LA’s new trains have not lessened the time spent stuck in traffic
economist.com
economist.com
I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood.
I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.
I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
I agree with the appeal, but I've always found the biggest issue with this dream is the need for utter stability. If you quit your job, you might end up with a new one at an office 30 minutes down the highway. If your partner works, it's even harder to keep two commutes low. If you move with each new job, you may have to uproot your kid and send them to a new school.
Compare NYC to LA: LA is driving dominant and has the longer commute time, despite a smaller population than NYC.
Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have.
A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway. I know people who would rather have their fingernails removed without anesthesia than do drive the 405 in rush-hour traffic. I might include myself in that group.
Who gives out building and business permits? Car companies? No. The city, the county, the State. Why do they allow such concentration? OK, maybe concentration makes sense at some level. Why, then, do they allow concentration where they do? One look at the map --particularly if armed with traffic pattern familiarity-- instantly tells you it isn't a good idea to pile-up so many businesses in these areas.
So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design. We could use public transportation but it would take me somewhere in the range of two to three hours longer per day to go almost anywhere and come back. Sorry, my time is far more valuable than that. And, to complete the picture, this means spending somewhere in the range of six hours per day coming and going from the aforementioned tech centers. And then you have to work 8 to 10, if not 12, hours per day.
With regards to the myth of car companies driving or forcing urban development in a place like Los Angeles (really, think about that for a moment), here's the most complete research on Los Angeles mass transport I have ever found:
https://media.metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/pre...
There are an array of interconnected competing interests that drive the evolution of a city or region. For example, good union jobs building highways, suburban home developments and driving buses (one train = one conductor; 100 buses = 100 union jobs), etc.
No, car companies are not that powerful. Los Angeles did this to itself over a very long period of time and for a number of reasons not having much to do with this fable of a car company promoted car culture. The simplest explanation is: It just happened.
This isn't unlike the internet, which just exploded at one point and it is what it is. If we had to design it from scratch today with the benefit of hindsight we would likely change quite a few things. Same with cities. You get what you get, unless someone early enough had enough vision or was naturally restricted in some way to take a more favorable path.
EDIT: I stand corrected. I just checked with Google Maps. There is NO way to take public transport of any kind. Well, at least Google can't solve the routing problem. I think there might be a way if I took something like three buses to get close to where I might be able to reach light rail. Plain and simple, Los Angeles didn't evolve to favor mass transportation.
> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.
> The scholar Sy Adler once wrote, plain and simple, that everything Snell suggested about transit in Los Angeles "was wrong."
That's a reason why mass transit in LA doesn't work now, not how it came to be that way.
You seemed to have stopped reading before I literally said the current problem was zoning and building (aka urban planning). I lived in LA myself and have felt the length of a trip taking the expo line all the way in/out and how it isn't a viable commute. The sprawl of LA renders the bus system nearly useless as well.
> Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have. > So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design.
Urban planning doesn't exist in isolation, it is shaped by those in power at the time, in every city. The motor industry absolutely was a power player that had a vested interest in pushing urban planning towards a vision of a city that meant cars coming in from suburbs instead of dense urban areas where public transit would actually be effective. LA is not alone in this within the US. Of course they weren't the only factor, a good example being white flight hitting cities pretty hard as well. But to say the car industry was not involved is 100% false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
> Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[3] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland.
You are absolutely correct. Sorry. That was dumb.
Yeah, not sure who comes up with the idea of tossing everything within the same 5 square miles (or whatever) and expecting life to be great.
Check out this document I found on LA transportation history, interesting.
https://media.metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/pre...
I love cities for availability of so many things quickly, diverse people and cultures that can only really be accomplished with large numbers of people, large social pools, high arts density, public transit so no need for a car, etc. If you're looking for a large space to live in, a backyard, lots of nature, then most cities won't hit that. Just depends on values but neither is wrong.
Personally, I find you need some kind of minimum time separation from work, otherwise you don't get the sense of separation between work and home life. I had a 5 minute walk from my house as a work commute once, and I much prefer my 30 minute bus ride today, because by the time I get home I'm in "home mode".
