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Yeah but I bet you can't name 15 cities larger than LA that depend on an outdated tech like trains. When's the last time you saw one of those at TechCrunch Disr

Yeah but I bet you can't name 15 cities larger than LA that depend on an outdated tech like trains. When's the last time you saw one of those at TechCrunch Disrupt? Seriously though, this is a solved problem everywhere but major US cities. Paris - which once loved cars - has totally changed over to being bus, bike, and train promoting, and it works.

LordKano 10y ago
There are cultural reasons why what works in Europe won't work in most of the US. If I can't take my car or park for a reasonable fee, I simply won't go somewhere and most of the people I know are the same.
- cashmonkey85 10y ago
  I see this in Tokyo. Americans just stuck at home, stranded and helpless because of their culturally reasons. Oh no wait they just use the awesome public transport system. But it's very difficult for them to enjoy such efficience because...you..know...culture
  - chongli 10y ago
    Huh? Americans don't have a cultural aversion to using world class public transit when in a place like Tokyo. They have a cultural aversion to altering their cities in the radical ways that'd be necessary to build a functional public transit. They call this NIMBY.
    - Retric 10y ago
      [citation needed] people in power have a problem with it. In large part because it takes to long to build to fit into a normal election cycle. However, subways for example are heavily utilized when they are useful.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - rhino369 10y ago
      It's not really even cultural. It is a socio-economic and technological issue. Every rich country that settled new territory or experienced massive growth after the invention of the car has cities that are spread out. Europe was already developed pre-car. Asia had huge population growth when their people generally couldn't afford cars. This is why US cities that were big before the Model T have a dense core with decent public transit. And cities that exploded after the Model T are basically suburbs of themselves, LA, Houston, Jacksonville. It's always why newly formed European suburbs often are just as car reliant as US suburbs. Though it's worth noting that some European suburbs existed before cars and at the time were just outlying cities that now got subsumed into the metro area. If Japan had a new city naturally develop in an open area, it would a lot more like LA than Tokyo.
      - Retric 10y ago
        DC in the US is a solid counter example as low density city older than the car. Density is based on a huge range of factors with for example geography playing a significant role. Another huge factor is they type of industry. Garment factory's for example have historically had very high density's where Iron Works are much lower density.
        rhino369 10y ago
        DC is a pretty good counter example. As you say the type of work matters, and DC has never an industrial town. It was also a planned city. It was intended to not be dense from the start. Something like 40% of DC is federal government land. DC also is doing a decent job at using mass transit to re-densify areas. The orange line corridor is making suburbs become dense. That is pretty unique in America.
        antisthenes 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#Incorporated_places_with_a_density_of_over_10.2C000_people_per_square_mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... For a city that was "intended to not be dense from the start", it sure is up there as far as density and would be #16 on the list if it counted as a part of a state. DC is incredibly dense by American standards and is actually one of the very few places in the US that you can get by without a car (which is, of course, priced into exorbitant rents and property prices) I guess what I meant to say is that the grandparent comment is blatantly false. DC _is_ a high density city and is much more like a European city in that it combines decent public transport and medium-rise developments.
    - cashmonkey85 10y ago
      Reply to the parent comment then. He was the one claiming Americans must drive cars. My reply was to what's called a "parent" comment. And in that comment was context. And using that context you should understand my comment. They need to be read together. My comment and the parent comment. Read both together. First the parent comment and then my comment, the "child" comment.
    - ergothus 10y ago
      A lot of Americans (in my anecdotal experience) have a very negative view of public transit. It's what you take when you are too poor or desperate to have a car. Chicken/egg, that's how it ends up, particularly in smaller metro areas (not your major cities, but cities). I currently live in Seattle, and when I met guests and said we'd be taking the bus to my house (which involved a walk of about a block in good weather, with a bus line that ran every ~15 mins, would get us there in 30 mins, and I was covering the $3.50/person) they refused and called a $45 cab (they paid) to take the trip (still took 30 mins - the bus was an express). I'm willing to bet a lot of city dwellers that DON'T use their public transit system have this negative view. They got it from somewhere else, brought it with them, and have no personal experience to change it. This will certainly impact how they vote on things like paying for transit and managing lines and stations. From my own experience, I've lived in a place were the bus coverage was pretty good, but they ran in circles and were infrequent. So going from Point A to Point B might take 20 mins with a bus that came every 1.5 hours, but going from Point B to Point A would take over an hour, on that same bus that came every 1.5 hours. In another place (Richmond, VA) the coverage was TERRIBLE. Going to work from my apt (roughly 5 miles away) meant that I had a bus with 2 time slots I could catch (one at 6 something am and the other at 7 something - no buses ran after that until end of workday), it would take over an hour to make the trip, the bus was loud, smelly, and bouncy (I was unable to read on that bus, but have no such issues in Seattle), and if I had to work past 6pm, I had no transit options to get home, nor if something caused me to want to get home before the end of the workday. Needless to say, while there I drove myself and contributed to the traffic, parking, and environmental problems. I haven't even mentioned the other passengers on the bus, but let's just say all of us on the bus probably were on it for lack of other options. Very few people "elected" to take the bus, they were forced to.
