21 ms·

Zurich had this problem, the city was built before cars were a thing and thus it is inept of handling much traffic. The authorities decided to disincentivize dr

Zurich had this problem, the city was built before cars were a thing and thus it is inept of handling much traffic. The authorities decided to disincentivize driving cars by blocking roads and reducing available parking spaces [0] while offering good public transport. Worked well, now only 17% commute by car. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zürich_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zürich_model

partiallypro 7y ago
That's well and good, but the sticking point is "the city was built before cars were a thing." The US is already heavy with sprawl and it's a reality that we have to live with. I'm not sure how to put that cat back in the bag.
- marcandre 7y ago
  Same idea. See Barcelona and superblocks for example.
- grecy 7y ago
  Block roads and build better public transport. Just because it's difficult and will require some pain in the short term, it doesn't mean we should do - and therefore improve - nothing.
  - mises 7y ago
    But public transport is simply not as good for now; ramming it down people's throats is not a solution. It is crowded, unclean, slow, and noisy. I have to listen to some one else blaring his music, or some fat guy taking two seats. Or some smelly guy who can't be bothered to shower. I suddenly have to plan my schedule around my transportation, rather than my transportation around my schedule. Maybe we should focus on making it a better option. Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. There's a difference between building something better and just forcing every one onto something worse. The market is stronger and smarter than any government, and will try as hard as it can to circumvent any thing you pass. Why not have the invisible hand do your work for you? Make it a better option, and people will use it.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      Depends where you are I guess - I rather like taking the train into Edinburgh. It's occasionally a bit crowded going home in the evening but 99% of the time getting a seat isn't a problem and my fellow commuters seem a decent bunch and it is faster and cheaper than driving (and I have a decent fairly new car). Edit: Out of interest, looking at your username is it not possible that you have an ideological objection to public transport?
    - helen___keller 7y ago
      > Maybe we should focus on making it a better option. I think everybody agrees with this until it comes time to talk taxes and then everyone with a car says they're happy with their commutes and they don't want to pay for somebody else to take a train, don't want a whole lane for a bus, and so on. So instead you get some meaningless token effort and everybody goes on driving Making driving "worse" (or at least refusing to invest to make it better) gives transit a competitive advantage. Optimizing for personal cars gives cars a competitive advantage, which is the story of the 20th century > Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. It's not even remotely controversial when I've seen it done, like downtown streets in Boston made pedestrian only. The vast majority of people (who are on foot) love it.
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        Speaking of being happy with their commute. I'm very happy and I'm walking to work everday. Maybe you should rethink the need for cars/trains in the first place? Because I sure am not using trains in my daily life and don't own a car.
        mantas 7y ago
        Other part of the equation is being be happy with living location. Walking to work is nice, but if that means you've to pay fuckton for a tiny apartment in concrete jungle.. Some people will be happy, some people would be more misery than dealing with long commute.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahoy 7y ago
    I'm on board with sweeping changes, but most US cities aren't built densely enough to take advantage of public transit even if we do build it. It's not just a matter of building more transit (which we should be doing!). We have to move people back into urban cores and out of sparsely populated suburbs.
    - helen___keller 7y ago
      Ironically many people already want this (as reflected by housing prices), but can't afford to do so
    - levythe 7y ago
      Japan, the golden child of public transportation, serves suburban areas as well as urban cores. I am not convinced it's altogether an issue of population density. It seems more a cultural issue. In America, public transportation is seen as being for people who can't afford a car. In Japan, it's just part of how you get places.
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Well, affording a car in Japan is also very expensive. The cars not so much; the inspections, taxes and parking very much expensive. So maybe Japan is just the place where almost nobody can afford a car? Thus, the same as the US.
      - lmm 7y ago
        Fix our attitude to car parking and the rest will follow. In Japan there's no street parking, thus narrow streets and no need for sidewalks, saving even more space for actual stuff. If you want to own a car, it's your responsibility to pay for space to keep it in (and you're not even allowed to buy one without showing that you've got a space), you don't get to just dump it in some public space.
        briandear 7y ago
        Most Americans have driveways and many have garages. It’s a pretty small minority that park their cars on the street. And most city street parking is certainly not free.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    I have a hunch that any authority who blocks roads in LA to prevent traffic from flowing won’t have much of a successful career in politics.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    I live in the city without a car but what you are suggesting is literally infeasible for most of the US, it goes far beyond "short term pain". There is no viable way to build usable, economical public transport for vast, low-density suburban sprawl. Blocking roads does not solve this obvious problem. The topology of most US infrastructure is designed in such a way that this conversion is not possible without demolishing and rebuilding thousands of square kilometers of existing infrastructure. That is a very expensive proposition. Even if all new construction and city growth is optimized for not needing a car, and a significant fraction of it is, that doesn't change the reality that 300 million people live in areas where a car is an absolute and largely irreplaceable necessity because the existing infrastructure requires it.
