adding to the burden on the roads or trains? Job swaps. There is probably someone doing a similar job to oneself a short distance from home. This person probably lives on the far side of town where you work. So what if you could swap jobs with that person, so both of you get 2-3 hours of life back, every day?
A city with all the records of who pays what taxes for what could do the match-making, saving everyone who takes up the scheme a lot of time, giving their lives back.
Better public transportation is part of the answer, but as another commenter pointed out, even in cities with decent subway systems commute times can be up to an hour.
The ideal solution would be encourage commercial and residential areas to intermingle. In particular, less restrictive zoning in residential areas could let companies locate themselves closer to workers.
Free market approaches seem to work well generally. Why not for roads? Seems self evident.
Anything you make cheaper will be used more, more expensive, less. Econ 101.
What would be an excellent solution is to make fast dedicated bus lanes, and make every bus free. Improves employment, bus ridership, and is probably cheaper than adding an extra lane to a single freeway.
When I was in college, we had this legacy system for class signups. During class registration week, in order to prevent large amount of traffic, they issued "registration passes" which were time blocked in different groups.
Instead of introducing tolls, why not have daily commuters be added to a pool, and be issued a time slot for their commute?
For the love of God it's not the traffic its lack of public transport. Once you hit a certain density CARS_DONT_WORK . Having lived in NYC, visiting LA was a joke.
The first thing I did after my first cab ride from the airport was look up public transport since I noticed traffic was worse than NYC. There wasn't any
Mass transit needs to take a page from Uber. The reason for declining ridership is because there's not enough trains or buses, etc. Get some funding, increase the number of trains by 5x, and people will start to go and use them because they're convenient. We need VCs for public service projects.
Tolls to subsidise busses is the solution to any gridlock issue.
The problem is buses are now run by bus companies and not a public service so the public are still charged too much to get on a bus and if they have a car it might still be more tempting to take the car to work.
Tolls don't bother me personally. If it clears congestion and earmarks funds so that the people that use them pay for them; that's a good thing. However, isn't it a regressive tax? The price for the tolls will affect people with little money the most.
UberPool is going to lead us to the future. It kind of sucks right now, but when self driving cars are prevalent, it will make ridesharing ubiquitous and cheap and way better than driving your own car. The more people use it the closer to optimal the sharing will get.
What's the state of the art urban planning in terms of actually giving people less reason to drive/travel? It seems you need more zoning pods in suburbs where mini city centers (with jobs) can pop up, giving people less reason for long commutes.
As I understand it the innovation is at the zoning level. In order to affect change you need to change all of these zoning laws, and the keyword is Form Based Code, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form-based_code
Encouraging info from the wiki:
The Cincinnati Form-Based Code adopted in 2013 is designed to be applied citywide in an incremental way, neighborhood by neighborhood. The code establishes transect zones and specifies standards for transects, building types, frontage types, walkable neighborhoods, and thoroughfares that can be adapted to each neighborhood.[4][5]
OK and what do you do with the toll money? Create a world class public transit system? Or do you just dump the money into a general fund and piss it away, as if classism is an ethical way to handle access to public infrastructure?
California should really consider using some of those bullet-train to nowhere funds to add at least one light rail system in west LA. That would be far more useful than a train that stops in Burbank.
Toll roads interfere with the right to assemble, because they create transactions. When there are transactions, there are records, and when there are records there are subpoenas.
I think demand based pricing is the most efficient tool to deal with traffic. That being said, assuming in 3-5 years cars will be self driven, traffic should be a thing of the distant past. Its already started where people no longer own cars and use Uber and the like...now imagine if over 50% of drivers did that? Picture a giant luxury bus with wi-fi and spacious seats driving all around the city using an Uber pool like service. Prices in theory would be vastly cheaper for the rider as a) there is no driver to pay and b) insurance cost for bus would be cheaper. seems like a win win
The problem is in LA, traffic blows. Not only blows, its becoming a liability costing productivity. If money is taken for this, money can be used for something else promoting less traffic. It isn't about taking money at this stage, I think that it way oversimplified. IMO LA is fubar in terms of traffic which is just one of the reasons I work remotely even though I'm 20 minutes away without traffic, meaning its fricken 2 am in the morning on a tuesday type traffic.
