Why is congestion pricing never brought up in any of these conversations about traffic?
Simply charge people 10 or 20 dollars to drive at heavily impacted times of the day. Take every last cent of that toll to subsidize buses and eventually mass transit on the same route.
People in a hurry win because their time is valuable and they get to buy it back relatively cheaply. People not in a hurry win because they get subsidized mass transit. Everyone wins because traffic and pollution go down.
In a country where we allow people to live in misery just to uphold the "Free Market", why do we allow our streets and freeways to become unusable twice a day just so freeways remain "free"?
The FastTrak toll system doesn't cover the LA Freeway or any other major thoroughfares in California. It does cover a handful of isolated toll roads and bridges, but mostly it just lets you drive in the carpool lane without having to actually carpool. This doesn't dissuade people from driving, it just lets people who can afford it get places slightly faster. A real congestion charge avoids creating this two-tiered system by leaving no reasonable alternative route. You either pay the toll, drive 30 minutes out of your way, or take mass transit. Hopefully the latter.
That still (or more so?) has the classism problem. Less wealthy people are more likely to be more severely punished if they are unable to get to work on time, and also more likely to live far away from their jobs. Both of those problems are exacerbated by being forced to take public transport. Owning a car is often a major bonus when applying for certain kinds of jobs, because it is viewed as increasing the chances that you will it to work on time.
I'm all for thinking about ideas to make transport work better, but this sort of stuff makes it quite hard to come up with good ones.
It's very disconnected though. The I-10 route ends at union station and there is no direct connection. Also it would be nice to extend it on I-105 west all the way to LAX. The current situation is pretty popular and the fares can be as high as $11 (or more?) to go into downtown so if the were to really improve the connections it would only make the routes more popular, and thus more expensive at peak times.
Who is made worse off by the FasTrak HOV lane arrangement? People who can't afford the HOV lanes will remain stuck in traffic like they always were, although there will be less traffic than there used to be, because the people who can afford to use the new HOV lanes are no longer in the normal lanes.
Some people are made better off, and nobody is made worse off.
Actually as someone who drives the 110N home everyday the HOV makes everyone worse off in my opinion. Every entrance to the HOV during rush hour makes cross-lane patterns that end up bringing traffic to halt around them, but in between entrances it flows properly. Entering a freeway and immediately crossing 5 lanes of traffic to enter the HOV is extremely disruptive to the flow.
I totally agree. I was just in LA for the summer and coming from Ft. Lauderdale where the HOV lane is free to enter and exit, the entrance and exit system in LA made no sense to me. I also had to quickly get out of the HOV lane when it suddenly switched to the FasTrak and I didn't know what that was.
In Ft. Lauderdale we have an HOV lane that you can enter whenever you want and exit whenever you want. Granted, we don't have near as much traffic as LA has, but at least in this system traffic keeps moving forward as people move in and out of the HOV lane. We also have an express lane that you pay for and exit at the end of 595, the equivalent of the 110 to our suburbs. The express lane there has really reduced traffic. When I'm running late, I pay $.50 and fly across, and otherwise I can still go faster than before.
Right because most HOVs have dedicated exits (I'm picturing 495 in D.C.) that avoid the cross traffic. Unfortunately we don't have that luxury on any of our HOV/Fastrak lanes that I drive.
Very much agree. For example, the I395 in Northern VA uses up 6 lanes of space but only provides 2 lanes for HOV, and these lanes change direction. So, instead of having 3 additional lanes in each direction, we get 2 lanes that change direction depending on the rush. The extra dedicated flyovers and exits are hugely expensive and negatively impact the interconnection of roads to the interstate. What a waste.
I suppose this misunderstanding boils down to semantics. By definition they are objectively better off. However, past a baseline threshold for human survival it's argued that a person's subjective perception of well-being is relative to that of others around him. Objectively, we are many times better off than we were pre-industrialization in almost every way imaginable, but does that make us many times happier or more satisfied than people who are unaware of such a standard of living? The argument is that they would perceive their well-being as much worse if they were aware, even if nothing has objectively changed.
Rather than comparing the availability of modern conveniences, it's more informative to compare stability. Are modern lives more stable in the face of unexpected events than historic lives? Is getting sick for a few days and then getting better worse now, or worse historically?
I would argue that the levels of instability make modern stresses higher. Even though there are many luxuries to help deal with these stresses, they are maintained only tenuously. The slightest disruption to a break-even lifestyle can result in disaster, and even if everything goes perfectly there may not be any spare cash to save for an eventual escape.
> The slightest disruption to a break-even lifestyle can result in disaster, and even if everything goes perfectly there may not be any spare cash to save for an eventual escape.
