[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.