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> I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here. Same. I’ve lived in Los
by tvaughan 3y ago
> I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here.
Same. I’ve lived in Los Ángeles and Amsterdam, and it is impossible to explain to my friends and family just how awful the quality of life is in LA precisely because of the difference in attitudes and priorities over cars. Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they would have in Ámsterdam, but once they leave their front door everything is objectively worse
- grecy 3y agoEvery time a politician anywhere in the world suggests adding more freeways or more lanes to freeways, I think they should be forced to live in LA for a year and do a ~1 hour commute each way in traffic. They need to see first hand what happens when you just add more freeways and more lanes. It's not good.
- fnimick 3y agoI had a conversation recently with someone lamenting that we didn't have roads like LA here in Boston. Saying their ideal road was 3 lanes, plus a bike lane, plus a bus lane in each direction. Imagine being a pedestrian trying to cross that! I really don't understand someone who looks at that traffic disaster and wants to build the same thing here at home.
- Gibbon1 3y agoI feel like the more modes of transportation you mix together the worse the cognitive load on people. And it get rapidly worse the higher the density. Inside of a mall where there are only pedestrians is very safe. Freeways are fairly safe. Protected bike lanes are safe. Light rail is safe. Mix all of those on a strode, rail, buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, pedestrians, not safe.
- atchoo 3y ago> the worse the cognitive load Or maybe better the cognitive load? There are various studies that show removing white lines and navigation furniture to make junctions more of a puzzle, decreases speeds and increases attention and safety.
- PaulHoule 3y agoI'd consider Amsterdam, where many kinds of transportation are carefully weaved together https://www.google.com/maps/place/Schiphol+Amsterdam+Airport/@52.3469203,4.8323419,1281m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x47c5e134e0fd162d:0xc7d51583f1cef188!8m2!3d52.3112829!4d4.760114!16zL20vMDczajI?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Schiphol+Amsterdam+Airport... In that area you will find highways, surface streets, bike paths, pedestrian walkways, trams, commuter trains and other kinds of transportation in a way that comes across as elegant, at least to me.
- kaibee 3y agoI think they still keep them as fairly separate networks, even if they highly overlayed and so have many intersections.
- DANmode 3y ago> strode Stroad.
- axpy 3y agoThis seems pretty counter intuitive but this is often the other way around. The safest streets in Europe are where cars, bikes and pedestrian mix together. It force focus on the driving task instead of doing something else. If you are interested, Freakonomics have an episode: "Why the U.S. so good at killing pedestrian". It's an interesting discussion with no simple answer.
- underdeserver 3y agoAs an equal-parts driver, biker, e-scooter rider and pedestrian, this is horrible. Yes, you have to focus on the driving, or walking, or scooting, but you're in constant stress because you can accidentally hit someone coming from any direction. Or they can hit you. It's far better to have separate spaces, and cross only when you really have to.
- brailsafe 3y agoI think this is exactly what Seattle is building at it's already awful waterfront
- hombre_fatal 3y agoAustin too. https://twitter.com/kelseyhuse30/status/1684337210760241152 https://twitter.com/kelseyhuse30/status/1684337210760241152
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThey're a car-centric person who wants the "nuisance" of bikes and busses out of their way while still pretending to have progressive values. People who only drive from garage to shopping center and back, never having to experience the dehumanizing impact of 6+ lanes affecting other transport modes.
- Slow_Hand 3y agoI’ve lived in LA for five years now and lived in Boston for seven years prior. They’re both uniquely terrible. LA’s roads are easy to imagine because it’s synonymous with huge interstates, congestion, and long commutes. Boston is terrible because it’s layout makes zero intuitive sense and looks like spaghetti when viewed from the sky. Of course Boston predates the automobile, so I understand why. I do enjoy the prevalence of bike culture in Boston. It’s just the right size to pedal most places and there are fairly good accomodations for cycling, like bike lanes. But hey, at least I don’t live in Philadelphia. By far the worst driving experience each time I visit. :)
- kaashif 3y ago> Of course Boston predates the automobile, so I understand why. New York City's grid plan far predates the automobile: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_181... Grids are sometimes but not always caused by cities being designed for cars.
- armandhammer 3y agoIt's the opposite, no? Cities / suburbs that were built after 1950 often don't have a grid system.
- crooked-v 3y agoThat's someone who's never actually had to drive in LA traffic. I only had to visit once for the experience of 3 straight hours of gridlock traffic just to get across the city to be seared into my brain.
- eredengrin 3y agoI'd say split it half and half, 6 months LA to learn the pain of the wrong way, then 6 months in a place with proper transit like Amsterdam or Seoul, then they come back with a vision of what could be.
- PaulHoule 3y agoLA is by no means the worst that America has to offer. At least within a 1 hour radius you have a staggering population and amount of commerce available. People visiting LA from "average" places in the U.S. will note that it's really dense, about as dense as the outer boroughs of New York City. If it's "sprawling" it is not because it is uneconomical in the use of space but because the whole area that is habitable is crammed with people. In Southern New Hampshire people drive almost as far although there is hardly anything to drive to. The confluence of Route 101 and I-93 south of Manchester is as bad as anything you'll find in a city 100 times Manchester's size leaving the question of where the hell all these cars are coming from and where they are going. (The answer is that the population is dispersed over a large area with a hierarchical road network that, as much as possible, wants to be like your lungs. Thus you always get stuck in traffic at several bottlenecks on your drive that you can't avoid.)