Have you tried living in a county with a social safety system?
Actually, Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms points out that bother the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now.
In earlier times levels of poverty now experienced would have been fatal and populations would have fallen. Today we allow them to live. But in crushing abject liberty. Transmitted to their children.
Wow, are those transponders still that big or is that an older model? We have Good2Go here in the Seattle area, and the little RFID cards are about as big as a credit card (though a bit thinner I think).
I have lived here for about same number of years. I just happened to finally sign up and try it. It was an interesting value proposition. Pay 5+ dollars but remove the stress of possibly being late. The $5 is high enough to make this not worth it as every day default but I am glad to have it as an option in a pinch. Seems to be working well.
They're pretty big, like the size of two credit cards side by side and 1/2" thick. It does make a beeping noise when it registers so that's probably why it's not just a card.
Capitalism is about the means of production being privately owned. It's quite possible to have a socialist society in which you get what you can pay for.
> It's quite possible to have a socialist
> society in which you get what you can pay for.
Of course it is, but that's not relevant to the point being made.
> Capitalism is about the means of
> production being privately owned.
... with the subsequent implication that things need to be operated for profit. As a result people have to pay for their services, so people can only get what they can pay for, which is the point.
Going back to the original comment[0]:
> ... you get what you pay for. It creates
> a classist, elitist society.
My point is that this is unavoidable under capitalism.
Capitalism => private ownership of production
=> operation for profit
=> charging for services
=> only get what you pay for
=> classist, elitist society
(according to kafkaesque[1])
This may not be limited to capitalism, but it is an unavoidable consequence of it.
This answer gets more awesome the more I think about it.
Initially, I was going to reply that it was crass. Then, I thought about it and grinned.
But I think that flakmonkey's point is that yes, if you're poor, you'll be stuck in traffic at least just as long. More likely though, you'll be stuck in traffic far more than currently, because people who can afford to pay for it will. Being that freeways use public funds, that probably shouldn't be the case.
Time redistribution. People with more time will be required to pull over to the side of the road and wait for some time interval to redistribute their share of excess time to people in a hurry. It's part of the self driving car program and will be administered by the Federal Dept of Transportation. It's only fair.
Vancouver doesn't have a freeway so all traffic goes through regular city streets.
What actually happens is that the level of traffic basically stays static, and people travel using other means.
The level of automobile traffic moving through the downtown core is unchanged since the 1960s even though the population and amount of people working there has massively increased.
Yeah. That's a good point. I was back in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. I took a taxi from the airport and at one point we were "delayed" for maybe 5 minutes and the driver said, "Ugh. Why is there traffic?"
That was funny considering I'm now living in LA. I was thinking, "You don't know traffic, buddy".
I do admit that the downtown core gets bottlenecked at certain times of the day. But it's better than traffic all the time at most hours of the day, like in LA.
Vancouver is a much smaller region and has more of a cohesive topology versus the spare conglomeration of Los Angeles, which could be better described as the "downtown" of Southern California.
The majority of people living in Southern California commute via freeway, and generally many people commute 70 mile roundtrips across town or from the valley into LA, and than for nightlife or a trip to a favorite bookstore etc, another ~70 mile round trip across town is totally normal.
Until there's more jobs available near affordable housing, millions of people in LA will continue relying on the freeways. The train is being slightly expanded into downtown Santa Monica, but that's not really a big improvement for LA - what would help the most is better transit lines between the San Fernando Valley and LA.
I personally believe that all traffic (including surface streets) should pay congestion tolls when there would otherwise be a traffic jam. Again, spend all that money to subsidize mass transit which would benefit local residents without raising local taxes.
The result of congestion tolls: You still have a traffic jam, but the government just has more money to waste. People have to get to work. They have to drive to get there. Unless you're proposing a 24-hour train that goes to every business and every home in the area, you can't escape cars.
Just raise the tolls until the traffic jam goes away. If the revenue is used to build better public transit, most people won't need a car to get to work.
A "24-hour train that goes to every business and every home in the area" is not necessary to achieve this. It is very easy to live without a car in many of the cities which implement congestion tolls, and they don't have 24-hour train service straight to everyone's front door. Trains or buses within walking distance of most people's homes and workplaces, which operate from say 5AM to midnight, would be sufficient, and that is exactly what most great cities in the world have.
If you put high congestion tolls on the freeways, people will just move their commutes to the smaller arterial roads that go between cities and jam them up. If you put congestion tolls on those, people will commute through residential areas. If you put congestion tolls on every street in the 500 square mile surface area of Los Angeles, you'll be voted out of office.
