Hacker News Reader

Comment by egh | Hacker News Reader

The density of the LA MSA is 2,744/sq mi, the New York MSA is 4,432/sq mi. The average commute in each area is only about 1 mile longer in LA (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...) And yet, there are vastly different commute patterns. (And still over half of people in the NY MSA commute by car). It's not at all clear that density plays nearly as much a role in this as you suggest.

View on HN

That's not a good baseline for comparison. The MSA you're looking at covers a much bigger area, lumping in parts with lower population density which, no surprise, don't all have subways every five minutes that the GP was referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

comparing MSAs is more apples-to-apples than comparing manhattan to LA county, which is roughly what was being done. an MSA bounds the totality of the economic reach of a city, which more-or-less coincides with the commute boundaries.

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.

It's definitely more apples-to-apples for some statistical comparisons, but as a New Yorker it really does feel ridiculous to include Beacon and the Hamptons in to the equations when considering density for a subway system. Those places are hours away in the suburbs.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com