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Apologies for looking at everything through startup-colored glasses, but my first thought on reading this was that LA is going to have a hard time becoming a st

by pg 13y ago

Apologies for looking at everything through startup-colored glasses, but my first thought on reading this was that LA is going to have a hard time becoming a startup hub with attitudes like this. The hackers and designers that startups want to hire seem to be disproportionately likely to want to travel on foot or by bike. So they like to live in cities where you can do that, and dislike car-centric cities. There is a bigger trend here though. As several recent studies have shown, people in their 20s are turning against cars. So a city that favors cars at the expense of pedestrians and bicycles is also one that favors the old at the expense of the young.

mjn 13y ago
Do you guess that's also the driver behind startups gravitating more lately towards walk/transit-oriented SF and Oakland, and away from the car-centric Valley? Or is something else at work there?
toomuchtodo 13y ago
Should every city gravitate towards catering to startup culture? Will we witness large major metro areas trying to move swiftly with regards to policy decisions, attempting to outdo each other? Interesting times.
9999 13y ago
Los Angeles consists of a lot of cities within cities. The downtown core is actually remarkably accomodating for pedestrians, train riders, and bike riders with the exception of this stupid and wrongheaded new enforcement policy. It's funny that Eric Garcetti and many other LA boosters keep trying to create the "Silicon Beach" when downtown, Koreatown, and Culver City all have far superior environments for startups when you consider cost of living, cost of office space, public transit and walkability. Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo and Venice are horrible in comparison.
- fudgekludge 13y ago
  Weather, weather, weather. The "silicon beach" is 10 to 15 degrees cooler than downtown on a summer day with noticeably less smog. For many the west side is where its at,
  - mixmastamyk 13y ago
    It can be too cold at times. The (SF) Valley is horrible, Westside a bit chilly... Hollywood to Downtown perfect, best weather in the world (unless you like rain).
    - subsection1h 13y ago
      > Westside a bit chilly... Hollywood to Downtown perfect, best weather in the world Do you exercise outdoors? Would you seriously prefer to run at Griffith Park rather than on The Strand? When I lived in LA, everyone who preferred the weather east of the 405 didn't exercise outdoors (if at all). They would ask, "Isn't the weather beautiful today?" after walking for less than 30 seconds from their air conditioned car to our air conditioned office. (I've long since moved from LA to the Pacific Northwest, where I can work up a comfortable sweat hiking Mount Rainier.)
      - mixmastamyk 13y ago
        I ride my bike up to the Observatory a few times a week. There is a stretch from Aug to Sept or so where I need to be done by 11am (or start late afternoon). Every year is a bit different though... sometimes there is not much of a winter, sometimes the summer is mild, sometimes almost hellish... luck of the draw I guess. In any case I can usually count on about 3/4 of the year being sunny, 80F, and low humidity. I've traveled but have not seen better.
  - saym 13y ago
    I agree weather is an important factor. I live on the west side, about a mile from the beach, and commute to Culver city by bicycle. I'm lucky there is a bike path that accommodates me in the least bike accommodating city. To the previous commenter's point: Culver City has it all in terms of food, rental space, and access to the (albeit lacking) LA Metro.
- dabent 13y ago
  That's one thing I've noticed as well. There's certainly cheaper office space and cheaper living in other parts of LA, but somehow cost of living seems to have an inverse relationship with startups, with the biggest hubs being Silicon Valley/SF, NYC, and Boston.
wh-uws 13y ago
While I totally agree many hackers and designers want to bike, walk, and mass transit, I've visited LA recently (I stayed a week to see if I might live there) and I can tell you that many of those types actually live and work in Santa Monica which is quite bike and ped friendly. I have a friend who is working on a startup there ( http://www.homehero.org/ http://www.homehero.org/ ) out of one of the coworking spaces. He bikes to work.
mapgrep 13y ago
> The hackers and designers that startups want to hire seem to be disproportionately likely to want to travel on foot or by bike Startups clustered first in the aggressively car-centric suburbs of Silicon Valley and in large part remain there. Even the YC offices are a long slog from Caltrain, on foot through big streets clogged with cars and parking lots. If Mountain View can attract startups why can't LA? I don't even agree with these jaywalking fines but there seem to be at least as many car lovers among my startup friends as my writer pals. (More, actually, when you factor in all the friends who live in NY.)
- jrockway 13y ago
  Mountain View is pretty bike-friendly, and even won some sort of award for being so. (According to some sign I saw while biking in Mountain View.) It's no Portland, but drivers seem pretty attentive. Of course, I bet the average Mountain View startup founder owns a car.
