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.
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.