5 ms·

This may simply be an LA thing. The entire basin is designed for cars, as a teenager having a car affords a freedom that is simply not possible otherwise. If yo

• Larrikin 9y ago
  >I'm hard pressed to think of any mass transit system in the US that could allow one to get away with this. That is a combined failure of US city planners and US transit systems.
  • Zafira 9y ago
    I am absolutely not denying that, but it's particularly acute in Los Angeles. I am optimistic given the aggressiveness that Metro has had in recent years about growing out the light rail, that it'll get better...as long as it doesn't turn into BART.
  • smsm42 9y ago
    That assumes everybody wants to and does live in a highly compact urbanized environment. It is not the case, especially in the US. Outside of this environment, covering it with a transit system that allows freedom of movement and convenience comparable to having a personal car does not seem feasible. You need to cover pretty big distances, you need frequent stops to make it accessible and you also need it to move with reasonable speeds so you don't take whole day to go to a mall and back. I don't see how this can work with current model of mass transit. Maybe if we could magically build a subterranean tunnels everywhere and put fast trains there... But this seems to be super-costly. Taking one case - public transport in Silicon Valley, esp. southern parts, sucks. A lot. But I don't see how it can realistically be made better without super-massive investment of money which will never be recovered and will never be self-sustaining. And I don't see how it could have been "planned" upfront - should people have been banned from living in South SV with density they are? Should somebody somehow spent billions and billions of dollars, taken from who knows where, to somehow build magic transportation network that would have never paid for itself? I don't think there's a simple solution for this, or any solution beyond personal cars. Maybe automated on-demand taxis one day?
  • Spivak 9y ago
    You should look at the current state of cities like a large legacy codebase written imperatively. But worse because you can't rewrite it, any change is slow and political, and you have to apply any change in code by patching the binary live. The fundamental mistake was that cities were decomposed into an interconnected system of districts separated by purpose. This wasn't an assumption that people would think to question -- it doesn't seem opinionated, it doesn't prescribe a way to plan, and it's 'obvious'. So naturally this way of looking at cities lead people to plan cities that fit the model. So we have districts separated by use that require transportation systems to go between. I don't think it's right to shoulder the blame on the transit systems because their existence is a band-aid fix for a severed corroded. The fact that a person needs a transit system at all to satisfy their daily needs is the problem. However, modern city planning has undergone a revolution that throws out this old model. A new model where everything is intermixed and in close proximity is the new hotness in the industry. It's sometimes called mixed use but that's a small part of what really is a larger set of changes. Overall I wouldn't fault city planners for such a non-obvious mistake that was made a long time ago and only lived on through the industries cultural memory.
• spilk 9y ago
  Probably possible in New York City and San Francisco (proper), but nowhere else.
  • vostok 9y ago
    I think New York and Chicago are both very good in this regard. San Francisco and Boston are not great, but doable.