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> Why? All the office buildings are in one central place.

No! The defining feature of the LA megapolis is that the offices and workplaces are not all in one central place. Just within LA County, there are major business districts in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, Burbank, Pasadena, Warner Center, Playa Vista, downtown, Westwood, Century City, … it goes on and on. As Human Transit says, Los Angeles is a "vast constellation of dense places." [1]

This feature actually makes Los Angeles a prime candidate for mass transit. In highly centralized "hub and spoke" metropolises like Chicago, packed trains rush towards the city center all morning, while no one travels the reverse direction. In the afternoon, the situation is flipped. This is an inefficient use of transit infrastructure.

http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-metr...

There is significant reverse commute and congestion from Chicago into the suburbs The travel times are typically longer than the conventional flow.

Suburb to Suburb mass transit is bus but challenging for long transits. There are only two major ring type highways. Attempts to get a suburban ring "STAR" train or outer Chicago "Circle" Loop line never get past the study stage.

I'm one such commuter. I go from western Chicago burbs to north. There is no legit public trans option. It's 3 hours one way for what takes me 30 mins in no traffic.

What i really hate is the variability. Good days its 30 min. Bad days, may be over 2 hours. And, you cant always tell before you get on the road.

So the conditions change so quickly that opening Waze just before you leave doesn't at least give you a ballpark estimate?

Yes, actually. Crashes, for example, can't be predicted via Waze and periodically f* up your commute in an epic way. And they happen very quickly and the effects ripple through the system equally quickly.

One other thing. If you get on at 22nd street, headed north on 294, past the Cermack toll (and 290/Roosevelt ramps), you have no exit available for about 8 miles. So, you're committed. And, once you've made it that far, you might as well stick it out, because it'll open up to 80-90 mph as soon as you get past the Touhy toll about 2 miles away.

Yup, happened again this morning for me. Same spot as last week. North bound accident between the Ohare Oasis & the 90/190 exit ramps. 2 lanes blocked. 40 minute estimate from when I left at 8am turned into 70 minutes by the time I arrived at work.

In addition to what drewbug stated: I check traffic before I leave. If I'm lucky, there's a stated 10 minute delay due to a single accident. By the time I get to where the accident was, there's been 3 more. In my 25 mile commute, it's common that I see at least 4 accidents each way. See my other comment, by the time you're on the highway, due to the routes, it's a waste to reroute, mostly due to lack of off ramps.

Denver has this also. My drive into the city is about 40 minutes. The drive home is about 1hr 20min.

I disagree that this is what makes LA a prime candidate for mass transit. If you look at NYC, all train lines exist to bring people in and out of manhattan where most people work. In LA you have this massive N+1 problem where you'd need every one of these miniature dense cities to connect to each other miniature dense city by rail.

If that were done, way more people would take public transit, as being able to take a direct route to the place you're going by train would be substancially faster.

That was just an example of questions to think about what is the root cause. Obviously you have a better handle on at least part of the root cause(s).

Most of these have to do with inefficient use of land, and ultimately can be aided with the big kahuna of fixes: a land value tax.[0] It would work to push back against restrictive zoning policies (holding costs of land go up), and would create a virtuous cycle of land values being invested back into local infrastructure, resulting in higher land values (you can get transit for free).

Donald Shoup (the author of "The High Price of Free Parking", namechecked below), has written extensively about how LVT would improve urban land use, as has Chuck Marohn (of Strong Towns, whose "Growth Ponzi Scheme" is namechecked below.)

In fact, few things seem to have a stronger consensus than LVT among economists and urban planners. Then why don't we have it?

In short, it shows the limitation of Pareto Optimality―to enact a LVT, the returns to landowners would be limited, which creates a very active special interest. Sob stories result when land is used more efficiently―people are generally moved by tales of the Old Poor Widow who can't possibly consider moving out of her ranch house that she's lived in for 40 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

UK-focused blog with rebuttals for many common anti-LVT arguments: http://kaalvtn.blogspot.co.uk/

The author is an advocate for (as I recall?) having LVT replace at least CGT, income tax, national insurance, corporation tax, and, especially, VAT.