Just be patient. With the advent of automated cars, Uber/Lyft services, delivery drones, and eventually flying taxis, the congestion should finally start to ebb.
I'm convinced that the agencies involved with traffic problems don't understand shit about traffic, and this article is one example why.
They mention HOT lanes. I need to see exactly where, and what time of day they used to get their stats, because I can tell you, HOT lanes don't do shit if you allow carpoolers on for free. The idea of the carpool lane is a nice thought, but in reality it's a joke.
Any time there is actual "red" traffic (as you would see in Google maps), the carpool lane(s) are just as backed up as the rest of the traffic. The only time I've seen moving traffic alongside red traffic, is from a pure toll lane alongside a regular highway, like The 91 FasTrak lane. And even STILL, those lanes can be backed up during peak times.
Ask yourself, who uses carpool lanes? Carpoolers? Hardly. It's mostly families, who will be on the road anyway. Then you have work vehicles, who naturally have multiple people, and the ever annoying buses. My point is, the vast majority of those who use carpool lanes were going to be on the highway anyway. There aren't people saying to each other "hey, lets carpool so we can use the carpool lane and get places faster". Even if for some reason we decided to start doing this as a society, we would then realize it's bullshit because the carpool lane just doesn't work.
Here's an idea: 1) set up cameras or road strips at several places along problem highways 2) create a computer model using the traffic data 3) try out road configurations using this data until you find something that works really well. Or at least, use the traffic data to identify what's actually causing traffic problems.
My guess is most of the time it's the shockwave effect from bad or desperate drivers. It happens to all of us, even the experienced drivers, where we suddenly need to get off the highway and we have to cut off people, which inevitably results in a shockwave effect. Adding lanes isn't going to help this, in fact it will probably hurt this particular problem. And now think about this problem combined with carpools, where at least here in SoCal, don't let you get off when you want. So now you are in the carpool lane, unable to get off, and finally when your offramp is 1 mile away you are able to get off, what are you going to do? You have 3+ lanes of traffic to get over. Good luck and please drive nicely!
When I see these giant highway structures built for a single carpool lane [1], it really depresses me. How did we allow it to happen?
> And yet we miss that this very same, simple system of pricing could solve our congestion problem.
This article is really bad. The above line is one of the worst.
People don't clog-up the freeways because they are having a good time. Nobody wants to be on them. I drive the 405 with some frequency. It's hell. I don't want to be on it. But I have to. Just like everyone else on it.
We have to be on the damn roads because of where work takes us. I have clients and contracts that require me to traverse this pathway. Others are employed by companies in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor. They don't have a choice. They have to be on that hellish road. People can't just quit and move to greener pastures, at least not at scale.
Elon Musk and his quest for tunneling are now used as examples of the frustration. Well, SpaceX didn't need to be in Hawthorne. The company has, what, 7,000 employees? That general area (anything around the 405) is hell for traffic. SpaceX could have been out towards Ontario, in Mojave or farther north or south somewhere. There are no inherently magical reasons for building a company with 7,000 employees in Hawthorne other than perhaps the availability of large buildings and amicable zoning and regulatory frameworks.
Not picking on SpaceX, simply using it as an example. The problem with Los Angeles is this mass of businesses concentrated in that corridor. It attracts tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people driving in from within a 50 mile radius in every direction. This is the problem.
Tolls are not going to fix this. They would only punish folks who would have no choice but to pay-up and continue to go to work.
