To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

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.

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.

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.

http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/LA1963.html

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.

> 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.

[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...

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?

Aren't tolls like this an incredibly regressive tax that further hurts the poor?

"To fix traffic, we need tolls"

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".

Some observations:

- 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.

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!

Tolls do not reduce traffic. Chicago's (and when I say Chicago, I mean it in the same vein that the author uses "LA", a massive metro area) installation of toll systems in my life here have caused the infrastructure to perpetually be under construction for the last 20 years I've been here.

At best, tolls remove large trucks from the roads - which is not the problem in L.A. Mostly though, they just make the situation worse, and more expensive for users that have little alternative.

The solution is the same as it's always been: stop building areas with car travel as the only option. The little things like bus routes dropping off at a stop that has no sidewalks and no legitimate way to cross a street without a mile long detour for a pedestrian are what make buses not work. The same features that funnel cars into shopping centers disregard the human walking element and make it all but impossible to move in this suburban sprawl.

The physical distances people typically go in one of the most beautiful climates in the country, cooped up in a car, makes me also wonder why there isn't more of a push to create safe cycling routes? I ride 11 miles each way to work here in Chicago, all year, and in the winter extremes it can be occasionally miserable, but one thing I don't have much problem with is safety. I have a path or lane almost my entire commute, and other than the 1 mile of the heart of the loop, it's basically stress free. If I had this safety with LA's climate, I would literally become an evangelist for bike commuting.

Any Houstonian can tell you this is a lie. We have HOV lanes (HOT lanes) which often move at slower speeds than regular lanes because minimum speed limits are not enforceable. You might remember a man getting arrested for driving with his son on a riding lawnmower in a HOV lane before the Super Bowl. Frequently, I've been stuck behind hybrid car drivers who don't want to exceed a certain speed to improve their gas mileage or tourists pointing out landmarks to passengers.

Regular toll roads don't work either. They'll sell you on the idea that they can build more roads by charging drivers who use them. But the tolls never go away. Houston's toll roads have paid for themselves many times over yet toll prices only increase. Once the government has a source of revenue, they'll never let it go.

Across the US, cities are gentrifying, increasing taxes to push the poor people out allowing developers to rebuild neighborhoods, increase the property value, and then resell for profit. This means poor people have to commute into the city for work congesting the roads. Building toll roads just hurts them more.

If you want to cure traffic congestion make inner cities affordable again.

I've never been to LA so I'm speaking from ignorance but some of the objections raised in this thread seem like they have obvious solutions to me.

1) Tolls are regressive. I believe cities in the US have power over some taxation so why not offset the extra cost by reducing another tax? e.g. property taxes in low value areas could be cut, or sales taxes. Alternatively spend all the toll revenue on heavily subsidising public transport so that it is cheap and plentiful.

2) Other cities have had tolls and it did not effect the traffic. Why not just raise the toll until it does effect the traffic? In London the charge for breaking Ultra-Low Emission Zone requirements will be £130/$160 after 2020. Raise the toll to $100 and it will have an effect.

Sounds though that the underlying issue is that LA's urban geography doesn't lend itself to public transport so that whatever you do people will still have to use cars if they want to travel any reasonable distance. Short of undertaking a Shanghai-metro level of construction (from nothing to the world's largest rapid transit system in 20 years.)

Are there any behavioral economists on here?

Isn't there a well-proven positive (meaning unstable) feedback loop between the increased supply of roads and the demand for them? Is there any way to introduce an effective negative (stabilizing) feedback loop into the system? Congestion pricing is an attempt to do that.

How about introducing some kind of net metering into the system? Not only could people who use the road at peak times be charged a toll, but people who travel off-peak could get a credit. It should be possible for somebody who has an off-peak commute to actually earn a bit of money.

Yes, I'm proposing the transponder-age version of the toll-booth person handing money to the driver.

With respect to Mr. Musk, his tunnelling proposal is nuts: on many things he's good, not this. We did some tunnels in Boston in the 1990s and early 2000s. Caissons! Flooding! Cooling systems to freeze the mud so the buildings near the project don't fall down! Ventilation systems! Rats flushed out by the tunneling projects! Buried utility lines! In LA, several layers of underground storm drains! Cost overruns!

What about the poor? LA for most parts, against popular belief, is a pretty homogenous city when it comes to wealth, sure you have Beverly Hills and Malibu but LA is so vast that majority of it doesn't feel secluded. Now if you toll the non-wealthy (the rich will not notice the toll) you remove that dynamic, that headline should really say let's remove more poor people from the freeways.

Sounds like a great way to solve other people's problems. I drive through D.C. often enough. Their congestion scheme seems to do little for the schmucks who can't afford to pay.

It makes a hell of a lot of money though. And it's defiantly a help for people driving through.