      - sotojuan 10y ago
        I see this attitude even in NYC itself. A lot of people dislike the idea of taking the bus (even though it costs the same as the subway) for some reason.
        pcsanwald 10y ago
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      NIMBY-ism mostly depends on legislation. Most people do not want new construction in their neighborhood. I assume that's as true in Japan as elsewhere. Regardless of culture, if the neighbors have a veto against construction, it will be stopped. If they do not, it will be built.
- mola 10y ago
  People are very adaptive
  - LordKano 10y ago
    People are also very averse to chance.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- astrange 10y ago
  You must have trouble filling out the activity rings on your Apple Watch.
- akgerber 10y ago
  That's all well and good, but in most urban areas of the US, business owners can't even choose whether they want to cater to you as a customer— instead, all new development is required to have a certain quantity of parking by legislative fiat, effectively outlawing the classic 'main street' that's the anchor of so many communities. http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Trouble.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Trouble.pdf
jcfrei 10y ago
Not so fast though. Comparing Paris to LA isn't quite fair. Paris is about six times denser than LA and therefore creating a competitive public transportation network is quite a bit cheaper there.
- Fricken 10y ago
  That's the problem with most american cities- grossly inefficient land use policy. Fix land use and effective transportation becomes an afterthought.
  - Nav_Panel 10y ago
    It's very hard to "fix" land use once the land is already "in use". Much harder than before the land is developed, at least. LA seems to be doing the right thing: build subway lines/high-density transit, even if it "goes nowhere," and the density will follow.
    - cbr 10y ago
      It's very hard to "fix" land use once the land is already "in use". Relaxing zoning to allow people to expand or rebuild more densely on existing lots would go pretty far in high-demand areas.
      - Nav_Panel 10y ago
        Zoning is the issue in some cities, but sometimes it isn't the root problem. Robert Caro gets into this a little bit in his book "The Power Broker" describing Robert Moses' development of highways in NYC: basically, if you build a highway before you build a subway line, the resulting area will be developed in a low-density pattern (regardless of zoning), as the "last mile" of driving is much less difficult than the "last mile" on foot, coming off a train. If you look at NYC in particular, this happened in eastern Queens -- the highways were built (with poor public transit coverage) and the properties were developed in a low density pattern. This cannot be fixed by simply building more high-density housing (despite the massive city-wide demand for housing), because no transit exists. But you cannot build new transit because it's a political nightmare: current residents will complain that you're disrupting their neighborhood, and city residents elsewhere will complain that your new transit development doesn't "go anywhere useful." From what I saw in LA when I visited a few weeks ago, much of the new systems of transit serve (a) large office campuses (I was regularly taking the metro at Universal City) and (b) non-commuter destinations such as Hollywood (for tourism) and the airport. The result, as pointed out to me by an Uber driver, was a huge explosion of development in Downtown LA. The newest line in LA, the Expo Line to Santa Monica, seems more commuter focused -- perhaps it is serving the new residential population moving into DTLA? Eastern Queens, unfortunately, doesn't have the luxury of important destinations or office campuses. It's overshadowed by Manhattan in terms of tourism, and Moses built the Long Island-bound highways specifically to prevent the sorts of development that would lead to Long Island becoming a commuter destination rather than a residential community. Thus, Queens is trapped in this residential catch 22, and not even rezoning can fix it. The only solutions I can see involve closing down lanes of highway to obtain right-of-way for transit (the overpasses were intentionally built too low to support bus service, so it'd be a permanent closure), a sure path to political suicide in an area utterly dependent on its highways.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jozzz 10y ago
Except in Paris there are so many cars in use, causing such a huge amount of pollution, that the government had to ban half the cars in Paris from driving on certain days last year.
- Xixi 10y ago
  Isn't the main issue of Paris the lack of wind to blow the pollution away? Combined maybe with the high number of diesel cars? I don't think you'd see this level of pollution in a city like NYC, or really any city near the coast, simply because of the wind.
  - knz 10y ago
    Isn't LA known for it's smog?! Being coastal just means you have prevailing winds - if geography is working against you (barrier mountains or a basin) then you will have a pollution issue.
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > Isn't LA known for it's smog?! LA has the second-lowest carbon emissions in the country, after NYC. The problem is that it sits at the foothills of mountains which block the wind and prevent the pollution from blowing away. NYC, on the other hand, has very clean air because it has incredibly low pollution output per capita and the geography favors its quick removal. (In fact, most of the pollution in NYC air actually comes from across the Hudson - pollutants emitted by Newark and Elizabeth and which pass over NYC as they disseminate.)
      - rhino369 10y ago
        I bet LA and NYC are low carbon only because they don't actually produce any electricity inside their borders.
        phdp 10y ago
        According to this list, I count at least five in New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...