The problem with the prototypical Old Poor Widow (she lives in a million-dollar home in an excellent neighborhood, how sad) is that she votes in every local election.

The people who benefit from density -- the young, the renters -- don't vote. Well, they vote every four years in the high-drama national electoral-college reality show, but that doesn't matter. And the people working service jobs who have to commute in from far away couldn't vote for local candidates who would benefit their interests even if they wanted to, because of course they don't live there.

Politicians know that if they enact a land value tax, the elderly who lucked into amazing homes will vote them out of office. This won't change unless renters start voting for their interests.

Well, how do we get the young to vote in every election? How do we get the 25 year old barista to care about their community when they've been transient since they were 18? And I mean consistently, not just every four years.

Among my peers there was so much political activity in the weeks after the national election. Unfortunately, it's already slowed down to a trickle after everyone has outrage fatigue. None of my friends want to even mention politics at this point.

Wouldn't that create some incentive to move further out into the suburbs or rural areas to avoid taxes?

It creates a trade-off between living in high-infrastructure areas (cities) and paying for the infrastructure directly or indirectly through your taxes, or living in low-infrastructure areas (rural) and saving on your taxes.

A related question is―why do we so frequently build new development out on the edge of a city (sprawl), and why do we so rarely build up development in the heart of a city (infill)? The latter would seem wiser, as the city already has an infrastructure system to build upon. Why don't we do this, instead choosing to bring the infrastructure out to where it isn't?

The answer is related to the lack of a LVT―it's cheaper to consume marginal land for near-free and improve it than to utilize supermarginal land to its highest use, due to the return that landowners expect for it. (For an extreme example, consider why Walt Disney chose to buy swampland in Florida rather than expand his development in Anaheim.) The same payment to landowners is what prevents the extension of public transit: the government may invest in this infrastructure, but the benefits go to land values near the improvements. Stiglitz formalized this effect in the 1970s[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

I think LA and the Bay Area are going to eventually go the way of New York where you have huge buildings and residential and business well mixed. Right now the Bay is terrible because the jobs are all in SF, MV, SJ and fairly far from affordable housing. So most people do very long commutes adding in more traffic. I really shouldn't be working with so many people who commute 1-2 hours each way every day because they cannot afford to live any closer to their work.

The tech buses were started because google was creating too many jobs with housing being too far away.

Google wanted to expand their campus. Mountain View was concerned about the added traffic on their roads, so they said no. Google then wanted to work with developers to create medium-density housing within walking/biking distance, but mountain view also said no to that ("would ruin the character of the neighborhood"). So the people filling the new jobs can't live nearby and they can't commute in.

Solution? Bus them in on tech shuttles. The thing that's a workaround to political dysfunction and NIMBY'ism is somehow a symbol of the tech industry excess.

There are a lot of cars on the roads. Why? People live far away from their work. Why?

Because they're not paying for the cost of the road capacity they're using.

> Because they're not paying for the cost of the road capacity they're using.

Suppose it costs $3000/month for an apartment near where you work, because supply is constrained by bad zoning regulations etc. If it costs $1500/month + $400/month travel expenses to live an hour's drive away, lots of people will do that instead. If you add $1100/month to the cost of driving to discourage that, all that happens is that the $3000/month apartment goes up to $4000/month because you've increased demand for closer housing but not supply. If there is no housing for people to move into, there is no price that will get them to move into it.

But if you increase the supply of no-commute housing then people will immediately move into it independent of the cost of road capacity, because landlords don't want empty apartments so the price will fall to the level that causes the new units to be occupied.

If you add $1100/month to the cost of driving to discourage that, all that happens is that the $3000/month apartment goes up to $4000/month because you've increased demand for closer housing but not supply.

That's not all that happens. You also see an increase in the population living close to work (even without zoning changes, you'll have more people living in the same set of units) and employees demanding higher wages for working in inaccessible parts of town, and companies responding by moving offices to places where they can get cheaper workers (i.e., places which are more accessible).

The problem is all of those things are bad:

> You also see an increase in the population living close to work (even without zoning changes, you'll have more people living in the same set of units)

Everyone gets squeezed into a tin can in probable violation of zoning and fire codes, when instead we could build nice new housing for everyone.

