Imagine how much more expensive living in LA will be. Instead of fixing their god awful public transit (like NYC) they want to punish people for using the only reliable mode of transportation?
No. You are thinking about it wrong. By making it cost prohibitive for the poors to move around we will be able to concentrate their populations into designated "bottom feeder" neighborhoods allowing us to more effectively rob them of basic public services like education, healthcare, and potable water.
You forgot regressive forms of taxation. So increase the street sweeping to 3x a week in the bottom-feeder neighborhoods, and issue 3x the number of street sweeping violations.
Hyperbole aside, when you see gentrification in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, one has to wonder how numbered are the days of LA's poor neighborhoods.
I figured this comment carried enough satire to not need explanation. He was using an offensive tone to carry over the implicated apathy that city planning has on the impoverished.
I think based on the rest of the context that was kind of the point - to drive home the "screw these people" attitude that policies like this would spring from.
sigh I am surprised how much I misread that comment. I think I just saw 'the poors' and I didn't properly read the rest of the comment at first glance.
They're already paying for it. The injustice is that even people too poor to drive pay an undue amount. Sit on the packed 720 crawling down Wilshire blvd at rush hour and realize those people have just as much right to get around. I need to find the source but a few years ago, more people got down Wilshire in buses during rush hour than in cars, yet the condo canyon folks screamed and wailed about the prospect of a bus lane.
By far the most efficient mechanism humanity has ever come up with for distributing scarce resources (such as room on freeways) are free markets. The article is 100% correct that pervasive tolls are the only effective and fair way to reduce what has become monumentally oppressive traffic congestion in LA.
Tolls are a monopoly granted by the government, which makes it the opposite of a free market. The real result of a free market would be private roads or highways that would compete against each other for tolls. Neither are a great solution. Simply throwing more public transportation at the problem isn't going to help either.
If LA wants to improve their traffic problem, they need to address the root cause: bad urban planning and zoning laws. Where people work and where people live are in completely different areas of the city, requiring you to commute. They need to make local traffic easier (ie: not force you onto the freeway) and they need to reduce the need to drive all over the city every single day.
People will use free highways until they're at capacity. Throwing more public transportation at the problem does increase the number of people that can travel down the freeway, but it won't reduce traffic because any car taken off the highway by a driver switching to public transit will be replaced by another driver taking up the commute.
How are you going to get people to invest in public transit without getting them out of their cars?
LA is hands down the worst major metro area I've been to when it comes to transit, and getting people off the roads will only improve that situation—carpooling, public transit, biking, and hell WALKING are all better options.
Ehh idk. I've lived in a couple major cities, and moved here to LA in 2015. It's not as terrible is it might seem on the surface. One of the major differences that sets Los Angeles apart from other cities is that people tend to live quite far from work because of housing costs and geography. I'm fortunate that I can take the bus (for now) and often take the Expo Line downtown to go to Kings games, but I know a lot of people that live in Playa or El Segundo and work in downtown, or even the Valley. That just isn't a realistic option for them. I think people have to see Public Transit as a reliable replacement before we introduce some forcing mechanism for them to sell their vehicle.
I think LA is probably a market that most uniquely fits for self driving cars (depending on whatever business model emerges for those things). Thing is, I can't imagine the special kind of road rage that'll emerge when you're driving on the 405 and look to your left and right and see a completely empty vehicle.
LA is 35 miles long. What would the walking commute of 10 million people look like?
So you're suggesting that instead of fixing the problem (public transit) they should start whipping people so that the rich can drive on their traffic-free roads?
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy. A sensible toll would be something anyone who can afford to own a car can be expected pay.
The point of tolls is not to make roads exclusive for the wealthy
But that's exactly what it accomplishes. Further pushing the poor into poverty punishing the commute to a minimum wage job in a part of town they can't afford.
Not to mention that the very same person will sometimes WANT to pay a toll for an uncongested lane. Running late for an interview? Maybe $15 is worth it to go 70mph for 20 miles at 8:30 AM.
The long tail very often has to "ride on fumes" until payday. Unless the tolls are literally cheaper than the fuel cost of idling in traffic, the result will be to punish those uppity poor for imagining they could afford a car (which they could previously afford, if just barely).
Some people don't have any room in their budget for anything! Any time you charge people $N for something that used to cost $0, the poor get hit the worst and the rich don't get affected at all.
"the poor people" is such a wide brush. How about it would make middle class people think about their budgets carefully and only drive when really needed.
The metro isn't that bad. I commuted from Hollywood to Torrance by metro/bus daily for a few years. The metro fare cost me more than gas actually but staying off the 110 was golden.
The argument for public transportation in Los Angeles is a continuing theme...and it is also one that is nonsensical in the context of this city.
