Clash of Subways and Car Culture in China: Are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"According to the Federal Highway Administration, of the 36 largest metro areas, Los Angeles ranks dead last in terms of freeway lane miles per resident." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/los-angeles...
"But while the situation is far from ideal, the numbers from the California Air Resources Board make it clear that Los Angeles has come a remarkably long way toward cleaning up the air." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/los-angeles...
"As of the 2000 census, the Los Angeles region’s urbanized area had the highest population density in the nation. Yes, that was the word “highest,” not a smudge on your monitor." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/los-angeles...
"But compared with the majority of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not a transit wasteland. The region is second in the nation in transit patronage, behind only New York. Even on a market share basis (passenger transit miles traveled as a share of all miles traveled), Los Angeles’s ridership rate is relatively high: 11th among the 50 largest urban areas." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/los-angeles...
The myths appear to arise from a multitude of factors, such as confusing downtown density with overall density, and viewing the city through the eyes of Hollywood. Also, once a city acquires a reputation (such as NYC and crime), it takes forever to lose it.
Similarly, the Boston metro area is often considered to extend out to Worcester and southern New Hampshire, which includes towns like Dunstable (3000 people on land area that's about the size of downtown Boston). But there's a very big difference between a metro area like Boston where most of the people live within a dense urban core and then it drops off to farmland and open space quickly, vs. one like LA where it's medium-density suburbs all the way through.
(If you're familiar with Long Island, the metro area in Suffolk would be Suffolk - anything south of the Sunrise Highway up until Westhampton (going up north through Riverhead), and anything east of that boundary)
Los Angeles pop: 3,849,378 dens: 8,205
New York pop: 8,274,527 dens: 27,147
Vancouver pop: 578,041 dens: 13,817.6
London pop: 7,556,900 dens: 12,331
The kicker is that these figures obscure the fact that the core of LA just 3 million. In other words, only 1/4 of the people live in the core, and the core is still more spread out than these other cities.
By contrast, half of the people in the NY Metro live in NYC proper. In London, greater than half of the people live in it London proper.
LA's profile is most similar to Vancouver's, which is a city with fewer people in its greater metro area than LA has in its core.
What's unique about the US west coast is that the cities there were not much older then the automobile, that's why the are so much more car oriented.
I assure you this is not the case in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, anywhere that car culture is the culture.
Once a place grows up with car culture, it very rarely loses it. That's the point of the article.
I was thinking more along the lines of European towns like Zurich.
Really? Pretty much every single major city with 10M or more inhabitants in China (of which there are dozens, if not hundreds) was destroyed in WW2 and rebuilt after. There was no Marshall plan for this, which is why you probably had no idea. The US was not interested in helping communists in China or the USSR rebuild after WW2.
And even if a city wasn't destroyed, it was rebuilt just for the sheer hell of it 2 or 3 times in a row during the post-war period. Chinese cities have pretty much been being rebuilt continuously since 1950. Anyone who's ever gone would know this, which you obviously haven't.
So what exactly is your point, other than you didn't learn anything about China during your US or European history classes in high school?
Having been born behind the iron curtain I do know there was no Marshall plan outside of Western Europe. But I did not know that cities in China were rebuilt 2 or 3 times for the sheer hell of it during the post-war period.
My point is that I agree with you, L.A. (like most American cities) is a city build around cars. I'm no sure about Berlin and Tokyo, but I am quite sure about the plethora of other west and east European cities I've enjoyed living in. Those cities, much like NY, are great to live in even if you don't own a car.
San Jose, LA, and San Francisco are all 100 years older than the automobile. Seattle, Sacramento, and Oakland are 50 years older. (Wikipedia says that the Seattle area has been inhabitied for 4000 years.) I didn't check any other West Coast cities.
It's not a matter of if they can build the metro fast enough. If you have a sprawling suburbia, you can't effectively cover enough area to make public transit competitive. (I think this applies to all public transit, not just subways.)
On the other hand, they reduce the speed of traffic outside of the dedicated lanes...Whether that is a bug or a feature depends on whether you are an economist or social planner.