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Comment by bootloop | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I am from europe and visited a few north american cities in the past, including LA. No or bad public transport was the norm but LA was a whole other level. You get out of the airport and there is a endless line of car rental places after each other. That makes it clear to you that you won't get far without a car. Going into the city or out takes you on a ridiculous wide highway which is basically a permanent traffic jam. And in general it seems like a car is a first class citizen in this city. (As you said, so much car infrastructure.) So wierd. If it isn't for work I would not go there ever again I guess.

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Yes car is king in LA. In recent years though Lyft/Uber have changed the game a lot. I'd say it's cost effective to not have a car at this stage, especially when you add in the cost of parking.

It depends on what you mean by LA. LA itself actually has fairly decent public transit (by US standards, not NYC, but by nearly every other city) -- the RapidBus busses are actually fairly rapid (they can control stoplights so they always hit green) and the Metro is quite nice where it goes.

I'd rather be anywhere in Seattle or Portland trying to use mass transit rather than in LA, its so spread out due to zoning (requiring abundant, unused parking, and limiting building height) and all of my past experiences there have been piss poor with mass transit in LA. San Diego is slightly better, but it has the same issue as LA with zoning.

I do not think I could reliably take the bus to work in LA or San Diego, whereas in Seattle or Portland I grew up riding it and I know I'll get there reliably.

Interesting that you mention San Diego. I used to live there and actually took the bus to work. But I'd say mass transit is actually better in LA (which I would use while visiting) than SD. In San Diego, busses came generally only once an hour and most stopped running after 7:30pm making it impossible to use them to go somewhere after work. LA buses generally ran all day and every 15-30 minutes. which made them much more convenient.

If it runs less often than every 15 minutes, then its not a major bus line, and your in a suburban slum. Or, possibly your local transit agency has decided lifeline service to the suburban slums/gricklegrass is more important than urban transit, in which case its time to get the management canned.

Serving suburban slums with mass transit will never provide effective transit, nor is it financially feasible for most of these areas to maintain their infrastructure long term, usually they are underwater 5x to 6x in terms of maintenance funds needed to keep the current level of infrastructure afloat.

Richer areas may be able to make it work past the 50 year mark for a few decades more, but poorer areas (Detroit, Flint, and good chunks of Texas) are literally letting their infrastructure fall to bits as the tax base can't support it.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

San Diego itself (where I lived, near UCSD) is a "suburban slum" in terms of density. I now live in an actual suburb of Washington DC and it is far more dense than San Diego (as well as being on both the DC Metro and commuter rail lines)

> has fairly decent public transit (by US standards)

If LA has public transport like SF, I'd expect rapid transit to downtown, Santa Monica, Venice and Hollywood straight from LAX [1].

[1] With everything covered in human poop because LA is now SF.

> Yes car is king in LA. In recent years though Lyft/Uber have changed the game a lot.

Do Lyft/Uber not operate with cars as well?

Why go through the complexity and expense of setting up a toll system when LA could simply raise gas taxes?

LA is actually very suitable for public transit: it's a city with multiple, reasonably dense urban centers. The greater LA as a whole is also pretty dense, denser than NY metro area. And the city is investing like crazy in new transit infrastructure. Give it 20 years and, at least in the central parts of LA metro, it will be much more convenient to move by transit.

Could you provide a source which backs LA's metro area being denser than NYC's?

I've yet to see any sort of metric (certainly not the US Census) that supports that claim.

Whenever I go to LA, it seems like an urban slum with no significant development of note (above 6 story) in most of LA. Its as though the land is worthless, even Oceanside has taller buildings than Long Beach or Riverside, and Oceanside is literally the middle of nowhere California!

With that low density style of development, your not going to be able to justify a rail line that can move 20k people an hour, as there aren't enough people who can get to a station to feed it.

I blame LA's zoning that keeps it as an urban slum. Dezone the city and you'd see areas around existing mass transit densify over the next decade.

Bit unfair to Oceanside there, we are closer to San Diego (or to Orange County) than Santa Monica is to Long Beach.

Plus we are sat on the SoCal coast, not exactly middle of no-where...

Its an hour from anywhere (about even time wise in my experience, whether heading to San Diego or Long Beach), has a beautiful coastline, but there is a gang war currently raging there and it is a rural small town, and that is how it operates (alongside the county gov't in North County).

Hell, there was a murder last week not a block from where I walked daily when I was there a few weeks ago. Had a window get smashed there too a few months back. IMO, Seattle is safer (just gotta keep the crack heads from breaking my windows in Chinatown :P).

LA county alone has a higher population than 42 states in the Union.

Compare to Long Island which has ~70% of the population in about 1/3 of the area.

If LA County is a metro area, I think Long Island is in the comparable NYC metro area.

Yes, the US Census supports that. See this table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

This table is directly extracted from census data: http://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/ua_list_all.txt

> The greater LA as a whole is also pretty dense, denser than NY metro area.

Sorry, this is not even close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

There are many ranking areas in NYC in the top 25, and only a few from LA. NYC overall is ranked #6! Los Angeles doesn't even place in the top 130.

You're not really looking at the right information there. Your top 5 cities are in single-digit km^2. For comparison, Yorkville, at 1.29 km^2, in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has 60,349 persons/km^2.

I said greater LA, whereby, to be precise, I meant Los Angeles metro area. The density of LA metro is 2,702.5ppl/km2, compared to 2,053.6ppl/km2 for NY metro. LA metro is denser by a good margin.

NY metro area includes a lot of very sparse suburbs. LA is mildly dense all over.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

http://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/ua_list_all.txt

Every large city has car rental places by the airport. That is where they are. It doesn't signify. I'm sure there are people who wouldn't like to visit your home town either.

I travel a lot for work and LA/OC is consistently the only city where I bother to get a rental car. Most places I'd want to go are far away from each other and public transit is often stigmatized and underdeveloped. I went to high school in orange county and the public bus took about an hour and a half to go about 10 miles. I live in San Francisco and gave my car to my family after a year or so of rarely driving it. Two years later and I can't really justify purchasing another.

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