7 ms·

I find most of LA really hard to spend time in. The mangled road network (Grids? Nah bruh, lets have lots of dead ends!), constant drone of traffic everywhere,

I find most of LA really hard to spend time in. The mangled road network (Grids? Nah bruh, lets have lots of dead ends!), constant drone of traffic everywhere, and few things being walkable makes it not the most enjoyable place to visit. Seattle is up there on the traffic scale, but at least in the neighborhoods there aren't 6 lane monster roads criss crossing every which way, with few pedestrian crossings and no lanes for bikes or busses. Traffic calming has helped quite a bit too, though I imagine reducing a 4 lane road to a 2 lane road with parking, a center turn lane and bike lanes would get the average politician recalled down in LA.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
I lived in LA for about 30 years, and while it isn’t that walkable, there aren’t that many dead ends, and where there are, it is due to geography (canyons, mountains). It is also in large part gridded out.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I think walkability also varies a lot within LA. At my previous apartment, I was about a 5 minute walk from 2 grocery stores, my dentist, my doctor, etc. Maybe a 15 minute walk to the beach.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
LA gets vilified for being sprawling and car-centric, as if its love of cars is why it sprawls. This is not true. It sprawled from the beginning before cars were the norm. It is rooted in the high cost of building infrastructure in a desert and how that necessitates building large tracts in one fell swoop to make the financing make sense.
- piyh 8y ago
  How is building in a desert more difficult than building on a plain? Water is a municipal problem, not the builder's.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Much of the water for LA comes from the Colorado River. You have to build substantial infrastructure to pipe it in. Building a large swathe of stuff helps defray the cost of this essential infrastructure, without which you can't survive. Once you put in the pipes to get it there, you better build out enough homes and businesses to at least break even on that part of it or you are doomed.
  - tomnipotent 8y ago
    Sure, when you're building in 2018 with all the luxuries the modern world has to offer. Not so a hundred years ago.
- the_gastropod 8y ago
  This is technically true, but kind of a stretch. The population of LA in 1900 was only ~100k people. By 1920, there were over 500k. And it continued to explode in growth through the '70s. The "sprawl" was less sprawly than it was a collection of multiple cities that have been annexed over the decades. In the 1890's, LA was 28 square miles (and that 28 "original" LA is still very evident today). Today, it's 469 square miles. LA's current sprawl is absolutely because of the car. There's a very clear reason old east coast cities and european cities look so much different than newer cities like LA.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I have read a history of the origin of LA. It didn't agree with you. LA sprawled from the start. This likely made it well suited to developing their cult of the car, not the other way around.
    - wwweston 8y ago
      Which history? I'd love to know more. I've got stories of relatives living anywhere from Hermosa Beach to Huntington Park pre-depression, so I'm inclined to believe LA certainly spread out early on, but I'd guess most of the density was along the coast and rail.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I don't recall. I believe it was part of a book with short excerpts from many famous urban planning books. I was (or had been) bedridden. I had been to San Francisco for the first time and fallen madly in love with the city and I spent $300 at the bookstore on the way home on urban planning books and other books that I felt made sense for my mad, mad scheme to get well and someday be an urban planner. (And also to keep me occupied while I recuperated.) I'm terrible with titles anyway and this was a particularly bad time in my life. Sorry.
    - trgn 8y ago
      Not sure why this get downvotes. American cities were overbuilt from the start. In most american cities, from the late 1700s onward, wide roads on a grid were a desirable feature, a hundred years before cars were a thing. These wide roads were originally a buffer space for all the smoke and filth of the industrial city. As a weird unintended consequence, the car could become commonplace so early because american cities already had the roads to accommodate them. And now with cars, these roads became dangerous and noisy as well. When industry left the city proper, early 20th century, the cars remained and continued to make the city an unpleasant place to live in. No wonder people decided to move out, first using streetcars or trains, and then yes, with their cars, which paradoxically contributed to why the city was awful in the first place. LA, even though younger than most american cities, follows a similar template.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Building vertically instead of horizontally would make the infrastucture even more cost-efficient.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    True, but 100+ years ago, there were practical engineering limitations on building vertically. I don't remember the details of the history I read. It was a long time ago. I just remember that it made the point that LA sprawled from the beginning and this had to do with what made financial sense at the time. What we can do today is different from what was feasible back then.
