11 ms·

The time is right to re-examine the L.A. freeway

113 points by samclemens 11y ago

buckbova 11y ago
Mostly nonsense article with no answers. Get rid of carpool lanes and add some dang lanes in the meantime.
- hn9780470248775 11y ago
  http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  The I-5 HOV lanes in Seattle carry almost as many people per unit of time as the rest of the highway combined. If you're feeling daring enough to argue, note very carefully that I said "people", not "vehicles".
  - buckbova 11y ago
    The article is for LA. Anyway, it's a traffic system. You open that lane up to general traffic and it unburdens the other lanes.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      Except now you're adding the traffic that was there to all the other lanes, and you're adding cars at the same time. The key to traffic is to REDUCE the amount of cars on the road, not increase it.
- chadgeidel 11y ago
  It's pretty well known that adding lanes actually increases congestion. Here are two cited articles that came up in a quick search: * http://transportationist.org/2015/03/02/elements-of-access-induced-demand/ http://transportationist.org/2015/03/02/elements-of-access-i... * http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.html http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.ht...
  - buckbova 11y ago
    This doesn't prove anything. Lanes are added a decade or more after there is a need and these cities are generally growing anyway with an existing growing demand that isn't being met by current infrastructure. With this extra congestion it is moving more people than before.
  - tomohawk 11y ago
    In Northern VA they have the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country. They knew there was going to be growth, but no roads were built to handle it and no rights of way were purchased when they were easy to purchase. I know someone who worked in the Federal Highway Admin at the time (late 60's early 70's) and recalls how they tried to do rational planning for the expected growth but were shot down. They were told that building roads would just cause growth. Now they have had the growth and don't have the roads. That's definitely worse than having both. Contrast this with the other side of DC where MD put in the roads and set aside rights of way. They are way better off. Not perfect by any stretch, but better.
    - TheCoelacanth 11y ago
      NoVA's traffic is bad because of suburban sprawl. Car travel simply doesn't scale to that level, no matter how many roads you build. The only part that did anything correctly is Arlington, which focused it's development in areas that are walkable and can be serviced by mass transit, resulting in decreased traffic volumes on most roads in spite of a large increase in population.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Every study ever done has shown that getting rid of carpool lanes is just about the worst thing you could do. All those people that were in the carpool lane are now in with the general traffic, and they're not carpooling. So there are even more cars.
  - buckbova 11y ago
    The studies I've seen suggesting converting these lanes to toll lanes that allow for HOV free passes. The lanes serve a political purpose and do not solve an engineering issue. The facts are mass the conversion of single car drives to avid carpooled never happened.
chishaku 11y ago
Many streets in LA are wider than even the widest highways in certain countries (UK comes to mind). You can't broaden the 405 much more, nor would such a scheme work for the 10. The obvious answer is more mass transit and please, pretty please, protected bike lanes on major throughways. If Amsterdam can squeeze a dedicated bike lane, cars and trams on roads that haven't changed in hundreds of years, surely LA can figure it out.
- jonknee 11y ago
  LA could definitely do better, but Amsterdam and Los Angeles aren't comparable in any way.
  - revelation 11y ago
    People in the US keep bringing this up. Oh, but look, the US is such a big place! It will never work here. Oh, but look, everybody is living in the suburbs and there is no shopping in 20 miles here! You know, in 1960, Amsterdam was the same car-centric hellhole. They didn't always have that transport modal share. They worked on it.
    - Noted 11y ago
      You realize that LA (the city proper, not metro area) is over 5x the size of Amsterdam with over 4x the population. I think that's part of what he meant by they're not really comparable. I definitely agree that, yes, it needs to be worked on. It just might be a longer process and some of the tricks that work in other locales aren't directly applicable.
      - revelation 11y ago
        I don't get it. What does that even mean? It's 5x as big and has 5x the population? Do you realize what you are saying here? Yeah, it's always a longer process. You still gotta start at some point. 30 years behind Amsterdam and the clock is still clicking on for the process to actually start. Tomorrow it will be 30 years and 1 day without action. (I'll just say it to be very clear here: when I say Amsterdam, really it's all of the Netherlands, to slightly varying degree.)
ltrump 11y ago
I asked my teenaged nephew the other day, while he was playing a car racing game, what he thinks would be a reasonable good first car for him. He is two, maybe three years from driving age. He grew up in the suburbs and both his parents have cars. Dad has a classic car for weekend pleasure driving. You get the picture. My nephew hadn't really considered getting a car. I can see the first car thing being a whole lot less of a thing for his generation than it was for his parents'. He would rather spend time tinkering on his computer than under the hood or behind the wheel like his father did.
- bennyg 11y ago
  Give him 2-3 years and he'll tell you. Especially once his friends start driving and owning their own cars.
