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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t fundamentally change the supply and demand problem in LA, which is a city built entirely for cars and nowhere near the road capacity for everyone to be able to make all the car trips they would like to.

For cities that want people to be able to get around AND for the roads to be relatively uncontested, the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving - ie. significant congestion pricing (tolls) across the metro - and invest the proceeds into a vast increase in more space efficient transit options. Typically this means express bus and rail service, although the number of people who can cycle efficiently on a dedicated bike way is pretty impressive, and with the scooter revolution there are a lot of other personal mobility choices for people who are less physically able.

Traffic congestion is a problem of geometry and public will - with public will being the primary impediment to progress.

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>the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving

You can also reduce the need to travel by increasing density, which LA is attempting in certain respects.

How so? There was this reddit comment where someone listed all the ridiculous parking requirements they impose that torpedos apartment projects, regardless of how close to downtown or transit they are.

[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_arc...

Every bit of new construction seems to be mixed use commercial, retail, and housing with large underground parking structures. He's right that its "luxury" condos but its still a lot denser than the traditional two story apartment buildings.

Building luxury condos and apartments is fine. Rich people will live in them instead of outbidding poorer people for the older apartments.

People who oppose luxury apartment construction need to explain how they will prevent rich people from competing with poor people over existing housing and causing the prices to go up.

- Rich people will probably not lower their standards enough to live in what we plebs do, thus move somewhere else, reducing demand - Doesn't luxury living space pretty much by definition require more space? In other words, you could likely house more poor people there instead, reducing demand for housing. Even if the same rich people move in as well

Yes, those kind of policies seem to be on the more reasonable spectrum to me, though I'd prefer having incentives instead of hard requirements. Of cause prices for luxury space would go up, but this doesn't seem like much of a problem for most residents.

You seem to see new luxury apartment as only option over currently existing housing. That might be the only realistic option when owners want to maximize profits, but for society it might be better to optimize other metrics, like people living there.

i wish all the ugly parking went underground. a lot of new construction in LA is mixed use but most of the parking is above ground in podium style structures because it’s cheaper.

but once you dig the hole, it’s like building the same building but starting 30 feet (or whatever) lower in elevation (yes, that requires reinforcing the ground, more environmental review, etc., but still...)

Ironically, use of Uber and Lyft decrease the need for parking.

If you raise the cost of driving without a vastly improved public transit option, you're just putting in more regressive taxes on the middle class.

  > public will being the primary
  > impediment to progress.

What an extremely arrogant statement. If the public will does not agree with your world view, perhaps the latter needs adjustment, and not the former, like you imply?

I’m not saying public will is currently “wrong,” I’m saying we shouldn’t kid ourselves about why we’re in the mess we’re in.

Most of American city-dwellers want to “have their cake and eat it too,” that is, they want to live in a major metro AND be able to easily drive and park everywhere they want to go.

Those two things (major population and easy driving) are mutually exclusive, because car oriented development doesn’t scale beyond rural / suburban size very well.

But so far I haven’t seen any public leaders or communities acknowledge that and start working on alternatives. Instead they play games like blaming Uber and Lyft and pretending that an extra tax on them will make any real difference, when in reality it’s political theater.

The American public is unbelievably misinformed. Public opposition to an idea indicates only how much cable TV the public has been watching recently and says little about the merits of the idea. Just as an example of such a thing, the median survey respondent believes that foreign aid is the largest component of federal spending, and the overwhelming majority are against increasing it. However when those same people are informed that foreign aid is among the smallest parts of federal spending and that the USA is by far last among rich countries in per-capita and per-GDP aid those same people in the same survey at the same moment largely change their minds.

"The American public is unbelievably misinformed."

This may be true without implying any defense of something that is contrary to the public will.

The public can be totally awful and that doesn't mean people who have contempt for the public are any good.

I don’t see how saying that “public will is an impediment to solving traffic congestion” indicates contempt for the public. It seems like a straight-forward factual statement, and not a particularly controversial one.

After we acknowledge that “public will” is an impediment, we can then probe whether the problem is really so bad after all, what “public will” really means, whether it is self-contradictory, how strongly entrenched those interests/ideas are, whether there are ways of reframing the conversation to significantly sway public perception and action, and so on.

It might turn out that everyone loves griping about traffic congestion but isn’t really too bothered. Or that “public will” is just reflexive opposition to misunderstood alternatives conditioned by decades of deliberate propaganda. Or that “public will” is very weakly held and malleable if an alternative proposal does a charismatic marketing blitz. Or that the disparate powerful interest groups involved are in direct opposition and political progress working towards compromise is at a total impasse and impossible. Or ...

Op said that "public will is an impediment to progress". That is much more arrogant statement than the one you claim to defend: "public will is an impediment to solving traffic congestion"

The context made it abundantly clear that this meant “... impediment to progress [with respect to traffic congestion]”.

Not just that the public is generically “anti-progress”.

