9 ms·

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 schem

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.)
      - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        LA is a lot of communities crammed into one huge community. You can do almost anything there but the distinct sections are really far apart. Especially when it comes to jobs. Mom know the subject is LA's transportation system, but I can't help but see it as a problem of densification.
      - pinaceae 11y ago
        he is saying that it has 4x population on 5x the area. the latter being the kicker, most euros do not comprehend the distances that hit you in the US. plus, cali is a desert. try cycling in 40C heat, for 10miles (15km). people use cars because of the AC. distances also hit as your work rarely is located where you live - US has planned cities with strict zones. you live here but you work there. US commute is very, very different than anything in Europe.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Amsterdam has ~1.5m people in the metro area while LA has ~18m (more than The Netherlands in total!). They're just not comparable in terms of infrastructure. LA is also growing very rapidly (it's added 2 Amsterdam's worth of people since just 1990!) which makes it difficult to properly plan infrastructure.
    - revelation 11y ago
      You're right they are not comparable in infrastructure, there are no dedicated bike lanes forming a connected network, but there are surely lots of dead pedestrians and car carnage.
    - yxhuvud 11y ago
      They are not directly comparable, but not for the reason you state. Thing is, mass transit scale a heck of a lot better than highways do when population rises.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    Yeah, I don't get this either. It's a weird kind of American exceptionalism, except in reverse: we can't have good broadband on a national level like in Finland, because America! a strong social welfare system won't work here like it does in Scandinavia, because America! People won't adapt to biking, because America! Yeah, we're bigger and more diverse, but so what? It's like people give up on solving problems, and use that as an excuse, without even trying. When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!"
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!" I've quite often heard the "because America!" lines you refer to -- in response to the specific issues you mention -- used by Fox News and similar right-wing outlets. So, I'm not sure the two things you contrast here as sources of the issue are actually mutually exclusive alternatives, rather than closely related facets of the same thing.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      > When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!" Ironically, it was the wide-eyed liberal optimists of their day that inflicted suburbia on us. Disrupting how we built cities to that point was supposed to make everything better.
      - pjlegato 11y ago
        This is true. The zoning laws that led to suburbia were introduced in the 1910s and 1920s by well-meaning "progressives" who decried the ability of the rich to cloister themselves in country estates while the poor were forced to live among commerce in the city. They won, and the result was the legislation of vast suburban "residential" zones where commercial business was prohibited, with minimum lot sizes and setbacks and minimum space between houses.
mindslight 11y ago
The fundamental problem is LA's culture of eschewing planning because it requires thinking and an opinionated design might cause someone to feel bad. LA traffic rehabilation: 1. Eliminate left turns at lighted intersections and any other place a queue builds up. It's a grid - trip routing should use right turns. Lights should only ever have two phases. 2. Transition most through streets to one-way for cars, scavenging some of that width for generous bike paths protected by parked cars. 3. Eliminate lights at entrances to neighborhoods and shopping plazas. 4. Build more than one light rail line at a time. Keep them elevated rather than needlessly dipping into level crossings. 5. If neighborhood streets remain two-way, paint lines down the middle as people seem to have no clue where the edges of their cars are. 6. Stop putting Brawndo on the plants.
- tommoor 11y ago
  Agreed apart from lines on the road. Many studies have shown that less signage and lines makes people drive more carefully/slowly - a boon in housing neighborhoods.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    I've thought about this. Even lights do this, as every green light is actually saying "please blow through this blind intersection at 45mph". It seems like more of a concern for my terms (1) and (3) on larger roads, possibly encouraging traffic get up to 60mph. For neighborhoods, the streets wouldn't be getting any wider which is a larger speed factor. Driving on your side of the line, you'd feel pretty close to driveways etc. And if you're stradding the line because nobody else is coming the other way, I don't see how that would encourage you to go any faster than you do currently.
- kctess5 11y ago
  Solid points - especially the left turn thing and neighborhood lights. Half my commute is caused by waiting on a major road for one car to pull out of a tiny street. This is a slightly more nuclear option, but a fleet of self-driving cars operated by a third party (like Uber or Lyft etc) could hit the problem at its main cause - too many cars on the road. Most cars spend the majority of their time motionless, if the ownership model changed, the the cars in use could operate nearly all the time, driving directly from one pickup to the next. This could significantly reduce the number of cars required, removing all need for street parking and freeing up the majority of off-street parking. Less cars on the streets = wider city streets for free, and self-driving cars could more efficiently use that extra space. There would be other side effects too - coordinating carpools would be relatively trivial, and people wouldn't have to worry letting strangers into their personal vehicles. The freeways could operate at higher speeds with significantly less follow space and lower friction at interchanges. Routing optimizations (like what you describe in #1) could be implemented at large scale, and the whole grid could effectively be load-balanced. Some people will still probably want control over their vehicle; individuals could still own private cars alongside the shared model. Those cars would just be like private autonomous limos. This option could let people who could afford it use their car as a private office during the commute, without having to take all of their things out after every use. Families could more effectively share a single vehicle, because it could drive back home after the daily commute. I'd imagine that most consumers would opt for low cost and no ownership risk over that convenience.
mattmanser 11y ago
I don't know if you've been to Holland, but it's flat. It's flat everywhere. Their steepest hill is a joke, it was less steep than the hill I lived on as a kid in the UK, which in UK terms was a pretty standard hill. That's why everyone cycles. And that's why Amsterdam squeezed it in because they knew they were going to be used. I cannot stress how much of a difference it makes everywhere being flat.
- monknomo 11y ago
  LA is pretty flipping flat. IDK if it is Holland flat, but except for the edges of the bowl it's contained in, it's a pancake.
- _delirium 11y ago
  When I lived in LA, I didn't find topography to be a major issue, though it does depend on where in LA you live. There are mountains around, but huge swathes of flat, heavily populated area. For example the whole 30-mile ride from Hollywood south to Long Beach has minimal elevation change. The main obstacle to biking in that area is that it's not safe due to the street design. The image that sticks in my mind when I think of LA is a flat, wide, road that goes completely straight for many miles. Something like https://goo.gl/maps/DRjBP https://goo.gl/maps/DRjBP or https://goo.gl/maps/30hg3 https://goo.gl/maps/30hg3.
- nathancahill 11y ago
  In LA, it's not the flatness, it's the distance that makes having a car necessary. Everywhere is _miles_ away from everywhere else. I haven't been to Amsterdam so I can't comment on that, but the first two sections of this excellent article[0] touch on that. [0] https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/city-by-city/los-angeles-plays-itself/ https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/city-by-city/los-angeles...
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    To be honest, miles on a bike is not much difference from miles in a car. Average speed is like 10 mph, without any of the traffic jams.