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      100 years ago, NYC already had 20-story buildings. Cities built longer ago tend to sprawl LESS because most people got around most of the time on foot. Most of LA (by square mileage) was built up since the 1950s (later than the Empire State Building). There’s no reason except political will that it couldn’t have been built in clusters of 2-4 story multi-family units within walking distance of transit.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        You say that like political will is merely a matter of wanting it bad enough. I don't think that's true. As a college student, I wrote an alternate commuter rail plan for Solano County around 15 years ago. It was based on GIS and research and lacked the politicking that strongly influenced the existing rail plan. I was told gas would need to be $4/gallon before the stations would be built. I was sick and going through a divorce and had been a homemaker for 2 decades. I have no political connections and no political know how. Some months ago, I tried briefly to figure out how to promote that plan. It basically went nowhere. The first rail station had its grand opening in April. I believe this increases the odds that Travis AFB will finally leave California like the federal government has threatened for years. The worst of the three stations has yet to be built. I updated the website yesterday and stuck a link in my HN profile. That's probably as far as it will go. I'm no longer in California. I'm still struggling to solve my own problems. The rail plan research I did is dead in the water. I wish I had the know how. I wish I had the right connections. I wish people took me more seriously than they do. I wish I had to be time and energy to pour into figuring this out. I don't. I have to get on with my life and none of that fits into my schedule. I've tried. It went nowhere. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by entropy.
neonhomer 8y ago
> The mangled road network Have you ever been in Pittsburgh? I cannot fathom many cities have a worse network between the myriad of bridges, triangle shaped downtown and geography.
- radiorental 8y ago
  I'll see your Pittsburgh and raise you a Boston.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    The city whose road network was designed by a spider on LSD.
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    I'll raise you Canton Avenue. All the way to the top! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Driving in Boston is a nightmare... but you don't have to do it! Even if you're out in the suburbs you can park your car and ride the train in. LA doesn't afford you that option, really.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - DoubleCribble 8y ago
    In Pittsburgh, it's the topography that thwarts you. In Boston it's the other drivers.
- DoubleCribble 8y ago
  No kidding! I recently visited Pittsburgh and remarked to my passenger that I'd have zero (expletive deleted) chance of getting anywhere on time without a nav. More than once, I missed turnoffs and entire roads when navigating the hills outside of downtown.
IvyMike 8y ago
Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit. That being said, the revitalized downtown, the slowly growing metro system, and uber/lyft to fill the gaps have made it better than it once was. It still is a massive monstrosity of a city, so it's never going to be as "walkable" as compact city like SF.
- bksenior 8y ago
  This is a perfect way to put it "Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit." Once you understand how to travel the city, it's hard to live anywhere else because quality of life is so ridiculously high. It's why people tend not to leave if they make it past their two year mark.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Shhhh, stop telling everyone!
  - flyinglizard 8y ago
    Genuinely interested - what makes LA a great place to live?
    - taurath 8y ago
      There's always activity and something interesting and new everywhere, but you can still get privacy and quiet. Very open culture, easy to make friends (though can be hard to find good ones). Easy to find an enclave you like (if you can afford it).
    - borkt 8y ago
      It has every type of food known to man, and often truly authentic restauarants if not neighborhoods devoted to specific regions/groups. People are generally much nicer than the bay area, and the weather is great most of the time. Proximity to the Ocean, not too far from mountains, LAX goes everywhere basically. I agree that it is not a place to visit, but the 2 years I lived there were great.
CodeWriter23 8y ago
Oh they’ve done away with the 6-lane artery. ALL of those roads in Los Angeles now have a dedicated, hardly used Bike Lane in each direction. More Traffic. More Pollution due to more stop and go. And little benefit to the people. I’m all for Bike Lanes where enough people will actually use them to create a benefit that outweighs the impact of losing that lane, like DTLA. Or Manhattan. But across sprawling LA, where people take on an extra commute 1.5 hrs/day to get their kids to the “good” school, the shotgun approach to deleting traffic lanes is just stupid.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
fjabre 8y ago
You really cannot think of LA as a traditional city. It is a collection of sprawling neighborhoods. There are plenty of walkable neighborhoods in Los Angeles. This is a common misconception. More than in Seattle is my guess but Seattle is much smaller. Apples and Oranges. Weather plays a big role of course as many find Seattle too depressing to live in for most of the year.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

WillPostForFood 8y ago

I lived in LA for about 30 years, and while it isn’t that walkable, there aren’t that many dead ends, and where there are, it is due to geography (canyons, mountains). It is also in large part gridded out.