The main issue with transit time in the US is that American cities have made intentional policy decisions that result in land uses being far apart and sprawling areas, so a nonstop car trip is the only reasonable option. But everyone making nonstop car trips doesn't scale, which is why the Lincoln and Holland have hour-long waits into the tunnels more often than not.
Graded ramps are high capacity but take up a lot of space since the grade can't be all that steep.
Elevators don't take up a lot of space but are really slow, and have worse reliability issues due to the moving parts.
How many spots on the surface exist that you could just take a chunk out of for either? Most land in existing cities is already being used for buildings or roads or sidewalks.
This metro station being built in Paris is 300,000 cubic meters: http://www.leparisien.fr/val-de-marne-94/villejuif-la-gare-c...
why oh why doesn't that city have light rail…
Texas generally sees public-transport as something for poor people and the state is full of armchair libertarians..
I was at a lecture recently about the things cities do right and wrong when planning public transit, and the speaker used Austin's rail system to illustrate what happens when cities route public transit around political opposition. The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable, and Austin's Red Line is the perfect example: it barely sticks its nose into one side of downtown and then manages to dodge the capitol area, the university, and the dense residential neighborhoods of north Austin. Even the station that seems intended to serve the Domain is actually a ten minute walk from it, twenty minutes to most of the shops and restaurants.
I lived in Austin when they were voting to build the rail line and there was so much opposition that they never would have been able to get funding for any serious development of new tracks. There was a proposal for a while to run trains up Mopac, along the train line in the middle of the highway there, but apparently that wasn't possible because there is too much freight traffic on that line.
> The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable
That actually wasn't the case either. The original proposal was for a roughly $2 billion project, and while it had lots of support in the central city the suburbs voted against it.
In the end they got the proposal passed, but with a drastically reduced budget, and were only able to spend about $100 million to build a rail system. So they just slapped together the red line on existing rail tracks
The number of handicapped and mentally ill / incapacitated users who take public transport is a really big problem when combined with a system's stated need to serve everyone equally.
They take up stopping time, slow the bus down, antagonize other riders, which leads to people not wanting to take the bus, making it seen more and more a transport mode of the dysfunctional. Then depriving it of funding, and into a spiral of decline. On a train or bus, you can't allow 1 person to delay 50 or 200 by multiple minutes during every ride.
People who take public transport (the poor, those with no alternative) are the very people whose time is precious and wasting it with delays is really irresponsible.
There needs to be a way to handle the outlier cases who slow the system down, to maintain confidence and reliability of the system for the bulk majority of passengers.
http://www.ttc.ca/WheelTrans/index.jsp
All regular buses are still wheelchair accessible, but in practice I cannot remember the last time I saw a wheelchair user on a bus.
Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that.
The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.
In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.
It costs about $500,000 to run a bus for a year (every day, 16 hours a day). If you have that extra half a million in the budget you should run another bus someplace (preferably getting some existing route to the under 5 minutes headway). If you don't have that much in the budget but have something spending money on shelters isn't a bad use of money but it is way down on the list of what riders really want.
So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite at the level of being pleasant.
The stops are variable in terms of nice-ness. Generally, if there is a shelter (mostly just for lightly falling rain), there is a bum there. Generally, those bums have lived in/about that shelter for a number of years and tend to have mental health problems [0]. Generally, if you an able-bodied male, you should be alright around them during the day. If the stop has no shelter, it's like any other patch of sidewalk.
The Big Blue Busses were mostly ok for commuting. You'd get to work about 10 min later, so with waiting, you spend about another 30 min/day commuting. Most of the time, the busses had sitting space even during commute hours, but not always. You can't count of getting work done on the bus and having a seat the whole way. Also, if your plans have to change in the middle of a Tuesday (your kid gets sick at school, dentist appointment, etc), likely you have to go all the way home to grab your car and then drive to the shindig. That said, I was a LOT calmer than my co-workers that drove in. LA traffic is terrible.
Busses were intermittent and not always on time. So you have to plan for that. Sometimes the piss bus would come along and then you're an hour late, so that sucked.