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    It might depend on where you live. For a teenager who lives in a reasonably dense area, even using Uber/Lyft to get around could easily be less expensive than car ownership. (I mean, geez, even just insurance premiums for teenagers are off the wall these days.) If that summer job is accessible without a car, that means it can be even more part time without sacrificing the ability to get around. I lived in a very rural area so for me car ownership really did represent freedom. But if that weren't the case then I think that calculus would have been pretty attractive to me. Having the freedom to not spend so @$@#% much time doing menial crap like flipping burgers? Heck yeah.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    I'm having a hard time imagining what world you live in where teenagers have ~$3000 + gas money in disposable income from their $7.25/hour jobs and no pressure to save it for college. My suburb was probably in the top 1% of property values in the state and only a few (~10 out of 250) kids "owned" cars, which their finance-industry parents bought them. Most garages were 2-car, and you don't want a car outside of a garage in snow. I was actually offered my grandmother's car for free when she died, but my parents refused it because they didn't want to deal with 3 cars in a 2-car driveway and garage. No one else had any say in what car they would drive; 99% of the time it was Mom's minivan or Prius, with constant tension over when the keys would be brought back home. 95% of my graduating class went to college, and all but a few of them lived in dorms (at least for the first year) where car ownership was neither necessary nor permitted. None of us will be thinking about buying cars until we graduate. And even then, those who will have money to buy cars they want, instead of the cheapest thing that starts, will be the San Francisco software engineers and the Manhattan investment bankers, i.e. the people who don't need them. I know a few people who got cars out of necessity for internships in remote places, and on all accounts it was a ~10-year-old, boring, practical castoff of a middle-aged relative who wanted an upgrade, to be sold when no longer necessary. Personally, I'd love a Jetta but I can't imagine what I'd use it for, and for the same amount of money I can get a fully-loaded rMBP, an iPhone, and less student debt.
randomaxes 11y ago
Why is congestion pricing never brought up in any of these conversations about traffic? Simply charge people 10 or 20 dollars to drive at heavily impacted times of the day. Take every last cent of that toll to subsidize buses and eventually mass transit on the same route. People in a hurry win because their time is valuable and they get to buy it back relatively cheaply. People not in a hurry win because they get subsidized mass transit. Everyone wins because traffic and pollution go down. In a country where we allow people to live in misery just to uphold the "Free Market", why do we allow our streets and freeways to become unusable twice a day just so freeways remain "free"?
- flakmonkey 11y ago
  What happens if you are poor and in a hurry?
  - jdminhbg 11y ago
    The same thing that happens now.
    - arenaninja 11y ago
      This answer gets more awesome the more I think about it. Initially, I was going to reply that it was crass. Then, I thought about it and grinned. But I think that flakmonkey's point is that yes, if you're poor, you'll be stuck in traffic at least just as long. More likely though, you'll be stuck in traffic far more than currently, because people who can afford to pay for it will. Being that freeways use public funds, that probably shouldn't be the case.
    - nawitus 11y ago
      No, it depends. The mass transit option might be e.g. 20% slower compared to the travel time the poor have now.
  - mieses 11y ago
    Time redistribution. People with more time will be required to pull over to the side of the road and wait for some time interval to redistribute their share of excess time to people in a hurry. It's part of the self driving car program and will be administered by the Federal Dept of Transportation. It's only fair.
burritofanatic 11y ago
I went to go have lunch with a friend on a Westside, coming from Burbank (20 miles), and the roundtrip took me close to 3 hours. LA is a strange place in that way. The other day, I overheard someone, who is 'non-minority', tell someone else that they took public transit (bus) to work. The other person was slightly dumbfounded, wondering why anyone would subject themselves to that. I really do want to see a more bikeable Los Angeles (see link below), and I do want to see the freeways as not part of the problem in this city. http://www.williamha.com/bike-commuting-to-work-in-los-angeles/ http://www.williamha.com/bike-commuting-to-work-in-los-angel...
- wcummings 11y ago
  If you press people about why they don't like taking the bus, you get some interesting answers, usually containing some riff on the phrase "those people". It's pretty shitty.
  - nether 11y ago
    Yeah, Angelenos are terrified of the very poor. I've taken the bus a bit in LA (both the Metro and some of the local lines in the south bay). I didn't notice any more colorful characters than I did on transit in NYC, Chicago, or SF.
  - xraystyle 11y ago
    I'm not sure who you're talking to, but generally when I ask people why they don't like taking the bus the response is usually much more likely to have something to do with the fact that getting anywhere by bus in LA takes easily double the time one would spend in the car. The crowds and the lack of cleanliness on the busses are usually mentioned as well. Dirty, crowded, loud, and slow? No thanks. I've taken the bus numerous times in LA out of necessity, usually when my bike unexpectedly broke or I was just too tired to ride home, and it always sucks. I avoid it at all costs. The subways are better, but not by much. They're still insanely crowded during peak hours and not really any faster than driving when you factor in the time and effort it takes to get to and from the stations themselves. However, I'd take the subway downtown more often if it just ran later.
Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
Not directly on topic here, but anyone else feel this was a monstrous jump to make? >Younger drivers see cars less as tickets to freedom and connection and more as obstacles to those things, in part because the one time that they can’t tap out texts or post pictures to Instagram is while they’re behind the wheel.
tzs 11y ago
> Three decades ago, according to Fortune, about 70% of American 17-year-olds had a driver’s license; the figure today is 46%. More U.S. teenagers now have a smartphone than a license. I'd guess that the rise in cell phones, text messaging, and now smartphones was a big contributor to the decline in early licenses and also in the urgency of teens to get their own car. Before such easy communications, you generally were not in contact with your friends except when you were actually physically with them at school or at pre-arranged times outside of school. You could call then on the phone, of course, but that only worked if they were home to take the call, and you had to compete with the rest of your family for the phone in your house. This made spontaneous arranging of rides from friends a rather uncertain endeavor. Unless your parents were very generous in the policies for sharing the family car(s) with you, getting a car of your own meant a tremendous leap in your freedom. Nowadays, a large fraction of teens have cell phones, largely smartphones. They make heavy use of them for messaging services and social networks (and, I've been told, they sometimes even actually use them to talk!). They update their statuses several times a day, and send on average something like 100 messages a day. Because of this, today's teens (and younger) are much better informed as to where their friends are and what they are doing when those friends are not physically present. They know which of their friends with cars are not busy, and it is trivial to propose a joint trip to the place they wish to go. Accordingly, having your own car is not as important as it once was. Your social group is now more efficient at sharing cars than social groups were back before widespread mobile communications.
titzer 11y ago
I lived in LA for quite some time. The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art, unless in an ironic, soul-destroying sense of immense fuck-upery. LA would have all the space it needs if freeways were one way. Yeah, I'm serious. Separate the two directions of traffic by a city block or two and suddenly four lanes will fit in more places, the interchanges become less complex, and there's no spillover delays from rubbernecking the other side of the freeway. Also, they only recently realized that freeways need to obey the pressure principle: lots of exits, few entrances with meters and long acceleration lanes. That discourages short-distance trips and gives many outlets for relieving congestion in the case of accidents. Long acceleration lanes reduce merge pressure and help reduce the jamming caused by fast traffic hitting slower traffic.
- lovemenot 11y ago
  >> The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art While I agree with you now and have always done so, the point made in the article was that cultural norms have changed so greatly these decades. Our antagonistic view was once exceptional, but it has become mainstream. As a parallel, I still see immense beauty in the internet's form and function, but many of those of a younger generation who grew up with it might already be seeing the internet as a ubiquitous, soul-destroying, immense fuck-up.
- joshuaheard 11y ago
  I think he was referring to the cloverleaf interchange being a work of art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverleaf_interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverleaf_interchange
melling 11y ago
If only there was some way to move a large number of people a mile a minute... Of course, it wouldn't be built in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR
sandworm101 11y ago
The OP talks of fewer kids having licenses. That has little to do with smartphones and technology. Beyond the increased costs, operating a car today is more emotionally expensive than ever. Driving is now a rationally terrifying experience for kids. 1) Traffic fines are no longer trivial. Beyond the money, if a teen is part of any graduated licensing program ANY ticket may delay them getting their full license many months. 2) Parking is dangerous. Wrong place or wrong time doesn't mean a simple ticket. Your car may be disappeared to some distant impound lot. The ransom demanded will likely be more than the vehicle's worth (at least given the junkers I had as a teenager). 3) Police encounters. The most likely place for a teen to interact negatively with an officer is during a "routine" traffic stop. Turn on the news. A minor incident can quickly spiral into days or weeks in jail. 4) Teenagers now fear failure above all else. A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary. (See many threads here). So they avoid the DMV. 5) Cars increase mobility, but have you seen the streets in most cities? Gridlock makes people feel trapped. For a child in today's world of apparently constant violence, being stuck on a city street is scary. Whereas you or I might see a simple frustration, kids today see physical danger. Teenagers have plenty of reasons to avoid driving. It isn't because they once needed to physically move in order to communicate. It's because they have good reason to fear the road.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  6) So many people are distracted by their phones - crossing the street or in their cars - that a meaningless text could ruin your life - or end it.
