11 ms·

I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it'

I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in traffic. Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that. The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.

CameronNemo 7y ago
I live in Orange County and commute to La Mirada (only ~13 miles away). The bus routes are so inefficient that it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work by bus. Biking would be faster (although significantly more stressful and dangerous). Some areas just need to add more and better routes.
- jppope 7y ago
  Orange County and the IE are some of the worst public transit in the country. LA's trains/ Metrolink are actually an improvement over sitting on the 10 by quite a bit. The accessibility to the metrolink and the trains have a lot to be desired though in the OC and the IE...
  - dhosek 7y ago
    When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).
naravara 7y ago
How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or if there are delays? In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.
- jppope 7y ago
  You can't really use the busses in Orange County because of the routes and the traffic. Cars are pretty much required unless you're <5 miles from work, then biking is a decent option.
- bluGill 7y ago
  If the bus comes every 5 minutes nobody asks the questions you asked. Comfort waiting only matters when the bus doesn't come.
  - naravara 7y ago
    5 minutes of having a mid-summer sun beating down on you, after you've possibly walked for up to 15 minutes to even get to the stop, can feel like a lot. Especially if you don't know with any confidence that the next bus is coming in 5 minutes.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      If you are not confident that the next bus will be there in less than 5 minutes, then my criteria are not met. It costs about $500,000 to run a bus for a year (every day, 16 hours a day). If you have that extra half a million in the budget you should run another bus someplace (preferably getting some existing route to the under 5 minutes headway). If you don't have that much in the budget but have something spending money on shelters isn't a bad use of money but it is way down on the list of what riders really want.
- pfranz 7y ago
  10 years ago they had GPS maps on the bus showing your current location, but afaik you couldn't access that when waiting for the bus. There were covered bus stops, just none of the ones I used were. They were only "ok" at marking stops when routes changed. The bus schedule (for the routes I used) was sparse. So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite at the level of being pleasant.
pfranz 7y ago
I lived on the east side and my job offered a free transit pass. It was a 15m drive for me or a single bus. My car broke down fairly often and I tried to give public transit a shot. The single bus took an hour and arrived every 30m. I was often standing during busy times and we'd all talk about the loud, likely mentally ill people, who caused disruptions. I'd often work later than the busses would run. Biking had similar hazards when trying to use it as an alternative. Almost all of those downsides still exist in places with great public transit, it's just the incentives compared to the alternatives are better. LA needs more incentives; continue investing in public transit, incentivize it, and disincentivize driving.
- bluGill 7y ago
  No, in places with great transit people with a 15 minute drive have at most 20 minutes on the bus and for some it is only 10 minutes on the bus. Of course where transit is great people also move to live near the right line, so the 1 hour trips like you see still exist - but those are different neighborhoods where you rarely go.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    The universal downsizes I was talking about were dealing with obnoxious riders, having to stand during rush hour, and not always running as late as you need it to. I completely agree with your points. The big thing I notice is that where transit is good I find having a car to be a chain around my neck. Parking is difficult/expensive to find, it's often just easier to walk to the next thing, and navigating roads/traffic is often difficult.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Almost never deal with crazy people on Munich public transit. That's a combination of a broader swathe of society taking transit here, plus German society doing a better job of taking care of the homeless and mentally ill. The buses are generally reliable and frequent. Train + bike is comparably fast to driving during rush hour.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
The reason mass transit works in Manhattan is that you can have a subway train arrive every five minutes and still have it full of people. The reason you can do that is that Manhattan has more than 25 times the population density of LA County. To fill the same subway cars in LA would require intervals more than 25 times longer, i.e. more than two hours instead of every five minutes, and then it's garbage and nobody wants to use it. Or, in practice, you only run mass transit along the most popular routes and then the majority of people can't use it because it doesn't go where they're going. Making it less convenient to drive doesn't really fix that, all it does is make more people miserable, because you make driving worse where no viable alternative to driving is available. The only real way to fix it is to reduce sprawl so that you have more density over less area -- and that's only possible in the long-term, so in the short-term LA is pretty screwed for traffic. But that's no excuse to not be working on the long-term solution.
- egh 7y ago
  The density of the LA MSA is 2,744/sq mi, the New York MSA is 4,432/sq mi. The average commute in each area is only about 1 mile longer in LA (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_JobsProximity.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...) And yet, there are vastly different commute patterns. (And still over half of people in the NY MSA commute by car). It's not at all clear that density plays nearly as much a role in this as you suggest.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    That's not a good baseline for comparison. The MSA you're looking at covers a much bigger area, lumping in parts with lower population density which, no surprise, don't all have subways every five minutes that the GP was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
    - clairity 7y ago
      comparing MSAs is more apples-to-apples than comparing manhattan to LA county, which is roughly what was being done. an MSA bounds the totality of the economic reach of a city, which more-or-less coincides with the commute boundaries. LA (the city) is relatively dense (medium-high density) compared to its cursory reputation of being low density. but public transit here is imperfect, to be sure. it's good if you live near a train line, and not so good if you have to depend only on buses. LA metro and LADOT are trying to change that, but it's a frustratingly slow process. micro-mobility options (e-scooters, e-bikes, car share, etc.) help.
gkuan 7y ago
I once did the LA transit ride from Thousand Oaks to Pasadena and back entirely by transit (40 mi one way by driving, transit was more circuitous than that). More frequently, I would take Thousand Oaks to Hollywood or Thousand Oaks to DTLA transit trips. The Red and Gold lines seem quite reasonable. Though short of something I would want to take daily given that I lived far away, it was still a lot less exhausting than trying to drive from Santa Monica to the other side of 405 during the afternoon. Now I’m in a different city and take transit daily.
- mayneack 7y ago
  40 miles is a pretty long commute. A modern city shouldn't be optimized to make that experience the norm. Most trips are much shorter.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    I moved to the bay area in 2006. Between then and now, each employer I've had was at least 30 miles away from the next.
    - mayneack 7y ago
      That makes you quite an outlier. 95% of trips are < 5 miles https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips I don't think we should optimize our cities for that.
      - erik_seaberg 7y ago
        They also report that under 17% of trips are for work, which is surprisingly low and seems like too much noise to learn much about the distribution of peak hour commuting distances. If I had a five mile commute, I would use surface streets. Congested highways are full of people going far enough in roughly that direction that even the congestion plus the first/last mile is faster than countless stoplights on the direct route.
downerending 7y ago
> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. After thinking about this a moment, you might realize that this mostly just makes life harder and more miserable for the poor, disabled, etc. Most people don't have a plausible option to change their mode of transportation--they just have to suffer. Beyond that, these "improvements" often don't even benefit their intended targets. I currently live in a city that has this "make it harder" smug in spades. Ironically, the resulting improvements have made it a scarier place to walk and bicycle, due to the attention overload induced on drivers. As the saying goes: God save us from people that only mean well...
- mayneack 7y ago
  It's obviously hard to tell by looking in windows, but there's plenty of poor and/or disabled people riding the bus and already dealing with the problems you think removing cars would give them.
  - downerending 7y ago
    Indeed. But "make it harder" isn't about them (it won't change their behavior). It's rather about the poor and disabled for whom public transportation isn't their best option. It's a message from the elite telling them that their suffering doesn't count.
marcell 7y ago
> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt. FWIW these are actually NIMBY policies. NIMBYs don't like it when people drive cars on their streets.