Generally, if you have to be at work on time, have kids, or are female, taking the bus on the west-side is going to be very very tough to finagle.
[0] The vast majority of homeless people in LA are in vehicles/tents and are trying to stay out of the public view (MANY horrible reasons for this). If you want to help out your fellow homeless citizens, and they NEED the help, here is a good run down: https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/22/16911052/homeless-count-volu...
Please donate time or money, these organizations are saints.
My timing is usually flexible, so I can absorb one delay a month, but when I'm in a hurry (like today), I'll just string together two buses (1 to 4) if the 704 doesn't show. I've taken ubers in a pinch before, but way less than once a month.
Biking had similar hazards when trying to use it as an alternative.
Almost all of those downsides still exist in places with great public transit, it's just the incentives compared to the alternatives are better. LA needs more incentives; continue investing in public transit, incentivize it, and disincentivize driving.
The big thing I notice is that where transit is good I find having a car to be a chain around my neck. Parking is difficult/expensive to find, it's often just easier to walk to the next thing, and navigating roads/traffic is often difficult.
The buses are generally reliable and frequent. Train + bike is comparably fast to driving during rush hour.
To fill the same subway cars in LA would require intervals more than 25 times longer, i.e. more than two hours instead of every five minutes, and then it's garbage and nobody wants to use it. Or, in practice, you only run mass transit along the most popular routes and then the majority of people can't use it because it doesn't go where they're going.
Making it less convenient to drive doesn't really fix that, all it does is make more people miserable, because you make driving worse where no viable alternative to driving is available. The only real way to fix it is to reduce sprawl so that you have more density over less area -- and that's only possible in the long-term, so in the short-term LA is pretty screwed for traffic. But that's no excuse to not be working on the long-term solution.
LA (the city) is relatively dense (medium-high density) compared to its cursory reputation of being low density.
but public transit here is imperfect, to be sure. it's good if you live near a train line, and not so good if you have to depend only on buses. LA metro and LADOT are trying to change that, but it's a frustratingly slow process. micro-mobility options (e-scooters, e-bikes, car share, etc.) help.
Density of city limits would maybe be more appropriate when talking about subway service or LA's light rail. So that'd be about 8,092/sq mi for LA and 28,491/sq mi for NYC. Maybe MSA would make sense for things like commuter rail, which runs something like every 20 or 30 minutes (hourly on weekends) for Metro North.
[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
And "induced demand" is a misnomer. Existing congestion suppresses existing demand, which comes back when you relieve some of it. You need to find better ways to satisfy the demand, not find ways to further suppress it.
The best way to do that is to increase density, because that both makes mass transit more viable on its own terms (more frequent trains and they're still full) and decreases the number of miles people have to travel because things are close together.
It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.
> It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.
Of course you do. Trains replace buses in the places with enough density to justify them. You don't build a train in a place that would only see it half full, you just run a bus there which holds half as many people.
The problem is most of these places can't even fill a bus every ten minutes because everything is so spread out. You need more taller buildings first.
https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips
I don't think we should optimize our cities for that.
If I had a five mile commute, I would use surface streets. Congested highways are full of people going far enough in roughly that direction that even the congestion plus the first/last mile is faster than countless stoplights on the direct route.
After thinking about this a moment, you might realize that this mostly just makes life harder and more miserable for the poor, disabled, etc. Most people don't have a plausible option to change their mode of transportation--they just have to suffer.
Beyond that, these "improvements" often don't even benefit their intended targets. I currently live in a city that has this "make it harder" smug in spades. Ironically, the resulting improvements have made it a scarier place to walk and bicycle, due to the attention overload induced on drivers.
As the saying goes: God save us from people that only mean well...
FWIW these are actually NIMBY policies. NIMBYs don't like it when people drive cars on their streets.
Or to put it a different way: everybody wants to arrive to leave at 7:30am and arrive at 8:00am. (you can subtract a few minutes from the leave time for people who live close to work). Anybody working some other schedule (who has a choice of when to work) is doing it because they are avoiding traffic. Thus if transit makes traffic a little better someone on the edge will adjust their schedule to account for that and bring traffic back to where it was.
