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Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents
KindMind writes According to AP, Waze has caused trouble for LA residents by redirecting traffic from Interstate 405 to neighborhood side streets paralleling the interstate. From the article: "When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled. When word spread that the explosively popular new smartphone app Waze was sending many of those cars through their neighborhood in a quest to shave five minutes off a daily rush-hour commute, they were angry and ready to fight back. They would outsmart the app, some said, by using it to report phony car crashes and traffic jams on their streets that would keep the shortcut-seekers away. Months later, the cars are still there, and the people are still mad."
Google Maps used to send you down random side streets thinking it would save 3 minutes, which it often didn't (my least favorite was when it took you on a route that ended up requiring you to take an unprotected left through traffic, something that on its own easily ate any time savings and more). I notice they're a bit more conservative on that in the past few years; they only tell me to hop off the freeway and take a surface street when it's really going to save a significant amount of time.
The real solution for this neighborhood, though, is to complain to their local politicians. If the neighborhood isn't intended to be a through route, it's pretty easy to make it unattractive as a through route, e.g. by making some of the streets one-way. That's not uncommon at all in traffic planning.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They should add a gang shooting feature to waze. I'm sure if people learn that their route has gang shootings they won't take that path ... or maybe they would ;)
I feel like they should have the voice of Elvis as the nav voice for all the ghettos it takes you through.
That's when the local government needs to slap up a no thru traffic sign, and the local police need to camp out and write tickets as fast as they can until the traffic thins out.
Or petition your city to reduce the number of streets that can be used to enter the neighborhood or to exit it. I the traffic commute predominately flows one direction, make the neighborhood flow the opposite direction, so that there's no benefit to driving through.
I've seen this done around shopping malls, sports stadiums, popular downtowns that have festivals, all sorts of places where the neighborhood itself doesn't have 'destinations' in it. It just requires a civic-minded neighborhood to make the effort, rather than to just sit at home and do nothing about it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Our local paper took a slow news day to post "the best shortcuts during heavy traffic" screwing everything up. Now everybody jams on the side roads the second they see tail lights.
Speed bumps. Waze has done some strange rerouting taking me into the Bay Area. Instead of keeping me on US101 through the admittedly heavy slog by San Jose airport, it wants me to get in a long line of metered traffic to get on 85, then get on the heavily congested 87 freeway and then get in another massive line of metered traffic to rejoin US 101 right at the end of the runway.
I think Waze will improve, but for now, I only depend on it for rerouting around accidents.
App or no app, traffic in cities and suburbs is something that is going to need to be dealt with somehow. Cities like Boston or New York at least have a workable public transit system to keep some cars off the roads. LA is totally different -- it was built around cars and is only now getting a very small set of public transit choices. Buses do nothing when they're stuck in the same traffic everyone else is. Whenever I go to California for work (either northern or southern,) it amazes me how much people put up with to live there. I would go nuts spending 2 hours doing a 10 mile trip each direction every day.
Some trends are encouraging from a traffic perspective, but maybe not from a demographic one. Younger people aren't buying suburban houses and having big families the way they used to, so it's possible cities will become denser like they are in Europe. The big thing that has to stop, especially in mid-size cities, is the suburban sprawl. The ability to expand for miles in every direction directly contributes to messy traffic problems. Urban planners need to look into reclaiming hollowed-out cities and first ring suburbs, and getting people to move back into them.
This is a simple case of knowledge as power.
Telling people they shouldn't use software to avoid freeway traffic is like telling black slaves they can't read because they might learn what it's like to have a life outside the plantation.
Knowledge exists whether or not you want it to and you can't force ignorance.
If someone discovers a way to improve their life in a way that is perfectly legal and legitimate, such as driving down a street in front of your house, you have no right to complain.
I appreciate the frustration of people taking alternative routes right through "their" neighborhood. However, these are public streets, not specifically "theirs". While you could argue tax dollars pay for those streets, ultimately it pays for the entire transportation system. Overloaded freeways are a huge problem - and how many municipalities are expanding (or can expand) the size of these arteries in order to handle the traffic? No one wants to pay for them, but everyone wants to use them. If you want the cars to leave, then vote for more projects in transportation and put your money where your mouth is.