    - grecy 7y ago
      Take the however-many billions of dollars each city is currently spending to build new (or bigger) freeways. Spend that same money on buses instead. Instead of millions of cars that carry 1 person to a max of 5, lets have thousands of buses that carry ~40-80 people. In the years to come when there are less vehicles on the road, we can start closing roads, like Paris does (or did). Or, you know, do absolutely nothing. Improve nothing. Move forward with nothing. Complain about everything, and every idea to improve stuff.
      - goostavos 7y ago
        When the "ideas to improve stuff" stop being hopelessly naive, the critiques will surely lessen.
        grecy 7y ago
        Let's hear your idea then. There are an awful lot of people nay-saying ideas to make stuff better and extraordinarily few people coming up with ideas to make stuff better. What do you think will be the outcome of that?
        lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  - toast0 7y ago
    > Block roads and build better public transport. If you make the city unlivable in the meantime, that should help with affordable housing as people with means go elsewhere. Sure, drop parking minimums in/near density/transit access. Let the market decide where you can sell residences without parking; although, building a multi unit building without parking in a neighborhood with street parking isn't really appropriate. Public transport in the LA area is a pretty tough issue -- you've got a ton of people who often live far from where they work, and households with multiple workers rarely have the workers anywhere near each other. It's very hard to have public transit that has the speeds needed for long commutes while also maintaining the flexibility for the varied commutes that are common in the area. That said, almost all of the transit that gets built does get used, to the surprise of everyone -- so the answer for LA is probably just keep building transit until ridership saturates, and make small changes in zoning policy along the way.
  - ufmace 7y ago
    It's not possible without essentially destroying the entire city and rebuilding it with more dense buildings. Public transit would be intolerably bad, because the parking lots are too big. The buildings are too far apart, and too far from the roads. You would have to have stops so frequent that it would take too long to get anywhere that was far away, and you would still be dropped off a significant walk from any building.
- coredog64 7y ago
  Practically speaking, it’s going to require the destruction of wealth on a vast scale. All that sprawling housing (and the associated businesses) will be physically or practically bulldozed to disincentivize use of private vehicles. GLWT.
  - tremon 7y ago
    it’s going to require the destruction of wealth on a vast scale I don't see why that's a requirement. What exactly needs to be destroyed, and why? From my simplistic point of view, all you need to do is to start injecting dense cores in the middle of the sprawl. Those cores can provide both local employment and local shopping coverage, thereby increasing the utility of the local area and raising the land value. Providing local jobs already reduces the need to commute. Then start connecting the local cores with high-frequency public transport, then add park&ride infrastructure along those same lines to make the old city center private-vehicle free. That further reduces inner-city traffic while keeping the core accessible. After some 30-odd years or so, the sprawl cores will have matured to mostly-independent city cores themselves, and the need for regular commute is even lower. Then you can dismantle the old park&ride lots and replace them with more efficient use of that space. I don't see practical problems with that, nor do I see the need for bulldozing existing wealth. The only thing that needs to be bulldozed is the misplaced perception that living in sprawl is a symbol of high status.
    - CapricornNoble 7y ago
      >>> all you need to do is to start injecting dense cores in the middle of the sprawl. It might be better to call it a "destruction of utility", in the sense of economic "utility maximization". Many people are living in the sprawl partly because they DON'T want to live in a "dense core". Injecting a dense core into their neighborhood might be considered a significant loss in quality of life.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      So basically you just described LA as it already is: a number of independent city cores that are part of a larger connected sprawling urbanized area, except without the high-speed public transport between independent city cores (though the public transport is now being built).
- Fricken 7y ago
  Many American cities have run down and hollowed out cores that are ripe for redevelopment. The challenge is to achieve a critical mass of housing, services and employment options that are accessible without the need for a cars, which requires committed effort.
  - partiallypro 7y ago
    There are some incentives you could use to move people and jobs back to city centers that don't require much effort. For instances, I believe Portland, has lower property taxes closer to the city center than the outer boroughs to incentivize people/business to move there.
    - cgriswald 7y ago
      > For instances, I believe Portland, has lower property taxes closer to the city center than the outer boroughs to incentivize people/business to move there. Unless this was written down in law as guaranteed for a certain number of years, I am not sure I would trust it. In leaner times there will be a lot of pressure on politicians to bring those taxes in parity with other areas; especially if it is a success and property values climb. It's pretty easy to imagine a totally unfair 'pay your fair share' campaign.
- AceyMan 7y ago
