[kkhire]

'Getting around the city' culture is just different here in LA. There's folks in NYC who make half million a year and take the subway several times a day.

In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!

[deaddodo]

You're going for the wrong side of the chicken/egg.

People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.

The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.

Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone / read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).

[Seenso]

> The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.

And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general have a bad reputation, it's going to take a long period of sustained good & convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.

> Most people I know would rather ride the train.

One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.

[twblalock]

> One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.

Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.

[bluGill]

There is no reason any of those objections need to be true. They typically are, but you can make a train even worse than a bus.

[erik_seaberg]

Caltrain has a lot of trouble because people are constantly driving or walking onto the tracks. BART is either subway or elevated or fenced off between stations.

[naravara]

>People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.

Very true. There was an aphorism from (I think) the Mayor of Bogota who said something like "I'll consider the city prosperous not when everyone has their own car, but one where even the rich will happily take the train."

[Shivetya]

only better bus routes, preferential treatment for buses, and more routes, will alleviate the issue. light rail is a boondoggle for every city that has it with a combined near hundred billion dollar deferred maintenance tab across the US.

Light rail goes where it is politically beneficial and that rarely aligns where people need it. it the becomes such a money sink that other parts of the mass transit system are short changed to prop it up and in some cases bus routes are made worse in order to cajole people onto rail they don't want to use. then throw in the whole land cost and it just becomes silly, you could always raise the cost ten fold and go underground /s

[bluGill]

Light rail is the right investment when the existing buses running every 5 minutes typically have > 80 people on them. Most US routes didn't prove it with the bus first though which means they have no idea if it is true.

There is only other reason to run light rail: you are doing bridge over a route that doesn't have any road bridges and want to ensure drivers won't take the bridge over.

[toast0]

Getting around the city is a totally different problem in LA than NYC. Wikipedia says NYC is 303 square miles (784 square km), and just the city of LA is 469 square miles (1214 square km); but getting around LA doesn't usually mean getting around the incorporated city of LA, it means getting around the whole greater Los Angeles area, which is 33,954 square miles (87,940 square km). That's immense and fixed route transit is just not going to cover very many trips.

That said, the LA MTA trains do seem to get pretty significant ridership, and voter support, so it makes sense to me to keep building them. Some people are able to make it work for them, and I'd guess more people over time will be able to find housing and jobs near enough to the lines that it makes a difference for them.

I doubt it's going to make a significant dent in congestion, but it might bend the curve a bit. If you increase transit capacity, and you don't limit population growth, congestion is going to get worse over time. The LA area in general doesn't have the same general resistance to high density residential as the bay area, and there's also always a lot of single family housing going up on the edges, and of course, nothing stopping people from having more people in a single unit, so population growth seems to be a given.

[twblalock]

Unlike the LA system, the New York subway can get riders to most parts of the city. The LA system is only useful for a very limited set of routes.

[ng12]

That's because the trade-offs are worth it. Taxis are usually slower than the subway except for late night and early mornings.

[garmaine]

Public transit is supposed to be cheaper than a car...

[rolltiide]

tolls alleviate this, not an endorsement, but it isn't inaccurate that they help curb that mentality