Where i grew up, everything was laid out in a grid, so cutting through a neighborhood was normal and no big deal. Now I live in CA, and EVERY neighborhood is designed to prevent that with curves and limited ins/outs. Very infuriating.
Good-bye
'nuff said.
TFA explains why that won't work.
We have the same problem where I live (spoiler: not LA), and the solution is pretty easy. Traffic furniture (aka concrete obsticles in the road) and anti-traffic flow patterns both work very well. Make it hard to get through your neighborhood (lots of 1 ways and blocked roads) for people trying to parallel the 405 & your traffic problems go away. Of course, work with your city government to make this happen.
Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.
Probably better to put a new highway in off to one side or another, considering it's LA go with both.
No sir I dont like it.
Ugh, and if they do that, I hope they know.... I have been stuck in traffic many times for little more reason than the fact that so many places did this that there is only a single remaining route through the area.
Because of that, I personally look down on people who request such things, and really, do hold it against someone when they feel that their desire to see clear streets is more important than the entire set of communities around them needing to travel.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The thing about cool tricks to avoid traffic is that they only work if nobody else is using them
Broadcasting them to the general populace will make certain that the local govs will step in with one-way streets and speed reduction devices in short order
What ever happened to the idea of keeping stuff like this close to the chest to avoid ruining it for yourself?
"Predominately" isn't a word. You want "predominantly".
Actually it's spelled "Pedantic"
In certain parts of Montgomery County, MD I recall they placed DO NOT ENTER signs on streets that were obvious short-cuts. They were usually qualified with rush-hour times. In other words, the signs made them into temporary one-way streets that were against the short-cut direction. That's probably the most cost-effective and least annoying solution. The threat of a moving violation was enough to keep most offenders in check. Local residents are only mildly inconvenienced by having to circle the block. I suppose they could have put "except local traffic", but I think they wanted to keep it simple.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Around here, the neighborhoods that were developed with all straight streets have generally ended up becoming poor neighborhoods. Those with curved streets and cul-de-sacs generally are nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps it's related to laying out the roads so that people that have no legitimate business in the neighborhood have no incentive to drive through it either, which would maintain a degree of exclusivity through a passive design.
The main artery streets can still be an organized grid.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Get with your local government to put a "no through traffic" sign and have fines for violating it
Actually, complaining is very effective. All it takes is a municipal decision to make the road one-way (in the wrong direction) or install speed bumps, or four way stops at every intersection. And local municipalities care more about what their residents think than what passing commuters think. I expect a good bit of road construction in these burbs soon, and the commuters aren't going to like it.
The solution is simple: speed bumps. Even though the cars aren't going through a neighborhood fast, putting a few speed bumps along this route will discourage drivers from taking it.
From TFA:
Why wouldn't it be a problem for those of use not living in Trendville? It was a hell of a problem here in a town much smaller (37k) than either Detroit (681k) or Des Moines (203k) where cars would speed (during non rush hour) down a neighborhood street or pack it bumper to bumper (during rush hour) to cut around a stop light - especially when the elementary school one more street over was letting out and the area was filled with kids walking home. It finally took a kid getting hit (though thankfully not seriously injured) before the city stopped "studying the problem" and got around to blocking one end of the street.
Sure it is. Article on the subject.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Except Local Traffic" doesn't work because to enforce, an officer would have to follow the driver from the moment they entered the neighborhood until they left, to ensure that they conducted no business in the neighborhood. "Local Traffic" could be as little as looking at a property with a for-sale sign in front, or driving past a holiday decoration display on the front yard, neither of which would need the car to even stop or slow down very much.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No, further in the article. Waze explained that if Waze users make the trip without incident (which they would in the event of a fake accident), it does not reroute people to avoid it.
"If they have, they've obviously failed. Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour."