Having toll lanes don't help with anything. Look at what the 10 freeway don't rush hour. Equally clogged. No form of public transit is going to help with the traffic, it's only going to give people an alternative to avoid traffic.

The problem lies in just bad freeway design. If you look at the 405 North at the 10 intersection. You're going from 6 lanes to 4 and then adding long merging lanes as Santa Monica, Wilshire, and Sunset come up.

Now let's look at the 10 freeway Eastbound past downtown. The freeway immediately splits in 4 with traffic merging into the center. An on ramp in the center of a freeway!? Unless the entire intersection is completely rebuilt traffic will never be fixed because the bottleneck is unavoidable.

"Nobody likes paying for anything they are used to getting for free, and freeway tolls are no exception. But why are we willing to pay for electricity, gasoline or air travel, but not for roads?"

- The author has a false assumption here that roads are free, there are various forms of taxes you are paying to Gov (City, State, Fed) in forms of gasoline tax, DMV registration tax, federal income tax where your dollars are supposed to maintain and develop infrastructure. It's just that Gov is doing a horrendous job managing it. Paying in the form of tolls is a really bad idea specially stupid if you think you are not paying for using roads (freeways etc) at the moment.

Why do we drive?

- Unaffordable housing. If you are able to be a homeowner, you'll most likely live further away from where you work and not have as many travel options.

Median individual income: $28k; Median house price: ~$600k.

I personally think the market is inflated but I have no idea how or if it will crash.

- Unaffordable rents. You find a great place to live, that you can afford, that might be rent control, and it doesn't make monetary sense to move elsewhere. Or you just can't afford to (like if you work in SM/Venice).

- Geography. For example, look at The Valley. If you have to come into central LA, your options are pretty limited. If you wanted to use good public transit, there's an express bus and the stunted Red Line. Not much of the rest of the Valley is served.

There are of course other reasons but I think these are main drivers. I think dedicated bus lanes could alleviate these issues but, when I asked someone at Metro about that, she skirted the issue by saying there are no plans to widen any streets in LA. Which I'm ok with - I'd prefer to see some of them reduced or reconfigured. It seems their focus is mainly on rail. Sadly, it's also still focused on a hub-and-spoke system pointing downtown instead of something more nodal around other job centers/geography.

Tolls aren't going to help. They're only going to be another nickel or dime to help overwhelm the poor and middle class here. As someone else pointed out, it's not going to be an issue for Mr. Audi and Mrs. Land Rover to pay them, but when Jose and Juanita come over to cut their lawn and babysit their kid, they will suffer.

And Jose and Juanita, and all the rest of us already suffer each time there's a new measure to increase sales tax to pay for public transit so that we can hopefully, maybe, one day have a decent, less dangerous, less stressful way to get around. I'm not super-familiar with all the consequences of Prop 13 but I'm assuming that because the city can't extract it's fair share of tax revenue from the housing stock that that is why everything is based on sales tax increases.

At least Measure S was voted down yesterday.

I recently attended a transit planning meeting in Austin where they discussed the idea of combining demand driven tolls that provide free access to express buses.

I think this approach provides an excellent alternative to trains (which Austinites keep voting down) because:

- It addresses the issue where buses are slowed down by other traffic.

- It has the potential to convince people to take buses when total travel time is faster than driving and the cost of the toll is too great to use routinely.

- It has a low financial impact on tax payers, making it more likely to be approved.

People have no problem spending $20,000 for a car, $3k/year for insurance, thousands more for gas and maintenance. For some reason, people freak out when anyone tries to add or increase toll roads. If you want to see a comment get epic downvoted, propose a GPS based tolling system to replace the gas tax. Every road is passively tolled so everyone pays for what they use. People freak out, everybody feels entitled to free roads.

Does this article think that Elon Musk is going to donate all the tunnels to the city for free? What he is creating is a network of toll roads, under the city. I'm sure he did his research and saw that adding one lane to the freeway cost 1.6B, and noticed that it was probably a lot cheaper to dig under the city, instead of paying incredibly high prices for land and supports. Billionaires love to act like "This morning I came up with this idea in the shower, and i thought it was cool so I'm going to move forward with it." Lets take a minute and think about some of the moves he's recently made. He has an electric car company, that is developing self driving car technology. He's stated that you could only use the self driving car through "Teslas network" for Uber like service. If tesla has the electric/self driving car market, a vast network of uncongested roads they will essentially have such a competitive advantage in major cities, that you'd be stupid to not use their service. More and more people using "Tesla Uber", will automatically declog the roads until theres a natural balance.

People should pay for what they use. And the price for what they use should go up when demand for it is high.

After all, the most expensive construction is done to satisfy demand when demand is high.

And paying for what you use will spur people to use less of that valuable road space. Alternatives will increase as more people seek to avoid paying the actual costs for they had been using.