- superuser2 11y ago
  >A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary The driving test is stupidly easy. Whereas very smart kids have well-founded anxiety about SAT and AP testing (genuinely difficult, can make or break your life ambitions), only the most incompetent of the fuckups ever came within a thousand miles of failing a driving test. These were the kind of poeple where everyone else wondered how they managed to stay alive, how they would ever be adults. For those above the 5th percentile of general ability level, passing the driving test on the first try was pretty much guaranteed. I think this is wrong. I'd much prefer a world where some normal people can't get drivers licenses and moat people on the road are professionals or robots, but if the state says, "No, you're not a good enough driver" then you can't really carry on a suburban life. So it has to say yes to all but the most egregiously incompetent, or lose its tax base.
rwhitman 11y ago
I would love to see a future where on-demand car services and / or self-driving cars shrink the traffic volume of Los Angeles back down to the scale it was originally designed for. As you could imagine, native Angelenos are culturally disposed towards car-as-identity thinking. But the value shift away from that is definitely visible amongst younger people, and trends and values in LA have a tendency to spread at an accelerated pace. So it's possible after a certain tipping point, this could become reality much sooner than we think. But I'm doubtful we'll be turning the 10 into a park anytime soon. Much more likely that it will just shave off some of the stress of trying to get to a meeting in Santa Monica from Downtown on time
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Jevons Paradox: if the convenience and cost of taking the automobile goes down, the usage will go up. It just might suck less because you can go anywhere, from anywhere, and drunk.
  - maxxxxx 11y ago
    That's what scares me about self driving cars. right now a three hour commute each way is not really feasible but if you could sleep in your car it would be very possible. We may end up with even more sprawl and more cars on the roads.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      Or worse: Mini RVs that let people live permanently on the road, taking up even more space. I'm reminded of the guy in Snow Crash who hooked himself up into a repurposed fire truck that smashed through the LA freeways like a tank.
deleted 11y ago
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jensen123 11y ago
I think it's great that people are questioning car use in big cities like Los Angeles. I've visited a fair number of cities in my life, and those without many cars are much more pleasant to hang out in. Much healthier, too. Subways, bicycle paths and walking streets work very well in large cities. However, I hope people won't make the mistake of trying to get rid of cars in rural areas and small towns. Public transportation does not work well here. Many left-wing politicians don't want cars anywhere, whereas many right-wing politicians want cars everywhere. Some people seem to have difficulties seeing that different solutions work well in different situations.
- rayiner 11y ago
  I don't think any left wing politicians give a shit about public transit in rural areas. The battleground is the dense suburbs.
  - jensen123 11y ago
    Maybe that's the case these days in the US. However, where I live (Norway, Europe), left-wing politicians want high taxes on new cars, gasoline etc. in order to discourage car use everywhere. Hopefully, the US won't end up like this.
mjevans 11y ago
Why I drive to work and don't take the bus: * The bus still takes longer (2-3 times as long) This might change, but only if normal traffic gets worse. * Loss of freedom I have the option of visiting friends/family in other locations if I drive. Loss of freedom is also related to the very poor intra-networking; the entire transit system in the area is designed as a star pattern for getting workers to the city. * Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a shift worker: your hours and those of other workers aren't the same, you might not even have multiple workers from the same area at a small company. * Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a full time worker: (I don't have this problem, but friends do) if your hours aren't consistent or you might be called in at a moment's notice. I think the answer to all of this is flexible pooled transit. Probably an extension of what we know of today as taxi/ubur; but much more Johnny Cab (80's Total Recall).
mmorett 11y ago
The L.A. freeway system is not about L.A. It's about Southern California. Comments that suggest public transportation don't take into account the unique layout of SoCal. Here are just a few of the things to take into account, coming from a guy that grew up in NYC and now lives in SoCal. --SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks. --SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.) --There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on. --The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way. I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car. It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed. ---------- Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away. +higher quality of life +less wear and tear on the cars +less pollution +less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch +less maintenance on the roads +less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them +less congestion for those that need to be on the road