It takes her 2 hours to go 4 miles. That's her driving a car at 2 mph for 2 miles. You know what else is faster than that? EVERYTHING. That's slower than walking speed, definitely slower than biking, jogging, rollerblading, skating, skateboarding and anything else I can think of. I would *love* to have only a 4 mile commute in LA's climate. I'd never drive my car to the office again.
Strikes me they should angry at either the city of L.A. or the state of California for not investing in better road infrastructure. Waze is a symptom of overburdened roads, lack of proper infrastructure is the cause.
I'd also be curious to know how many of these folks may have voted against tax increases to fund road infrastructure.
As long as you accept that a free right turn, followed by a u-turn, followed by another free right turn, is faster than waiting for the light at the intersection.
on-topic: seems to me that the problem is more with the highway not being able to handle the volume of traffic. Sure, you can make it less attractive for people to use the parallel road but that does little more than shift the problem elsewhere. In addition, these measures often hinder the residents themselves and emergency services as well, and depending on the choice of measure, can even increase problems. When they put speed bumps at the intersections in our area, we started to see an increase in structural damages in houses, as buses and trucks late in the evening had no trouble getting over those at normal speed, and just transferred energy from the bump, into the ground, and out to the houses.
LA isn't laid-out a whole lot different from my city, and there are only a couple of regions where there aren't a whole host of methods to get through without using the freeways. Even those somewhat-isolated areas are served by several freeways and a whole slew of artery roads, so there's no need to duck into collector or neighborhood streets just to get through.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My town has originally built on a grid like pattern. The town has placed barriers in streets in order to create a tree like pattern.
I stopped relying on Waze when it had me exit the freeway and then immediately re-enter the freeway just to pass a few cars. I thought, "Thanks, Waze. In order to save 15 seconds I just made several people angry."
In most states, it's just silly to use surface streets when there's a freeway - even in rush hour, the freeway will be faster. But California is broken, and they just don't want to build big enough freeways (though LA at least tried, once). Making traffic flow better anywhere is rejected with "but it will bring more traffic" (sure, in the same way building a hospital will bring more deaths). NIMBY for more lanes on the freeway. NIMBY for wider surface streets. NIMBY for everything. The basic understanding that, yes, you can build enough lanes on a freeway was lacking. As a result, it sometimes felt like the entire state was a bumper-to-bumper gridlock, every neighborhood street, everything. Meh, they have the roadways they wanted, let em live with it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes and no.
It's more related to the time period in which those neighborhoods were built, and how they were built. Grid street patterns were normal before WWII, along with smaller houses (Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, etc.). "Subdivisions" didn't become common until the postwar era, when sprawling ranch houses with two-car garages and big yards were popular.
Not coincidentally, those postwar subdivisions were also getting built at the same time as the civil rights movement: at the time, black people were "blockbusting" in those grid-street neighborhoods, while the white people were moving out to the curved/cul-de-sac subdivisons to get away from them. In fact, the restricted number of subdivision entrances/exits, along with the higher housing prices (enforced in the zoning code by minimum lot sizes, which forced lower-density development) were, in part, tools to keep out those perceived to be undesirable.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Caltrops.
If it looks for passive movement data, why not create a bunch of accounts and put some old cell phones to good use broadcasting traffic data? Hook them up to wireless, use a VPN if needed to mask the IP, and show "cars" stopped. You could add in accident reports to make it more realistic. Maybe even some VMs running an iPhone simulator to increase the number of spoofed cars. Remember, technology is your friend if used correctly; just don't get any on you...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
That would be rather inconvenient for the residents themselves, would not it?
Why, yes, this is a great argument to justify selective enforcement of traffic laws too — tell the police to only ticket non-residents. Still feeling good?
Why is the site, that is all up-in-arms about net-neutrality — forcing private corporations to treat all traffic the same — tolerates the exact opposite sentiment, when it comes to traffic on public roads?
Unlike the network cables and electronics, the roads are actually ours — we all pay taxes for their repairs and upkeep — how can it be Ok for mayor and/or town-council of Western Bumfuck to limit traffic and give preference to local residents?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Except Local Traffic" doesn't work because to enforce, an officer would have to follow the driver from the moment they entered the neighborhood until they left, to ensure that they conducted no business in the neighborhood.