If you widen the roads or add lanes, making commutes less miserable, people will move farther from work where it's cheaper and maintain their previous misery level. In other words, traffic volume (demand) will always rise to meet the available amount of road (supply).
That's only true if driving is the only way to get to work. If people can get to work on public transit, and it costs less than paying the congestion charge, they will use public transit.
In other words, the congestion charge is a constraint on traffic volume, just as road supply is, because it changes the equilibrium of supply and demand.
It isn't like this is a hypothetical experiment that hasn't been tried. It is a fact that people take public transit when it is easier or cheaper than driving. It has happened in cities around the world.
Choice where I live: (1) Live in inner city with high taxes, high crime, poor schools, and nonfunctional govt, but have access to mass transit that doesn't go anywhere useful and takes an hour to get there. (2) Live in the burbs with lower taxes, good schools, low crime, and (sorta) functional govt but no mass transit. At least with choice #2 I can easily get wherever I typically need to within 30 minutes in my car.
Expanding mass transit isn't going to fix the reasons why people aren't interested in living in the cities hereabouts. It will just add to the subsidies already flowing in to prop them up.
Really, congestion pricing would be a vanishingly small increase to the cost of commuting, given the already-existing costs in terms of money and lost time that goes along with doing it (by car, at least.)
Those are very densely populated places. Los Angeles is something like 1/6th as dense as NYC. And if LA is anything like the rest of the United States, there are laws on the books preventing it from becoming dense enough to support mass transit like the cities you mention.
> And if LA is anything like the rest of the United States, there are laws on the books preventing it from becoming dense enough to support mass transit like the cities you mention.
Laws can be changed. (Otherwise, congestion tolls wouldn't be an issue, since they could never be imposed.)
Any ideas how to effectively police that type of permit? My gut says the infrastructure and manpower needed would be incredibly expensive. Possibly enough to negate a significant chunk of the revenue
"Why is congestion pricing never brought up in any of these conversations about traffic?"
Because it would be incredibly regressive. The people who can least afford the fee are those that are not at all in the position to change their driving time habits.
> Three decades ago, according to Fortune, about 70% of American 17-year-olds had a driver’s license; the figure today is 46%. More U.S. teenagers now have a smartphone than a license.
I'd guess that the rise in cell phones, text messaging, and now smartphones was a big contributor to the decline in early licenses and also in the urgency of teens to get their own car.
Before such easy communications, you generally were not in contact with your friends except when you were actually physically with them at school or at pre-arranged times outside of school. You could call then on the phone, of course, but that only worked if they were home to take the call, and you had to compete with the rest of your family for the phone in your house.
This made spontaneous arranging of rides from friends a rather uncertain endeavor. Unless your parents were very generous in the policies for sharing the family car(s) with you, getting a car of your own meant a tremendous leap in your freedom.
Nowadays, a large fraction of teens have cell phones, largely smartphones. They make heavy use of them for messaging services and social networks (and, I've been told, they sometimes even actually use them to talk!). They update their statuses several times a day, and send on average something like 100 messages a day.
Because of this, today's teens (and younger) are much better informed as to where their friends are and what they are doing when those friends are not physically present. They know which of their friends with cars are not busy, and it is trivial to propose a joint trip to the place they wish to go.
Accordingly, having your own car is not as important as it once was. Your social group is now more efficient at sharing cars than social groups were back before widespread mobile communications.
The OP talks of fewer kids having licenses. That has little to do with smartphones and technology. Beyond the increased costs, operating a car today is more emotionally expensive than ever. Driving is now a rationally terrifying experience for kids.
1) Traffic fines are no longer trivial. Beyond the money, if a teen is part of any graduated licensing program ANY ticket may delay them getting their full license many months.
2) Parking is dangerous. Wrong place or wrong time doesn't mean a simple ticket. Your car may be disappeared to some distant impound lot. The ransom demanded will likely be more than the vehicle's worth (at least given the junkers I had as a teenager).
3) Police encounters. The most likely place for a teen to interact negatively with an officer is during a "routine" traffic stop. Turn on the news. A minor incident can quickly spiral into days or weeks in jail.
4) Teenagers now fear failure above all else. A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary. (See many threads here). So they avoid the DMV.
5) Cars increase mobility, but have you seen the streets in most cities? Gridlock makes people feel trapped. For a child in today's world of apparently constant violence, being stuck on a city street is scary. Whereas you or I might see a simple frustration, kids today see physical danger.
Teenagers have plenty of reasons to avoid driving. It isn't because they once needed to physically move in order to communicate. It's because they have good reason to fear the road.
