[tptacek]

I don't know that much about Los Angeles but did quietly presume that a lot of these problems are due to it being irretrievably screwed by terrible urban design: it seems like a place that's very hard to drive in (like New York) that is impossible to live in without driving (unlike New York).

Move to Chicago!

[jamra]

I've lived in LA for 27 years. The problem here is not the design of the city's grid. The problem is the lack of public transportation. The city is not a city like Chicago or New York is a city. LA is a bunch of suburbs dispersed across a very large land mass.

There are too many cars on the road and five lane freeways don't fix the issue. Traffic has been getting worse year by year. If they just offered an appropriate metro, I would take it. If they had busses that arrived more frequently than 30-40 minutes, I'd ride them. Add wifi and I may never drive again.

Maybe this will be the catalyst to finally solve the public transportation problems that ruin this city.

[ljd]

You are spot on. I lived in NYC for a few years for school and LA is just as crazy as NYC for traffic, except you have to drive.

[tptacek]

Here's another way to think about this:

Transit LA is irretrievably screwed by its design.

Traffic relief using residential streets is going to make things only marginally better for commuters (for the same reason that adding buffers to a router has diminishing returns).

Making full commuter use of residential streets is going to make things a lot worse, not just marginally but dramatically, for residents.

Meanwhile, the precedent that residential streets are part of the commuter transit fabric is eventually going to spread beyond the rich neighborhoods, right? That same idea is going to eventually harm lower and middle income residents of other neighborhoods that get coopted into the commuter transit system.