LordKano 10y ago

There are cultural reasons why what works in Europe won't work in most of the US. If I can't take my car or park for a reasonable fee, I simply won't go somewhere and most of the people I know are the same.

cashmonkey85 10y ago
I see this in Tokyo. Americans just stuck at home, stranded and helpless because of their culturally reasons. Oh no wait they just use the awesome public transport system. But it's very difficult for them to enjoy such efficience because...you..know...culture
- chongli 10y ago
  Huh? Americans don't have a cultural aversion to using world class public transit when in a place like Tokyo. They have a cultural aversion to altering their cities in the radical ways that'd be necessary to build a functional public transit. They call this NIMBY.
  - Retric 10y ago
    [citation needed] people in power have a problem with it. In large part because it takes to long to build to fit into a normal election cycle. However, subways for example are heavily utilized when they are useful.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rhino369 10y ago
    It's not really even cultural. It is a socio-economic and technological issue. Every rich country that settled new territory or experienced massive growth after the invention of the car has cities that are spread out. Europe was already developed pre-car. Asia had huge population growth when their people generally couldn't afford cars. This is why US cities that were big before the Model T have a dense core with decent public transit. And cities that exploded after the Model T are basically suburbs of themselves, LA, Houston, Jacksonville. It's always why newly formed European suburbs often are just as car reliant as US suburbs. Though it's worth noting that some European suburbs existed before cars and at the time were just outlying cities that now got subsumed into the metro area. If Japan had a new city naturally develop in an open area, it would a lot more like LA than Tokyo.
    - Retric 10y ago
      DC in the US is a solid counter example as low density city older than the car. Density is based on a huge range of factors with for example geography playing a significant role. Another huge factor is they type of industry. Garment factory's for example have historically had very high density's where Iron Works are much lower density.
      - rhino369 10y ago
        DC is a pretty good counter example. As you say the type of work matters, and DC has never an industrial town. It was also a planned city. It was intended to not be dense from the start. Something like 40% of DC is federal government land. DC also is doing a decent job at using mass transit to re-densify areas. The orange line corridor is making suburbs become dense. That is pretty unique in America.
        antisthenes 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#Incorporated_places_with_a_density_of_over_10.2C000_people_per_square_mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... For a city that was "intended to not be dense from the start", it sure is up there as far as density and would be #16 on the list if it counted as a part of a state. DC is incredibly dense by American standards and is actually one of the very few places in the US that you can get by without a car (which is, of course, priced into exorbitant rents and property prices) I guess what I meant to say is that the grandparent comment is blatantly false. DC _is_ a high density city and is much more like a European city in that it combines decent public transport and medium-rise developments.
  - cashmonkey85 10y ago
    Reply to the parent comment then. He was the one claiming Americans must drive cars. My reply was to what's called a "parent" comment. And in that comment was context. And using that context you should understand my comment. They need to be read together. My comment and the parent comment. Read both together. First the parent comment and then my comment, the "child" comment.
  - ergothus 10y ago
    A lot of Americans (in my anecdotal experience) have a very negative view of public transit. It's what you take when you are too poor or desperate to have a car. Chicken/egg, that's how it ends up, particularly in smaller metro areas (not your major cities, but cities). I currently live in Seattle, and when I met guests and said we'd be taking the bus to my house (which involved a walk of about a block in good weather, with a bus line that ran every ~15 mins, would get us there in 30 mins, and I was covering the $3.50/person) they refused and called a $45 cab (they paid) to take the trip (still took 30 mins - the bus was an express). I'm willing to bet a lot of city dwellers that DON'T use their public transit system have this negative view. They got it from somewhere else, brought it with them, and have no personal experience to change it. This will certainly impact how they vote on things like paying for transit and managing lines and stations. From my own experience, I've lived in a place were the bus coverage was pretty good, but they ran in circles and were infrequent. So going from Point A to Point B might take 20 mins with a bus that came every 1.5 hours, but going from Point B to Point A would take over an hour, on that same bus that came every 1.5 hours. In another place (Richmond, VA) the coverage was TERRIBLE. Going to work from my apt (roughly 5 miles away) meant that I had a bus with 2 time slots I could catch (one at 6 something am and the other at 7 something - no buses ran after that until end of workday), it would take over an hour to make the trip, the bus was loud, smelly, and bouncy (I was unable to read on that bus, but have no such issues in Seattle), and if I had to work past 6pm, I had no transit options to get home, nor if something caused me to want to get home before the end of the workday. Needless to say, while there I drove myself and contributed to the traffic, parking, and environmental problems. I haven't even mentioned the other passengers on the bus, but let's just say all of us on the bus probably were on it for lack of other options. Very few people "elected" to take the bus, they were forced to.
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      I see this attitude even in NYC itself. A lot of people dislike the idea of taking the bus (even though it costs the same as the subway) for some reason.
      - pcsanwald 10y ago
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    NIMBY-ism mostly depends on legislation. Most people do not want new construction in their neighborhood. I assume that's as true in Japan as elsewhere. Regardless of culture, if the neighbors have a veto against construction, it will be stopped. If they do not, it will be built.
mola 10y ago
People are very adaptive
- LordKano 10y ago
  People are also very averse to chance.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
astrange 10y ago
You must have trouble filling out the activity rings on your Apple Watch.
akgerber 10y ago
That's all well and good, but in most urban areas of the US, business owners can't even choose whether they want to cater to you as a customer— instead, all new development is required to have a certain quantity of parking by legislative fiat, effectively outlawing the classic 'main street' that's the anchor of so many communities. http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Trouble.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Trouble.pdf