Yes, we do pay gas taxes. But that effectively translates into a subsidy for traveling when demand is high. It's not a reality-based price.

Imagine if government provided all the hotel rooms and you always paid the same price. Peak demand would be much higher than it is now. And there would be political pressure to build many more hotel rooms. And this construction would require higher taxes because the additional rooms would be the most expensive to build while also only being used when demand is higher.

Of course, we don't usually think of road space as space we are occupying, just like we occupy a hotel room. But it is.

How would we implement this? Regular commuters could have a fixed price they pay in advance. But they could get paid to delay their trip when traffic is particular bad. And those not planning ahead would pay a spot price, which would go up enough to deter non-planners from traveling and/or convince commuters to delay.

And if there is an uproar about making people pay to get to jobs when they cannot control when they start work, make the employer pay for these workers. If it costs workers more to do a job, the employer will have to pay them more to do it anyway, so why not get the support of those workers who don't understand this reality?

Tolls simply aren't the answer. At best they end up being a regressive tax. $10/day means nothing to someone living in Malibu. It can be a huge deal to someone who comes into Culver City to clean a house.

But the real problem with tolls is that there really is no alternative to driving and it's going to be irresponsible and ineffective to pretend like there is.

Other posters have mentioned the concentration of businesses downtown as a problem but there is some spread. And commercial districts tend to cluster for a reason. Supporting infrastructure, proximity to other businesses and so on.

What LA needs--and any other sprawling city for that matter--is for high density, affordable living close to employment centers such that car ownership may eventually become optional.

This requires changes in zoning (which current landowners will fight tooth and nail) and probably an adjustment to the property tax system to pay for new public transit infrastructure such that the property tax is a function of the land area you occupy inversely proportional to your distance from downtown (and maybe several other important points).

Basically you need to tax people who own large lots close to the city center. This effectively means the rich and again they'll fight it tooth and nail.

Everybody wants to live on a half acre lot (or bigger). They want it to be affordable and close to work. Well that doesn't work in a city of X million people.

Additionally outer areas may need to be treated like commuter towns are in NYC, meaning rail transport from there to, say, downtown where there's essentially just one stop in the "town". Too many stops and it just stops working at anything over, say, 20 miles or so.

Money seems to incentivize people one way or another as I'm exactly like this and I'm sure others are probably too. I hate the toll roads and avoid them even though I can afford them. Lots of times it ends up costing me because I cross a toll road without paying accidentally then get something in the mail, forget to pay it, then end up with some fee. I really really hate toll roads however I can't control if they exist or not. If they are all over, I would really think twice about the type of transportation I take, especially if I didn't want to shell out the dough or had a smaller budget to work with.

Alternatively, the money obtained via the toll roads (basically a tax) should be then funneled to "cheapifying" mass transportation or subsidizing it to be more affordable and a better experience as well so it has greater appeal over just saving money. You then get ying and yang motivation.

This just reminded me of how taxes work, for example, you can shape the way companies pollute by having a carbon tax and promote green by having it subsidized, well, I'm just copying that idea.

The author's thesis depends pretty heavily on drivers having alternatives. I place little faith in the Peak Travel Study -- http://www.travelbehavior.us/Nancy-pdfs/Peak%20Travel%20in%2... -- who in their right mind would drive in rush hour traffic except to work or school -- except for the naive out-of-towner who realized too late they would arrive in The Big City during Rush Hour en route to their ultimate destination?

Moreover, the HOT lane idea, which my city (ATL) has implemented in a couple of places, only reduces traffic in the HOT lane. The other lanes become MORE crowded by the people who prefer to suffer for free.

Once, I think the toll hit $35. If I were heading home, maybe I would pay it; heading to work, not so much.

Why does L.A.'s traffic need fixing? We have some of the slowest freeways in the country, yet everybody manages to get to work. They aren't that bad, even the 10.

Elon Musk says a lot of things. That's no reason to think there's a problem.

Our public transportation isn't that bad either. I agree, our bus system SUCKS in contrast to other states and countries. But the Metro system is actually pretty good. They arrive frequently and have been expanding to new areas. The fact that I can hop on the Gold Line from East Pasadena and take the train all the way to the Natural History Museum, or DTLA, or Santa Monica, or Long Beach is pretty nice.

The problem, if you can even call it one, is in the culture. In LA, we choose to live far away from public transit vessels. It's just what we do; we've chosen to build lots of freeways and we're probably going to stick to that long into the driverless-car revolution. It's also not very hard to find somewhere to live along the Metro line and find a workplace nearby a stop. I've done it a few times. Sure, I'm a programmer but, well, choice is a perk you get from having marketable skills.