  While the US is no doubt "heavy with sprawl" Los Angeles isn't one of them. I'm from Atlanta—now that's sprawl! Compared to other major US cities Los Angeles is truly dense (63% of LA is paved!). My favorite demonstrative anecdote—when approaching by air from the east the 'carpet of lights' starts to appear below about fifteen minutes prior to reaching LAX (which is on the Pacific shore). That's fifteen minutes at transport aircraft arrival speed. I go 'wow' every time I come into town at night if the views are clear. Los Angeles is just massive, meanwhile its 'effective density' [my term] is reduced by the prevalence of quakes and the expense of taller structures¹. It's a shame more folks cannot find a pattern of transit/cycling that works for them; the weather is so favorable and the topography is bike-friendly, outside of the canyons/SaMo Mtns), but so many people must live where it's more affordable while working where the businesses are (historically high-rent areas). This is an urban planning trope, so nothing new about that but LA is doubling-down on that pattern lately with the genesis of "Silicon Beach" these past few years. (me: LA transplant (10+ years) here and I use transit/cycle exclusively for the work week & for more than half of my weekend activities.) ¹—I'd expect we have zoning that impedes "increased density + lower parking minimums" but admittedly I cannot speak to that point directly.
  - novok 7y ago
    It's a myth that LA can't build high rises due to earth quakes. Also things like low rise apartment buildings and fourplexes could still be blanket legalized across LA and create significantly more density if that myth was true.
  - nathanasmith 7y ago
    Yep, though I am having trouble pulling up a good source and density map, I understand there are pockets of LA County both larger and more dense than San Francisco. Edit: According to this[0], LA is "the single most densely populated urban area in the United States". [0]https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-most-densely-populated-urban-area-in-the-us https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-...
  - bscphil 7y ago
    > It's a shame more folks cannot find a pattern of transit/cycling that works for them If you want to commute by bike in LA you've got to have the place you live and the place you work (and everywhere in between) be properly managed by the city so that it's safe to bike. In my experience that's very rare: anything resembling a bike lane near me is likely to suddenly end into a line of parked cars, and with poor visibility and high traffic the risks are large. I know of only one coworker who commuted by bike. He lives much closer than I do. He was also hit by a car in his first year.
- Arn_Thor 7y ago
  Plenty of low-density cities make public transit work, all over the world—Canada would be your closest example. With a bit of public money and political willpower extensive, fast and functional bus systems can be set up even in the sprawliest of American cities.
HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
A city that only the rich can afford to live and work in. What a concept.
samgtx 7y ago
The problem here is really that public spending has been vilified through decades of propaganda. The general public will vote against any taxation increase to pay for public works, even if those works would, in the end, lead to better lives for themselves.
ssully 7y ago
While this is great for Zurich, and I would like to see it applied to a larger American city, but LA and Zurich are incredibly different scales of size. LA (according to Wikipedia) is 1,213.8 squared km, compared to Zurich at 97.8 squared km. I am not an urban planner, but I imagine that size difference would make implementing the Zurich model a completely different challenge.
- jadell 7y ago
  LA is effectively several different cities tied together under a single government entity. It even has a few holes in it where it completely surrounds several independent cities (Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, for example.) There's no reason a Zurich-sized chunk of LA couldn't implement a Zurich-like system and test how it works out.
  - ssully 7y ago
    You are probably right in how that would be best in how it would be done. My wife recently went to LA, and between the pictures she sent and me looking into it more afterwards, your description of several cities tied together is a very apt description. Even by what I know (Chicago), LA is just massive.
  - Spellman 7y ago
    Well, yeah, but the pure density isn't there. All of LA was built assuming car ownership. So there are large 4-lane streets everywhere breaking up the usable land. Not to mention huge freeways cutting a net through the whole area. Plus, much of the zoning has segmented regions. You have a whole area just for housing, and another just for commercial property, and another just to industry. So by necessity you need to travel moderately long distances to reach your needed destinations. I imagine most European cities that weren't built for cars means they originally were built with much narrower and sparse streets, more mixed-use regions, and thus walking or biking a short distance covers the majority of your needs. The rest can be handled by public transportation. In LA, that isn't feasible because so much extra road space means everything is much more spread out. NYC and other major cities (Chicago) have higher density by building upwards as well as building their public transport from the beginning.
WilTimSon 7y ago
It's a good idea in theory but what about out of town trips? Where do people park their cars until they need them? You can commute for 42 weeks but then, if you want to drive out to the country, how do you do it? I presume Zurich has some suburbs and houses with garages but I'm wondering if the current parking is enough to account for the need in cars that aren't used strictly for commuting.
- pr0duktiv 7y ago
  Well the train network in all of Switzerland is great. If I want to go skiing, I just hop on a train towards any ski resort and arrive within 1-2h. Wanna go hiking? Take the train. Wanna visit the French or Italian part of Switzerland? Take the train. Works very well and covers most out-of-town trips for me and most people I know. In those rare cases when I do need a car, I just get a rental or use car-sharing (for example when leaving Switzerland). Factoring in the train tickets and the rental car, my transport expenses are still significantly less than they would be if I owned a car.
  - WilTimSon 7y ago
    That does sound quite wonderful. Sadly, it's probably not an option for the USA with all the factors like a lack of train infrastructure and a pretty poor car-sharing culture (that I know of, not a US citizen) combined with the industry at large not really trying to change things because that would eat into their profits. Trains would be a great solution though, even if it would take time to set up the infrastructure proper.