113 points by samclemens 11y ago

buckbova 11y ago

Mostly nonsense article with no answers. Get rid of carpool lanes and add some dang lanes in the meantime.

hn9780470248775 11y ago
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
koenigdavidmj 11y ago
The I-5 HOV lanes in Seattle carry almost as many people per unit of time as the rest of the highway combined. If you're feeling daring enough to argue, note very carefully that I said "people", not "vehicles".
- buckbova 11y ago
  The article is for LA. Anyway, it's a traffic system. You open that lane up to general traffic and it unburdens the other lanes.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Except now you're adding the traffic that was there to all the other lanes, and you're adding cars at the same time. The key to traffic is to REDUCE the amount of cars on the road, not increase it.
chadgeidel 11y ago
It's pretty well known that adding lanes actually increases congestion. Here are two cited articles that came up in a quick search: * http://transportationist.org/2015/03/02/elements-of-access-induced-demand/ http://transportationist.org/2015/03/02/elements-of-access-i... * http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.html http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.ht...
- buckbova 11y ago
  This doesn't prove anything. Lanes are added a decade or more after there is a need and these cities are generally growing anyway with an existing growing demand that isn't being met by current infrastructure. With this extra congestion it is moving more people than before.
- tomohawk 11y ago
  In Northern VA they have the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country. They knew there was going to be growth, but no roads were built to handle it and no rights of way were purchased when they were easy to purchase. I know someone who worked in the Federal Highway Admin at the time (late 60's early 70's) and recalls how they tried to do rational planning for the expected growth but were shot down. They were told that building roads would just cause growth. Now they have had the growth and don't have the roads. That's definitely worse than having both. Contrast this with the other side of DC where MD put in the roads and set aside rights of way. They are way better off. Not perfect by any stretch, but better.
  - TheCoelacanth 11y ago
    NoVA's traffic is bad because of suburban sprawl. Car travel simply doesn't scale to that level, no matter how many roads you build. The only part that did anything correctly is Arlington, which focused it's development in areas that are walkable and can be serviced by mass transit, resulting in decreased traffic volumes on most roads in spite of a large increase in population.
s73v3r 11y ago
Every study ever done has shown that getting rid of carpool lanes is just about the worst thing you could do. All those people that were in the carpool lane are now in with the general traffic, and they're not carpooling. So there are even more cars.
- buckbova 11y ago
  The studies I've seen suggesting converting these lanes to toll lanes that allow for HOV free passes. The lanes serve a political purpose and do not solve an engineering issue. The facts are mass the conversion of single car drives to avid carpooled never happened.

chishaku 11y ago

Many streets in LA are wider than even the widest highways in certain countries (UK comes to mind). You can't broaden the 405 much more, nor would such a scheme work for the 10. The obvious answer is more mass transit and please, pretty please, protected bike lanes on major throughways. If Amsterdam can squeeze a dedicated bike lane, cars and trams on roads that haven't changed in hundreds of years, surely LA can figure it out.

jonknee 11y ago
LA could definitely do better, but Amsterdam and Los Angeles aren't comparable in any way.
- revelation 11y ago
  People in the US keep bringing this up. Oh, but look, the US is such a big place! It will never work here. Oh, but look, everybody is living in the suburbs and there is no shopping in 20 miles here! You know, in 1960, Amsterdam was the same car-centric hellhole. They didn't always have that transport modal share. They worked on it.
  - Noted 11y ago
    You realize that LA (the city proper, not metro area) is over 5x the size of Amsterdam with over 4x the population. I think that's part of what he meant by they're not really comparable. I definitely agree that, yes, it needs to be worked on. It just might be a longer process and some of the tricks that work in other locales aren't directly applicable.
    - revelation 11y ago
      I don't get it. What does that even mean? It's 5x as big and has 5x the population? Do you realize what you are saying here? Yeah, it's always a longer process. You still gotta start at some point. 30 years behind Amsterdam and the clock is still clicking on for the process to actually start. Tomorrow it will be 30 years and 1 day without action. (I'll just say it to be very clear here: when I say Amsterdam, really it's all of the Netherlands, to slightly varying degree.)

ltrump 11y ago

I asked my teenaged nephew the other day, while he was playing a car racing game, what he thinks would be a reasonable good first car for him. He is two, maybe three years from driving age. He grew up in the suburbs and both his parents have cars. Dad has a classic car for weekend pleasure driving. You get the picture. My nephew hadn't really considered getting a car. I can see the first car thing being a whole lot less of a thing for his generation than it was for his parents'. He would rather spend time tinkering on his computer than under the hood or behind the wheel like his father did.

