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I find most of LA really hard to spend time in. The mangled road network (Grids? Nah bruh, lets have lots of dead ends!), constant drone of traffic everywhere, and few things being walkable makes it not the most enjoyable place to visit.

Seattle is up there on the traffic scale, but at least in the neighborhoods there aren't 6 lane monster roads criss crossing every which way, with few pedestrian crossings and no lanes for bikes or busses. Traffic calming has helped quite a bit too, though I imagine reducing a 4 lane road to a 2 lane road with parking, a center turn lane and bike lanes would get the average politician recalled down in LA.

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Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit.

That being said, the revitalized downtown, the slowly growing metro system, and uber/lyft to fill the gaps have made it better than it once was. It still is a massive monstrosity of a city, so it's never going to be as "walkable" as compact city like SF.

This is a perfect way to put it

"Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit."

Once you understand how to travel the city, it's hard to live anywhere else because quality of life is so ridiculously high. It's why people tend not to leave if they make it past their two year mark.

Genuinely interested - what makes LA a great place to live?

As far as the larger LA area goes, it's a few hours from Vegas, next to the beach, Santa Barbara and San Diego next door. Access to various Mojave type deserts and national parks (Joshua Tree is amazing). Big Bear / mountains nearby. Various price points of housing, anything from affordable-ish family homes to expensive upscale condos (downtown) and ridiculous mansions (Hollywood hills, Malibu, Belair etc). Great for all stages of life, whether you're young and want to mingle, or have a family and want to live somewhere safe (Pasadena, OC). Access to decent UC schools. Absurd amount of entertainment all day every day for whatever taste you have. Food from every corner of the Earth. Ethnic diversity. Major airport next door. If you're into fashion, arts, cinema, music, tech, real estate, science, there's a place here for you with that interest. Tons of people from all walks of life. Oh yeah, shorts and t-shirt weather all year round.

Only big downsides are commuting and cost of living. Also homeless everywhere unless you're locked up in a suburb, but not as bad as SF since they stick to certain areas. Skid Row is both fascinating and terrifying to visit.

Please don't come here though, rent is going up as it is.

Was visiting LA a couple years ago, originally from Prague. Absolutely fantastic city to visit if you do your homework first and know where you wanna go. Wander about like in a European city - not going to work.

I was set on relocating there but real estate prices, taxes and distance from relatives forced me to backpedal. I think LA has a fantastic fuutre, especially once efficient public transit system will fully emerge. Recently I was shocked to learn that LA has better air quality than Prague. Can you believe that? Everybody drives fucking diesel on a stick here while you guys are migrating to hybrids. Go LA.

Excellent breakdown. People are quick to hate on LA. You cannot think of it as a traditional city. If you do your homework LA is an amazing place to visit with a ton to do and lots of friendly people to engage with under sunny skies most of the year.

> it's a few hours from Vegas

Many would consider proximity to Vegas as a downside

If you're the kind of person who considers proximity to Vegas a downside, in LA you're far enough away to ignore Vegas entirely. It's not like you're going to wind up there by accident...

Ha! Drive in for a show, a couple of rounds at the casinos, a nice stay at a hotel and a trip to the buffet, then drive back home. It's a great option to have in one's bourgeois boredom toolbox.

You forgot to mention how much of your life is spent in a car commuting.

Not if you work from home! It's a joy.

You can say most of those things about san diego as well...

>Please don't come here though, rent is going up as it is.

Why do you have a right to the city but others don't?

Please leave there, I'd like to come and want rent to go down. Thanks.

Eh everyone tells Californians to not move places. I thought it was funny. Maybe that wasn't the intention.

To be fair, I find that obnoxious too

It has every type of food known to man, and often truly authentic restauarants if not neighborhoods devoted to specific regions/groups. People are generally much nicer than the bay area, and the weather is great most of the time. Proximity to the Ocean, not too far from mountains, LAX goes everywhere basically. I agree that it is not a place to visit, but the 2 years I lived there were great.

Weather, accessibility of diverse food options (this exists in new york too, but you'd need to go to queens), housing that is cheaper on a price per square foot basis (units are still expensive, but they tend to be larger), larger geography (beaches, mountains, national parks). The list goes on.

There's always activity and something interesting and new everywhere, but you can still get privacy and quiet. Very open culture, easy to make friends (though can be hard to find good ones). Easy to find an enclave you like (if you can afford it).

You can grow pomegranates in your backyard and go on breathtaking group night bike rides: http://www.thepassageride.com/Photos

You can afford a place with a yard even if you don't work in tech, though it'll still take a few decades to save up.

I live in Seattle now and I dearly miss LA. I still love the Seattle area for the mountains, but as a city, LA is my favorite in the world (yes I've visited plenty of others and my sister lives in NYC).

There are 12000 foot mountains within 2 hours of LA and visible from most of its sprawl. California has plenty of mountains all over.

There's one 11,503' peak within 2 hours of LA. Don't get me wrong, the San Gabriels and the rest of the Transverse Ranges are great fun. But they're not the same as the glaciated stratovolcanoes in the Cascades.