partiallypro 7y ago

That's well and good, but the sticking point is "the city was built before cars were a thing." The US is already heavy with sprawl and it's a reality that we have to live with. I'm not sure how to put that cat back in the bag.

marcandre 7y ago
Same idea. See Barcelona and superblocks for example.
grecy 7y ago
Block roads and build better public transport. Just because it's difficult and will require some pain in the short term, it doesn't mean we should do - and therefore improve - nothing.
- mises 7y ago
  But public transport is simply not as good for now; ramming it down people's throats is not a solution. It is crowded, unclean, slow, and noisy. I have to listen to some one else blaring his music, or some fat guy taking two seats. Or some smelly guy who can't be bothered to shower. I suddenly have to plan my schedule around my transportation, rather than my transportation around my schedule. Maybe we should focus on making it a better option. Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. There's a difference between building something better and just forcing every one onto something worse. The market is stronger and smarter than any government, and will try as hard as it can to circumvent any thing you pass. Why not have the invisible hand do your work for you? Make it a better option, and people will use it.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    Depends where you are I guess - I rather like taking the train into Edinburgh. It's occasionally a bit crowded going home in the evening but 99% of the time getting a seat isn't a problem and my fellow commuters seem a decent bunch and it is faster and cheaper than driving (and I have a decent fairly new car). Edit: Out of interest, looking at your username is it not possible that you have an ideological objection to public transport?
  - helen___keller 7y ago
    > Maybe we should focus on making it a better option. I think everybody agrees with this until it comes time to talk taxes and then everyone with a car says they're happy with their commutes and they don't want to pay for somebody else to take a train, don't want a whole lane for a bus, and so on. So instead you get some meaningless token effort and everybody goes on driving Making driving "worse" (or at least refusing to invest to make it better) gives transit a competitive advantage. Optimizing for personal cars gives cars a competitive advantage, which is the story of the 20th century > Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. It's not even remotely controversial when I've seen it done, like downtown streets in Boston made pedestrian only. The vast majority of people (who are on foot) love it.
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      Speaking of being happy with their commute. I'm very happy and I'm walking to work everday. Maybe you should rethink the need for cars/trains in the first place? Because I sure am not using trains in my daily life and don't own a car.
      - mantas 7y ago
        Other part of the equation is being be happy with living location. Walking to work is nice, but if that means you've to pay fuckton for a tiny apartment in concrete jungle.. Some people will be happy, some people would be more misery than dealing with long commute.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ahoy 7y ago
  I'm on board with sweeping changes, but most US cities aren't built densely enough to take advantage of public transit even if we do build it. It's not just a matter of building more transit (which we should be doing!). We have to move people back into urban cores and out of sparsely populated suburbs.
  - helen___keller 7y ago
    Ironically many people already want this (as reflected by housing prices), but can't afford to do so
  - levythe 7y ago
    Japan, the golden child of public transportation, serves suburban areas as well as urban cores. I am not convinced it's altogether an issue of population density. It seems more a cultural issue. In America, public transportation is seen as being for people who can't afford a car. In Japan, it's just part of how you get places.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Well, affording a car in Japan is also very expensive. The cars not so much; the inspections, taxes and parking very much expensive. So maybe Japan is just the place where almost nobody can afford a car? Thus, the same as the US.
    - lmm 7y ago
      Fix our attitude to car parking and the rest will follow. In Japan there's no street parking, thus narrow streets and no need for sidewalks, saving even more space for actual stuff. If you want to own a car, it's your responsibility to pay for space to keep it in (and you're not even allowed to buy one without showing that you've got a space), you don't get to just dump it in some public space.
      - briandear 7y ago
        Most Americans have driveways and many have garages. It’s a pretty small minority that park their cars on the street. And most city street parking is certainly not free.
