[melling]

Venice to Torrance is about 20 miles? Commuting great distances of 20-30 miles to work will hopefully be solved sometime in the latter half of the 21st century.

I don't think most people in America suffer in quite the same way. Ok, the NYC area can be that bad but most people use mass transit. Maybe there's room to make the roads even wider in CA?

Seriously, the problem is self-inflicted and was easily avoidable with some better urban planning 4-5 decades ago.

[pchristensen]

s/urban planning/less restrictive zoning/

LA has great transportation bones and layouts (http://www.humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-...), but it cannot densify, so it's stuck at a bad level of too dense for cars to work well but not dense enough to be primarily transit based. Metro LA is denser than metro Boston, SF, or Chicago.

[droidist2]

True, and sadly LA is more dense than like 95% of the places people live in the US (including "cities" like Houston, Phoenix, and Jacksonville). If they can't make transit work in LA, that's pretty bleak.

[mullingitover]

It's not really fair to compare LA county to single cities. LA county contains something like 80+ cities that grew into each other.

[ChrisNorstrom]

"You have to have a car in LA" is little by little becoming outdated. We rented a car for our 3 day vacation in LA and ended up ditching it and taking the light rail and subway everywhere. Even the little shuttle bus up to the Griffith observatory to see the Hollywood sign. And it's only $5 for a day pass. It saved us a lot of time, gas, & parking money. LA's rail services are spotless as well. The only thing that's missing is the density to truly make it a city and not just one big crowded suburb.