> employees demanding higher wages for working in inaccessible parts of town

Which some of them would get but it would only go directly to rent. Which prices the existing occupants without higher wages out of the space, and makes high housing costs even stickier because landlords never like to see rent decrease and now have more incentive and resources to fight against it.

> companies responding by moving offices to places where they can get cheaper workers (i.e., places which are more accessible).

Another way of saying less density and more sprawl.

Yes, this. Also, maybe those people who drive so far into offices to sit at a desk all day clicking buttons in a web app... Maybe those people don't need to be driving into an office at all. Or maybe just one day a week. Or, if you can't trust your employees to work from home, maybe there should be neighborhood working spaces where you can have a supervisor with your employees as they click buttons in a web app, but do so only a couple of miles from their house.

I don't know how true that statement is. But that sounds like some AI, a mouse and a browser would make someone a lot of money.

Regarding everyone who thinks LA offices are not centralized... think Tokyo. It's multiple cities connected at the hip. LA never ends between them, and is actually worse for traffic because people need to travel through them.

Like Tokyo, LA would be perfect for more trains. But like Tokyo or NY, the evolution of which becomes a city where cars become either a luxury or an impossibility.

This is great when the ride is clean and on time, which is why I would hate to see LA end up like NY.

But then again, if it's too convenient, you end up being pushed in by men wearing white gloves, at least during rush hour.

That's why co-working spaces are awesome. It's not working from home, but it's not going to work either.

Traffic in Tokyo is much worse because freeways are few and far between in Japan (and with very, very expensive tolls). I have to take the local roads if I go anywhere, so a 10km drive ~6 miles takes about 30-40 minutes. When I lived in Berkeley, I could get to downtown SF in under 20 minutes with no traffic, and even with traffic it would take about 40 minutes.

> All the office buildings are in one central place.

That fact is what makes traffic manageable in places like NYC or Chicago. It allows building rail infrastructure that can move a ton of people in every morning and a ton of people out every evening. Commuting patterns where offices are spread out in different places (e.g. in the D.C. metro area where people will commute from one suburb to another) are worse, because it makes no sense to have rail between all the random suburbs people commute to/from.

> Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to prefer jobs closer to their home.

Your suggestion would have the opposite effect -- if you increase the cost of commuting, people will commute further to find cheaper housing to make up for the cash you just took away from them. If a person can't afford to live near their job already, taking more money from them (by taxing their commute) just makes all housing less affordable to them.

(There should probably be a "Paradox" label for this. It's a commonly cited argument that sounds plausible, but isn't)

Encouraging more work from home might be a good start. However I can't see this being the solution for everything obviously (how is one to work from home as a prep cook?). However there seems to be a lot of opportunity to expand work from home positions. The last few jobs (mostly office related) I held could have been work from home while saving the company money by being able to cut on office space. Meh, then there's the argument "well they don't work as well at home", which could be countered by financial incentives/perks. Overall it would be nice to see a shift an attitudes regarding work from home. Less commuters then at least would make it easier for the prep cook or whomever who's needs are physical appearance to get to work easier. But of course, most people like to be around people and work from home is away from people which is to many anti-social and thus looked down on. I think that's the real reason for the deeper issues around it.

> Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to prefer jobs closer to their home.

Or perhaps impose such high state taxes/ local body taxes that the people simply leave the town, state or even better the country! Just kidding. This is a very heavy handed solution that hurts a lot of people and especially poor, minorities and vulnerable groups.

Roads, Vehicles and Gas has far too many alternative uses and this sort of tax gives broad powers and worse more money to state which will then be used to enforce drug war and other bullshit laws. Above suggestion deeply hurts poor and vulnerable minorities who have to travel a lot for work. This is like shooting someone in chest because breast cancer was detected.

A toll however is a far better solution. A toll applied only on specific routes on specific times will directly change the traffic pattern and will have much greater consequences over longer time.

A toll is a bad solution. You can't just slap a toll on drivers and expect the free market to provide them with an alternative. No do that and they'll hate you and start doing malign things at the ballot box.

