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Comment by mehrzad | Hacker News Reader

As a native and lover of LA (currently in NYC), I've been enjoying all the press we've been getting recently. But as I skim this article, I'm confused. LA has massive urban sprawl. LA County is very, very vast in area, and many people live 1-2 hours by car (without traffic) away from their work. How is public transportation going to get so good that this car-dependence will go away? I'm all for it, I hate cars. The subway system in New York is great, but not including metro areas, LA is quite a bit larger in area.

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The New York metro is also very, very vast in area, and many people also live 1-2 hours by car away from their work. If you're carfree in NYC, you probably just don't have Riverhead and Stamford and Allentown in mind as part of 'NYC', whereas you might well count the far end of Redlands and the San Fernando Valley and Orange County as part of 'LA'.

As LA's transit system evolves and new companies evolve and are re-sited, it's likely that more jobs will be sited at transit nodes instead of purely at freeway nodes. Beyond that, if the driverless taxi era comes to pass, people won't be stuck buying a car for many thousands and fighting tooth-and-nail for parking just because there's a need for a car trip twice a week.

It won't, ever. And that's okay. LA County won't be served by an awesome network of public transit, but if investments continue into dense areas of LA City you should see market forces at work -> public transit availability driving higher density development, driving more desire for public transit.

You can't de-sprawl Southern California as a whole, but you can make the dense urban core more palatable.

The sprawl in the LA metro area was built on the back of the then largest interurban system in the world, the Pacific Electric. If you take a map and overlay it on the modern freeway system, there are large parallels. There are also parts of LA City that have (and not even recently acquired) density rivaling Manhattan.

The future of maintainable sprawl is workable wide ranging rail and bus options, rail for the distance, bus for the last mile.

There was an interesting study recently showing that population density in LA is still greatest along the long-vanished streetcar lines.

It's also worth noting the streetcar lines were built specifically to serve land development goals, so they drove the development in the first place, not the other way around. In a way, streetcars caused the sprawl of Los Angeles.

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/09/23/long-dead-stree...

>> "You can't de-sprawl Southern California as a whole..."

Wait till the key parameters of our present socioeconomic order are perturbed. A lot of ducks have to line up in a row for suburbs to work at LA scale, and something tells me the party won't continue indefinitely.

Can you be more concrete?

LA is working on greatly expanding rail. Denser development will slowly occur near the new stations to make walking to the station an option for some. However, LA will never have the density of NYC and so walking to a station will never become an option for most in LA.

But Uber/Lyft (especially Uberpool and Lyft Line) are potential solutions to this. I don't think they have the critical mass yet to be a true solution. But if they ever reach that point, it may become viable someday to commute to/from work by using only a mix of Uber/Lyft and rail. It's already possible today, but only for high income jobs. For this to have a big effect on LA transportation, it must become an option for middle class jobs.

It's possible that the critical mass of Uber/Lyft can only be achieved with self driving cars. Some think that self driving cars will mean the end of public transportation. But I think they will instead complement each other well. The roads are already at capacity. Self driving cars will help improve the efficiency, but traffic is like a gas, it simply fills to the new available space. It's why adding a new lane to a freeway usually doesn't help much. The main reason is that a single occupant in a vehicle that can seat 4 or more is fundamentally a very inefficient way to travel. Making the car self driving doesn't change this fact.

There is potential in the future for rail and cars in LA to work together to truly improve transportation. Uber/Lyft and self driving cars could solve the "last mile" issue of getting to/from stations. Rail can provide the high efficiency and density that freeways can never provide. I hope this is the future of LA transportation because I don't think cars alone or rail alone will be enough to truly solve the traffic issue.

"How is public transportation going to get so good that this car-dependence will go away?"

Its too much money to rebuild LA for public transit, and given the next step in transportation is automated vehicles why buck the trend and just go with it. We talk a lot about how automated vehicles will change things for individuals or families, but what about public transportation departments? I get the feeling that swarms of automated vehicles will be cheaper than adding light rail.

The city is aware of that possibility, and it's at least a factor in their planning.

"How do you spend billions of dollars on fixed rail when we might not own cars in this city in a decade or a decade and a half? [...] A bus lane today may be a bus and an autonomous vehicle lane tomorrow." - LA Mayor Eric Garcetti

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-driverless-car-r...

I'm also currently in NYC, as a native of FL, and I've often considered moving to LA (but I work remote, so my commute isn't much of a concern).

Do you think there is something about LA, though, which makes people there more willing to drive those extreme distances for work, instead of just moving closer? I understand LA County to be a relatively loose collection of independent communities, anchored around the city.

I hear a 120 minute commute and I'm thinking almost like a Tampa -> Orlando commute, or a West Palm Beach -> Miami commute - which I know some people do, but its not nearly as "normal" in FL to make that kind of extreme drive, and I'm certain it isn't because Tampa somehow provides more and better opportunities than, say, Burbank on its own, or Long Beach on its own, does.

As a longtime (but not current) resident of Los Angeles, merely growing up in traffic very effectively desensitized me to the misery of long commute times. To the degree that the natives have factored in sunk time in the car, a lot of what you see is adaptation to circumstance.

Also, housing prices in LA preclude lots of folks from moving closer to work despite the commute pain. I'd expect that's the biggest reason. I had a history teacher in high school who commuted from Lancaster to the San Fernando Valley every day.

Interestingly, I find traffic in my present domicile of Boston unbearable, but regular trips back to LA don't inspire the same sort of feelings despite the average commute time and distance being longer while I am in California. I guess you just get used to conditions in a location and don't carry those expectations to different places.

which makes people there more willing to drive those extreme distances for work, instead of just moving closer

It's frequently very difficult. "Closer" may mean "way out of budget," and it's hard to build anything, anywhere in LA: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o... . Large parts of it are single-family houses, which tend to be purchase-only, and that can make moving around prohibitively expensive. My Dad currently lives in Santa Monica, and building anything in Santa Monica is wildly hard. Even near the soon-to-be-completed light rail station I think the maximum height is 65 feet (!). It should be at least 450 feet. Santa Monica has had the same population since 1960: http://www01.smgov.net/business/demographics/2006population.... while the U.S. has more than doubled in size.

Many people probably also underestimate how bad commuting is: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back-... .

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