- pg 13y ago
  Actually Palo Alto is an exceptionally bike-friendly place. I wouldn't live in a town that wasn't. I've never seen a town in the US where a higher percentage of students bicycled to school, or serious cycling was a hobby of more adults. (Bicycling has for years been the cool sport among VCs, for example.) And as for YC, it's less than a mile from the Caltrain, in weather that is almost always dry and warm, mostly along roads that are pretty empty of cars. A lot of the founders we fund never get cars during the 3 month cycle, because they can get everywhere by bike and Caltrain.
  - mjn 13y ago
    Palo Also is comparatively good for its area, but bicycling's modal share among commute options even there is quite low, hovering around 10%. Partly that's because many people who live in Palo Alto work elsewhere, and vice versa. In other cities on the peninsula it doesn't even crack 5%; nearly everyone who lives or works in Santa Clara or Sunnyvale drives, for example (biking's modal share is <2%). Mountain View is somewhere in between, at ~6%. Those numbers aren't inconsistent with it being possible to bike in those cities, but they suggest that people in practice don't. Here's a map: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/8007583135/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/8007583135/ Infrastructurally, it's quite noticeable as well. The Valley doesn't feel like a bike- or pedstrian-friendly place, but like a place criss-crossed by huge roads, giant parking lots, and not only interstates and state freeways, but county expressways, something I've rarely seen elsewhere (apparently the Peninsula opted out of BART and took the money that would've been spent there, to build abominations like the San Tomas and Lawrence expressways, instead). I remember walking from Mountain View Caltrain to the Microsoft campus on La Avenida once for a SuperHappyDevHouse, and it clearly did not seem like a route anyone ever expected a pedestrian to walk on.
jboggan 13y ago
This is why Santa Monica and Venice are much closer to the startup center of gravity than Los Angeles proper is. My parents have been visiting here (Santa Monica) for Christmas and it has been very easy to do everything without having a car. The neighborhoods along the coast are very walkable, and when you infrequently need to change locales there's always Über. I only have a motorcycle to commute a few miles to Century City, but on the weekends it stays parked and pedestrian transport reigns. Googlers are even luckier with their Venice office, it's smack dab in the middle of a thriving pedestrian neighborhood.
- teleclimber 13y ago
  This map of LA startups does indeed show where the center of gravity lies: http://represent.la/ http://represent.la/
  - jboggan 13y ago
    Fascinating, thanks! We (Factual) recently moved offices but stayed in Century City because we like the locale so much. But our employees are distributed all around LA and it is a relatively central location for them. Most drive but several are switching to (dangerous) bicycling and taking the bus.
dabent 13y ago
I've been living in LA for a while now and one thing I've noticed is that the area commonly referred to as "LA" is huge and that things can vary considerably from one part of town to another. The real "startup" hub in the Los Angeles area seems to be in Santa Monica, far from downtown LA, where the crackdown in the article seems to be taking place, and outside the jurisdiction of LAPD. It's home of many startups, near UCLA and home of at least one incubator (Mucker Lab). I've worked in Santa Monica during my time here and it's surprisingly bike and pedestrian friendly (as are most of the beach cities). I don't currently work at a startup, but the my current employer has indoor bike rakes that are well used as did my previous (startup) employer. Startups chose this part of town over downtown LA, or other parts of town for many reasons, in spite of high rents for office space. They do so for many reasons, but I have a feeling that one is the ability for folks to get to work in a variety of ways, including on foot or by bike.
- sologoub 13y ago
  The new Expo rail also helps SM/Silicon Beach be much more of the hub. The SM deal included a bike path that connects to existing SM bike paths, taking you all the way to the beach. From there, you can very safely bike all the way to Manhattan Beach and beyond (the path runs along the beach without any cars). Your only point of exposure to cars is transitioning from Marina del Rey to Playa del Rey. All-in-all, the beach cities are awesome, but costs easily compete with the best of SF, especially if you like the newer, more modern stuff closer to the beach...
deleted 13y ago
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im_a_lawyer 13y ago
>> As several recent studies have shown, people in their 20s are turning against cars. That is such a misleading statistic. Of course young people are moving to the city centers, but what happens when they're in their 30s and with kids? Back to suburbia again because the going rate for 2 bedrooms in NYC is insane... People as a whole aren't ditching suburbia yet.