jcfrei 10y ago

Not so fast though. Comparing Paris to LA isn't quite fair. Paris is about six times denser than LA and therefore creating a competitive public transportation network is quite a bit cheaper there.

Fricken 10y ago
That's the problem with most american cities- grossly inefficient land use policy. Fix land use and effective transportation becomes an afterthought.
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
  It's very hard to "fix" land use once the land is already "in use". Much harder than before the land is developed, at least. LA seems to be doing the right thing: build subway lines/high-density transit, even if it "goes nowhere," and the density will follow.
  - cbr 10y ago
    It's very hard to "fix" land use once the land is already "in use". Relaxing zoning to allow people to expand or rebuild more densely on existing lots would go pretty far in high-demand areas.
    - Nav_Panel 10y ago
      Zoning is the issue in some cities, but sometimes it isn't the root problem. Robert Caro gets into this a little bit in his book "The Power Broker" describing Robert Moses' development of highways in NYC: basically, if you build a highway before you build a subway line, the resulting area will be developed in a low-density pattern (regardless of zoning), as the "last mile" of driving is much less difficult than the "last mile" on foot, coming off a train. If you look at NYC in particular, this happened in eastern Queens -- the highways were built (with poor public transit coverage) and the properties were developed in a low density pattern. This cannot be fixed by simply building more high-density housing (despite the massive city-wide demand for housing), because no transit exists. But you cannot build new transit because it's a political nightmare: current residents will complain that you're disrupting their neighborhood, and city residents elsewhere will complain that your new transit development doesn't "go anywhere useful." From what I saw in LA when I visited a few weeks ago, much of the new systems of transit serve (a) large office campuses (I was regularly taking the metro at Universal City) and (b) non-commuter destinations such as Hollywood (for tourism) and the airport. The result, as pointed out to me by an Uber driver, was a huge explosion of development in Downtown LA. The newest line in LA, the Expo Line to Santa Monica, seems more commuter focused -- perhaps it is serving the new residential population moving into DTLA? Eastern Queens, unfortunately, doesn't have the luxury of important destinations or office campuses. It's overshadowed by Manhattan in terms of tourism, and Moses built the Long Island-bound highways specifically to prevent the sorts of development that would lead to Long Island becoming a commuter destination rather than a residential community. Thus, Queens is trapped in this residential catch 22, and not even rezoning can fix it. The only solutions I can see involve closing down lanes of highway to obtain right-of-way for transit (the overpasses were intentionally built too low to support bus service, so it'd be a permanent closure), a sure path to political suicide in an area utterly dependent on its highways.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jozzz 10y ago

Except in Paris there are so many cars in use, causing such a huge amount of pollution, that the government had to ban half the cars in Paris from driving on certain days last year.

Xixi 10y ago
Isn't the main issue of Paris the lack of wind to blow the pollution away? Combined maybe with the high number of diesel cars? I don't think you'd see this level of pollution in a city like NYC, or really any city near the coast, simply because of the wind.
- knz 10y ago
  Isn't LA known for it's smog?! Being coastal just means you have prevailing winds - if geography is working against you (barrier mountains or a basin) then you will have a pollution issue.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Isn't LA known for it's smog?! LA has the second-lowest carbon emissions in the country, after NYC. The problem is that it sits at the foothills of mountains which block the wind and prevent the pollution from blowing away. NYC, on the other hand, has very clean air because it has incredibly low pollution output per capita and the geography favors its quick removal. (In fact, most of the pollution in NYC air actually comes from across the Hudson - pollutants emitted by Newark and Elizabeth and which pass over NYC as they disseminate.)
    - rhino369 10y ago
      I bet LA and NYC are low carbon only because they don't actually produce any electricity inside their borders.
      - phdp 10y ago
        According to this list, I count at least five in New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...