5 ms·
Every 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 an
by grecy 3y ago
Every 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.
- chmod775 3y agoMaybe you should be stressed? The point might be that environments where you're not stressed because they lull you into a false sense of security tend to kill more pedestrians. You're moving tons of metal at high speeds. Don't get too comfortable doing that.
- hulitu 3y agoYet some cyclists have no issue going with high speed through children on those streets.
- chmod775 3y agoWhat is the point here? We shouldn't build roads that are proven to be safer... because some cyclists are idiots?
- tremon 3y agoI have also seen cars go 60+ km/h through traffic-calmed cul-de-sacs where children were playing on the street. Are you saying that only cyclists emulate Carmageddon in real life?
- 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.