[Sindrome]

I work on the West Side of Los Angeles. People honk at me when I cross the streets and they are in a hurry.

In Beverly Hills rich man-children with sports cars speed around with bumper stickers showing they donate to the Beverly Hill PD.

Just citing some high-level observations that show some issues.

[wutbrodo]

I moved to the bay from LA when I was 17, having lived in both relatively sense Beverly Hills and a relatively sparse part of the Valley. I instantly couldn't believe how much better quality of life could be when you're not surrounded by a fetish for car travel, no matter the cost. The creepiest part is the Stockholm's Syndrome exhibited by all my friends who couldn't make it out of LA[1]. The logical contortions they had to go through to convince themselves that the downsides of a car-centric city don't exist were laughable (while everyone I know who lived elsewhere would happily admit that upsides to a car-centric city exist, but argue that they weren't worth the tradeoff).

(I should note that this comparison is no longer as dramatic, since LA has started making at least certain areas denser and more accessible)

[1] I graduated college during a time when the LA economy was sputtering, while SF, NY, London, Seattle, etc were booming, so the only people who stayed in LA were the ones who didn't have much going on.

[toasterlovin]

Overall, I feel pretty ambiguous about public transit or bikes vs. cars. I see the hypothetical appeal of public transit and bikes, but I think their respective proponents ignore a lot of the convenience of a personal automobile.

That said, West LA is a fucking hellscape and the cars are mostly to blame for that.

[wutbrodo]

The problem isn't transit as much as layout. Build your cities relatively sanely instead of doing whatever the fuck LA does, and most transportation options end up reasonable. Build it as a sprawling, poorly-utilized asphalt stain on the landscape, and your hands are pretty tied.

SF is a pretty mismanaged city in general, but it's telling that complaints about transport are (IME) far less strident than complaints about everything else. There's a floor on how bad your transport experience can be based on the layout of the city: if there as gridlock on every street in San Francisco and all the subways were flooded, I could still easily walk to the equivalent of many, many square miles of a place like LA.