My wife recently went to LA, and between the pictures she sent and me looking into it more afterwards, your description of several cities tied together is a very apt description. Even by what I know (Chicago), LA is just massive.
All of LA was built assuming car ownership. So there are large 4-lane streets everywhere breaking up the usable land. Not to mention huge freeways cutting a net through the whole area. Plus, much of the zoning has segmented regions. You have a whole area just for housing, and another just for commercial property, and another just to industry. So by necessity you need to travel moderately long distances to reach your needed destinations.
I imagine most European cities that weren't built for cars means they originally were built with much narrower and sparse streets, more mixed-use regions, and thus walking or biking a short distance covers the majority of your needs. The rest can be handled by public transportation. In LA, that isn't feasible because so much extra road space means everything is much more spread out.
NYC and other major cities (Chicago) have higher density by building upwards as well as building their public transport from the beginning.
This obviously isn't an overnight project, or even a ten-year project. It would probably take decades to rebuild a car-centric city for affordable housing and walk-ability. It would be easier to start from scratch, for sure. But existing large metro areas have a housing and congestion problem now, so need to start solving it somehow.
China is able to build entire, gigantic, "ghost cities" within a few years. And bulldozers and explosives don't take much time to clear land of existing structures. If there were actual political will to change existing cities to be walkable, it could be done in a very short amount of time.
Low-income people are often the best people to revitalize and area because they don't really have many other options. So the city could take a few blocks of underdeveloped space and have it redeveloped as cheap housing with no parking at all and maybe some nearby retail/office space. People will figure out ways to get around without a car because they have a huge financial incentive to do so.
We've seen this work before. Often times low-income neighborhoods slowly revitalize as people move in because the cost savings is worth dealing with the negative aspects of the neighborhood.
Just because it's difficult and will require some pain in the short term, it doesn't mean we should do - and therefore improve - nothing.
Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. There's a difference between building something better and just forcing every one onto something worse. The market is stronger and smarter than any government, and will try as hard as it can to circumvent any thing you pass. Why not have the invisible hand do your work for you? Make it a better option, and people will use it.
Edit: Out of interest, looking at your username is it not possible that you have an ideological objection to public transport?
I think everybody agrees with this until it comes time to talk taxes and then everyone with a car says they're happy with their commutes and they don't want to pay for somebody else to take a train, don't want a whole lane for a bus, and so on. So instead you get some meaningless token effort and everybody goes on driving
Making driving "worse" (or at least refusing to invest to make it better) gives transit a competitive advantage. Optimizing for personal cars gives cars a competitive advantage, which is the story of the 20th century
> Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition.
It's not even remotely controversial when I've seen it done, like downtown streets in Boston made pedestrian only. The vast majority of people (who are on foot) love it.
Making driving worse does give transit a competitive advantage. However, if transit were so desirable, why would it need to win by simply making everything suck more? That’s not a very strong vote for transit. Transit should win because it’s better, not because we have made all the other options suck more. I suppose we could have snipers shooting at freeway cars if we wanted to increase subway ridership right? However, that doesn’t make the subway intrinsically better. It just means you have a lot more people unhappy.
I don’t understand why people are willing to make the largest number of people unhappy in order to achieve some transit utopian fantasy. The whole debate sounds like Marxism: let’s make everyone’s life suck equally. We don’t actually want anyone to enjoy their car because then they wouldn’t want to take our shitty bus. If your bus wasn’t so shitty (I am in the Bay Area, so I mean that both literally and figuratively,) then maybe people might want to ride your bus. My company has some private bus shuttles that are spectacular. When possible, I prefer to ride those shuttles despite having a great car and an easy drive. But riding the city bus? Heck no! I would need a hepatitis booster shot as well as having to ride in dirty, uncomfortable surroundings with crazy people. Not to mention waiting at a bus stop with those same sorts of people — and stopping every two blocks for someone to get on or off.
Transit isn't just a chauffeured limo ride for rich people to ride to their job downtown, while saying they are helping the environment. If that was the only reason for transit it should pay for itself (a small fare increase might be required).