- PaulHoule 3y agoTry Massachusetts. You drive just as far, there are hardly any businesses to patronize on your commute (except for maybe two Dunkin Donuts), sometimes traffic is going 95 mph at 1am in the morning on Rt 128 in heavy rain, and it snows.
- systems_glitch 3y agoOut in route 128, down by the power lines.
- chrismcb 3y agoI lived in a place for most of my life that refused to build freeways "because they didn't want to become like LA" meanwhile more people moved there, traffic got worse. Going "across town" about 15 miles was a burden. You hated to do it. I then moved to a town that had a few freeways and 15 miles away was considered close. The town I grew up in, finally built some cross town roads, and travel time improved. I think you can have too many freeways, but you can definitely have to few
- xmprt 3y agoI think the problem with the town you grew up in is that they didn't build any good modes of transportation and not that they didn't build freeways. Sure freeways can fix the problem of people getting from point A to point B, but they're probably one of the worse ways to go about it. Street cars, bus rapid transit, metros, etc., are all better across the board even for the people who do want to drive because it allows non-drivers to get to point B without a car, thereby clearing up traffic for the drivers.
- chrismcb 3y agoIn a town that is very forward out, almost any form of public transportation is worse than cars. And while I agree that public transportation helps. My current turn has horrible transportation abs more freeways and it is far easier to get around in than my old town.
- angmarsbane 3y agoAustin?
- escapedmoose 3y agoI grew up in a similar place, which had too few freeways around it and navigating anywhere was a major headache. Now I live in a highly walkable town near a few freeways, and it’s much nicer; I can avoid driving altogether and walk/bike around town, or I can easily get to the nearby city by car. There’s a happy medium to be found.
- Slow_Hand 3y agoFunnily I live in LA and have a one-hour commute each way. But I drive a Vespa and am therefore limited to taking the side streets. I don’t mind it all that much, aside from the distance. One thing that helps is that motor bikes are permitted to split lanes and thus I can flow through congested traffic quite easily. It’s quite fun and I find that it allows me to enter a flow state more readily and it takes some of the edge off of the whole traffic experience because I get to keep moving.
- Lammy 3y agoIronically the reason LA's freeway traffic is so bad is because so much of the system was left unfinished: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-forgotten-freeways-20141028-htmlstory.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-forgotten-freeways-20141...
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoThe reason LA doesn't have bike lanes is that LA City Councilmembers have fought back bike lanes for years. It's zero sum thinking. The Councilmembers think that making driving worse for cyclists hurts the dominant mode so hurts the most people, even though many of the arterials in LA just cannot be expanded because of existing businesses, homes, and ROWs.
- msla 3y ago> Los Ángeles Why the accent? Is it not the one in California?
- TacticalCoder 3y agoThat's the spanish spelling of the city's name.
- thenewwazoo 3y agoAlmost certainly autocorrect. Bilingual devices sometimes forget (or mistake) the language you’re typing in. I’m typing this on a Spanish keyboard, for example.
- tvaughan 3y agoThis is the answer
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoReminds me of the runin I had with someone from San Rafael north of SF. They corrected me when I pronounced it as the spanish name it is. Apparently it's officially pronounced ra-fell, and they're adamant about it.
- systems_glitch 3y agoOur town is Buena Vista, the first word is pronounced "Bew-nuh" -- and it's not strictly local, horse saddles were produced here in the early 1900s until I guess sometime before WW2, and old-timers who worked horses in the surrounding states know the local pronunciation! The conflict aversion way to pronounce it is "BV" :P
- panzagl 3y agoIt's pronounced 'Bew-nuh' in both Virginia and Colorado.
- DANmode 3y ago
- sershe 3y agoSubjectively worse, not objectively worse. I think driving is much more convenient and nice for most things I like to do. The only exceptions I can think of are if I were a kid in a car-centric area (strangely, the thinking in the US is usually reversed, kids supposedly need to be in the burbs), or if I was drunk. I don't often get drunk, so I'd prefer to drive for everything from minor groceries to outdoor activities ~100% of the time.
- mbs159 3y agoIt is more convenient because city infrastructure in the US was designed specifically for the car, not for humans.
- badtension 3y agoObjectively we are still animals that need at least some movement. The environment described by the parent is hostile to our most basic needs.
- sershe 3y agoI find I'd much rather drive to the mountains, or a lake, or at least a nice big park, and recreate there. Walking to a store in Amsterdam or Munich or Vancouver or Moscow was neither much fun nor a lot of exercise.
- kaibee 3y ago> I find I'd much rather drive to the mountains, or a lake, or at least a nice big park, and recreate there. This is not a sustainable solution to population level health needs, even if maybe in your particular situation you do actually get enough vacation days and free time on weekends to be able to do this (I also doubt this).
- sershe 3y agoWell, a more sustainable solution is everyone exercising at home whenever they want in the way they want, or going for a run around the block. Going to the store by car + going for a run, is still faster and more convenient than walking to the store (per unit of exercise - e.g. driving to the store 10 times and running 2 miles vs walking 0.2 miles to the store).
- jjav 3y ago> Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they would have in Ámsterdam The (insane) cost of housing in LA doesn't exactly lead to people having bigger houses (or often affording any house).
- rconti 3y agoGotta imagine the cost per square foot is significantly less in LA than Amsterdam. Obviously depends where in "LA".