As others have said, one thing that keeps many folks away from public transit is the lack of enforcement; without a doubt, you'll have to sit near one or two sleeping homeless individuals any time you take the Red or Purple Lines. They always smell terrible, and average riders often get tired of this. The Gold Line has more enforcement, but I don't recall ever seeing people in orange vests once on any of the other lines. Metro doesn't seem to care.

People in L.A., on average, have it good, and we're spoiled. We should all try living in SF, or NY, or Boston, and then think about complaining about traffic again.

Does anyone know if there are any tax benefits to companies who allow telecommuting in LA? I used to deal with 2 hours of LA traffic per day for my commute and it was absolutely soul crushing. My current company allows telecommuting and even though I'm only 18 miles away, it's a blessing to not to have to deal with LA traffic on a daily basis anymore.

I wanted to read these comments to see whether HN readership was with or against this argument, and instead everyone just decides they have better ideas or different arguments.

For what it's worth, I think this would be a great first start. It's an easy MVP (thinking agile here) to get data and then decide what the next potentially more costly step might be.

Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane. The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'

Tolls do little suppress traffic. They do a lot to divert it as people seek to avoid the toll, as Sydney discovered stupidly when it tried to use road closures to force traffic through privately built inefficient roads (public-private partnerships might as well have been rewritten as "legal corruption").

Ultimately we pay for the roads regardless. The point of a toll is simply to make that payment a visible use tax. You can pay at the pump, pay on 4/15, pay with your Fastrak, it's all the same and then all taxes are fungible.

I would like to but I do not think this will improve LA traffic. It will divert it somewhat. Improving infrastructure won't help either; as the opinion piece points out, that's been tried.

Ultimately, LA has to either get people out of their cars or they have to get more people into their cars.

One thing I'd love is an Uber quality app for transit. It would unify transit systems. Maybe it could tell about overcrowding (6:30 first train out of Fullerton to Union Station was packed to the gills). Maybe it could be unified with Uber/Lyft/Yellow.

Metrolink is not that app. SmartRide is not that app. Amtrak is not that app.

Great opinion, continue to price individuals out of existence.

Why not use more helicopters for commuting, e.g. like Putin in Moscow?

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-to-commute-to-work-i...

Simplest way: $5/gallon gas.

When the costs for the road increase in that manner, there was a drastic drop in commuters and a big jump in mass transit.

It has happened in the past when gas was steep. Perhaps it is time again to help reduce congestion.

Right now, its not much more expensive to drive than to use light rail.

> But why are we willing to pay for electricity, gasoline or air travel, but not for roads?

Because we already pay for roads through taxes, and car registration fees, and drivers license fees! Meanwhile the money that gets put into tolls doesn't get returned to infrastructure we agree with. It goes into company pockets who then monopolise the roads for decades and providing awful service.

It also penalises the poor; everyone in a BMW/Audi can pay the tolls and travel in comfort but the rest of you need to go to cattle class in the bus. Ummm, subsidised by everyone else of course.

You don't get to make money off of the commons just because you're unhappy that - you know - commoners are using it "too much".

One thing I've noticed about some freeway systems is that they add more lanes, but don't plan correctly. For instance, in my home city, there's a connector that runs from downtown to the main interstate. When the two meet, 8 lanes have to merge into four. This creates a crunch situation, one that it seems LA suffers from as well.

Instead, the lanes should be decreased ahead of time, before the merging occurs. Lanes can be reduced by making the rightmost lane exit-only at upstream exits, or through an upstream merge of the leftmost lane into the lane to its right.

By reducing these two roads to two lanes before the merge, they can completely avoid this crunch.

As an interesting aside, the CHP hates HOT lanes because they are very difficult to enforce. My friend is CHP and he says it's hard to read the lights as the cars pass and then make sure the car has a carpool in it if they skipped the toll.

I'm from Dallas, and I'm considering a move to the LA/OC area in the second half of this year, so I've been doing copious research about what it's like to live in LA. Doing my research, I've noticed some things about the way the LA area is laid out that surprises me, and not in a good way. Dallas has just as much sprawl as LA, but without the ridiculous traffic problems. Perhaps LA can take some inspiration from Dallas here:

- In Dallas, all arterials are six-lane divided highways, and even a large chunk of our collectors are four-lane divided highways. Bidirectional turn lanes are virtually nonexistent. In the LA area, very few surface streets are divided, with only Orange County making heavy use of divided highways, and bidirectional turn lanes are used all over the place. Bidirectional turn lanes slow down traffic, and divided highways help prevent accidents. LA should kill the turn lanes and start installing medians.

- North Texas has spent most of the 21st century retiring its old cloverleaf interchanges and replacing them with five-level stack interchanges, which are more efficient and allow traffic to flow through faster. Is LA doing that?

- Virtually all freeways in Texas have frontage roads equipped with Texas U-turns [0]. You don't see that in California.