- kube-system 7y ago
  I have a hunch that any authority who blocks roads in LA to prevent traffic from flowing won’t have much of a successful career in politics.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  I live in the city without a car but what you are suggesting is literally infeasible for most of the US, it goes far beyond "short term pain". There is no viable way to build usable, economical public transport for vast, low-density suburban sprawl. Blocking roads does not solve this obvious problem. The topology of most US infrastructure is designed in such a way that this conversion is not possible without demolishing and rebuilding thousands of square kilometers of existing infrastructure. That is a very expensive proposition. Even if all new construction and city growth is optimized for not needing a car, and a significant fraction of it is, that doesn't change the reality that 300 million people live in areas where a car is an absolute and largely irreplaceable necessity because the existing infrastructure requires it.
  - grecy 7y ago
    Take the however-many billions of dollars each city is currently spending to build new (or bigger) freeways. Spend that same money on buses instead. Instead of millions of cars that carry 1 person to a max of 5, lets have thousands of buses that carry ~40-80 people. In the years to come when there are less vehicles on the road, we can start closing roads, like Paris does (or did). Or, you know, do absolutely nothing. Improve nothing. Move forward with nothing. Complain about everything, and every idea to improve stuff.
    - goostavos 7y ago
      When the "ideas to improve stuff" stop being hopelessly naive, the critiques will surely lessen.
      - grecy 7y ago
        Let's hear your idea then. There are an awful lot of people nay-saying ideas to make stuff better and extraordinarily few people coming up with ideas to make stuff better. What do you think will be the outcome of that?
        lawnchair_larry 7y ago
- toast0 7y ago
  > Block roads and build better public transport. If you make the city unlivable in the meantime, that should help with affordable housing as people with means go elsewhere. Sure, drop parking minimums in/near density/transit access. Let the market decide where you can sell residences without parking; although, building a multi unit building without parking in a neighborhood with street parking isn't really appropriate. Public transport in the LA area is a pretty tough issue -- you've got a ton of people who often live far from where they work, and households with multiple workers rarely have the workers anywhere near each other. It's very hard to have public transit that has the speeds needed for long commutes while also maintaining the flexibility for the varied commutes that are common in the area. That said, almost all of the transit that gets built does get used, to the surprise of everyone -- so the answer for LA is probably just keep building transit until ridership saturates, and make small changes in zoning policy along the way.
- ufmace 7y ago
  It's not possible without essentially destroying the entire city and rebuilding it with more dense buildings. Public transit would be intolerably bad, because the parking lots are too big. The buildings are too far apart, and too far from the roads. You would have to have stops so frequent that it would take too long to get anywhere that was far away, and you would still be dropped off a significant walk from any building.
coredog64 7y ago
Practically speaking, it’s going to require the destruction of wealth on a vast scale. All that sprawling housing (and the associated businesses) will be physically or practically bulldozed to disincentivize use of private vehicles. GLWT.
- tremon 7y ago
  it’s going to require the destruction of wealth on a vast scale I don't see why that's a requirement. What exactly needs to be destroyed, and why? From my simplistic point of view, all you need to do is to start injecting dense cores in the middle of the sprawl. Those cores can provide both local employment and local shopping coverage, thereby increasing the utility of the local area and raising the land value. Providing local jobs already reduces the need to commute. Then start connecting the local cores with high-frequency public transport, then add park&ride infrastructure along those same lines to make the old city center private-vehicle free. That further reduces inner-city traffic while keeping the core accessible. After some 30-odd years or so, the sprawl cores will have matured to mostly-independent city cores themselves, and the need for regular commute is even lower. Then you can dismantle the old park&ride lots and replace them with more efficient use of that space. I don't see practical problems with that, nor do I see the need for bulldozing existing wealth. The only thing that needs to be bulldozed is the misplaced perception that living in sprawl is a symbol of high status.
