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I would love to use LA public transport but it’s simply not usable to get most places I want to go. I live a block away from an expo line and I can’t even make

I would love to use LA public transport but it’s simply not usable to get most places I want to go. I live a block away from an expo line and I can’t even make it all the way to little Tokyo without making a transfer. Getting to West Hollywood via the metro is basically not possible. The only solution to this problem is a lot more lines

ravenstine 7y ago
Exactly. And if it can get you where you want to go, you have to transfer through multiple buses or taxis. The hassle kind of burns you out and you just want something simpler. Unlike other cities, there's not a whole lot in downtown that I need to visit on a regular basis. Most of what I want to do is peripheral to the actual city of LA. Everything is so spread out, and there really isn't much we can do to undo that at this point. We're never going to be the pedestrian paradise that is San Francisco. (I don't want to live in SF again, but boy was it nice to be able to walk and take light rail everywhere) I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.
- butterthebuddha 7y ago
  > I don't want to live in SF again Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    I'll boil it down to a few things: - The rampant homelessness and mental illness - Cost of living - Feces and urine everywhere - Lots of rats and cockroaches - Rotting garbage in the streets - Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA. - Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question. It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
    - bxparks 7y ago
      Yup, we left SF for pretty much the same reasons: 1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem. 2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80. 3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty. I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
      - macdamaniac 7y ago
        Your experience and GPs are definitely valid, but I will say that there are many different San Franciscos if you try out places that aren't downtown or the Mission. The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great food, services, etc in walking distance). If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights. Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its neighborhoods.
- bproven 7y ago
  yeah - saw that a lot in bay area. Not that CO / Denver has great transit, but their solution is to have transit police on every train. They check tickets/passes and do rounds. Which does seem to reduce this...
- Moru 7y ago
  It's not illegal to be sick and I guess the police do this sort of short trip because what else can they do?
mgolawala 7y ago
The issue with LA is the low density sprawl. It would simply be cost prohibitive to build and run a public transport infrastructure that would cover such a large area and transport you around quickly. At least with today's technologies and costs. If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
- vkou 7y ago
  Isn't it just as cost-prohibitive to build and run a private transport infrastructure? Consider the cost of all the overbuilt roads, the cars on those roads, the human life wasted in traffic... Yet, LA has obviously done so. Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
  - mgolawala 7y ago
    Agreed. I don't think the current situation is better. Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
    - deaddodo 7y ago
      > However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
groby_b 7y ago
What OP said. Just to throw out an example, if you want to get from Culver City (somewhat night-spotty place, and lots of new companies sprouting up) to Encino (somewhat affordable place on the other side of the hills, where rent won't completely kill you)? That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses. That doesn't really qualify as public transportation. Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA. The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"
- jppope 7y ago
  Yea but people in the rest of the country would be blown away by the travel times by car as well. Irvine to Santa Monica leaving at 7:30am is 2.5 - 3 hours. Total distance 45 Miles? You can drive from Kansas City to Omaha in roughly the same time
  - cylentwolf 7y ago
    Yeah but you won't pass as many people. The density of SoCal is high but it is spread out which defeats public transportation. Maybe once we get some kind of automated bus system and bus lanes this could be less of a hassle but I doubt it.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  You're wildly exaggerating. It takes just about 20 minutes to get from Culver City to the end of the line in Santa Monica. It doesn't even take an hour to traverse the entire Expo Line between DTLA and Santa Monica, about fifty minutes. If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes. Timetables: https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_1571341545.pdf https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_15...
  - groby_b 7y ago
shams93 7y ago
For a lot of areas the one available bus only goes downtown for example to get from glendale to burbank can take 5 hours on the bus going through several buses to get downtown then you take the redline to north hollywood and have another series of buses up to burbank, meanwhile by car burbank is 15 minutes away from glendale.
thewebcount 7y ago
Not only that, the time to take public transport is way worse than driving. If it were a 5-15 minute difference to get from point A to point B, OK, I would do it. But for me, I can get to/from work in ~20 minutes. I could also take the bus and it would be 50 minutes one way. That means an extra hour out of my day to take public transportation. I have too much going on to lose an hour a day. The extra time spent in traffic is obviously not as bad as the extra time spent on public transit, so why would I take it?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  It can work if you use the time on the bus doing work. You can't do work while driving.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    I don't have space on the bus to do anything except look at my phone, or maybe read a book.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tomjakubowski 7y ago
The Regional Connector project, responsible for the giant holes currently in the streets of Little Tokyo, will directly join the Expo and Gold lines together, which will solve many of these "west Downtown/east Downtown" transfer issues. Due to open in 2022. https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/ https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/
- webkike 7y ago
  2 years for a mile of line is not very encouraging for the future of this city
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    The delay is entirely due to private businesses that failed to properly disclose active utility lines. The work to reroute those lines resulted in a 2 year delay.
bproven 7y ago
yeah sadly it is pretty typical of US transit buildouts - half ass vision and implementation and then everyone wonders why it fails.
takeda 7y ago
Same here, I would use it, but then drive to a near station is same as driving directly. I like though that is expanding, so maybe one day I can use it.
thinkcontext 7y ago
The longer game is to encourage denser redevelopment around the stations so that they become places more people want to go.