Rebelgecko 8y ago
I think walkability also varies a lot within LA. At my previous apartment, I was about a 5 minute walk from 2 grocery stores, my dentist, my doctor, etc. Maybe a 15 minute walk to the beach.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

LA gets vilified for being sprawling and car-centric, as if its love of cars is why it sprawls. This is not true. It sprawled from the beginning before cars were the norm. It is rooted in the high cost of building infrastructure in a desert and how that necessitates building large tracts in one fell swoop to make the financing make sense.

piyh 8y ago
How is building in a desert more difficult than building on a plain? Water is a municipal problem, not the builder's.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Much of the water for LA comes from the Colorado River. You have to build substantial infrastructure to pipe it in. Building a large swathe of stuff helps defray the cost of this essential infrastructure, without which you can't survive. Once you put in the pipes to get it there, you better build out enough homes and businesses to at least break even on that part of it or you are doomed.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  Sure, when you're building in 2018 with all the luxuries the modern world has to offer. Not so a hundred years ago.
the_gastropod 8y ago
This is technically true, but kind of a stretch. The population of LA in 1900 was only ~100k people. By 1920, there were over 500k. And it continued to explode in growth through the '70s. The "sprawl" was less sprawly than it was a collection of multiple cities that have been annexed over the decades. In the 1890's, LA was 28 square miles (and that 28 "original" LA is still very evident today). Today, it's 469 square miles. LA's current sprawl is absolutely because of the car. There's a very clear reason old east coast cities and european cities look so much different than newer cities like LA.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I have read a history of the origin of LA. It didn't agree with you. LA sprawled from the start. This likely made it well suited to developing their cult of the car, not the other way around.
  - wwweston 8y ago
    Which history? I'd love to know more. I've got stories of relatives living anywhere from Hermosa Beach to Huntington Park pre-depression, so I'm inclined to believe LA certainly spread out early on, but I'd guess most of the density was along the coast and rail.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I don't recall. I believe it was part of a book with short excerpts from many famous urban planning books. I was (or had been) bedridden. I had been to San Francisco for the first time and fallen madly in love with the city and I spent $300 at the bookstore on the way home on urban planning books and other books that I felt made sense for my mad, mad scheme to get well and someday be an urban planner. (And also to keep me occupied while I recuperated.) I'm terrible with titles anyway and this was a particularly bad time in my life. Sorry.
  - trgn 8y ago
    Not sure why this get downvotes. American cities were overbuilt from the start. In most american cities, from the late 1700s onward, wide roads on a grid were a desirable feature, a hundred years before cars were a thing. These wide roads were originally a buffer space for all the smoke and filth of the industrial city. As a weird unintended consequence, the car could become commonplace so early because american cities already had the roads to accommodate them. And now with cars, these roads became dangerous and noisy as well. When industry left the city proper, early 20th century, the cars remained and continued to make the city an unpleasant place to live in. No wonder people decided to move out, first using streetcars or trains, and then yes, with their cars, which paradoxically contributed to why the city was awful in the first place. LA, even though younger than most american cities, follows a similar template.
cimmanom 8y ago
Building vertically instead of horizontally would make the infrastucture even more cost-efficient.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  True, but 100+ years ago, there were practical engineering limitations on building vertically. I don't remember the details of the history I read. It was a long time ago. I just remember that it made the point that LA sprawled from the beginning and this had to do with what made financial sense at the time. What we can do today is different from what was feasible back then.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    100 years ago, NYC already had 20-story buildings. Cities built longer ago tend to sprawl LESS because most people got around most of the time on foot. Most of LA (by square mileage) was built up since the 1950s (later than the Empire State Building). There’s no reason except political will that it couldn’t have been built in clusters of 2-4 story multi-family units within walking distance of transit.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      You say that like political will is merely a matter of wanting it bad enough. I don't think that's true. As a college student, I wrote an alternate commuter rail plan for Solano County around 15 years ago. It was based on GIS and research and lacked the politicking that strongly influenced the existing rail plan. I was told gas would need to be $4/gallon before the stations would be built. I was sick and going through a divorce and had been a homemaker for 2 decades. I have no political connections and no political know how. Some months ago, I tried briefly to figure out how to promote that plan. It basically went nowhere. The first rail station had its grand opening in April. I believe this increases the odds that Travis AFB will finally leave California like the federal government has threatened for years. The worst of the three stations has yet to be built. I updated the website yesterday and stuck a link in my HN profile. That's probably as far as it will go. I'm no longer in California. I'm still struggling to solve my own problems. The rail plan research I did is dead in the water. I wish I had the know how. I wish I had the right connections. I wish people took me more seriously than they do. I wish I had to be time and energy to pour into figuring this out. I don't. I have to get on with my life and none of that fits into my schedule. I've tried. It went nowhere. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by entropy.