>A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary
The driving test is stupidly easy. Whereas very smart kids have well-founded anxiety about SAT and AP testing (genuinely difficult, can make or break your life ambitions), only the most incompetent of the fuckups ever came within a thousand miles of failing a driving test. These were the kind of poeple where everyone else wondered how they managed to stay alive, how they would ever be adults. For those above the 5th percentile of general ability level, passing the driving test on the first try was pretty much guaranteed.
I think this is wrong. I'd much prefer a world where some normal people can't get drivers licenses and moat people on the road are professionals or robots, but if the state says, "No, you're not a good enough driver" then you can't really carry on a suburban life. So it has to say yes to all but the most egregiously incompetent, or lose its tax base.
I've known people that failed their driver's tests, but they were also people that deserved to fail... Otherwise, it's really just a question of experience. If you've been driving lawn mowers, ATVs, or farm equipment since you were old enough to reach the pedals, the way many rural children do, then passing the driving test is a piece of cake.
Driving is really fucking easy to do, as long as you have a bare minimum of situational awareness. It's not like most people are even driving stick and so have to keep track of what gear they are in and avoid stalling. Just keep it between the lanes, keep your hands on the wheel, put the damn cellphone down, and keep your eyes open.
> If you've been driving lawn mowers, ATVs, or farm equipment since you were old enough to reach the pedals, the way many rural children do, then passing the driving test is a piece of cake.
Not necessarily! When you go into the city for the driving test and encounter a bunch of crazy shit that doesn't exist on the dirt roads you drive, like stop lights and crosswalks and congestions, it's totally easy to fail a driving test just because you aren't familiar with the mechanics of how traffic works in areas with higher levels of development.
Many streets in LA are wider than even the widest highways in certain countries (UK comes to mind). You can't broaden the 405 much more, nor would such a scheme work for the 10.
The obvious answer is more mass transit and please, pretty please, protected bike lanes on major throughways.
If Amsterdam can squeeze a dedicated bike lane, cars and trams on roads that haven't changed in hundreds of years, surely LA can figure it out.
The fundamental problem is LA's culture of eschewing planning because it requires thinking and an opinionated design might cause someone to feel bad.
LA traffic rehabilation:
1. Eliminate left turns at lighted intersections and any other place a queue builds up. It's a grid - trip routing should use right turns. Lights should only ever have two phases.
2. Transition most through streets to one-way for cars, scavenging some of that width for generous bike paths protected by parked cars.
3. Eliminate lights at entrances to neighborhoods and shopping plazas.
4. Build more than one light rail line at a time. Keep them elevated rather than needlessly dipping into level crossings.
5. If neighborhood streets remain two-way, paint lines down the middle as people seem to have no clue where the edges of their cars are.
Solid points - especially the left turn thing and neighborhood lights. Half my commute is caused by waiting on a major road for one car to pull out of a tiny street.
This is a slightly more nuclear option, but a fleet of self-driving cars operated by a third party (like Uber or Lyft etc) could hit the problem at its main cause - too many cars on the road. Most cars spend the majority of their time motionless, if the ownership model changed, the the cars in use could operate nearly all the time, driving directly from one pickup to the next. This could significantly reduce the number of cars required, removing all need for street parking and freeing up the majority of off-street parking.
Less cars on the streets = wider city streets for free, and self-driving cars could more efficiently use that extra space. There would be other side effects too - coordinating carpools would be relatively trivial, and people wouldn't have to worry letting strangers into their personal vehicles. The freeways could operate at higher speeds with significantly less follow space and lower friction at interchanges. Routing optimizations (like what you describe in #1) could be implemented at large scale, and the whole grid could effectively be load-balanced.
Some people will still probably want control over their vehicle; individuals could still own private cars alongside the shared model. Those cars would just be like private autonomous limos. This option could let people who could afford it use their car as a private office during the commute, without having to take all of their things out after every use. Families could more effectively share a single vehicle, because it could drive back home after the daily commute. I'd imagine that most consumers would opt for low cost and no ownership risk over that convenience.
Agreed apart from lines on the road. Many studies have shown that less signage and lines makes people drive more carefully/slowly - a boon in housing neighborhoods.
I've thought about this. Even lights do this, as every green light is actually saying "please blow through this blind intersection at 45mph". It seems like more of a concern for my terms (1) and (3) on larger roads, possibly encouraging traffic get up to 60mph.
For neighborhoods, the streets wouldn't be getting any wider which is a larger speed factor. Driving on your side of the line, you'd feel pretty close to driveways etc. And if you're stradding the line because nobody else is coming the other way, I don't see how that would encourage you to go any faster than you do currently.
I don't know if you've been to Holland, but it's flat. It's flat everywhere. Their steepest hill is a joke, it was less steep than the hill I lived on as a kid in the UK, which in UK terms was a pretty standard hill.