by pg 13y ago

mjn 13y ago

Do you guess that's also the driver behind startups gravitating more lately towards walk/transit-oriented SF and Oakland, and away from the car-centric Valley? Or is something else at work there?

toomuchtodo 13y ago

Should every city gravitate towards catering to startup culture? Will we witness large major metro areas trying to move swiftly with regards to policy decisions, attempting to outdo each other? Interesting times.

9999 13y ago

Los Angeles consists of a lot of cities within cities. The downtown core is actually remarkably accomodating for pedestrians, train riders, and bike riders with the exception of this stupid and wrongheaded new enforcement policy. It's funny that Eric Garcetti and many other LA boosters keep trying to create the "Silicon Beach" when downtown, Koreatown, and Culver City all have far superior environments for startups when you consider cost of living, cost of office space, public transit and walkability. Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo and Venice are horrible in comparison.

fudgekludge 13y ago
Weather, weather, weather. The "silicon beach" is 10 to 15 degrees cooler than downtown on a summer day with noticeably less smog. For many the west side is where its at,
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  It can be too cold at times. The (SF) Valley is horrible, Westside a bit chilly... Hollywood to Downtown perfect, best weather in the world (unless you like rain).
  - subsection1h 13y ago
    > Westside a bit chilly... Hollywood to Downtown perfect, best weather in the world Do you exercise outdoors? Would you seriously prefer to run at Griffith Park rather than on The Strand? When I lived in LA, everyone who preferred the weather east of the 405 didn't exercise outdoors (if at all). They would ask, "Isn't the weather beautiful today?" after walking for less than 30 seconds from their air conditioned car to our air conditioned office. (I've long since moved from LA to the Pacific Northwest, where I can work up a comfortable sweat hiking Mount Rainier.)
    - mixmastamyk 13y ago
      I ride my bike up to the Observatory a few times a week. There is a stretch from Aug to Sept or so where I need to be done by 11am (or start late afternoon). Every year is a bit different though... sometimes there is not much of a winter, sometimes the summer is mild, sometimes almost hellish... luck of the draw I guess. In any case I can usually count on about 3/4 of the year being sunny, 80F, and low humidity. I've traveled but have not seen better.
- saym 13y ago
  I agree weather is an important factor. I live on the west side, about a mile from the beach, and commute to Culver city by bicycle. I'm lucky there is a bike path that accommodates me in the least bike accommodating city. To the previous commenter's point: Culver City has it all in terms of food, rental space, and access to the (albeit lacking) LA Metro.
dabent 13y ago
That's one thing I've noticed as well. There's certainly cheaper office space and cheaper living in other parts of LA, but somehow cost of living seems to have an inverse relationship with startups, with the biggest hubs being Silicon Valley/SF, NYC, and Boston.

wh-uws 13y ago

While I totally agree many hackers and designers want to bike, walk, and mass transit, I've visited LA recently (I stayed a week to see if I might live there) and I can tell you that many of those types actually live and work in Santa Monica which is quite bike and ped friendly. I have a friend who is working on a startup there ( http://www.homehero.org/ http://www.homehero.org/ ) out of one of the coworking spaces. He bikes to work.

mapgrep 13y ago

> The hackers and designers that startups want to hire seem to be disproportionately likely to want to travel on foot or by bike Startups clustered first in the aggressively car-centric suburbs of Silicon Valley and in large part remain there. Even the YC offices are a long slog from Caltrain, on foot through big streets clogged with cars and parking lots. If Mountain View can attract startups why can't LA? I don't even agree with these jaywalking fines but there seem to be at least as many car lovers among my startup friends as my writer pals. (More, actually, when you factor in all the friends who live in NY.)