CameronNemo 7y ago

I live in Orange County and commute to La Mirada (only ~13 miles away). The bus routes are so inefficient that it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work by bus. Biking would be faster (although significantly more stressful and dangerous). Some areas just need to add more and better routes.

jppope 7y ago
Orange County and the IE are some of the worst public transit in the country. LA's trains/ Metrolink are actually an improvement over sitting on the 10 by quite a bit. The accessibility to the metrolink and the trains have a lot to be desired though in the OC and the IE...
- dhosek 7y ago
  When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).

naravara 7y ago

How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or if there are delays? In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.

jppope 7y ago
You can't really use the busses in Orange County because of the routes and the traffic. Cars are pretty much required unless you're <5 miles from work, then biking is a decent option.
bluGill 7y ago
If the bus comes every 5 minutes nobody asks the questions you asked. Comfort waiting only matters when the bus doesn't come.
- naravara 7y ago
  5 minutes of having a mid-summer sun beating down on you, after you've possibly walked for up to 15 minutes to even get to the stop, can feel like a lot. Especially if you don't know with any confidence that the next bus is coming in 5 minutes.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    If you are not confident that the next bus will be there in less than 5 minutes, then my criteria are not met. It costs about $500,000 to run a bus for a year (every day, 16 hours a day). If you have that extra half a million in the budget you should run another bus someplace (preferably getting some existing route to the under 5 minutes headway). If you don't have that much in the budget but have something spending money on shelters isn't a bad use of money but it is way down on the list of what riders really want.
pfranz 7y ago
10 years ago they had GPS maps on the bus showing your current location, but afaik you couldn't access that when waiting for the bus. There were covered bus stops, just none of the ones I used were. They were only "ok" at marking stops when routes changed. The bus schedule (for the routes I used) was sparse. So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite at the level of being pleasant.

pfranz 7y ago

I lived on the east side and my job offered a free transit pass. It was a 15m drive for me or a single bus. My car broke down fairly often and I tried to give public transit a shot. The single bus took an hour and arrived every 30m. I was often standing during busy times and we'd all talk about the loud, likely mentally ill people, who caused disruptions. I'd often work later than the busses would run. Biking had similar hazards when trying to use it as an alternative. Almost all of those downsides still exist in places with great public transit, it's just the incentives compared to the alternatives are better. LA needs more incentives; continue investing in public transit, incentivize it, and disincentivize driving.