It isn't arrogant, just another "tragedy of the commons" that we've experienced many times before.

Roads are expensive and we don't have room to build anymore anyways. Without an effective way to increase capacity, something obviously has to give.

Public will used to hold some very shocking positions in he past.

Popularity does not imply correctness.

in a democracy, popularity implies policy. literally the definition

That's the problem with democracy that ignores the existence of divine authority, or at least natural law.

Internment camps were popular. That made them no less an abomination.

> is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving - ie. significant congestion pricing (tolls) across the metro

All that does is increase the cost of living.

Either people need to drive or they don't. People don't drive just for the fun of it anymore.

And if you succeed and do manage to reduce travel you also managed to reduce economic activity.

If you goal is to get people to switch, then you have to do it on the other end: Make the alternatives better than driving.

> Either people need to drive or they don't. People don't drive just for the fun of it anymore.

This isn't true. Some people live in places where it's possible to reduce their driving quite a lot, but when they decide to do that, it isn't as easy as simply choosing not to drive. Once they're motivated, they start to figure out opportunities to drive less. They start to figure out which other forms of transit are practical in their area, and they figure them out one by one. They start to figure out how they can adjust their habits to reduce driving. (Fewer, larger trips to the grocery store, for example.)

There are a lot of degrees of "not driving." You might bike to work in perfect weather at one level of motivation, and bike to work in the rain at a different level of motivation. One level of motivation might prompt you to make fewer, larger trips to the grocery store; at another level of motivation, when you run out of milk unexpectedly, you might walk five blocks to a corner store of driving ten minutes to the supermarket.

The only perspective from which it seems like a clean either/or is for people who haven't yet found a reason to try. People living in the same neighborhood with the same economic means can and do drive drastically different amounts depending on how motivated they are.

There are no practical means of transit in LA. Sure, there are light rail here and there but it doesn’t get you most places you want to go.

Charging tolls does not fix anything. All that does is enable those with money to have a slightly less stressful commute and add an empty lane to an otherwise crowded highway.

At some point there will be an incentive to move closer to where you drive to the most often. For a lot of people this would be their job.

Unfortunate that the sprawl is so heavily subsidized. In a world where it wasn't, people would make different choices about where to live and work.

It’s not so simple. Many couples don’t work in the same place. You could have the wife working in city A. And the husband working in city B 30 miles away. Moving to where they work only works for one and not the other. In other cases they have kids and the school districts in large cities are absolute shit. In that case you move for the school district so that your kids can have better chances in the same rat race you are in.

Which is why I included the second part of my statement, which you did not quote: we would need to use the proceeds to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of alternatives to driving so that people had a realistic choice.

I totally agree with you that people are driving mostly because they have to, not for fun. However, retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally difficult.

I can’t imagine any way of accomplishing that, unless we begin by acknowledging that cars won’t scale up any farther and that we have to redirect our efforts into things that will.

Public transit has to happen first.

If you introduce congestion charges without also providing a functional public transit alternative you'll be voted out of office. Plain and simple.

Congestion charges worked in London, for example, because public transit is amazing there and people could stop driving without decreasing their quality of life. Yet it was still a source of much controversy in London at the time. What are people supposed to do in LA -- walk everywhere?

> we would need to use the proceeds to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of alternatives to driving so that people had a realistic choice.

I agree, but public transit projects take years to complete, so in the interim you'd have very expensive driving and worse congestion than before (due to construction), which sounds like hell on earth. Would it be feasible to invest the costs up front and collect the payout later?

Sevilla, Spain is the poster-child of rapidly building out a bike network[0], and with the political will, that could be replicated elsewhere (especially somewhere flat and sunny like LA). Another easy way to improve transit is paint dedicated bus lanes for BRT lines. Not as sexy as dropping a few mil on light rail, but quick, cheap, and rapidly scalable.

[0]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/05/07/six-secrets-from-the-...

> which you did not quote

I did not quote, but I did address "Make the alternatives better than driving."

You have things completely backwards, first you want to make everyone miserable, then hopefully they'll fix things.

> retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally difficult.

It's actually not about retrofitting, it's because cars are just that good. Nothing else comes close.

> unless we begin by acknowledging that cars won’t scale up any farther

They'll scale just fine if we space out our cities a bit more.

It's actually pretty self balancing, when we run out of road space, people spread out a bit more. So there's no scaling issues, there's plenty of space in the world.

I mean if your goal is to pack people in like livestock then it doesn't scale, but that's not something I want.

> and that we have to redirect our efforts into things that will.

Such as? So far nothing exists. And I'm not just saying that. I tried it. I exclusively used public transportation for 1.5 months, in a city that is world renounced for probably the best public transportation of anywhere. (There was literally nowhere you couldn't go with public transportation.)

It was horrible. I feel really bad for anyone who has to use public transportation.

That's the reality.

If you want change, change that first. You won't need to tax cars off the road, they'll leave on their own.

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