Until you get to a city where rush hour lasts for 15 minutes transit will not make a measurable difference in time spent in traffic.
> Even as its budget has expanded, the number of people actually using public transport in la has collapsed. Total ridership is down almost a quarter since 2013. Three in four Angelenos travel to work on their own in a car, the highest figure ever.
Train, bus, whatever--if I have to wait longer than eight minutes on average, it's useless.
(And don't even get me started on the geniuses that decided that light rail shouldn't have an LAX terminal.)
The only solution to this problem is a lot more lines
I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.
Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
- The rampant homelessness and mental illness
- Cost of living
- Feces and urine everywhere
- Lots of rats and cockroaches
- Rotting garbage in the streets
- Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA.
- Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question.
It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem.
2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80.
3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty.
I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great food, services, etc in walking distance).
If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights.
Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its neighborhoods.
And unfortunately, the votes to solve the problem are slowly moving out of state...
If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
Yet, LA has obviously done so.
Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach.
Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
It doesn't help that transit costs 4x-7x as much to build in the US vs Spain. It also doesn't help that nobody cares about good investments - republicans hate transit and won't invest in anything if they can avoid it. Democrats love the idea of transit and waste a lot of money on slow, expensive lines to nowhere that nobody rides thus proving the republicans right that transit is a bad investment.
Prioritize dense, mixed-use development within ~.5 miles of transit hubs. Every new subway/light-rail station should include rezoning with a focus on a livable mix of commercial, residential, and retail.
Remove parking minimums. Let the market determine how much parking is available and how much it costs. Plentiful, free parking is not a right.
Remove single-family zoning (allow accessory dwelling units and duplexes in existing SFH zones).
None of this will work overnight. It will take years. But, the basic goal is to make living near work achievable and desirable.
Once in LA itself the buses have the same problem of not being able to really drive on the smaller side streets so they're limited to the big avenues. That makes them slightly better than LA's trains but still a pain for a majority of riders. LA doesn't have the space in most places for dedicated bus lanes with above-grade platforms.
Note that LA has lots of bus lines but commuting on them is tedious and slow. Getting where you need to go usually requires several transfers then travel on foot to your actual destination. For most commutes it takes at least as long as driving.
Shuttle buses (24-28 occupants) do quite well on twisty suburban roads. Those same roads often have curbside parking, and delimiting a 30-foot stretch of road as a bus stop is not going to seriously hamper that.
In Vancouver, the cost to operate regular buses, per revenue-hour (time the bus is carrying passengers) is ~$120/hour. The cost of operating shuttle buses is ~$70/hour. [1] This is because smaller buses use less gas, are cheaper to maintain, and have better labour utilization (Time the driver spends on the clock driving passengers, versus time the driver spends on the clock waiting around, switching routes, etc.)
And this is operational costs. Capital costs are another huge factor, that's not accounted for in the operational numbers. It costs a lot more to order an 80-passenger bus (And even more so for a trolley), then it does a 24-passenger one.
Also, this is only anecdotal, from being a rider, but I'm pretty sure that shuttle-buses both perform better in congested environments, and cause less traffic congestion (As they have a much better power-to-weight ratio, better acceleration and breaking, a smaller turning radius...)
[1] https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Documents/about_translink/g...
The capital costs of the bus isn't that much different over the lifespan of a bus. If you need a large bus at all, then it is cheaper to buy one large bus than both the large and small. Small buses cost less mostly because the drivers don't have to be as well trained - I'm not sure I want that difference.
This worked because shuttlebus service was slowly ramped up year over year.
The small buses are solely used for last mile suburban routes, the large buses for anything else.
I'm not saying LA should be this way, it just is this way. The suburban sprawl makes most of Southern California a shit show for public transit. Cities with effective public transit tend to have higher population densities at least more concentrated commercial areas. In SoCal (tired of typing it out) places where jobs are located are distributed all throughout the sprawl. There's no real "downtown" where all the jobs are located.
