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> LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines.

That is demonstrably false. As I type this comment I can hear the sounds of excavators digging out a station for a new subway line in Toronto.

Panama Metro Line 3, too, which is underground for 5km.

All the extensions under construction to the Seattle‘s link light rail are grade separated and subway standard (or 3/4 if you count the Tacoma extension).

which Toronto? The biggest known Toronto isn't in the US.

"[...] city in North America [...]"

> LA is walkable.

> However I don't really like walking everywhere

Hint: If you don't like walking, then your city is not walkable. In actually walkable places, everyone likes to walk because it's so much better.

Hint: if you read the parent comment, you see that "LA" is actually a collection of many smaller cities, and that "LA" is geographically bigger than some states and so of course it is not completely walkable. LA is 44 miles long and 24 miles wide. And that's just the city of Los Angeles. The county of Los Angeles is 4000 square miles, and has over 80 cities, most of which are only separated from each other by a road. But LA Metro is the (geographically) largest public municipal public transportation system, so you can take a bus from one of of LA county to another.

Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.

> Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.

In the same way that Everest is walkable. None are walkable cities by any reasonable definition.

No matter how accessible you make it, humans in the modern era can't just walk around 15+ miles a day and do any other kind of commerce. LA is just a huge, hilly city. Even with full bipartisan support and unlimited funding, it's a fundamentally harder problem to make LA walkable compared to something like Copenhagen.

Well, yeah, that is the point.

Making a walkable LA would mean making a much smaller urban area (or series of much smaller) with much higher population density and ideally rewilding most of the LA metro area. It is functionally impossible in the current political environment.

100% this. The person above has never been in any actually walkable city. Can't blame them, these are very rare in the US. (I haven't seen any yet).

I'm out walking around LA all the time. Santa Monica alone is a beach town with an amazing ocean front. You don't need a car at all. I'm seriously sitting here doing the Obama shrug meme.

It's stupid that I even have to point out a few things. Like that I was born in Europe, have been to Germany and Japan, and lived near NYC for a time so I probably know better than some European about my own city.

Santa Monica *beachfront* is decently walkable. Santa Monica as a whole is not walkable. All the other examples (Downtown?) are also completely not walkable.

At least my definition of walkable does not mean "you can technically walk there" it means "if you live here you will not want nor need to use your car"

There's three new stations in downtown which extended the blue and yellow line.

Santa Monica and downtown are now directly linked with the yellow line.

Having public transport is 5% of what makes a place walkable

Of course the entire city of Los Angeles isn't walkable. It's 500 square miles, or over 10x the size of Paris (40 square miles).

But LA has a great many neighborhoods that are very walkable, and it has public transportation connecting all those walkable neighborhoods.

And in response to your spurious claims about Santa Monica: the entirety of the city of Santa Monica is just as walkable as the cities of London and Paris, and definitely more walkable than the outlying neighborhoods like Versailles.

Downtown Los Angeles is also very walkable, and there are tourists who make that walk every day.

New york comes to mind.

> LA is walkable.

You and I have different definitions of walkable.

Mostly in the 70s, sunny, sidewalks everywhere, an actual street food culture, a bus network that spans the entire county and about half a dozen rail lines. Where does the goalpost have to move for people who have clearly never spent much time in LA to see it for what it is?

It's also mostly low density, single story housing which of course means that the distance to get anywhere will be quite substantial.

Density is pretty dispersed in hot pockets. You have places like koreatown with 45 thousand people a square mile.

LA with a subway system would be insanely clutch. Throw in a regional rail to SB and SD, and I won't need a rental car again when I go out there!