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...
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.
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.