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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't make any sense. LA is dense. The suburban areas from satellite look like wall-to-wall housing for tens of miles in all directions. How can that not be enough to support a bus-stop every half-mile? How can my little town in the UK support a bus depot but a small area of LA cannot?

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> LA is dense.

LA is ludicrously sparse for a big city.

> The suburban areas from satellite look like wall-to-wall housing for tens of miles in all directions.

Yes, the suburban areas (pretty much all of LA) are often wall to wall low density (single family or small, 2-3 story apartments) housing for miles in all directions.

> How can my little town in the UK support a bus depot but a small area of LA cannot?

LA has bus depots, and thousands of of stops.

So with all of that, how does the last mile problem turn into '3-4 miles (or more!)'?

LA has about 10 bus stops per square mile. It looks like Metro's Google Maps API key expired but there's a nice map here[1]. Most of the gaps are uninhabited areas or cities that have their own transit systems. But just because there's 5 bus stops within a half mile of your house doesn't mean that those 5 (or more) bus lines take you to your destination. It's like a graph, as the number of bus stops increases linearly there's n^2 ways to connect them. Traveling somewhere that isn't directly North/South/East/West usually requires 1 or more transfers, and most of the bus lines are subject to the same traffic that you'd experience if you drove yourself.

[1]: https://www.metro.net/interactives/gmaps/bus_routes/bus_stop...

It can. The people complaining are generally those that chose to live far away from transit. There are plenty of us that barely drive; we just don't complain.

LA is incredibly spread out. It's almost only single family homes with a few exceptions.

It can’t be more sparse then my town in UK which manages to support local bus stops fine.

small area of LA? lol.

Yes for any given small area in LA why can’t it have as many bus stops as the same sized area somewhere else?

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