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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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]
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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!
[+] [-] reillyse|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bootloop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|9 years ago|reply
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.
It's really bad.
[+] [-] deepGem|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] memco|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ng-user|9 years ago|reply
[0] - http://oppositelock.kinja.com/the-busiest-highway-in-north-a...
[+] [-] shams93|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveax|9 years ago|reply
That's against traffic. What does Santa Monica to Downtown LA at 9am take?
A big problem in LA is that many people drive much longer distances than that, 30, 50, 70 miles one way in their commute.
[+] [-] SippinLean|9 years ago|reply
>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.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/02/20/los-angeles-n...
[+] [-] rtpg|9 years ago|reply
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?
[0]:https://goo.gl/maps/YSwaooCWK3y
[+] [-] nkrisc|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lightedman|9 years ago|reply
I live in the area. I guess you've not seen the potholes lining Ventura. The infrastructure, bridges included, are garbage.
[+] [-] bit_logic|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Osiris|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|9 years ago|reply
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.
http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-metr...
[+] [-] bufordsharkley|9 years ago|reply
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
[+] [-] enknamel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cperciva|9 years ago|reply
Because they're not paying for the cost of the road capacity they're using.
[+] [-] Touche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unabst|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maxsilver|9 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] brokenmasonjars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tn13|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] megablast|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shams93|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrei_says_|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bobthepanda|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|9 years ago|reply
I don't know that I've ever heard someone suggest that fewer job opportunities is better than more job opportunities.
[+] [-] sizimon|9 years ago|reply
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.
http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/LA1963.html
[+] [-] piplgobde|9 years ago|reply
What a shame it wasn't built.
[+] [-] adrr|9 years ago|reply
To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
[+] [-] bufordsharkley|9 years ago|reply
Consider cities that do better for transit by building upward. This is usually a case of a more sane zoning system, like in Tokyo[0], or ownership residing in the municipality, like Hong Kong.[1]
[0] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html [1] http://www.hkclic.org/en/topics/saleAndPurchaseOfProperty/ba...
[+] [-] wwweston|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] u801e|9 years ago|reply
It would make a lot more sense to just raise the gas tax to achieve the same effect.
[1] https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/24/2438.asp
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-22/indiana-t...
[3] http://kxan.com/2016/03/02/company-that-runs-sh-130-toll-fil...
[4] http://www.virginiaplaces.org/transportation/pocaparkway.htm...
[+] [-] P3R3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ahh|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Asturaz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wonderdonkey|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lewis500|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myowncrapulence|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endianswap|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|9 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] sandover|9 years ago|reply
- LA is densifying fairly quickly.
- More road capacity will not, in general, be added; road capacity is actually being removed.
- Average car velocity is slowing and will likely continue to slow.
- Freeways at capacity, such as the 101 in the morning, move at approximately bicycle speed.
- Most bus routes in town move at slower than bicycle speed.
- The slower the traffic is, the safer a bicycle trip feels, subjectively.
- LA has 300+ days of great weather a year, making it pleasant to be outside.
- Air quality in LA gets better every year.
- Battery technology is the subject of intense R&D right now.
- 2-wheeled vehicles are never stuck in traffic.
- Consider the future of electric 2-wheeled vehicles in LA.
[+] [-] secult|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhoujianfu|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|9 years ago|reply
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!