- In the Dallas area, most tech companies are located in the suburbs, and virtually all companies moving their HQ to Texas from out of state are building their campuses in the suburbs too. LA, on the other hand, insists on stuffing most of their tech industry in the Westside. Let's get these companies out of the city and into the SFV, OC, SGV, and Inland Empire.

- Sadly, LA is screwed because of its natural boundaries. The mountains may be pretty, but they get in the way of commuting. I don't think there's anything that can be done about that. Palmdale and the area north of it is the future of development of Los Angeles County... just make sure it's self sufficient so nobody has to commute across the mountains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_U-turn

The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way. That might not sound unreasonable, but nearly the entire commute was freeway driving, which should have been much faster.

I don't know if tolls are the answer, but it's probably worth a try. Also massively expanding the metro system would be fine with me. LA needs to try whatever it can to solve the traffic problem. Traffic makes living in LA a huge drag and I found that friends often wouldn't bother to get together even on weekends because the traffic and parking are just so unpredictable.

This is a terrible solution. This will disproportionately affect the working poor. Think of all the people who work in Malibu. Hardly anyone who works a service job there live in the 'Bu.

This is effectively a tax on lower income people who had to move away from the city because they couldn't afford it. Buses aren't a good solution, as they double the amount of transit time vs a car. Advocating buses would be another tax on time.

There are no easy solutions LA traffic which is why it remains such a problem. An expansion of the subway system would be a good start, but eminent domain needs to trump NIMBY-ism to keep the costs down.

I moved to LA about a year ago from DC, where the traffic is notoriously bad as well, and I have to say that LA traffic is leaps and bounds worse. I've never seen gridlock like this where you literally DO NOT MOVE. In DC, you'll move maybe a couple inches here and there, maybe average 2-5 MPH in a gridlock. Here, you sit completely still. When you're up to turn left, there's not even room to turn in because everyone jammed the cross section because they've been behind that same like for 30 minutes. I basically just use delivery services for any thing between 4-7pm

This is a classic externalities problem[0]:

My use of roadway space imposes a cost on other drivers because they now have less roadway to use leading to lower speeds. Currently, I do not have to pay for this cost leading me to use more roadway space than may be optimal. Taxing roadway use captures this cost and forces me to take it into consideration when choosing whether to drive.

[0]http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/external.ht...

The author says "we've tried density" to fix traffic. It's just not true. Also trying public transportation means it should be useful enough to be used: when I was in LA that wasn't the case.

Traffic is not a problem per se: commuting time is! Lower traffic is a solution only as long as the others have given up their cars. But what's an empty road good for if I can't use it due to tolls?

On the other side, try and offer me a solution which takes me to work faster than current crowded street, and you won't need any toll to push my car off of the road.

Clarification: "faster" meaning a lower commute time from door to door. Station-to-station doesn't matter, not at all!

LA has a light problem. I don't live in LA, but I have driven there: Why wouldn't they put green arrows to let people waiting to make a left go first? After those people go, then traffic can flow as normal. I remember the light kept turning green, with no green arrow, and I had to keep waiting and waiting until there were almost no cars. Had that left arrow been there, this could have cleared up traffic along with the 20 cars waiting behind me to make a left as well.

Isn't the biggest problem with tolls the regressive impact it has on residents? What do you do for people who can't get to work because they can't afford tolls?

I'm not sure I see this working, unless you toll every road or have a hidden toll by enforcing a local gasoline tax. Surface roads are a very viable way to make relatively long journeys in LA when the freeways are jammed.

When I fly into LAX and head to Studio City, I take La Cienega, Fairfax, Fountain, and Cahuenga.. it's so much faster than than the freeway unless it's night or weekend. ("Take Fountain" is even a cliche in Hollywood.)

why do people keep comparing LA to any other city in the world?

that's the same logic of: my life is a mess, but my neighbour's is worse, so I'm pretty alright.

I do think traffic is one of the main issues in our society because we still have the same mentality about cars as we had 50y ago (or more). They should never be a priority, we're a collective not a bunch of singulars, so investing in good public transportation and keeping private cars out of the main areas of interest should be the norm. This way of living messes up with our health and life quality.

Here in Lisbon, Portugal, people complaint everyday about traffic and how much time they spend on it..even public transportation is a mess because it's schedules and quantity aren't that good. Fortunately, 2 years ago, I switched to riding my bicycle for 50min (each way) everyday. The commute is by the river and there's no description for how better my life got. But I recognise we can't all do that, so at least we should invest in good public transports and keep cars out of the cities so we can just walk a little bit once we got out of the train, metro, bus, whatever or even bring our bicycles to make this easier.

We will always be as lazy as possible if we allow ourselves to drive the car everywhere.