bluGill 7y ago
No, in places with great transit people with a 15 minute drive have at most 20 minutes on the bus and for some it is only 10 minutes on the bus. Of course where transit is great people also move to live near the right line, so the 1 hour trips like you see still exist - but those are different neighborhoods where you rarely go.
- pfranz 7y ago
  The universal downsizes I was talking about were dealing with obnoxious riders, having to stand during rush hour, and not always running as late as you need it to. I completely agree with your points. The big thing I notice is that where transit is good I find having a car to be a chain around my neck. Parking is difficult/expensive to find, it's often just easier to walk to the next thing, and navigating roads/traffic is often difficult.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
Almost never deal with crazy people on Munich public transit. That's a combination of a broader swathe of society taking transit here, plus German society doing a better job of taking care of the homeless and mentally ill. The buses are generally reliable and frequent. Train + bike is comparably fast to driving during rush hour.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

The reason mass transit works in Manhattan is that you can have a subway train arrive every five minutes and still have it full of people. The reason you can do that is that Manhattan has more than 25 times the population density of LA County. To fill the same subway cars in LA would require intervals more than 25 times longer, i.e. more than two hours instead of every five minutes, and then it's garbage and nobody wants to use it. Or, in practice, you only run mass transit along the most popular routes and then the majority of people can't use it because it doesn't go where they're going. Making it less convenient to drive doesn't really fix that, all it does is make more people miserable, because you make driving worse where no viable alternative to driving is available. The only real way to fix it is to reduce sprawl so that you have more density over less area -- and that's only possible in the long-term, so in the short-term LA is pretty screwed for traffic. But that's no excuse to not be working on the long-term solution.

egh 7y ago
The density of the LA MSA is 2,744/sq mi, the New York MSA is 4,432/sq mi. The average commute in each area is only about 1 mile longer in LA (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_JobsProximity.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...) And yet, there are vastly different commute patterns. (And still over half of people in the NY MSA commute by car). It's not at all clear that density plays nearly as much a role in this as you suggest.
- SilasX 7y ago
  That's not a good baseline for comparison. The MSA you're looking at covers a much bigger area, lumping in parts with lower population density which, no surprise, don't all have subways every five minutes that the GP was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
  - clairity 7y ago
    comparing MSAs is more apples-to-apples than comparing manhattan to LA county, which is roughly what was being done. an MSA bounds the totality of the economic reach of a city, which more-or-less coincides with the commute boundaries. LA (the city) is relatively dense (medium-high density) compared to its cursory reputation of being low density. but public transit here is imperfect, to be sure. it's good if you live near a train line, and not so good if you have to depend only on buses. LA metro and LADOT are trying to change that, but it's a frustratingly slow process. micro-mobility options (e-scooters, e-bikes, car share, etc.) help.

gkuan 7y ago

I once did the LA transit ride from Thousand Oaks to Pasadena and back entirely by transit (40 mi one way by driving, transit was more circuitous than that). More frequently, I would take Thousand Oaks to Hollywood or Thousand Oaks to DTLA transit trips. The Red and Gold lines seem quite reasonable. Though short of something I would want to take daily given that I lived far away, it was still a lot less exhausting than trying to drive from Santa Monica to the other side of 405 during the afternoon. Now I’m in a different city and take transit daily.

mayneack 7y ago
40 miles is a pretty long commute. A modern city shouldn't be optimized to make that experience the norm. Most trips are much shorter.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  I moved to the bay area in 2006. Between then and now, each employer I've had was at least 30 miles away from the next.
  - mayneack 7y ago
    That makes you quite an outlier. 95% of trips are < 5 miles https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips I don't think we should optimize our cities for that.
    - erik_seaberg 7y ago
      They also report that under 17% of trips are for work, which is surprisingly low and seems like too much noise to learn much about the distribution of peak hour commuting distances. If I had a five mile commute, I would use surface streets. Congested highways are full of people going far enough in roughly that direction that even the congestion plus the first/last mile is faster than countless stoplights on the direct route.

downerending 7y ago

> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. After thinking about this a moment, you might realize that this mostly just makes life harder and more miserable for the poor, disabled, etc. Most people don't have a plausible option to change their mode of transportation--they just have to suffer. Beyond that, these "improvements" often don't even benefit their intended targets. I currently live in a city that has this "make it harder" smug in spades. Ironically, the resulting improvements have made it a scarier place to walk and bicycle, due to the attention overload induced on drivers. As the saying goes: God save us from people that only mean well...

mayneack 7y ago
It's obviously hard to tell by looking in windows, but there's plenty of poor and/or disabled people riding the bus and already dealing with the problems you think removing cars would give them.
- downerending 7y ago
  Indeed. But "make it harder" isn't about them (it won't change their behavior). It's rather about the poor and disabled for whom public transportation isn't their best option. It's a message from the elite telling them that their suffering doesn't count.

marcell 7y ago

> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt. FWIW these are actually NIMBY policies. NIMBYs don't like it when people drive cars on their streets.