bennyg 11y ago
Give him 2-3 years and he'll tell you. Especially once his friends start driving and owning their own cars.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  It might depend on where you live. For a teenager who lives in a reasonably dense area, even using Uber/Lyft to get around could easily be less expensive than car ownership. (I mean, geez, even just insurance premiums for teenagers are off the wall these days.) If that summer job is accessible without a car, that means it can be even more part time without sacrificing the ability to get around. I lived in a very rural area so for me car ownership really did represent freedom. But if that weren't the case then I think that calculus would have been pretty attractive to me. Having the freedom to not spend so @$@#% much time doing menial crap like flipping burgers? Heck yeah.
- superuser2 11y ago
  I'm having a hard time imagining what world you live in where teenagers have ~$3000 + gas money in disposable income from their $7.25/hour jobs and no pressure to save it for college. My suburb was probably in the top 1% of property values in the state and only a few (~10 out of 250) kids "owned" cars, which their finance-industry parents bought them. Most garages were 2-car, and you don't want a car outside of a garage in snow. I was actually offered my grandmother's car for free when she died, but my parents refused it because they didn't want to deal with 3 cars in a 2-car driveway and garage. No one else had any say in what car they would drive; 99% of the time it was Mom's minivan or Prius, with constant tension over when the keys would be brought back home. 95% of my graduating class went to college, and all but a few of them lived in dorms (at least for the first year) where car ownership was neither necessary nor permitted. None of us will be thinking about buying cars until we graduate. And even then, those who will have money to buy cars they want, instead of the cheapest thing that starts, will be the San Francisco software engineers and the Manhattan investment bankers, i.e. the people who don't need them. I know a few people who got cars out of necessity for internships in remote places, and on all accounts it was a ~10-year-old, boring, practical castoff of a middle-aged relative who wanted an upgrade, to be sold when no longer necessary. Personally, I'd love a Jetta but I can't imagine what I'd use it for, and for the same amount of money I can get a fully-loaded rMBP, an iPhone, and less student debt.

randomaxes 11y ago

Why is congestion pricing never brought up in any of these conversations about traffic? Simply charge people 10 or 20 dollars to drive at heavily impacted times of the day. Take every last cent of that toll to subsidize buses and eventually mass transit on the same route. People in a hurry win because their time is valuable and they get to buy it back relatively cheaply. People not in a hurry win because they get subsidized mass transit. Everyone wins because traffic and pollution go down. In a country where we allow people to live in misery just to uphold the "Free Market", why do we allow our streets and freeways to become unusable twice a day just so freeways remain "free"?

flakmonkey 11y ago
What happens if you are poor and in a hurry?
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  The same thing that happens now.
  - arenaninja 11y ago
    This answer gets more awesome the more I think about it. Initially, I was going to reply that it was crass. Then, I thought about it and grinned. But I think that flakmonkey's point is that yes, if you're poor, you'll be stuck in traffic at least just as long. More likely though, you'll be stuck in traffic far more than currently, because people who can afford to pay for it will. Being that freeways use public funds, that probably shouldn't be the case.
  - nawitus 11y ago
    No, it depends. The mass transit option might be e.g. 20% slower compared to the travel time the poor have now.
- mieses 11y ago
  Time redistribution. People with more time will be required to pull over to the side of the road and wait for some time interval to redistribute their share of excess time to people in a hurry. It's part of the self driving car program and will be administered by the Federal Dept of Transportation. It's only fair.

burritofanatic 11y ago

I went to go have lunch with a friend on a Westside, coming from Burbank (20 miles), and the roundtrip took me close to 3 hours. LA is a strange place in that way. The other day, I overheard someone, who is 'non-minority', tell someone else that they took public transit (bus) to work. The other person was slightly dumbfounded, wondering why anyone would subject themselves to that. I really do want to see a more bikeable Los Angeles (see link below), and I do want to see the freeways as not part of the problem in this city. http://www.williamha.com/bike-commuting-to-work-in-los-angeles/ http://www.williamha.com/bike-commuting-to-work-in-los-angel...