And carpool? Carpool is a joke. Carpool lanes only serve to waste 20 to 25% of the road's capacity. The vast majority of users are those who are not carpooling at all. For example, when we load-up the family in the car to go somewhere. In other words, no appreciable number of cars are removed from the road. Why don't people carpool? Because people are sprawled all over the place and it is utterly inconvenient. If you can find just one person who lives near you who can carpool you still lose freedom. What if you need to leave work early or go late because your kids are sick? I can't even think of one person I know who carpools.
My opinion is that LA would benefit greatly from providing tax incentives and the appropriate zoning and infrastructure support to decentralize the centers of employment. Give companies 10 years without taxes (NY state style) to either move or start-up on the outskirts of Los Angeles proper in every direction. Change traffic patterns this way and traffic will improve.
The rest will come with time. Autonomous vehicles will change the nature of traffic in potentially significant ways.
Until then it's going to suck more with each passing year until it starts to get better.
Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using a vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than N miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds if you use your car very little during a month.
Another option could be a centralized "smart-driving" app, that would act as a hybrid between self-driving and manual driven cars. Each driver could be given "hints"/instructions, and measured on their compliance rate. The reward would be a measurable improvement in travel time. For instance, if 80% of the cars on a block were using this app, preference could be given to hold a signal light green longer for them. Drivers would see a benefit, and that would be their only impetus to comply with its directions (slow down, turn left here, park and wait 5m, etc). Someone who never listened to the thing would be kicked off. Soon with enough users , you could organize mini "convoys" of cars travelling through the city (say, all cars slow from 65 to 60mph for 2 miles, so that the offramp signal could be ready and green at the exact moment of their arrival and kept green for the whole convoy) and attempt to optimize travel for them or give them other perks such as free parking. It wouldn't solve all problems, but it would encourage cooperative behavior on the roads which may go a long way to easing congestion.
> Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using a vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than N miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds if you use your car very little during a month.
Don't know if LA is anything like SF, but here, the poorer you are, the longer your commute is, generally. So this scheme would simply penalize people who already can't afford to live close to work.
Good point, I forgot about that. I had it backwards thinking wealthy people had more latitude to choose better jobs further away from home, whereas the (non-driving) poor are more stationed in their neighborhoods. I agree 100% though.
despite your snark, yes we would. I dont know LA very well, but obviously the public transit system is broken and the reasons are probably very complex. So yes, a cooperative app telling you which lane and speed to select would be a form of public transportation, using one's own vehicle.
Driving a car is not a human right. It is actually a very expensive service provided you, almost for free, by the government. It is your largest entitlement.
Given the taxes I pay, I have a much different definition of "free". I also pay an ecological fee to clean the air and scrap the vehicle when it's done.
I doubt this has any effect, rich people don't care, poor people can't afford to move somewhere else. Public transport is the only effective approach to reducing the congestion.
Only if people use it. I don't have a source easily at hand, but I have read about how people are willing to fund public transit via tax increases, but those same people rarely ever use it.
As someone who has also lived and commuted in lots of cities around the world, LA just doesn't have that much of a problem.
What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15 miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an hour (I'm using as reference Downtown LA to Santa Monica at 9am, typically takes 35 to 1h 5min according to google maps). Good luck in London, Paris, NYC or Tokyo never mind Delhi or Beijing.
The line made famous by clueless that everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes is completely true, with the caveat being, so long as you don't drive during traffic. This reality is what people are comparing their rush hour commute to, they know that if they are lucky enough to avoid traffic they will get there in 20 minutes, but when they hit bad traffic it takes an hour. (Obviously I'm ignoring stuck on the 405 for 5 hour nightmare stories here, I'm just talking about day to day driving.)
LA is a victim of having too good a car infrastructure, it allows people to make ridiculous commuting decisions and get away with it the majority of the time. Adding more traffic infrastructure just makes the problem worse. People can drive from further away and save money on their housing and they will. They'll also work in places that are further away, the problem is as much about where businesses are located as it is about where people live.