That's why everyone cycles. And that's why Amsterdam squeezed it in because they knew they were going to be used.
I cannot stress how much of a difference it makes everywhere being flat.
In LA, it's not the flatness, it's the distance that makes having a car necessary. Everywhere is _miles_ away from everywhere else. I haven't been to Amsterdam so I can't comment on that, but the first two sections of this excellent article[0] touch on that.
When I lived in LA, I didn't find topography to be a major issue, though it does depend on where in LA you live. There are mountains around, but huge swathes of flat, heavily populated area. For example the whole 30-mile ride from Hollywood south to Long Beach has minimal elevation change. The main obstacle to biking in that area is that it's not safe due to the street design.
Most of LA is incredibly flat. One of the most striking vistas of the city is at Griffith Observatory. From that vantage point, Normandie Ave stretches in a straight line from the base of Griffith Park all the way to the horizon.
People in the US keep bringing this up. Oh, but look, the US is such a big place! It will never work here. Oh, but look, everybody is living in the suburbs and there is no shopping in 20 miles here!
You know, in 1960, Amsterdam was the same car-centric hellhole. They didn't always have that transport modal share. They worked on it.
Yeah, I don't get this either. It's a weird kind of American exceptionalism, except in reverse: we can't have good broadband on a national level like in Finland, because America! a strong social welfare system won't work here like it does in Scandinavia, because America! People won't adapt to biking, because America!
Yeah, we're bigger and more diverse, but so what? It's like people give up on solving problems, and use that as an excuse, without even trying.
When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!"
> When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!"
Ironically, it was the wide-eyed liberal optimists of their day that inflicted suburbia on us. Disrupting how we built cities to that point was supposed to make everything better.
This is true. The zoning laws that led to suburbia were introduced in the 1910s and 1920s by well-meaning "progressives" who decried the ability of the rich to cloister themselves in country estates while the poor were forced to live among commerce in the city.
They won, and the result was the legislation of vast suburban "residential" zones where commercial business was prohibited, with minimum lot sizes and setbacks and minimum space between houses.
Yeah, that's too bad. The wide-eyed liberal optimists got it wrong a hundred years ago. Shame that now the stodgy never-change-anything conservatives are clinging to that wrong idea from a hundred years ago, and once again the wide-eyed liberal optimists are trying to make it right!
> When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!"
I've quite often heard the "because America!" lines you refer to -- in response to the specific issues you mention -- used by Fox News and similar right-wing outlets. So, I'm not sure the two things you contrast here as sources of the issue are actually mutually exclusive alternatives, rather than closely related facets of the same thing.
This is simply the leftist version of the American exceptionalism thesis.
Whereas conservatives focus on supposed positive exceptional attributes of America, multiple generations of leftists have now promoted and developed the inverse: the idea that America is forever fundamentally broken (due to the power of big corporations, evil conservatives, Fox News, etc.), and thus certain problems that others can solve are deemed inherently unsolveable in America.
> This is simply the leftist version of the American exceptionalism thesis.
Strange description, because pretty much every example I've seen of this has been someone on the left saying "Of course we can do better in this area, see how it works in <other country>!" followed by someone on the right saying "No, we that won't work here, because America!".
(Sometimes pointing to something that might arguably be a legitimate difference -- I'm not saying that this pattern is universally wrong, just that there doesn't seem to be anything leftist about it, if anything, it tends to be the opposite.)
The closest I've seen from the Left to this is the defeatist version "we could in theory do that here and it would work, but it isn't politically viable because America!." But, OTOH, I've seen that form from the Right, too, just on different issues.
Yeah, like dragonwriter says, I never see this on the left. The left is almost always coming out and saying "This is what's wrong with America, and we should fix it."
I can't remember ever seeing any left-leaning or progressive type throw up their hands and say, "well, that just won't work here."
I will acknowledge that political conservatives or right-leaning types often do suggest that problems are solvable, but these days I only ever see right-leaning types suggesting that "the free market" will solve a problem (and, conversely, if it's one of the large class of things that the free market can't solve, then it is either not a problem or it is not solvable).
Still, the whole "it can't be done here" is, if not right-leaning, at least a conservative attitude in the sense of not trying to change anything. It just adds in an extra layer of (often irrelevant or nonsensical) defeatism, like the problem is unsolvable, and not just difficult.
It's weird, because we could put people on the moon, but a city can't adapt to a more bike-friendly way of life?
You realize that LA (the city proper, not metro area) is over 5x the size of Amsterdam with over 4x the population. I think that's part of what he meant by they're not really comparable.