jrockway 13y ago
Mountain View is pretty bike-friendly, and even won some sort of award for being so. (According to some sign I saw while biking in Mountain View.) It's no Portland, but drivers seem pretty attentive. Of course, I bet the average Mountain View startup founder owns a car.
pg 13y ago
Actually Palo Alto is an exceptionally bike-friendly place. I wouldn't live in a town that wasn't. I've never seen a town in the US where a higher percentage of students bicycled to school, or serious cycling was a hobby of more adults. (Bicycling has for years been the cool sport among VCs, for example.) And as for YC, it's less than a mile from the Caltrain, in weather that is almost always dry and warm, mostly along roads that are pretty empty of cars. A lot of the founders we fund never get cars during the 3 month cycle, because they can get everywhere by bike and Caltrain.
- mjn 13y ago
  Palo Also is comparatively good for its area, but bicycling's modal share among commute options even there is quite low, hovering around 10%. Partly that's because many people who live in Palo Alto work elsewhere, and vice versa. In other cities on the peninsula it doesn't even crack 5%; nearly everyone who lives or works in Santa Clara or Sunnyvale drives, for example (biking's modal share is <2%). Mountain View is somewhere in between, at ~6%. Those numbers aren't inconsistent with it being possible to bike in those cities, but they suggest that people in practice don't. Here's a map: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/8007583135/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/8007583135/ Infrastructurally, it's quite noticeable as well. The Valley doesn't feel like a bike- or pedstrian-friendly place, but like a place criss-crossed by huge roads, giant parking lots, and not only interstates and state freeways, but county expressways, something I've rarely seen elsewhere (apparently the Peninsula opted out of BART and took the money that would've been spent there, to build abominations like the San Tomas and Lawrence expressways, instead). I remember walking from Mountain View Caltrain to the Microsoft campus on La Avenida once for a SuperHappyDevHouse, and it clearly did not seem like a route anyone ever expected a pedestrian to walk on.

jboggan 13y ago

This is why Santa Monica and Venice are much closer to the startup center of gravity than Los Angeles proper is. My parents have been visiting here (Santa Monica) for Christmas and it has been very easy to do everything without having a car. The neighborhoods along the coast are very walkable, and when you infrequently need to change locales there's always Über. I only have a motorcycle to commute a few miles to Century City, but on the weekends it stays parked and pedestrian transport reigns. Googlers are even luckier with their Venice office, it's smack dab in the middle of a thriving pedestrian neighborhood.

teleclimber 13y ago
This map of LA startups does indeed show where the center of gravity lies: http://represent.la/ http://represent.la/
- jboggan 13y ago
  Fascinating, thanks! We (Factual) recently moved offices but stayed in Century City because we like the locale so much. But our employees are distributed all around LA and it is a relatively central location for them. Most drive but several are switching to (dangerous) bicycling and taking the bus.

dabent 13y ago

I've been living in LA for a while now and one thing I've noticed is that the area commonly referred to as "LA" is huge and that things can vary considerably from one part of town to another. The real "startup" hub in the Los Angeles area seems to be in Santa Monica, far from downtown LA, where the crackdown in the article seems to be taking place, and outside the jurisdiction of LAPD. It's home of many startups, near UCLA and home of at least one incubator (Mucker Lab). I've worked in Santa Monica during my time here and it's surprisingly bike and pedestrian friendly (as are most of the beach cities). I don't currently work at a startup, but the my current employer has indoor bike rakes that are well used as did my previous (startup) employer. Startups chose this part of town over downtown LA, or other parts of town for many reasons, in spite of high rents for office space. They do so for many reasons, but I have a feeling that one is the ability for folks to get to work in a variety of ways, including on foot or by bike.

sologoub 13y ago
The new Expo rail also helps SM/Silicon Beach be much more of the hub. The SM deal included a bike path that connects to existing SM bike paths, taking you all the way to the beach. From there, you can very safely bike all the way to Manhattan Beach and beyond (the path runs along the beach without any cars). Your only point of exposure to cars is transitioning from Marina del Rey to Playa del Rey. All-in-all, the beach cities are awesome, but costs easily compete with the best of SF, especially if you like the newer, more modern stuff closer to the beach...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

im_a_lawyer 13y ago

>> As several recent studies have shown, people in their 20s are turning against cars. That is such a misleading statistic. Of course young people are moving to the city centers, but what happens when they're in their 30s and with kids? Back to suburbia again because the going rate for 2 bedrooms in NYC is insane... People as a whole aren't ditching suburbia yet.