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> Greater LA is home to nearly 20 million people. It's entirely feasible to create several car-free neighborhoods, each with more people than Omaha Nebraska. Th
by bscphil 7y ago
> Greater LA is home to nearly 20 million people. It's entirely feasible to create several car-free neighborhoods, each with more people than Omaha Nebraska. That's plenty enough people for transportation solutions to evolve organically
I agree with your goals (car free cities), but I don't see this happening. Imagine a neighborhood goes car free - in LA, probably 75+% of people living in that neighborhood work in some other neighborhood. What are they supposed to do to get to work? Public transportation? It doesn't exist, or takes 4x as long as driving.
So we build public transportation up to allow for the massive increase in people using it in that neighborhood? Well, the neighborhoods they're trying to commute to still all use cars, and there's no room for that kind of increase in public transportation there.
So we need some kind of massive public infrastructure project to create the kind of city-wide transportation that's needed to enable this kind of shift? Well, sure. But that takes decades and billions of dollars. And that's if there's the political will to make this happen at all. I live in LA (and commute to another neighborhood to work via public transportation); honestly I don't see it happening.
- magduf 7y agoIf it takes you literally "decades" to build a train line, when the US back in the mid-1800s built railroads across the continent by hand, then maybe you should just give up and admit your country is hopelessly broken. Other countries don't take that long to build a few train lines.
- bscphil 7y agoI agree with you! But the estimated time to complete just one of the extensions is running into the late 20s or even 30s!
- magduf 7y agoThat's my point. It doesn't have to be that way. Other nations are able to build not just "extensions", but entire train lines, in much less time than that.