I definitely agree that, yes, it needs to be worked on. It just might be a longer process and some of the tricks that work in other locales aren't directly applicable.
I don't get it. What does that even mean? It's 5x as big and has 5x the population? Do you realize what you are saying here?
Yeah, it's always a longer process. You still gotta start at some point. 30 years behind Amsterdam and the clock is still clicking on for the process to actually start. Tomorrow it will be 30 years and 1 day without action.
(I'll just say it to be very clear here: when I say Amsterdam, really it's all of the Netherlands, to slightly varying degree.)
LA is a lot of communities crammed into one huge community. You can do almost anything there but the distinct sections are really far apart. Especially when it comes to jobs. Mom know the subject is LA's transportation system, but I can't help but see it as a problem of densification.
he is saying that it has 4x population on 5x the area.
the latter being the kicker, most euros do not comprehend the distances that hit you in the US. plus, cali is a desert. try cycling in 40C heat, for 10miles (15km). people use cars because of the AC.
distances also hit as your work rarely is located where you live - US has planned cities with strict zones. you live here but you work there. US commute is very, very different than anything in Europe.
Amsterdam has ~1.5m people in the metro area while LA has ~18m (more than The Netherlands in total!). They're just not comparable in terms of infrastructure. LA is also growing very rapidly (it's added 2 Amsterdam's worth of people since just 1990!) which makes it difficult to properly plan infrastructure.
They are not directly comparable, but not for the reason you state. Thing is, mass transit scale a heck of a lot better than highways do when population rises.
You're right they are not comparable in infrastructure, there are no dedicated bike lanes forming a connected network, but there are surely lots of dead pedestrians and car carnage.
I lived in LA for quite some time. The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art, unless in an ironic, soul-destroying sense of immense fuck-upery.
LA would have all the space it needs if freeways were one way. Yeah, I'm serious. Separate the two directions of traffic by a city block or two and suddenly four lanes will fit in more places, the interchanges become less complex, and there's no spillover delays from rubbernecking the other side of the freeway.
Also, they only recently realized that freeways need to obey the pressure principle: lots of exits, few entrances with meters and long acceleration lanes. That discourages short-distance trips and gives many outlets for relieving congestion in the case of accidents. Long acceleration lanes reduce merge pressure and help reduce the jamming caused by fast traffic hitting slower traffic.
>> The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art
While I agree with you now and have always done so, the point made in the article was that cultural norms have changed so greatly these decades. Our antagonistic view was once exceptional, but it has become mainstream.
As a parallel, I still see immense beauty in the internet's form and function, but many of those of a younger generation who grew up with it might already be seeing the internet as a ubiquitous, soul-destroying, immense fuck-up.
I went to go have lunch with a friend on a Westside, coming from Burbank (20 miles), and the roundtrip took me close to 3 hours. LA is a strange place in that way.
The other day, I overheard someone, who is 'non-minority', tell someone else that they took public transit (bus) to work. The other person was slightly dumbfounded, wondering why anyone would subject themselves to that.
I really do want to see a more bikeable Los Angeles (see link below), and I do want to see the freeways as not part of the problem in this city.
The buses in LA are awful. They're subject to the same traffic commuters deal with AND also makes stops every couple blocks. The questionable cleanliness and sharing tight quarters with unsavory people is to be expected in a city that doesn't consider mass transit an viable option.
The major routes have express buses which make fewer stops and carry transponders that give them priority at stoplights. The biggest of them have bus-only lanes (at least during peak hours) for part of their route too.
I used to commute regularly from Palms to Downtown on Venice Boulevard on the 733 and never found getting stuck in traffic to be a major problem.
If you press people about why they don't like taking the bus, you get some interesting answers, usually containing some riff on the phrase "those people". It's pretty shitty.
I'm not sure who you're talking to, but generally when I ask people why they don't like taking the bus the response is usually much more likely to have something to do with the fact that getting anywhere by bus in LA takes easily double the time one would spend in the car.
The crowds and the lack of cleanliness on the busses are usually mentioned as well.
Dirty, crowded, loud, and slow? No thanks. I've taken the bus numerous times in LA out of necessity, usually when my bike unexpectedly broke or I was just too tired to ride home, and it always sucks. I avoid it at all costs.
The subways are better, but not by much. They're still insanely crowded during peak hours and not really any faster than driving when you factor in the time and effort it takes to get to and from the stations themselves. However, I'd take the subway downtown more often if it just ran later.
Yeah, Angelenos are terrified of the very poor. I've taken the bus a bit in LA (both the Metro and some of the local lines in the south bay). I didn't notice any more colorful characters than I did on transit in NYC, Chicago, or SF.