It also doesn't help that due to earthquake and fire codes it's rare to see mixed zoning in much of California. So few neighborhoods with ground floor commercial/retail and upper floor residential zoning.
Bus Rapid Transit is super cheap and you can have the lines run anywhere. You just have to be willing to give up lanes of traffic.
On my commute to work I see buses from half a dozen different agencies, the fact that every individual city in the metro area seems to run its own bus service is probably another piece of the problem.
They're usually placed due to politics, not maximal utility.
That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses.
That doesn't really qualify as public transportation.
Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA.
The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"
If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes.
Timetables: https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_15...
Also, the travel times are as predicted by maps. And it matches my in-person experience. But I'm glad you told me my experiences are completely wrong.
It does take a long time to get from Santa Monica to Pasadena by rail due to the multiple transfers. They're working to make that a single transfer and the new line alignments should start in 2 to 3 years.
Santa Monica is 45 to 55 min from downtown by rail, depending on game traffic.
Many train stops in LA proper are at retail/consumer locations rather than commercial centers where most people work. So you take a train into the city and you then need to catch a bus or cab to where you actually need to go. So you skipped some freeway traffic but get stuck in road traffic.
It's more of a pain if you're in the suburbs around LA. Because of the sprawl the trip from your home to a train station isn't a walkable distance. If you take public transit for that portion of your commute you're not seeing any sort of time savings. If you drive to a train station you have all the expenses of a car and the crappy commute time.
Because you basically need a car in most of Southern California you might as well use the freeways. The traffic sucks but at least you have your own radio, AC, and ability to get off and grab a coffee. The sprawl imposes a sort of fixed commute time for any given distance. You might as well be relatively comfortable in that commute.
I semi-regularly have to go from San Diego to Orange County. I could put a car at the Orange County terminus point so I'm not impacted by the bad connectivity to the stations themselves.
It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. You'd be better off driving to Solana Beach, except that most of the rush hour traffic issues are between San Diego and Solana Beach. So, once you reach Solana Beach, you might as well drive the rest of the way.
It also doesn't help that parking at Old Town is a disaster--you either get there by 7:00AM or you're not getting parking. Um, if I leave before 7AM, San Diego to Irvine is roughly a 1 hour drive.
On top of that, the train is semi-regularly stopped because someone decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of it. This means that your train is stopped 3+ hours AND YOU CAN'T LEAVE.
Why would I take the train at that point?
The schedule seems to indicate that it takes 11-12 minutes to get from San Diego to Solana beach. Where is the extra time coming from?
How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak) ?
Amtrak shows me 29-39 minutes from OLT (San Diego Old Town) to SOL (Solana Beach). I have never seen it that fast--I would estimate 40-60 minutes is the variance. Amtrak moves pathetically slowly until Solana Beach. Maybe something has changed recently, but I'm skeptical. I'm probably going to wind up on the train again this month, so I'll be able to check that.
It's kind of funny, because if I could originate at Solana Beach, the commute would be fine. The Amtrak flies north of Solana Beach (Amtrak shows about 65-75 minutes from Solana Beach to Irvine--and that's actually pretty accurate and just about as fast as driving). The problem is that in rush hour you can't get to Solana Beach--it's basically due north of some of the worst San Diego traffic chokepoints.
> How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak)
There seems to be some synchronization, but the buses go preferentially to downtown and are very slow in other directions. Unfortunately, San Diego Downtown kinda ... sucks. If you want to go east on something like El Cajon Boulevard into interesting areas where your "environmentally conscious" folks probably want to live, the buses take forever--something like 40 minutes to go 8 miles.
Generally if I'm using Amtrak, I'm driving to the starting station and picking up my second car at the ending station. This, of course, means that I'm now an entitled car user complaining about lack of parking. :)
Bussing much less so.
(Note, in metric countries, go with 800 meters between through streets for 400 meters to a through street - close enough)
They haven't grasped the concept that you have to accept either growing upwards, laterally, or both. You can't have neither.
