3 ms·

Exactly. LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately it just isn’t now and un-informed Europeans who haven’t

Exactly. LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately it just isn’t now and un-informed Europeans who haven’t even visited just can’t or won’t understand how ridiculous they sound when they say we should just put in mass transit. Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people Europeans, I’ll wait.

alephnerd 3y ago
Plenty of Europeans live in sprawly cities too. It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media. Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center. But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion). It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto" Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.
- paradox460 3y ago
  Don't the Palo Alto crowd send their kids to Harker?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Nope. Harker tends to skews new money and Asian American because it has an entrance exam (SSAT and ISEE), has merit based admissions, and gives scholarships if you have good grades and do well in the exam. Old Money Palo goes to Woodlands, Woodside Priory, and Menlo School, or Palo Alto High Lots of parents would buy houses or rent in crappy parts of East SJ to save enough money to sends both kids to Harker The reason that new money (like me) tries to buy a house in Palo is so we can send our kids to PAUSD. A lot of the born and raised crowd who were kids of hippies are fairly racist to the newer generation of Asian, Pacific Islander, Israeli+Eastern European, and Latino Americans on the Peninsula. At this point I might as well buy a semi-rural house in San Benito County and spend the same amount donating a couple department libraries and Named Lecturer positions to my Alma mater for legacy benefits tbh.
eqvinox 3y ago
It took a few decades to get this bad, it'll probably take a few decades to get good again. But if you never start, it'll never be good again. And people were displaced to build highways, why would you rule that out for mass transit?
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Because it was fucked up that they were displaced for highways. Jesus.
  - eqvinox 3y ago
    This is still how highways (and other public infrastructure) are built now, both in the US and EU. Unfortunately, affluent communities are frequently able to unduly influence these procedures to get them moved elsewhere. That's the real fucked up part.
Someone 3y ago
> LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s In 1920, the population of LA was less than 600,000 (https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php), and the built up area was a lot smaller (https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a-s-population-boom-at-the-turn-of-the-20th-century https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a...) I guess its population density also was quite a bit higher, making it harder to serve the population well with public transport using vehicles that can transport many people at a time. > Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people Having said that, mass transit includes buses. There are zillions of roads in LA. On the main roads dedicate one lane in each direction to buses or, better, light rail. Main problem will be how people would get to stations. You could change one lane on minor roads to a bidirectional bike lane, but such bike lanes would not only be unattractive to ride on, but also dangerous because they’d frequently cross huge roads. So, I don’t think that would solve this problem well enough.

alephnerd 3y ago

Plenty of Europeans live in sprawly cities too. It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media. Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center. But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion). It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto" Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.

paradox460 3y ago
Don't the Palo Alto crowd send their kids to Harker?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Nope. Harker tends to skews new money and Asian American because it has an entrance exam (SSAT and ISEE), has merit based admissions, and gives scholarships if you have good grades and do well in the exam. Old Money Palo goes to Woodlands, Woodside Priory, and Menlo School, or Palo Alto High Lots of parents would buy houses or rent in crappy parts of East SJ to save enough money to sends both kids to Harker The reason that new money (like me) tries to buy a house in Palo is so we can send our kids to PAUSD. A lot of the born and raised crowd who were kids of hippies are fairly racist to the newer generation of Asian, Pacific Islander, Israeli+Eastern European, and Latino Americans on the Peninsula. At this point I might as well buy a semi-rural house in San Benito County and spend the same amount donating a couple department libraries and Named Lecturer positions to my Alma mater for legacy benefits tbh.

eqvinox 3y ago

It took a few decades to get this bad, it'll probably take a few decades to get good again. But if you never start, it'll never be good again. And people were displaced to build highways, why would you rule that out for mass transit?

throwaway5959 3y ago
Because it was fucked up that they were displaced for highways. Jesus.
- eqvinox 3y ago
  This is still how highways (and other public infrastructure) are built now, both in the US and EU. Unfortunately, affluent communities are frequently able to unduly influence these procedures to get them moved elsewhere. That's the real fucked up part.

Someone 3y ago

> LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s In 1920, the population of LA was less than 600,000 (https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php), and the built up area was a lot smaller (https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a-s-population-boom-at-the-turn-of-the-20th-century https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a...) I guess its population density also was quite a bit higher, making it harder to serve the population well with public transport using vehicles that can transport many people at a time. > Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people Having said that, mass transit includes buses. There are zillions of roads in LA. On the main roads dedicate one lane in each direction to buses or, better, light rail. Main problem will be how people would get to stations. You could change one lane on minor roads to a bidirectional bike lane, but such bike lanes would not only be unattractive to ride on, but also dangerous because they’d frequently cross huge roads. So, I don’t think that would solve this problem well enough.