  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    >>> all you need to do is to start injecting dense cores in the middle of the sprawl. It might be better to call it a "destruction of utility", in the sense of economic "utility maximization". Many people are living in the sprawl partly because they DON'T want to live in a "dense core". Injecting a dense core into their neighborhood might be considered a significant loss in quality of life.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    So basically you just described LA as it already is: a number of independent city cores that are part of a larger connected sprawling urbanized area, except without the high-speed public transport between independent city cores (though the public transport is now being built).
Fricken 7y ago
Many American cities have run down and hollowed out cores that are ripe for redevelopment. The challenge is to achieve a critical mass of housing, services and employment options that are accessible without the need for a cars, which requires committed effort.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  There are some incentives you could use to move people and jobs back to city centers that don't require much effort. For instances, I believe Portland, has lower property taxes closer to the city center than the outer boroughs to incentivize people/business to move there.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    > For instances, I believe Portland, has lower property taxes closer to the city center than the outer boroughs to incentivize people/business to move there. Unless this was written down in law as guaranteed for a certain number of years, I am not sure I would trust it. In leaner times there will be a lot of pressure on politicians to bring those taxes in parity with other areas; especially if it is a success and property values climb. It's pretty easy to imagine a totally unfair 'pay your fair share' campaign.
AceyMan 7y ago
While the US is no doubt "heavy with sprawl" Los Angeles isn't one of them. I'm from Atlanta—now that's sprawl! Compared to other major US cities Los Angeles is truly dense (63% of LA is paved!). My favorite demonstrative anecdote—when approaching by air from the east the 'carpet of lights' starts to appear below about fifteen minutes prior to reaching LAX (which is on the Pacific shore). That's fifteen minutes at transport aircraft arrival speed. I go 'wow' every time I come into town at night if the views are clear. Los Angeles is just massive, meanwhile its 'effective density' [my term] is reduced by the prevalence of quakes and the expense of taller structures¹. It's a shame more folks cannot find a pattern of transit/cycling that works for them; the weather is so favorable and the topography is bike-friendly, outside of the canyons/SaMo Mtns), but so many people must live where it's more affordable while working where the businesses are (historically high-rent areas). This is an urban planning trope, so nothing new about that but LA is doubling-down on that pattern lately with the genesis of "Silicon Beach" these past few years. (me: LA transplant (10+ years) here and I use transit/cycle exclusively for the work week & for more than half of my weekend activities.) ¹—I'd expect we have zoning that impedes "increased density + lower parking minimums" but admittedly I cannot speak to that point directly.
- novok 7y ago
  It's a myth that LA can't build high rises due to earth quakes. Also things like low rise apartment buildings and fourplexes could still be blanket legalized across LA and create significantly more density if that myth was true.
- nathanasmith 7y ago
  Yep, though I am having trouble pulling up a good source and density map, I understand there are pockets of LA County both larger and more dense than San Francisco. Edit: According to this[0], LA is "the single most densely populated urban area in the United States". [0]https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-most-densely-populated-urban-area-in-the-us https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-...
- bscphil 7y ago
  > It's a shame more folks cannot find a pattern of transit/cycling that works for them If you want to commute by bike in LA you've got to have the place you live and the place you work (and everywhere in between) be properly managed by the city so that it's safe to bike. In my experience that's very rare: anything resembling a bike lane near me is likely to suddenly end into a line of parked cars, and with poor visibility and high traffic the risks are large. I know of only one coworker who commuted by bike. He lives much closer than I do. He was also hit by a car in his first year.
Arn_Thor 7y ago
Plenty of low-density cities make public transit work, all over the world—Canada would be your closest example. With a bit of public money and political willpower extensive, fast and functional bus systems can be set up even in the sprawliest of American cities.