neonhomer 8y ago

> The mangled road network Have you ever been in Pittsburgh? I cannot fathom many cities have a worse network between the myriad of bridges, triangle shaped downtown and geography.

radiorental 8y ago
I'll see your Pittsburgh and raise you a Boston.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  The city whose road network was designed by a spider on LSD.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  I'll raise you Canton Avenue. All the way to the top! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Driving in Boston is a nightmare... but you don't have to do it! Even if you're out in the suburbs you can park your car and ride the train in. LA doesn't afford you that option, really.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- DoubleCribble 8y ago
  In Pittsburgh, it's the topography that thwarts you. In Boston it's the other drivers.
DoubleCribble 8y ago
No kidding! I recently visited Pittsburgh and remarked to my passenger that I'd have zero (expletive deleted) chance of getting anywhere on time without a nav. More than once, I missed turnoffs and entire roads when navigating the hills outside of downtown.

IvyMike 8y ago

Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit. That being said, the revitalized downtown, the slowly growing metro system, and uber/lyft to fill the gaps have made it better than it once was. It still is a massive monstrosity of a city, so it's never going to be as "walkable" as compact city like SF.

bksenior 8y ago
This is a perfect way to put it "Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit." Once you understand how to travel the city, it's hard to live anywhere else because quality of life is so ridiculously high. It's why people tend not to leave if they make it past their two year mark.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Shhhh, stop telling everyone!
- flyinglizard 8y ago
  Genuinely interested - what makes LA a great place to live?
  - taurath 8y ago
    There's always activity and something interesting and new everywhere, but you can still get privacy and quiet. Very open culture, easy to make friends (though can be hard to find good ones). Easy to find an enclave you like (if you can afford it).
  - borkt 8y ago
    It has every type of food known to man, and often truly authentic restauarants if not neighborhoods devoted to specific regions/groups. People are generally much nicer than the bay area, and the weather is great most of the time. Proximity to the Ocean, not too far from mountains, LAX goes everywhere basically. I agree that it is not a place to visit, but the 2 years I lived there were great.

CodeWriter23 8y ago

Oh they’ve done away with the 6-lane artery. ALL of those roads in Los Angeles now have a dedicated, hardly used Bike Lane in each direction. More Traffic. More Pollution due to more stop and go. And little benefit to the people. I’m all for Bike Lanes where enough people will actually use them to create a benefit that outweighs the impact of losing that lane, like DTLA. Or Manhattan. But across sprawling LA, where people take on an extra commute 1.5 hrs/day to get their kids to the “good” school, the shotgun approach to deleting traffic lanes is just stupid.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

fjabre 8y ago

You really cannot think of LA as a traditional city. It is a collection of sprawling neighborhoods. There are plenty of walkable neighborhoods in Los Angeles. This is a common misconception. More than in Seattle is my guess but Seattle is much smaller. Apples and Oranges. Weather plays a big role of course as many find Seattle too depressing to live in for most of the year.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]