Correction it has mountains close to 12000 feet near by and the Sierras about 3-4 hours north. Yes I know the Cascades are amazing Ive been, but I was simply pointing out that there are plenty of high elevation and forested mountains close to LA and California has the highest elevation mountains in the lower 48 if you include Sierras with much better weather to boot so they are more accessible.

You said you missed mountains around Seattle, so I had to point out that while not glaciated, the Gabriels and San Bernardino mountains are breathtaking in their own right. And the Sequoias by Yosemite just 4 hours north arent bad either where you have peaks over 14K feet. I live in the mountains, I moved to California for the mountains.

> "Once you understand how to travel the city, it's hard to live anywhere else because quality of life is so ridiculously high"

Agreed. The tech scene here has also been exploding (especially along Santa Monica, Venice etc) to the point where colleagues of mine from SV have been relocating here. As a former New Yorker I honestly feel lucky to be living here - LA is a remarkable city and is continuing to evolve rapidly.

Shhhh, stop telling everyone!

I enjoy the outdoors too much to enjoy LA. LA tries really hard to encourage you to retreat into an artificial bubble. Sure the culture is vibrant and the city is moving at all times of the day, but your life is sitting at home, getting into a car to your destination, spending your time in the destination, then driving home. Nothing really encourages to go outside, walk, or spontaneously go places. The summers are punishing, and the air is horrible. Most of the city is a concrete jungle unless you find a park or two to spend time in.

I want to have the outdoors everywhere I go, not specifically drive there.

Yeah but it's not a city either, it's just a loose collection of neighboring suburbs.

I'm finding San Diego to be a lot like L.A. but without as much population crush.

San Diego is as good or better in certain ways but its also a much smaller city.

San Diego has also struck me as a bit more of a monoculture than LA. (although this may be my ignorance) Different parts of LA feel very different.

LA gets vilified for being sprawling and car-centric, as if its love of cars is why it sprawls. This is not true. It sprawled from the beginning before cars were the norm. It is rooted in the high cost of building infrastructure in a desert and how that necessitates building large tracts in one fell swoop to make the financing make sense.

This is technically true, but kind of a stretch. The population of LA in 1900 was only ~100k people. By 1920, there were over 500k. And it continued to explode in growth through the '70s.

The "sprawl" was less sprawly than it was a collection of multiple cities that have been annexed over the decades. In the 1890's, LA was 28 square miles (and that 28 "original" LA is still very evident today). Today, it's 469 square miles. LA's current sprawl is absolutely because of the car. There's a very clear reason old east coast cities and european cities look so much different than newer cities like LA.

While certainly influence by the car. LA also just has a history of filling in old large scale industry with more people.

Orange groves, mountain ranges, oil fields, and huge movie studio back lots are all part of LA's history.

I have read a history of the origin of LA. It didn't agree with you.

LA sprawled from the start. This likely made it well suited to developing their cult of the car, not the other way around.

Not sure why this get downvotes. American cities were overbuilt from the start. In most american cities, from the late 1700s onward, wide roads on a grid were a desirable feature, a hundred years before cars were a thing.

These wide roads were originally a buffer space for all the smoke and filth of the industrial city. As a weird unintended consequence, the car could become commonplace so early because american cities already had the roads to accommodate them. And now with cars, these roads became dangerous and noisy as well. When industry left the city proper, early 20th century, the cars remained and continued to make the city an unpleasant place to live in.

No wonder people decided to move out, first using streetcars or trains, and then yes, with their cars, which paradoxically contributed to why the city was awful in the first place. LA, even though younger than most american cities, follows a similar template.

People get very emotional about this stuff.

Places emerge because of culture, economics and time. LA is LA because it entered a long boom that lined up with the explosion of automobiles. People wanted cars and people wanted to live in LA. They got what they wanted. Ironically, at the time many of the "immigrants" from LA are fleeing the crowded cities of the east and midwest.

Now, we're in a era of wage stagnation where land is expensive and industry is consolidating into a few places. So apartments that were crack dens in the 80s are hot properties today.

Which history? I'd love to know more.

I've got stories of relatives living anywhere from Hermosa Beach to Huntington Park pre-depression, so I'm inclined to believe LA certainly spread out early on, but I'd guess most of the density was along the coast and rail.

I don't recall. I believe it was part of a book with short excerpts from many famous urban planning books.

I was (or had been) bedridden. I had been to San Francisco for the first time and fallen madly in love with the city and I spent $300 at the bookstore on the way home on urban planning books and other books that I felt made sense for my mad, mad scheme to get well and someday be an urban planner. (And also to keep me occupied while I recuperated.)

I'm terrible with titles anyway and this was a particularly bad time in my life.

Sorry.

Looking at a map of the Pacific Electric suburban system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric), I'd say that LA sprawled quite a bit by the 1920s. So it seems unreasonable to say that the car caused the sprawl.

Building vertically instead of horizontally would make the infrastucture even more cost-efficient.

True, but 100+ years ago, there were practical engineering limitations on building vertically.