I asked my teenaged nephew the other day, while he was playing a car racing game, what he thinks would be a reasonable good first car for him. He is two, maybe three years from driving age. He grew up in the suburbs and both his parents have cars. Dad has a classic car for weekend pleasure driving. You get the picture. My nephew hadn't really considered getting a car. I can see the first car thing being a whole lot less of a thing for his generation than it was for his parents'. He would rather spend time tinkering on his computer than under the hood or behind the wheel like his father did.
To be fair, many people worked on their car because it was both accessible and a cheap way to increase the value of and/or reduce the cost of a large purchase. Cars' mechanical components have become less accessible over time, and while you can still work on them yourself, it requires either more knowledge to do so or to use more modular components where there's less technical work besides plugging it in.
Computer hardware isn't much better.
Software though, that's where I'm convinced this spirit is more alive than ever. Instead of racing his car your nephew may play racing games, and instead of working on his car to make it faster/better/cooler, he might become interested in making a game, or other software, and the bars of entry for that are lower than they've ever been, and are just getting lower.
I'm having a hard time imagining what world you live in where teenagers have ~$3000 + gas money in disposable income from their $7.25/hour jobs and no pressure to save it for college. My suburb was probably in the top 1% of property values in the state and only a few (~10 out of 250) kids "owned" cars, which their finance-industry parents bought them.
Most garages were 2-car, and you don't want a car outside of a garage in snow. I was actually offered my grandmother's car for free when she died, but my parents refused it because they didn't want to deal with 3 cars in a 2-car driveway and garage.
No one else had any say in what car they would drive; 99% of the time it was Mom's minivan or Prius, with constant tension over when the keys would be brought back home. 95% of my graduating class went to college, and all but a few of them lived in dorms (at least for the first year) where car ownership was neither necessary nor permitted.
None of us will be thinking about buying cars until we graduate. And even then, those who will have money to buy cars they want, instead of the cheapest thing that starts, will be the San Francisco software engineers and the Manhattan investment bankers, i.e. the people who don't need them. I know a few people who got cars out of necessity for internships in remote places, and on all accounts it was a ~10-year-old, boring, practical castoff of a middle-aged relative who wanted an upgrade, to be sold when no longer necessary.
Personally, I'd love a Jetta but I can't imagine what I'd use it for, and for the same amount of money I can get a fully-loaded rMBP, an iPhone, and less student debt.
> you don't want a car outside of a garage in snow
Why not? It works fine, and there are few places in the US cold enough to even require a block heater, let alone actually endangering the engine. Just have to brush it off sometimes, but it's hardly a dealbreaker. I lived almost 20 years in Alaska and never had a garage that we used for cars.
I agree with you... However, where do you (or your parents, I guess) live where you have a 2-car garage but not enough space to park a car on the street in front of your house? (snow isn't a real excuse, plenty of people in snowy places don't park their cars in garages)
Municipal ordinance - parking between midnight and 5am by permit only, only n nights per year per resident. Not sure how common this is for suburbia, but I gather it's not hugely unusual.
But you need to understand that this perspective doesn't exist for the middle 90% of the country and really only applies to the large metros where things are either dense enough for cars not to be generally necessary, or public transit is acceptably good. Everywhere else, most teens need a [cheap] car just to get to & from their part time & summer jobs, or to shuttle around their younger siblings.
Public transit is worthless where I grew up. Your choices are to share your parents' cars, get driven everywhere by your parents (most common), work at one of the 3 walking-distance employers, or simply not leave the house very much.
I live in Huntsville, AL. Where I grew up in Madison, AL, basically everybody in my graduating class had a car. Some were junkers and some were stupid expensive. I didn't have one until I bought one from my parents after my freshman year of college.
It might depend on where you live. For a teenager who lives in a reasonably dense area, even using Uber/Lyft to get around could easily be less expensive than car ownership. (I mean, geez, even just insurance premiums for teenagers are off the wall these days.) If that summer job is accessible without a car, that means it can be even more part time without sacrificing the ability to get around.
I lived in a very rural area so for me car ownership really did represent freedom. But if that weren't the case then I think that calculus would have been pretty attractive to me. Having the freedom to not spend so @$@#% much time doing menial crap like flipping burgers? Heck yeah.
Not directly on topic here, but anyone else feel this was a monstrous jump to make?
>Younger drivers see cars less as tickets to freedom and connection and more as obstacles to those things, in part because the one time that they can’t tap out texts or post pictures to Instagram is while they’re behind the wheel.
This might change, but only if normal traffic gets worse.
* Loss of freedom
I have the option of visiting friends/family in other locations if I drive.