The solution is increasing the subsidies for public and mass transit. Problem with lack of transit in California can be summarized by three names; Governor Deukmejian, Governor Wilson, and Governor Schwarzenegger. They represent a 28 year period of under investment in public transportation.

>They represent a 28 year period of under investment in public transportation

They represent a 28 year period of under investment in all transportation infrastructure, not just public transit.

> A toll however is a far better solution. A toll applied only on specific routes on specific times will directly change the traffic pattern and will have much greater consequences over longer time.

That's a good point. I'm trying to say that it needs to be combined with additional policies (that may not even be transportation policies) that are all aimed at reducing the NEED to travel, especially long distances.

Sure, lets do a hole lot of stuff, costing billions, and moving businesses around, involved lots of planning and disruptions, and may not even work.

Or lets just introduce tolls, something that is proven to work, is easy to do, and raises funds to help fix the issue by improving roads and public transport.

The real problem is how impossible it is to get remote work in LA, employers here demand onsite even when it hurts the project, its very hard to get remote work living in La as most employers are looking for remote employees in cheaper cost of living areas.

If having everyone onsite hurts the project, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with that project.

The problem in LA is that VCs and founders have money to live by the ocean, so they start companies near the ocean.

If an LA startup is stunted by its inability to hire, that startup should move downtown where trains can deliver a workforce from distant suburbs and the surrounding counties of Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Ventura.

I have to travel 6 hours a day to get to work and back but my employer doesn't let me work remote, not even 1 day a week, attitude is its hard for everyone to get here and the harder the location is to reach, the better.

Sounds like you need a new job.

Yeah man you need a new Job. Tons of people are looking to hire here in Santa Monica.

Many of my colleagues commute 2+h/day. That's 10-14h/week.

Most everyone at work communicates via phone and email most of the time.

Why are we not all tellecommuting but instead burning fossil fuels while waiting in traffic, risking our lives twice a day and actively speeding up an irreversible climate change that will take away everything we care about?

in LA, all the office buildings are not in one central place. all the jobs are not in one central place.

the patterns are not so easily discerned. the traffic is not so easily predictable. people often express surprise about how the traffic "was horrible and it was three o'clock in the morning on a Sunday", etc.

if there is a single main problem, it is that there are too many cars for the available road and freeway space and too many people feel compelled to get into those cars and drive absolutely anywhere at any particular time because public transport is usually too slow and uncomfortable (being confined, mostly, to the same congested roads).

> if there is a single main problem, it is that there are too many cars for the available road and freeway space and too many people feel compelled to get into those cars and drive absolutely anywhere at any particular time

Exactly. The focus on improving traffic should be on addressing WHY people feel compelled to drive long distances throughout the day. Are they going to work, shopping, entertainment, etc?

The closer you can bring things to where people live, the less need there would be to get in your car and drive long distances.

Public transportation is the most effective in cities that are the most diverse; i.e, not large blocks of residential surrounding large blocks of commercial.

Even where I live, a city of about 65k, there are residential districts that have >2,000 homes, 1 major shopping district, and two smaller shopping districts. Freeway exits are all at the three shopping districts, which causes all traffic to funnel from the freeway into a very small commercial area before spreading out into the residential neighborhoods. And visa-versa, if you want to get onto the freeway from your home, you get pushed into the same funnel before you can get to the freeway.

The city plan appears to be specifically designed to funnel 65,000 people through shopping districts no matter whether the people need to shop or are just trying to get out of the city (freeway).

The problem is that mixed use doesn't necessarily lead to any of this. People want to live where they want to live, which is not necessarily next to work. Exhibit A of this is Tokyo, which despite being very dense, very mixed-use, extensive public transport, tolled highways, expensive vehicle registration, etc., is still commuting hell.

Which commute are you referring to? My experience in Japan is very limited but my impression was that the mixed-use, and extensive public transport options led to some of the efficient transport I've ever encountered. Perhaps you're referring to strains on capacity during peak times?

I'm sure he's referring to the fact that, while there is an extensive and efficient rail system, it's nonetheless pretty uncomfortably packed during the times when people commute.

> Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to prefer jobs closer to their home.

I don't know that I've ever heard someone suggest that fewer job opportunities is better than more job opportunities.