wcummings 11y ago
If you press people about why they don't like taking the bus, you get some interesting answers, usually containing some riff on the phrase "those people". It's pretty shitty.
- nether 11y ago
  Yeah, Angelenos are terrified of the very poor. I've taken the bus a bit in LA (both the Metro and some of the local lines in the south bay). I didn't notice any more colorful characters than I did on transit in NYC, Chicago, or SF.
- xraystyle 11y ago
  I'm not sure who you're talking to, but generally when I ask people why they don't like taking the bus the response is usually much more likely to have something to do with the fact that getting anywhere by bus in LA takes easily double the time one would spend in the car. The crowds and the lack of cleanliness on the busses are usually mentioned as well. Dirty, crowded, loud, and slow? No thanks. I've taken the bus numerous times in LA out of necessity, usually when my bike unexpectedly broke or I was just too tired to ride home, and it always sucks. I avoid it at all costs. The subways are better, but not by much. They're still insanely crowded during peak hours and not really any faster than driving when you factor in the time and effort it takes to get to and from the stations themselves. However, I'd take the subway downtown more often if it just ran later.

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago

Not directly on topic here, but anyone else feel this was a monstrous jump to make? >Younger drivers see cars less as tickets to freedom and connection and more as obstacles to those things, in part because the one time that they can’t tap out texts or post pictures to Instagram is while they’re behind the wheel.

tzs 11y ago

> Three decades ago, according to Fortune, about 70% of American 17-year-olds had a driver’s license; the figure today is 46%. More U.S. teenagers now have a smartphone than a license. I'd guess that the rise in cell phones, text messaging, and now smartphones was a big contributor to the decline in early licenses and also in the urgency of teens to get their own car. Before such easy communications, you generally were not in contact with your friends except when you were actually physically with them at school or at pre-arranged times outside of school. You could call then on the phone, of course, but that only worked if they were home to take the call, and you had to compete with the rest of your family for the phone in your house. This made spontaneous arranging of rides from friends a rather uncertain endeavor. Unless your parents were very generous in the policies for sharing the family car(s) with you, getting a car of your own meant a tremendous leap in your freedom. Nowadays, a large fraction of teens have cell phones, largely smartphones. They make heavy use of them for messaging services and social networks (and, I've been told, they sometimes even actually use them to talk!). They update their statuses several times a day, and send on average something like 100 messages a day. Because of this, today's teens (and younger) are much better informed as to where their friends are and what they are doing when those friends are not physically present. They know which of their friends with cars are not busy, and it is trivial to propose a joint trip to the place they wish to go. Accordingly, having your own car is not as important as it once was. Your social group is now more efficient at sharing cars than social groups were back before widespread mobile communications.

titzer 11y ago

I lived in LA for quite some time. The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art, unless in an ironic, soul-destroying sense of immense fuck-upery. LA would have all the space it needs if freeways were one way. Yeah, I'm serious. Separate the two directions of traffic by a city block or two and suddenly four lanes will fit in more places, the interchanges become less complex, and there's no spillover delays from rubbernecking the other side of the freeway. Also, they only recently realized that freeways need to obey the pressure principle: lots of exits, few entrances with meters and long acceleration lanes. That discourages short-distance trips and gives many outlets for relieving congestion in the case of accidents. Long acceleration lanes reduce merge pressure and help reduce the jamming caused by fast traffic hitting slower traffic.

lovemenot 11y ago
>> The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art While I agree with you now and have always done so, the point made in the article was that cultural norms have changed so greatly these decades. Our antagonistic view was once exceptional, but it has become mainstream. As a parallel, I still see immense beauty in the internet's form and function, but many of those of a younger generation who grew up with it might already be seeing the internet as a ubiquitous, soul-destroying, immense fuck-up.
joshuaheard 11y ago
I think he was referring to the cloverleaf interchange being a work of art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverleaf_interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverleaf_interchange

melling 11y ago

If only there was some way to move a large number of people a mile a minute... Of course, it wouldn't be built in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR

sandworm101 11y ago

The OP talks of fewer kids having licenses. That has little to do with smartphones and technology. Beyond the increased costs, operating a car today is more emotionally expensive than ever. Driving is now a rationally terrifying experience for kids. 1) Traffic fines are no longer trivial. Beyond the money, if a teen is part of any graduated licensing program ANY ticket may delay them getting their full license many months. 2) Parking is dangerous. Wrong place or wrong time doesn't mean a simple ticket. Your car may be disappeared to some distant impound lot. The ransom demanded will likely be more than the vehicle's worth (at least given the junkers I had as a teenager). 3) Police encounters. The most likely place for a teen to interact negatively with an officer is during a "routine" traffic stop. Turn on the news. A minor incident can quickly spiral into days or weeks in jail. 4) Teenagers now fear failure above all else. A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary. (See many threads here). So they avoid the DMV. 5) Cars increase mobility, but have you seen the streets in most cities? Gridlock makes people feel trapped. For a child in today's world of apparently constant violence, being stuck on a city street is scary. Whereas you or I might see a simple frustration, kids today see physical danger. Teenagers have plenty of reasons to avoid driving. It isn't because they once needed to physically move in order to communicate. It's because they have good reason to fear the road.