Transit is for the poor: those who can't afford a car, and have no prospect of getting a better job. These are a large number of such people, who really can't move up. Cheap transit means they can just afford rent and food thus meaning society doesn't have to do more to take care of them. Cheap is a matter of pride, it lets them think "I pay my full price for everything", while the real costs are hidden.
Transit is for the disabled. Many of them are poor (see above) - but even the rich ones cannot drive for some reason. A transit system means they have a way to get around and thus causing more work for nurses and the like. It is cheaper to subsidize a bus to the hospital and an ambulance.
Transit is to reduce load from the road network. A bus with just 3 riders is using less road than those riders in a car. thus cars should cheer the bus as it means less traffic for drivers to deal with. As traffic gets worse it is cheaper to shift drivers to transit than to build a road. Thus subsidies to transit can have the same effect as building another road at much less cost, making driving cheaper to everybody.
Transit has strong network effects. One bus/train isn't useful for many people, as you add more lines and service times the transit system becomes more useful to everybody. However this requires expensive upfront investment to get to the level of service required for people to ride. This investment is hard to pay for.
There is lag time between transit existing and people riding. Someone with a car won't bother to try the transit system even if they are the perfect candidate (a direct route from point a to point b that is faster than driving) they are so used to driving they won't look up the route right away. It can be years between opening a system and everybody who would ride actually riding. In the mean time the investment has to be paid for.
Transit allows denser building, which in turn allows higher property taxes. Thus a transit system should be subsidized by the property near where it stops (400m in each direction or some number in that range) as the property owner is benefiting from the transit in the form of increased property values.
Your city needs to fix the transit problems you noted. My city has very nice buses that I ride every day. This will require investment, but once it is paid for I think you will find like me that you will sell the car and use the bus to get around. Counting my taxes to pay for transit, and fares, I break even vs paying for fuel, maintenance, and insurance on my car (which was paid for years ago so I'm not counting costs to buy the car - in some years I will have to replace the car though and then I'm way behind)
I don't know what a fair competition would look like.
Those roads are not anywhere that anyone was formerly commuting through though and were already well served by mass transit (they're basically underneath the intersection of all the main subway lines.
The entire Boston area transit network (including road, light rail and heavy rail) is what you get when you write your master plan on a deck of cards, shuffle it and then flush it down the toilet. They should have stuck with their road and rail plans from the 1940s. 695 should exist (that would solve a lot of the commuter traffic east of I95) though they probably would have buried it by now like they did with the rest of the highway. Orange line should run all the way from 128 in the north to 128 in the south (where there would probably be massive park and rides). The North/South station connector should exist. Etc. etc. If they had just followed their own damn plan they could make the dense parts of Boston/Camb more pedestrian friendly and generally have more freedom to do "good urban transit" type things because you wouldn't have surface roads functioning as major arteries that you can't interrupt.
Boston is an example of good urban transit only so far as it was lucky enough to be a big enough city back in the day when big projects got done that it consequently has a subway. The rest of the region is a dumpster fire of things that were supposed to interconnect but don't.
I'd be far more apt to take a local train in Tokyo or Switzerland than I would BART.
If that is the case, the parking minimums should indeed be abolished, because they are mandated by the government, no?
Then let the market decide how much people should pay for the socialized parking that citizens provide for car owners benefit.
in North America it's also expensive and heavily subsidized by those who don't use it. With no judgement, both of these aspects go directly against the capatalist American zeitgeist
It's something of chicken-and-egg thing, though. It's hard to charge reasonable prices when a system is inconvenient, but it's hard to build a convenient system without demonstrable demand.
Uber/Lyft have done it with their pool/line service. IMHO, the problem is the focus on major infrastructure over less grand services that people actually will use. My city is talking about spending billions to extend commuter rail. Yet when I looked at going to a place in the city center 5 miles away it was 23 minutes by car and an hour and 20 minutes by public transport. I literally could have run there faster than taking the bus.
I did the math and for the system as a whole it comes out to be about ten bucks a ride. It would be cheaper and better for everyone if they just subsidized line/pool.