That new Expo Line tends to be pretty packed at rush hour. But that east/west commute continues to get more crowded overall. There have been ever-more apartments and offices opening up along that line for the past 6+ years, so it's no surprise traffic gets worse too.
In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!
People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone / read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).
Very true. There was an aphorism from (I think) the Mayor of Bogota who said something like "I'll consider the city prosperous not when everyone has their own car, but one where even the rich will happily take the train."
And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general have a bad reputation, it's going to take a long period of sustained good & convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.
> Most people I know would rather ride the train.
One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.
Light rail goes where it is politically beneficial and that rarely aligns where people need it. it the becomes such a money sink that other parts of the mass transit system are short changed to prop it up and in some cases bus routes are made worse in order to cajole people onto rail they don't want to use. then throw in the whole land cost and it just becomes silly, you could always raise the cost ten fold and go underground /s
There is only other reason to run light rail: you are doing bridge over a route that doesn't have any road bridges and want to ensure drivers won't take the bridge over.
That said, the LA MTA trains do seem to get pretty significant ridership, and voter support, so it makes sense to me to keep building them. Some people are able to make it work for them, and I'd guess more people over time will be able to find housing and jobs near enough to the lines that it makes a difference for them.
I doubt it's going to make a significant dent in congestion, but it might bend the curve a bit. If you increase transit capacity, and you don't limit population growth, congestion is going to get worse over time. The LA area in general doesn't have the same general resistance to high density residential as the bay area, and there's also always a lot of single family housing going up on the edges, and of course, nothing stopping people from having more people in a single unit, so population growth seems to be a given.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
In the words of Bertrand Russell: "Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area -- effectually cancels out the gain."[a]
See also: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-...
[a] As quoted on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour.
Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.
Those people will then bear with the hassles of using public transportation for the rest who needs to use their cars. The city might even see a surge in commerce, from people who can go to distant locations via public transit, that they wouldn’t otherwise bother going to by car.
Transit is NOT about reducing congestion. Induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) clearly means that some people will driving so long the congestion is within their tolerance level.
Public Transit is all about giving choices to people AND enabling people to get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of congestion.
For my family, I have been fortunate enough that the last 15 years or so I have been able to take public transit to my jobs. This has enable my family to use a single car and save tens of thousands. This is significant money for me and even more significant for someone making less than I do.
Public transit enables workers to keep more of what they earn because they don't have to spend money on gas, car repairs, and they don't have surprise expenses related to driving all the time.
Public transit is NEVER about congestion.
If the goal is "solving" congestion then:
* ban cars (Market Street in SF, 14th Street in NYC (https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transport...)
* have an economic collapse
* reduce parking options
* congestion pricing
... etc...
Light rail in Houston increased the time spent in traffic since it was intended to bring people who can't afford cars or taxis into the central business district, it was built at ground level consuming right-of-way, and ended up noticably obstructing the flow of traffic that was there before. The rail was not built as any kind of a substitute for very many established automotive commuters at the time, and it still does not take many cars off the road.
When waiting at a traffic signal for the train to pass, you notice how many fewer people make it across the intersection on the train compared to how many do it in their cars before you get the green light yourself.
It seems that with our current infrastructure, even if we could reduce the number of car users it would not be by such a margin that it would become safe enough to not have these “traffic breaks”.
Any staging for construction or emergency services were done with a slow moving truck dropping cones or flares put down in a zipper-like fashion, corralling cars into open lanes or into exits.
I've seen "traffic breaks" done to catch motorcyclists. Completely stops traffic with hundreds and hundreds of cars just to catch one guy speeding - not really worth it imo. Sometimes it's for debris but see plenty of pulling over too...
A public transit system takes decades of investment to see fruition. This really clicked for me when I was in London and saw a sign saying a transit stop was closed for the next 3 years. That has to be detrimental for the businesses, people renting, and real estate owners who were established there. A business lease averages 3-5 years. So you'd need zoning laws to change, real estate to be built, a business owner willing to commit to 3-5 years, and foot traffic and commerce.
I can't imagine any infrastructure project that would improve traffic--only a recession.
Find a better educated editor, y’all.