Let's just stop thinking that the car are the solution for need, it should never be. Cars and highways mess up our health, nature, landscapes, life quality, noise, etc. etc.

(I was in Washington D.C. for 2 months and hell I was about to get crazy just from the noise of cars and for the incapacity of being able to roam freely by foot.. there were cars EVERYWHERE, huge roads everywhere. I honestly think that cities like that aren't made for people who live or work there.)

Driving technology is 100 years old. The article doesn't discuss at all what technology solutions need to be deployed in order to make dynamic tolling possible. Sure, it just a matter of having all cars in the LA region be fitted with RFID. But I'll claim that with people behind the wheel that it just won't work. Let's just focus on the correct long-term solution of getting rid of the steering wheel.

Educating drivers could have a large impact as some of the issues are caused by the drivers themselves and has nothing to do with the volume of vehicles moving at a certain point in time. If somehow we are unable to educate people which would be the cheapest form of a fix, autonomous vehicles would basically do the same thing. (merging, vehicle spacing, gawking, etc...) Sorry no data to back these claims up.

Reason Foundation (obviously coming from a market/privatization point of view) did a series of videos about these types of problems.

TL;DR:

Tolls make sense in the situation of "only highways" regardless. You can make high-speed toll lanes/highways on/along side the existing highways (and put buses there too).

Those who can afford the tolls pay for the speed feeding more money into the system. Those who cannot pay more than they already do through gas tax and such, deal slower traffic, but that traffic should be lessened due to people paying for higher speed and hopefully on more buses. There's additionally higher funding available to spend on increasingly

Current highways are effectively the tragedy of the commons, which is where semi-private/public-private partnership toll roads could alleviate the problem. Certain transit systems have pros and cons depending on area, and for places like LA it is likely that at least for now highways should be the focus of additional spending.

I'll leave the arguments to the videos, some are quite long (45+ min talks by policy experts). Mostly passing along in case others are interested, particularly those who might have strong opinions to the contrary (e.g.: the 'rail or bust' folks) I've enjoyed the rail system in Europe, but the conditions here are very different so its important to not let one's perfect ideal be the enemy of making something failing significantly better in a bang/buck sense.

Highways vs. Rail (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIG0M4WT0s0

Toll vs. Gas (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrh8W2IFQ04

Funding/allocation problems (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUULDlMPFYU

Market success in China (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUPRlrVTd2g

LA specifically w/ tunnels, over/under pass, and that LA has been building "rail" for 25 years so far (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry852YXH53U

The danger of this pricing scheme is that people that can't travel on their ideal commute times hit the road earlier in the morning. They then realise that if they set off another half hour earlier they would breeze in on practically empty roads. So then a lot of people start doing this, leaving the house at 6 a.m. for some epic 50+ mile commute. So then the next step is to leave a 5.30 a.m. to beat the traffic, the traffic that people of their ilk generated. What next, start your working day at 3 a.m.?!?

So this means everyone has neighbours banging car doors, revving engines and doing disruptive stuff at some very early hour. The whole world gets noisier. And all so that some people with cars can sit at their office desks doing stuff they could have done at home.

If a bunch of homeless drug addicts made a similar amount of noise at such anti-social hours then they would be dealt with by the police, the police would make it clear to them how anti-social they have been. Office worker, with some spreadsheets and emails to do, they are given a free pass on the noise and other pollution at an un-godly hour.

Another thing that any big city should do is get people to swap jobs for something more local. I personally work local to my home and ride my bike in, but there are plenty of colleagues who come in from the far side of town, they have to go through the city centre or round some ring road, taking more than 3 hours out of their day, every day.

My bike ride home is so enjoyable I have no idea how long it takes, never had the need to look at the time whilst on the commute, no need to look at a phone either or read one of those 'free' newspapers. I wish more people could have a commute like mine, which is a gentle saunter along the river bank with the joggers, dog walkers and other people 'not imprisoned by the commute' and actively enjoying the great outdoors.

So how could a city get more people like me able to live and work locally, never adding to the burden on the roads or trains? Job swaps. There is probably someone doing a similar job to oneself a short distance from home. This person probably lives on the far side of town where you work. So what if you could swap jobs with that person, so both of you get 2-3 hours of life back, every day?

A city with all the records of who pays what taxes for what could do the match-making, saving everyone who takes up the scheme a lot of time, giving their lives back.

Better public transportation is part of the answer, but as another commenter pointed out, even in cities with decent subway systems commute times can be up to an hour.

The ideal solution would be encourage commercial and residential areas to intermingle. In particular, less restrictive zoning in residential areas could let companies locate themselves closer to workers.

Free market approaches seem to work well generally. Why not for roads? Seems self evident.

Anything you make cheaper will be used more, more expensive, less. Econ 101.