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rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
6) So many people are distracted by their phones - crossing the street or in their cars - that a meaningless text could ruin your life - or end it.
superuser2 11y ago
>A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary The driving test is stupidly easy. Whereas very smart kids have well-founded anxiety about SAT and AP testing (genuinely difficult, can make or break your life ambitions), only the most incompetent of the fuckups ever came within a thousand miles of failing a driving test. These were the kind of poeple where everyone else wondered how they managed to stay alive, how they would ever be adults. For those above the 5th percentile of general ability level, passing the driving test on the first try was pretty much guaranteed. I think this is wrong. I'd much prefer a world where some normal people can't get drivers licenses and moat people on the road are professionals or robots, but if the state says, "No, you're not a good enough driver" then you can't really carry on a suburban life. So it has to say yes to all but the most egregiously incompetent, or lose its tax base.

rwhitman 11y ago

I would love to see a future where on-demand car services and / or self-driving cars shrink the traffic volume of Los Angeles back down to the scale it was originally designed for. As you could imagine, native Angelenos are culturally disposed towards car-as-identity thinking. But the value shift away from that is definitely visible amongst younger people, and trends and values in LA have a tendency to spread at an accelerated pace. So it's possible after a certain tipping point, this could become reality much sooner than we think. But I'm doubtful we'll be turning the 10 into a park anytime soon. Much more likely that it will just shave off some of the stress of trying to get to a meeting in Santa Monica from Downtown on time

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Jevons Paradox: if the convenience and cost of taking the automobile goes down, the usage will go up. It just might suck less because you can go anywhere, from anywhere, and drunk.
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  That's what scares me about self driving cars. right now a three hour commute each way is not really feasible but if you could sleep in your car it would be very possible. We may end up with even more sprawl and more cars on the roads.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Or worse: Mini RVs that let people live permanently on the road, taking up even more space. I'm reminded of the guy in Snow Crash who hooked himself up into a repurposed fire truck that smashed through the LA freeways like a tank.

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jensen123 11y ago

I think it's great that people are questioning car use in big cities like Los Angeles. I've visited a fair number of cities in my life, and those without many cars are much more pleasant to hang out in. Much healthier, too. Subways, bicycle paths and walking streets work very well in large cities. However, I hope people won't make the mistake of trying to get rid of cars in rural areas and small towns. Public transportation does not work well here. Many left-wing politicians don't want cars anywhere, whereas many right-wing politicians want cars everywhere. Some people seem to have difficulties seeing that different solutions work well in different situations.

rayiner 11y ago
I don't think any left wing politicians give a shit about public transit in rural areas. The battleground is the dense suburbs.
- jensen123 11y ago
  Maybe that's the case these days in the US. However, where I live (Norway, Europe), left-wing politicians want high taxes on new cars, gasoline etc. in order to discourage car use everywhere. Hopefully, the US won't end up like this.

mjevans 11y ago

Why I drive to work and don't take the bus: * The bus still takes longer (2-3 times as long) This might change, but only if normal traffic gets worse. * Loss of freedom I have the option of visiting friends/family in other locations if I drive. Loss of freedom is also related to the very poor intra-networking; the entire transit system in the area is designed as a star pattern for getting workers to the city. * Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a shift worker: your hours and those of other workers aren't the same, you might not even have multiple workers from the same area at a small company. * Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a full time worker: (I don't have this problem, but friends do) if your hours aren't consistent or you might be called in at a moment's notice. I think the answer to all of this is flexible pooled transit. Probably an extension of what we know of today as taxi/ubur; but much more Johnny Cab (80's Total Recall).

mmorett 11y ago

The L.A. freeway system is not about L.A. It's about Southern California. Comments that suggest public transportation don't take into account the unique layout of SoCal. Here are just a few of the things to take into account, coming from a guy that grew up in NYC and now lives in SoCal. --SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks. --SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.) --There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on. --The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way. I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car. It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed. ---------- Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away. +higher quality of life +less wear and tear on the cars +less pollution +less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch +less maintenance on the roads +less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them +less congestion for those that need to be on the road