HNcantBtrustd 7y ago

A city that only the rich can afford to live and work in. What a concept.

samgtx 7y ago

The problem here is really that public spending has been vilified through decades of propaganda. The general public will vote against any taxation increase to pay for public works, even if those works would, in the end, lead to better lives for themselves.

ssully 7y ago

While this is great for Zurich, and I would like to see it applied to a larger American city, but LA and Zurich are incredibly different scales of size. LA (according to Wikipedia) is 1,213.8 squared km, compared to Zurich at 97.8 squared km. I am not an urban planner, but I imagine that size difference would make implementing the Zurich model a completely different challenge.

jadell 7y ago
LA is effectively several different cities tied together under a single government entity. It even has a few holes in it where it completely surrounds several independent cities (Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, for example.) There's no reason a Zurich-sized chunk of LA couldn't implement a Zurich-like system and test how it works out.
- ssully 7y ago
  You are probably right in how that would be best in how it would be done. My wife recently went to LA, and between the pictures she sent and me looking into it more afterwards, your description of several cities tied together is a very apt description. Even by what I know (Chicago), LA is just massive.
- Spellman 7y ago
  Well, yeah, but the pure density isn't there. All of LA was built assuming car ownership. So there are large 4-lane streets everywhere breaking up the usable land. Not to mention huge freeways cutting a net through the whole area. Plus, much of the zoning has segmented regions. You have a whole area just for housing, and another just for commercial property, and another just to industry. So by necessity you need to travel moderately long distances to reach your needed destinations. I imagine most European cities that weren't built for cars means they originally were built with much narrower and sparse streets, more mixed-use regions, and thus walking or biking a short distance covers the majority of your needs. The rest can be handled by public transportation. In LA, that isn't feasible because so much extra road space means everything is much more spread out. NYC and other major cities (Chicago) have higher density by building upwards as well as building their public transport from the beginning.

WilTimSon 7y ago

It's a good idea in theory but what about out of town trips? Where do people park their cars until they need them? You can commute for 42 weeks but then, if you want to drive out to the country, how do you do it? I presume Zurich has some suburbs and houses with garages but I'm wondering if the current parking is enough to account for the need in cars that aren't used strictly for commuting.

pr0duktiv 7y ago
Well the train network in all of Switzerland is great. If I want to go skiing, I just hop on a train towards any ski resort and arrive within 1-2h. Wanna go hiking? Take the train. Wanna visit the French or Italian part of Switzerland? Take the train. Works very well and covers most out-of-town trips for me and most people I know. In those rare cases when I do need a car, I just get a rental or use car-sharing (for example when leaving Switzerland). Factoring in the train tickets and the rental car, my transport expenses are still significantly less than they would be if I owned a car.
- WilTimSon 7y ago
  That does sound quite wonderful. Sadly, it's probably not an option for the USA with all the factors like a lack of train infrastructure and a pretty poor car-sharing culture (that I know of, not a US citizen) combined with the industry at large not really trying to change things because that would eat into their profits. Trains would be a great solution though, even if it would take time to set up the infrastructure proper.