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.)
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      LA is a lot of communities crammed into one huge community. You can do almost anything there but the distinct sections are really far apart. Especially when it comes to jobs. Mom know the subject is LA's transportation system, but I can't help but see it as a problem of densification.
    - pinaceae 11y ago
      he is saying that it has 4x population on 5x the area. the latter being the kicker, most euros do not comprehend the distances that hit you in the US. plus, cali is a desert. try cycling in 40C heat, for 10miles (15km). people use cars because of the AC. distances also hit as your work rarely is located where you live - US has planned cities with strict zones. you live here but you work there. US commute is very, very different than anything in Europe.
- jonknee 11y ago
  Amsterdam has ~1.5m people in the metro area while LA has ~18m (more than The Netherlands in total!). They're just not comparable in terms of infrastructure. LA is also growing very rapidly (it's added 2 Amsterdam's worth of people since just 1990!) which makes it difficult to properly plan infrastructure.
  - revelation 11y ago
    You're right they are not comparable in infrastructure, there are no dedicated bike lanes forming a connected network, but there are surely lots of dead pedestrians and car carnage.
  - yxhuvud 11y ago
    They are not directly comparable, but not for the reason you state. Thing is, mass transit scale a heck of a lot better than highways do when population rises.
- Frondo 11y ago
  Yeah, I don't get this either. It's a weird kind of American exceptionalism, except in reverse: we can't have good broadband on a national level like in Finland, because America! a strong social welfare system won't work here like it does in Scandinavia, because America! People won't adapt to biking, because America! Yeah, we're bigger and more diverse, but so what? It's like people give up on solving problems, and use that as an excuse, without even trying. When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!"
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!" I've quite often heard the "because America!" lines you refer to -- in response to the specific issues you mention -- used by Fox News and similar right-wing outlets. So, I'm not sure the two things you contrast here as sources of the issue are actually mutually exclusive alternatives, rather than closely related facets of the same thing.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    > When I think of the conservatism that's really hurting us, it's not Fox News or any of those right-wing nitwits, it's otherwise-smart people putting out this attitude of "we can't do anything, because America!" Ironically, it was the wide-eyed liberal optimists of their day that inflicted suburbia on us. Disrupting how we built cities to that point was supposed to make everything better.
    - pjlegato 11y ago
      This is true. The zoning laws that led to suburbia were introduced in the 1910s and 1920s by well-meaning "progressives" who decried the ability of the rich to cloister themselves in country estates while the poor were forced to live among commerce in the city. They won, and the result was the legislation of vast suburban "residential" zones where commercial business was prohibited, with minimum lot sizes and setbacks and minimum space between houses.