Loss of freedom is also related to the very poor intra-networking; the entire transit system in the area is designed as a star pattern for getting workers to the city.
* Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a shift worker: your hours and those of other workers aren't the same, you might not even have multiple workers from the same area at a small company.
* Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a full time worker: (I don't have this problem, but friends do) if your hours aren't consistent or you might be called in at a moment's notice.
I think the answer to all of this is flexible pooled transit. Probably an extension of what we know of today as taxi/ubur; but much more Johnny Cab (80's Total Recall).
I would love to see a future where on-demand car services and / or self-driving cars shrink the traffic volume of Los Angeles back down to the scale it was originally designed for.
As you could imagine, native Angelenos are culturally disposed towards car-as-identity thinking. But the value shift away from that is definitely visible amongst younger people, and trends and values in LA have a tendency to spread at an accelerated pace. So it's possible after a certain tipping point, this could become reality much sooner than we think.
But I'm doubtful we'll be turning the 10 into a park anytime soon. Much more likely that it will just shave off some of the stress of trying to get to a meeting in Santa Monica from Downtown on time
Jevons Paradox: if the convenience and cost of taking the automobile goes down, the usage will go up. It just might suck less because you can go anywhere, from anywhere, and drunk.
That's what scares me about self driving cars. right now a three hour commute each way is not really feasible but if you could sleep in your car it would be very possible.
We may end up with even more sprawl and more cars on the roads.
I think it's great that people are questioning car use in big cities like Los Angeles. I've visited a fair number of cities in my life, and those without many cars are much more pleasant to hang out in. Much healthier, too. Subways, bicycle paths and walking streets work very well in large cities.
However, I hope people won't make the mistake of trying to get rid of cars in rural areas and small towns. Public transportation does not work well here.
Many left-wing politicians don't want cars anywhere, whereas many right-wing politicians want cars everywhere. Some people seem to have difficulties seeing that different solutions work well in different situations.
Maybe that's the case these days in the US. However, where I live (Norway, Europe), left-wing politicians want high taxes on new cars, gasoline etc. in order to discourage car use everywhere. Hopefully, the US won't end up like this.
The L.A. freeway system is not about L.A. It's about Southern California. Comments that suggest public transportation don't take into account the unique layout of SoCal. Here are just a few of the things to take into account, coming from a guy that grew up in NYC and now lives in SoCal.
--SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks.
--SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.)
--There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on.
--The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way.
I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car.
It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed.
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Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away.
+higher quality of life
+less wear and tear on the cars
+less pollution
+less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch
+less maintenance on the roads
+less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them
+less congestion for those that need to be on the road
The I-5 HOV lanes in Seattle carry almost as many people per unit of time as the rest of the highway combined. If you're feeling daring enough to argue, note very carefully that I said "people", not "vehicles".
In Northern VA they have the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country. They knew there was going to be growth, but no roads were built to handle it and no rights of way were purchased when they were easy to purchase. I know someone who worked in the Federal Highway Admin at the time (late 60's early 70's) and recalls how they tried to do rational planning for the expected growth but were shot down. They were told that building roads would just cause growth. Now they have had the growth and don't have the roads. That's definitely worse than having both. Contrast this with the other side of DC where MD put in the roads and set aside rights of way. They are way better off. Not perfect by any stretch, but better.
NoVA's traffic is bad because of suburban sprawl. Car travel simply doesn't scale to that level, no matter how many roads you build. The only part that did anything correctly is Arlington, which focused it's development in areas that are walkable and can be serviced by mass transit, resulting in decreased traffic volumes on most roads in spite of a large increase in population.
This doesn't prove anything. Lanes are added a decade or more after there is a need and these cities are generally growing anyway with an existing growing demand that isn't being met by current infrastructure.
With this extra congestion it is moving more people than before.
Every study ever done has shown that getting rid of carpool lanes is just about the worst thing you could do. All those people that were in the carpool lane are now in with the general traffic, and they're not carpooling. So there are even more cars.
The studies I've seen suggesting converting these lanes to toll lanes that allow for HOV free passes. The lanes serve a political purpose and do not solve an engineering issue. The facts are mass the conversion of single car drives to avid carpooled never happened.
Simply charge people 10 or 20 dollars to drive at heavily impacted times of the day. Take every last cent of that toll to subsidize buses and eventually mass transit on the same route.
People in a hurry win because their time is valuable and they get to buy it back relatively cheaply. People not in a hurry win because they get subsidized mass transit. Everyone wins because traffic and pollution go down.
In a country where we allow people to live in misery just to uphold the "Free Market", why do we allow our streets and freeways to become unusable twice a day just so freeways remain "free"?