What would be an excellent solution is to make fast dedicated bus lanes, and make every bus free. Improves employment, bus ridership, and is probably cheaper than adding an extra lane to a single freeway.

When I was in college, we had this legacy system for class signups. During class registration week, in order to prevent large amount of traffic, they issued "registration passes" which were time blocked in different groups.

Instead of introducing tolls, why not have daily commuters be added to a pool, and be issued a time slot for their commute?

For the love of God it's not the traffic its lack of public transport. Once you hit a certain density CARS_DONT_WORK . Having lived in NYC, visiting LA was a joke.

The first thing I did after my first cab ride from the airport was look up public transport since I noticed traffic was worse than NYC. There wasn't any

Mass transit needs to take a page from Uber. The reason for declining ridership is because there's not enough trains or buses, etc. Get some funding, increase the number of trains by 5x, and people will start to go and use them because they're convenient. We need VCs for public service projects.

Tolls to subsidise busses is the solution to any gridlock issue.

The problem is buses are now run by bus companies and not a public service so the public are still charged too much to get on a bus and if they have a car it might still be more tempting to take the car to work.

Tolls don't bother me personally. If it clears congestion and earmarks funds so that the people that use them pay for them; that's a good thing. However, isn't it a regressive tax? The price for the tolls will affect people with little money the most.

UberPool is going to lead us to the future. It kind of sucks right now, but when self driving cars are prevalent, it will make ridesharing ubiquitous and cheap and way better than driving your own car. The more people use it the closer to optimal the sharing will get.

Tolls or Holes?

Link to Elon Musk's tunnel plan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk...

Why not really big credits for companies that allow telecommuting? That would be my suggestion.

What's the state of the art urban planning in terms of actually giving people less reason to drive/travel? It seems you need more zoning pods in suburbs where mini city centers (with jobs) can pop up, giving people less reason for long commutes.

OK and what do you do with the toll money? Create a world class public transit system? Or do you just dump the money into a general fund and piss it away, as if classism is an ethical way to handle access to public infrastructure?

California should really consider using some of those bullet-train to nowhere funds to add at least one light rail system in west LA. That would be far more useful than a train that stops in Burbank.

Try less, and smaller roads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox

Toll roads interfere with the right to assemble, because they create transactions. When there are transactions, there are records, and when there are records there are subpoenas.

I grew up in Detroit.

I travel to LA frequently for work and the traffic is not really that bad. It's congested, but at least it moves.

Adding more barriers for the poor will not help the situation.

I think demand based pricing is the most efficient tool to deal with traffic. That being said, assuming in 3-5 years cars will be self driven, traffic should be a thing of the distant past. Its already started where people no longer own cars and use Uber and the like...now imagine if over 50% of drivers did that? Picture a giant luxury bus with wi-fi and spacious seats driving all around the city using an Uber pool like service. Prices in theory would be vastly cheaper for the rider as a) there is no driver to pay and b) insurance cost for bus would be cheaper. seems like a win win

A note to those using an ad-blocker: The site won't show you the article. They want you to pay the toll to read the article as well.

L.A needs a lot of people on motorcycles. Not uber but simple Motorbikes and maybe scooters. LA has the perfect weather for that

Want to solve LA's traffic problems? Bring back the Red Cars. A Mayoral candidate in Pasadena is running on this platform.

I've always said that I'd run for mayor of LA on the platform of installing left-turn signals.

In phase 2 they can give people refundable tax credits to pay the tolls on a sliding scale based on age.

I think it's a great idea - and I think all motorcycles should be exempt from such tolls.

We can debate a lot but is there any city in the world where tolls fixed traffic jams?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Fix it... hahahahahaha. Excuse to take money, oh yeah.

We added tolls to London but traffic hasn't got any better

Great, just charge the people more taxes. Terrible idea.

You need tolls but with public transit upgrades

Just be patient. With the advent of automated cars, Uber/Lyft services, delivery drones, and eventually flying taxis, the congestion should finally start to ebb.

Why can't we just raise taxes?

>To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

...or less of Central America's surplus population on the United State's roadways.

I'm convinced that the agencies involved with traffic problems don't understand shit about traffic, and this article is one example why.

They mention HOT lanes. I need to see exactly where, and what time of day they used to get their stats, because I can tell you, HOT lanes don't do shit if you allow carpoolers on for free. The idea of the carpool lane is a nice thought, but in reality it's a joke.

Any time there is actual "red" traffic (as you would see in Google maps), the carpool lane(s) are just as backed up as the rest of the traffic. The only time I've seen moving traffic alongside red traffic, is from a pure toll lane alongside a regular highway, like The 91 FasTrak lane. And even STILL, those lanes can be backed up during peak times.