ravenstine 7y ago

Exactly. And if it can get you where you want to go, you have to transfer through multiple buses or taxis. The hassle kind of burns you out and you just want something simpler. Unlike other cities, there's not a whole lot in downtown that I need to visit on a regular basis. Most of what I want to do is peripheral to the actual city of LA. Everything is so spread out, and there really isn't much we can do to undo that at this point. We're never going to be the pedestrian paradise that is San Francisco. (I don't want to live in SF again, but boy was it nice to be able to walk and take light rail everywhere) I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.

butterthebuddha 7y ago
> I don't want to live in SF again Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I'll boil it down to a few things: - The rampant homelessness and mental illness - Cost of living - Feces and urine everywhere - Lots of rats and cockroaches - Rotting garbage in the streets - Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA. - Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question. It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
  - bxparks 7y ago
    Yup, we left SF for pretty much the same reasons: 1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem. 2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80. 3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty. I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
    - macdamaniac 7y ago
      Your experience and GPs are definitely valid, but I will say that there are many different San Franciscos if you try out places that aren't downtown or the Mission. The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great food, services, etc in walking distance). If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights. Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its neighborhoods.
bproven 7y ago
yeah - saw that a lot in bay area. Not that CO / Denver has great transit, but their solution is to have transit police on every train. They check tickets/passes and do rounds. Which does seem to reduce this...
Moru 7y ago
It's not illegal to be sick and I guess the police do this sort of short trip because what else can they do?

mgolawala 7y ago

The issue with LA is the low density sprawl. It would simply be cost prohibitive to build and run a public transport infrastructure that would cover such a large area and transport you around quickly. At least with today's technologies and costs. If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.

vkou 7y ago
Isn't it just as cost-prohibitive to build and run a private transport infrastructure? Consider the cost of all the overbuilt roads, the cars on those roads, the human life wasted in traffic... Yet, LA has obviously done so. Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
- mgolawala 7y ago
  Agreed. I don't think the current situation is better. Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
  - deaddodo 7y ago
    > However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.

groby_b 7y ago

What OP said. Just to throw out an example, if you want to get from Culver City (somewhat night-spotty place, and lots of new companies sprouting up) to Encino (somewhat affordable place on the other side of the hills, where rent won't completely kill you)? That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses. That doesn't really qualify as public transportation. Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA. The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"

jppope 7y ago
Yea but people in the rest of the country would be blown away by the travel times by car as well. Irvine to Santa Monica leaving at 7:30am is 2.5 - 3 hours. Total distance 45 Miles? You can drive from Kansas City to Omaha in roughly the same time
- cylentwolf 7y ago
  Yeah but you won't pass as many people. The density of SoCal is high but it is spread out which defeats public transportation. Maybe once we get some kind of automated bus system and bus lanes this could be less of a hassle but I doubt it.
tomjakubowski 7y ago
You're wildly exaggerating. It takes just about 20 minutes to get from Culver City to the end of the line in Santa Monica. It doesn't even take an hour to traverse the entire Expo Line between DTLA and Santa Monica, about fifty minutes. If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes. Timetables: https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_1571341545.pdf https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_15...
- groby_b 7y ago

shams93 7y ago

For a lot of areas the one available bus only goes downtown for example to get from glendale to burbank can take 5 hours on the bus going through several buses to get downtown then you take the redline to north hollywood and have another series of buses up to burbank, meanwhile by car burbank is 15 minutes away from glendale.

thewebcount 7y ago

Not only that, the time to take public transport is way worse than driving. If it were a 5-15 minute difference to get from point A to point B, OK, I would do it. But for me, I can get to/from work in ~20 minutes. I could also take the bus and it would be 50 minutes one way. That means an extra hour out of my day to take public transportation. I have too much going on to lose an hour a day. The extra time spent in traffic is obviously not as bad as the extra time spent on public transit, so why would I take it?

WalterBright 7y ago
It can work if you use the time on the bus doing work. You can't do work while driving.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  I don't have space on the bus to do anything except look at my phone, or maybe read a book.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tomjakubowski 7y ago

The Regional Connector project, responsible for the giant holes currently in the streets of Little Tokyo, will directly join the Expo and Gold lines together, which will solve many of these "west Downtown/east Downtown" transfer issues. Due to open in 2022. https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/ https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/

webkike 7y ago
2 years for a mile of line is not very encouraging for the future of this city
- gamblor956 7y ago
  The delay is entirely due to private businesses that failed to properly disclose active utility lines. The work to reroute those lines resulted in a 2 year delay.

bproven 7y ago

yeah sadly it is pretty typical of US transit buildouts - half ass vision and implementation and then everyone wonders why it fails.

takeda 7y ago

Same here, I would use it, but then drive to a near station is same as driving directly. I like though that is expanding, so maybe one day I can use it.

thinkcontext 7y ago

The longer game is to encourage denser redevelopment around the stations so that they become places more people want to go.