Huh? Here in DC, the subway fares are rather high compared to the fares I payed in Germany and Japan. Germany was downright cheap, with multi-day all-you-can-ride passes available for what it costs me to take 3 rides on the DC Metro. The NYC MTA isn't very inexpensive either, though I think it's still cheaper than DC's. But for the money, it's a far, far worse user experience than the systems in Germany and Japan.
That's exactly how I feel about cars
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51...
It's not just a matter of building more transit (which we should be doing!). We have to move people back into urban cores and out of sparsely populated suburbs.
So maybe Japan is just the place where almost nobody can afford a car? Thus, the same as the US.
Less so in cities I think? In any case, the streets are still built to parked-cars-on-both-sides width.
> And most city street parking is certainly not free.
Even when there is a charge, it's priced far below what the land is worth.
The USA wasn't bombed during WWII, but look at pictures of American cities in the 1940 vs. the 1970s; tens of thousands of small towns wiped off the map.
We are not even close to having the densest US cities use public transit well. Sparely populated suburbs are a problem, for sure, and they may require cars for a while, but cities still have too many cars because of poor transit management.
Even if all new construction and city growth is optimized for not needing a car, and a significant fraction of it is, that doesn't change the reality that 300 million people live in areas where a car is an absolute and largely irreplaceable necessity because the existing infrastructure requires it.
Spend that same money on buses instead.
Instead of millions of cars that carry 1 person to a max of 5, lets have thousands of buses that carry ~40-80 people.
In the years to come when there are less vehicles on the road, we can start closing roads, like Paris does (or did).
Or, you know, do absolutely nothing. Improve nothing. Move forward with nothing. Complain about everything, and every idea to improve stuff.
There are an awful lot of people nay-saying ideas to make stuff better and extraordinarily few people coming up with ideas to make stuff better.
What do you think will be the outcome of that?
That comment even lists a city where they've been successful: Paris
Greater LA is home to nearly 20 million people. It's entirely feasible to create several car-free neighborhoods, each with more people than Omaha Nebraska. That's plenty enough people for transportation solutions to evolve organically.
Something to keep in mind is the existing suburban infrastructure is also unsustainably expensive. It's quite likely that many American suburbs will decay in the coming decades, a la Detroit, as poor residence can't supply enough tax dollars for maintenance.
I agree with your goals (car free cities), but I don't see this happening. Imagine a neighborhood goes car free - in LA, probably 75+% of people living in that neighborhood work in some other neighborhood. What are they supposed to do to get to work? Public transportation? It doesn't exist, or takes 4x as long as driving.
So we build public transportation up to allow for the massive increase in people using it in that neighborhood? Well, the neighborhoods they're trying to commute to still all use cars, and there's no room for that kind of increase in public transportation there.
So we need some kind of massive public infrastructure project to create the kind of city-wide transportation that's needed to enable this kind of shift? Well, sure. But that takes decades and billions of dollars. And that's if there's the political will to make this happen at all. I live in LA (and commute to another neighborhood to work via public transportation); honestly I don't see it happening.
1) Stop building new roads, and stop improving existing ones. Stop worrying about traffic problems; if people don't like it, they can move somewhere else or start using public transit.
Maybe 1a) Convert some existing highways to toll roads. Use the funds for #2.
2) Use the money saved by not building or widening roads to build and operate more public transit: buses, and especially trains/subways. Give people a way to commute into the city for work without a car.
3) Fix zoning so that higher-density development is allowed, and can't be stopped by NIMBYs. Require mixed-use development where sensible (i.e., retail shops at ground level). Don't require a certain number of parking spaces, perhaps even add a tax for parking (lower for a garage maybe, higher for open lots).
Over time, the area will become denser. People will move closer to the city core, and want to get away from the congestion of the suburbs.
This stuff is perfectly doable, but only if there's the political will to do so. This country simple does not have the political will.
If you make the city unlivable in the meantime, that should help with affordable housing as people with means go elsewhere.