The city of Los Angeles, and by that I mean the sprawling megalopolis it really is, simply isn't built for public transportation. A fundamental shift in urban design of massive proportions would have to occur for mass transportation to make dent here.
In order to affect this massive re-modelling of the city one would have to use eminent domain laws to force millions of people to sell their properties and move. You would literally have to displace millions of people in order to build the required roadways and infrastructure that would allow a shift towards mass transit. This, of course isn't only unthinkable, it's impossible.
Take the "simplest" (in quotes because I am being sarcastic about the actual simplicity) of all problems: Where do you park your car?
Mass transit isn't going to reach into every suburban neighborhood. And, no, people are not going to ride bicycles. If we want an Amsterdam-like bicycle culture we would have to displace even more people. And then you'd have to build massive bike parking lots like the one next to Centraal station in Amsterdam.
People would need to drive a cars to a parking lot somewhere. Millions of people. There is no space to build these parking lots and the required rail in/out pathways without destroying whole neighborhood en-masse.
Once you get to work you'd have to be able to get from the station to your workplace. Once again, if we want this to be within walking or biking distance of most businesses we would have to tear-up whole neighborhoods in order to enable the tentacles of a mass transit infrastructure to get close enough.
And then there's the cost. I won't even bother trying to estimate it. What's the cost of buying-up, I don't know, 100,000 homes? Include both the real estate and legal costs ('cause there would be tens of thousands of lawsuits). And, once all homes are acquired and millions displaced, what's the cost of construction.
Nah, LA isn't suitable for mass transit in the spirit of many European cities. The comparison is futile.
What we could do is try to encourage --over time-- a spreading out of centers of employment. This can be done NY style by offering no taxes for ten years for the relocation or startup of businesses in designated areas. There's a huge focal point of businesses in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor that creates massive traffic flows from as far away as 50 miles in every direction. That's the problem.
Most of those businesses don't need to be there. Why some flock to that corridor is somewhat incomprehensible to me other than there might be lack of space availability or zoning issues much outside that region.
It's a tough problem. Not sure tunneling is the solution either.
Baloney. Just add a bunch of buses, with exclusive bus lanes covering their whole route. Choose the initial routes so they'll at least break even.
Bam, you have a good public transit system that is much faster than private cars due to being immune to traffic, and you didn't have to confiscate any property, build anything expensive, or do anything else exciting or risky.
Everyone's obsessed with rail, and rail is nice, but if you already have roads rapid bus transit makes more sense in the short run
You must not live in Los Angeles. If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably. In some places you can't due to the topology of the roads.
Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
There are no good mass transit solutions in Los Angeles. I've lived here long enough to see and analyze what is happening from multiple vantage points. We lived by the beach, desert, inland and in a couple of valleys. It's a mess. This megalopolis did not evolve to be mass transit friendly.
I say this with sadness because there's nothing I'd like more than not to own a car. I am simply being a realist on this one.
> If you took a lane away on every freeway the mayhem you'd create would be indescribably.
Really? Because all those lanes that have been added over the years don't appear to have made a big difference.
Also, the lane would be replaced with something amazing angelinos have never seen before -- a transport mode way faster than any other. With all the people choosing to use that bus, there'll be less car traffic. Saving half an hour has a way of turning excuses like "the bus is crowded" into jelly.
(Also, if it turns out you're right, lane rules and hours can be adjusted immediately with just a little paint or a sign. This is not risky.)
> Besides, buses will guarantee that it will take three hours to move a handful of miles because they would have to get on and off the freeways at regular intervals and brave street level congestion while then making stops
Um, don't use the freeway then, except where it's genuinely more direct. Then you don't have to take lanes away anyway.
> at non-existing parking lots (they don't exist now) to pick-up and drop off people.
Are you kidding? There's so much space in wasted parking lots for individual businesses, or even street space on these huge wide roads, any of which could be reclaimed.
> You must not live in Los Angeles.
Correct! If I did, I'd be afflicted by the same sad disease as you, lack of imagination.
Fact is, we make it work here in metro NYC, which is as big and sprawled out as LA -- probably more actually. If we can do it, so can you. (Note that by metro NYC I don't mean manhattan and the like, I mean to emphasize the outer parts, the 4 boroughs and 3 detached counties (Westchester, Bergen, Hudson) surrounding manhattan.
I invite you to come tour outer NYC, and see what you think
They don't even need to say no taxes in certain areas. All that has to be done is allow other uses in residential areas. An area that previously just had loads of houses could then have a commercial building. Businesses would do it because it is much cheaper than building in zoned commercial or leasing in a skyscraper. Just alter zoning laws and it would be much better.