Ask yourself, who uses carpool lanes? Carpoolers? Hardly. It's mostly families, who will be on the road anyway. Then you have work vehicles, who naturally have multiple people, and the ever annoying buses. My point is, the vast majority of those who use carpool lanes were going to be on the highway anyway. There aren't people saying to each other "hey, lets carpool so we can use the carpool lane and get places faster". Even if for some reason we decided to start doing this as a society, we would then realize it's bullshit because the carpool lane just doesn't work.

Here's an idea: 1) set up cameras or road strips at several places along problem highways 2) create a computer model using the traffic data 3) try out road configurations using this data until you find something that works really well. Or at least, use the traffic data to identify what's actually causing traffic problems.

My guess is most of the time it's the shockwave effect from bad or desperate drivers. It happens to all of us, even the experienced drivers, where we suddenly need to get off the highway and we have to cut off people, which inevitably results in a shockwave effect. Adding lanes isn't going to help this, in fact it will probably hurt this particular problem. And now think about this problem combined with carpools, where at least here in SoCal, don't let you get off when you want. So now you are in the carpool lane, unable to get off, and finally when your offramp is 1 mile away you are able to get off, what are you going to do? You have 3+ lanes of traffic to get over. Good luck and please drive nicely!

When I see these giant highway structures built for a single carpool lane [1], it really depresses me. How did we allow it to happen?

[1] (two lanes, one for each direction of traffic) https://www.google.com/maps/@33.6871144,-117.8750226,97a,20y...

> And yet we miss that this very same, simple system of pricing could solve our congestion problem.

This article is really bad. The above line is one of the worst.

People don't clog-up the freeways because they are having a good time. Nobody wants to be on them. I drive the 405 with some frequency. It's hell. I don't want to be on it. But I have to. Just like everyone else on it.

We have to be on the damn roads because of where work takes us. I have clients and contracts that require me to traverse this pathway. Others are employed by companies in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor. They don't have a choice. They have to be on that hellish road. People can't just quit and move to greener pastures, at least not at scale.

Elon Musk and his quest for tunneling are now used as examples of the frustration. Well, SpaceX didn't need to be in Hawthorne. The company has, what, 7,000 employees? That general area (anything around the 405) is hell for traffic. SpaceX could have been out towards Ontario, in Mojave or farther north or south somewhere. There are no inherently magical reasons for building a company with 7,000 employees in Hawthorne other than perhaps the availability of large buildings and amicable zoning and regulatory frameworks.

Not picking on SpaceX, simply using it as an example. The problem with Los Angeles is this mass of businesses concentrated in that corridor. It attracts tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people driving in from within a 50 mile radius in every direction. This is the problem.

Tolls are not going to fix this. They would only punish folks who would have no choice but to pay-up and continue to go to work.

And carpool? Carpool is a joke. Carpool lanes only serve to waste 20 to 25% of the road's capacity. The vast majority of users are those who are not carpooling at all. For example, when we load-up the family in the car to go somewhere. In other words, no appreciable number of cars are removed from the road. Why don't people carpool? Because people are sprawled all over the place and it is utterly inconvenient. If you can find just one person who lives near you who can carpool you still lose freedom. What if you need to leave work early or go late because your kids are sick? I can't even think of one person I know who carpools.

My opinion is that LA would benefit greatly from providing tax incentives and the appropriate zoning and infrastructure support to decentralize the centers of employment. Give companies 10 years without taxes (NY state style) to either move or start-up on the outskirts of Los Angeles proper in every direction. Change traffic patterns this way and traffic will improve.

The rest will come with time. Autonomous vehicles will change the nature of traffic in potentially significant ways.

Until then it's going to suck more with each passing year until it starts to get better.

No we don't.

why can the latimes detect my adblocker?

et al London.

Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using a vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than N miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds if you use your car very little during a month.

Another option could be a centralized "smart-driving" app, that would act as a hybrid between self-driving and manual driven cars. Each driver could be given "hints"/instructions, and measured on their compliance rate. The reward would be a measurable improvement in travel time. For instance, if 80% of the cars on a block were using this app, preference could be given to hold a signal light green longer for them. Drivers would see a benefit, and that would be their only impetus to comply with its directions (slow down, turn left here, park and wait 5m, etc). Someone who never listened to the thing would be kicked off. Soon with enough users , you could organize mini "convoys" of cars travelling through the city (say, all cars slow from 65 to 60mph for 2 miles, so that the offramp signal could be ready and green at the exact moment of their arrival and kept green for the whole convoy) and attempt to optimize travel for them or give them other perks such as free parking. It wouldn't solve all problems, but it would encourage cooperative behavior on the roads which may go a long way to easing congestion.

I doubt this has any effect, rich people don't care, poor people can't afford to move somewhere else. Public transport is the only effective approach to reducing the congestion.

This is an excellent idea which is unfortunately too simple, fair, and straightforward to have a chance in California.