I don't remember the details of the history I read. It was a long time ago. I just remember that it made the point that LA sprawled from the beginning and this had to do with what made financial sense at the time. What we can do today is different from what was feasible back then.

100 years ago, NYC already had 20-story buildings. Cities built longer ago tend to sprawl LESS because most people got around most of the time on foot.

Most of LA (by square mileage) was built up since the 1950s (later than the Empire State Building). There’s no reason except political will that it couldn’t have been built in clusters of 2-4 story multi-family units within walking distance of transit.

You say that like political will is merely a matter of wanting it bad enough. I don't think that's true.

As a college student, I wrote an alternate commuter rail plan for Solano County around 15 years ago. It was based on GIS and research and lacked the politicking that strongly influenced the existing rail plan.

I was told gas would need to be $4/gallon before the stations would be built. I was sick and going through a divorce and had been a homemaker for 2 decades. I have no political connections and no political know how.

Some months ago, I tried briefly to figure out how to promote that plan. It basically went nowhere.

The first rail station had its grand opening in April. I believe this increases the odds that Travis AFB will finally leave California like the federal government has threatened for years.

The worst of the three stations has yet to be built. I updated the website yesterday and stuck a link in my HN profile.

That's probably as far as it will go. I'm no longer in California. I'm still struggling to solve my own problems.

The rail plan research I did is dead in the water.

I wish I had the know how. I wish I had the right connections. I wish people took me more seriously than they do. I wish I had to be time and energy to pour into figuring this out.

I don't. I have to get on with my life and none of that fits into my schedule. I've tried. It went nowhere.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by entropy.

> 100 years ago, NYC already had 20-story buildings.

Well, it was also land-locked and not earthquake prone.

Should we be surprised that different incentives produce different outcomes?

Building vertically costs more than running utilities an additional 100ft.

Building vertically is even less attractive when you consider CA's geological situation.

You can absolutely make seismically safe tall buildings. Even so, building vertically doesn’t mean 50-story skyscrapers. It could be as modest as a three to six-story apartment building, which can nicely coexist in neighborhoods (like they do in Chicago). You could also get away with fourplexes. The point is that it doesn’t have to be JUST single-family homes. And don’t forget that the less densely you build, the less of a tax base you have. Suburbs are absolutely subsidized by cities because there aren’t nearly enough taxpayers to support all of the (aging) infrastructure required to support everyone and their grandma having their own mini estate.

How is building in a desert more difficult than building on a plain? Water is a municipal problem, not the builder's.

Much of the water for LA comes from the Colorado River. You have to build substantial infrastructure to pipe it in. Building a large swathe of stuff helps defray the cost of this essential infrastructure, without which you can't survive.

Once you put in the pipes to get it there, you better build out enough homes and businesses to at least break even on that part of it or you are doomed.

Sure, when you're building in 2018 with all the luxuries the modern world has to offer. Not so a hundred years ago.

I lived in LA for about 30 years, and while it isn’t that walkable, there aren’t that many dead ends, and where there are, it is due to geography (canyons, mountains). It is also in large part gridded out.

I think walkability also varies a lot within LA. At my previous apartment, I was about a 5 minute walk from 2 grocery stores, my dentist, my doctor, etc. Maybe a 15 minute walk to the beach.

> The mangled road network

Have you ever been in Pittsburgh? I cannot fathom many cities have a worse network between the myriad of bridges, triangle shaped downtown and geography.

I'll see your Pittsburgh and raise you a Boston.

Driving in Boston is a nightmare... but you don't have to do it! Even if you're out in the suburbs you can park your car and ride the train in. LA doesn't afford you that option, really.

In Pittsburgh, it's the topography that thwarts you. In Boston it's the other drivers.

I'll raise you Canton Avenue. All the way to the top!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue

The city whose road network was designed by a spider on LSD.

I'm originally from the Pittsburgh area and the Pittsburgh Left [0] throws me off guard every single time I visit.

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

This is one of the unspoken rules of the road I learned on a trip to Puerto Rico, only it's not only at traffic signals -- any time a vehicle is signaling a left turn common practice is to slow/stop and allow it to make the turn.

No kidding! I recently visited Pittsburgh and remarked to my passenger that I'd have zero (expletive deleted) chance of getting anywhere on time without a nav. More than once, I missed turnoffs and entire roads when navigating the hills outside of downtown.

You really cannot think of LA as a traditional city. It is a collection of sprawling neighborhoods.

There are plenty of walkable neighborhoods in Los Angeles. This is a common misconception. More than in Seattle is my guess but Seattle is much smaller. Apples and Oranges.

Weather plays a big role of course as many find Seattle too depressing to live in for most of the year.

Oh they’ve done away with the 6-lane artery. ALL of those roads in Los Angeles now have a dedicated, hardly used Bike Lane in each direction. More Traffic. More Pollution due to more stop and go. And little benefit to the people. I’m all for Bike Lanes where enough people will actually use them to create a benefit that outweighs the impact of losing that lane, like DTLA. Or Manhattan. But across sprawling LA, where people take on an extra commute 1.5 hrs/day to get their kids to the “good” school, the shotgun approach to deleting traffic lanes is just stupid.

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