mindslight 11y ago

The fundamental problem is LA's culture of eschewing planning because it requires thinking and an opinionated design might cause someone to feel bad. LA traffic rehabilation: 1. Eliminate left turns at lighted intersections and any other place a queue builds up. It's a grid - trip routing should use right turns. Lights should only ever have two phases. 2. Transition most through streets to one-way for cars, scavenging some of that width for generous bike paths protected by parked cars. 3. Eliminate lights at entrances to neighborhoods and shopping plazas. 4. Build more than one light rail line at a time. Keep them elevated rather than needlessly dipping into level crossings. 5. If neighborhood streets remain two-way, paint lines down the middle as people seem to have no clue where the edges of their cars are. 6. Stop putting Brawndo on the plants.

tommoor 11y ago
Agreed apart from lines on the road. Many studies have shown that less signage and lines makes people drive more carefully/slowly - a boon in housing neighborhoods.
- mindslight 11y ago
  I've thought about this. Even lights do this, as every green light is actually saying "please blow through this blind intersection at 45mph". It seems like more of a concern for my terms (1) and (3) on larger roads, possibly encouraging traffic get up to 60mph. For neighborhoods, the streets wouldn't be getting any wider which is a larger speed factor. Driving on your side of the line, you'd feel pretty close to driveways etc. And if you're stradding the line because nobody else is coming the other way, I don't see how that would encourage you to go any faster than you do currently.
kctess5 11y ago
Solid points - especially the left turn thing and neighborhood lights. Half my commute is caused by waiting on a major road for one car to pull out of a tiny street. This is a slightly more nuclear option, but a fleet of self-driving cars operated by a third party (like Uber or Lyft etc) could hit the problem at its main cause - too many cars on the road. Most cars spend the majority of their time motionless, if the ownership model changed, the the cars in use could operate nearly all the time, driving directly from one pickup to the next. This could significantly reduce the number of cars required, removing all need for street parking and freeing up the majority of off-street parking. Less cars on the streets = wider city streets for free, and self-driving cars could more efficiently use that extra space. There would be other side effects too - coordinating carpools would be relatively trivial, and people wouldn't have to worry letting strangers into their personal vehicles. The freeways could operate at higher speeds with significantly less follow space and lower friction at interchanges. Routing optimizations (like what you describe in #1) could be implemented at large scale, and the whole grid could effectively be load-balanced. Some people will still probably want control over their vehicle; individuals could still own private cars alongside the shared model. Those cars would just be like private autonomous limos. This option could let people who could afford it use their car as a private office during the commute, without having to take all of their things out after every use. Families could more effectively share a single vehicle, because it could drive back home after the daily commute. I'd imagine that most consumers would opt for low cost and no ownership risk over that convenience.

mattmanser 11y ago

I don't know if you've been to Holland, but it's flat. It's flat everywhere. Their steepest hill is a joke, it was less steep than the hill I lived on as a kid in the UK, which in UK terms was a pretty standard hill. That's why everyone cycles. And that's why Amsterdam squeezed it in because they knew they were going to be used. I cannot stress how much of a difference it makes everywhere being flat.

monknomo 11y ago
LA is pretty flipping flat. IDK if it is Holland flat, but except for the edges of the bowl it's contained in, it's a pancake.
_delirium 11y ago
When I lived in LA, I didn't find topography to be a major issue, though it does depend on where in LA you live. There are mountains around, but huge swathes of flat, heavily populated area. For example the whole 30-mile ride from Hollywood south to Long Beach has minimal elevation change. The main obstacle to biking in that area is that it's not safe due to the street design. The image that sticks in my mind when I think of LA is a flat, wide, road that goes completely straight for many miles. Something like https://goo.gl/maps/DRjBP https://goo.gl/maps/DRjBP or https://goo.gl/maps/30hg3 https://goo.gl/maps/30hg3.
nathancahill 11y ago
In LA, it's not the flatness, it's the distance that makes having a car necessary. Everywhere is _miles_ away from everywhere else. I haven't been to Amsterdam so I can't comment on that, but the first two sections of this excellent article[0] touch on that. [0] https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/city-by-city/los-angeles-plays-itself/ https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/city-by-city/los-angeles...
- mattmanser 11y ago
  To be honest, miles on a bike is not much difference from miles in a car. Average speed is like 10 mph, without any of the traffic jams.