Sure, drop parking minimums in/near density/transit access. Let the market decide where you can sell residences without parking; although, building a multi unit building without parking in a neighborhood with street parking isn't really appropriate.
Public transport in the LA area is a pretty tough issue -- you've got a ton of people who often live far from where they work, and households with multiple workers rarely have the workers anywhere near each other. It's very hard to have public transit that has the speeds needed for long commutes while also maintaining the flexibility for the varied commutes that are common in the area. That said, almost all of the transit that gets built does get used, to the surprise of everyone -- so the answer for LA is probably just keep building transit until ridership saturates, and make small changes in zoning policy along the way.
I don't see why that's a requirement. What exactly needs to be destroyed, and why?
From my simplistic point of view, all you need to do is to start injecting dense cores in the middle of the sprawl. Those cores can provide both local employment and local shopping coverage, thereby increasing the utility of the local area and raising the land value. Providing local jobs already reduces the need to commute.
Then start connecting the local cores with high-frequency public transport, then add park&ride infrastructure along those same lines to make the old city center private-vehicle free. That further reduces inner-city traffic while keeping the core accessible.
After some 30-odd years or so, the sprawl cores will have matured to mostly-independent city cores themselves, and the need for regular commute is even lower. Then you can dismantle the old park&ride lots and replace them with more efficient use of that space.
I don't see practical problems with that, nor do I see the need for bulldozing existing wealth. The only thing that needs to be bulldozed is the misplaced perception that living in sprawl is a symbol of high status.
It might be better to call it a "destruction of utility", in the sense of economic "utility maximization". Many people are living in the sprawl partly because they DON'T want to live in a "dense core". Injecting a dense core into their neighborhood might be considered a significant loss in quality of life.
The only thing that can work with the current system is more bus lines. But those are woefully inefficient for longer distances.
Ideally you could have some sort of rail system (either above or underground). But both would be prohibitively expensive and require bulldozing quite a bit of property.
Also, good luck bulldozing the rich folks' regions. Recently there was a proposal to add a freeway in Pasadena to greatly reduce congestion on the freeways. All the lawyers who lived there lined up and said they'd sue, in a queue, holding up the city by at least a decade in legal proceedings.
Unless this was written down in law as guaranteed for a certain number of years, I am not sure I would trust it. In leaner times there will be a lot of pressure on politicians to bring those taxes in parity with other areas; especially if it is a success and property values climb. It's pretty easy to imagine a totally unfair 'pay your fair share' campaign.
Compared to other major US cities Los Angeles is truly dense (63% of LA is paved!). My favorite demonstrative anecdote—when approaching by air from the east the 'carpet of lights' starts to appear below about fifteen minutes prior to reaching LAX (which is on the Pacific shore). That's fifteen minutes at transport aircraft arrival speed. I go 'wow' every time I come into town at night if the views are clear.
Los Angeles is just massive, meanwhile its 'effective density' [my term] is reduced by the prevalence of quakes and the expense of taller structures¹.
It's a shame more folks cannot find a pattern of transit/cycling that works for them; the weather is so favorable and the topography is bike-friendly, outside of the canyons/SaMo Mtns), but so many people must live where it's more affordable while working where the businesses are (historically high-rent areas). This is an urban planning trope, so nothing new about that but LA is doubling-down on that pattern lately with the genesis of "Silicon Beach" these past few years.
(me: LA transplant (10+ years) here and I use transit/cycle exclusively for the work week & for more than half of my weekend activities.)
¹—I'd expect we have zoning that impedes "increased density + lower parking minimums" but admittedly I cannot speak to that point directly.
Edit: According to this[0], LA is "the single most densely populated urban area in the United States".
[0]https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-...
If you want to commute by bike in LA you've got to have the place you live and the place you work (and everywhere in between) be properly managed by the city so that it's safe to bike. In my experience that's very rare: anything resembling a bike lane near me is likely to suddenly end into a line of parked cars, and with poor visibility and high traffic the risks are large.
I know of only one coworker who commuted by bike. He lives much closer than I do. He was also hit by a car in his first year.