You've never had that experience? It doesn't happen to me in my Mercedes, but otherwise...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stop signs are not effective for traffic calming.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Zoning laws prevent you from doing what you want with your property... They are evil and, obviously, a magnet for graft and other corruption.
Houston, for example, is not any worse without them...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Waze only works if users are opting into telling their secrets.
It uses your actual travel times to determine the best paths to route other cars, and stops bypass routing traffic if the bypass gets slower.
You could lie to Waze, but the best way to do it would be to (a) build a reputation as a good "Wazer" by submitting tons of good data, and then (b) walk down your street at 3mph, pretending to be slow-moving traffic every day before rush hour.
I've lived in LA for 14 years after moving from the east coast. Waze describes me as in the top 1% of my state, which bothers me quite a bit. The problem with LA is ..... (wait for it) the city is its own suburb. It always amazed me that my commute to downtown LA (about 65 miles) when I have to go is the same as someone living in say Culver city (10 miles). The problem when you get to the heart of it is a municipality that is unable to expand the traffic grid to match the cities growth, or subsidize mass transit to where it's viable. In new york city, or DC I can get to the city, then fairly easily get around. However in LA getting into the city costs as much, and takes as long as driving. Then when your in the city there is no way to get around as the localized mass transit grid isn't sufficient, and takes forever. Thus LA culture is one where you figure out the best way to drive (on your own) from point a. to point b. Waze is just making it a lot easier.
You obviously don't live in Los Angeles. The solution is not to force urban sprawl. The problem here is that everyone lives far away from where they work (due to rent prices in various neighborhoods), this forces the majority of the working middle class to commute to more affluent neighborhoods for jobs. If you minimize population density, you maximize commute distances. The solution is the opposite, you need to create affordable living even in affluent neighborhoods, so that fewer people are using the highway to commute to work. Thats not to say you need a highrise apartment on the same block as the Beverly Hills Mansions, but if there was affordable apartments in the area, you wouldn't have all those maids and other workers commuting on the highways. This is all compounded by the fact that only a portion of the traffic in Los Angeles is local, there are constantly thousands of tourists and tons freight moving on the highways. Ideally you organize the city so that locals don't need to use the highways as often.
Your part is only half of the free market equation, and if you do just that half, it will lead to lower GDP. The people commuting on those roads at that time aren't doing it for fun, they are doing it to get to or from jobs. If you reduce the trips, you reduce work accomplished. If you make the trips more expensive, you just took money that would be used to buy something else and gave it to the road authority.
If you still want to price freeway demand like that (which will restrict demand), you either have to be willing to give up the GDP, or you have to do something about the supply side. I don't see many people willing to give up GDP, so let's talk about supply. The usual free-market solution is for companies to see profit in the freeway-capacity market (due to the excessive demand and limited supply) and provide additional supply, thereby taking that profit. Roads are a natural monopoly mostly controlled by the government, but you can approximate what would happen on the supply side by requiring the toll authority to spend its profit on adding road capacity in particularly supply-constrained sections of road.
Who get's to simply claim a public street as their own? I live on a street. Cars drive down the street. They have every right to. Either move to a gated community or campaign for telecommuting or something. This isn't the fault of waze or any other navigation system. There are simply too many people. they have to go somewhere. They can't all keep fitting down the same pipe. The navigation systems are likely helping traffic on the whole.
Or ask them to eliminate the shortage of freeway road space for the number of people who want to use it at the same time, by setting the price of freeway travel at market equilibrium and adjusting the price by the hour to achieve permanent free-flow.
So at times of high demand the price of using the freeway will rise to the point it's discouraging people from using the freeway.
and you think this will help with the problem of people chosing to use local streets instead of the freeway?!
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
FTFA:
Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour.
>4 miles
>Sunny LA
GET A FUCKING BICYCLE!
--
BMO
In downtown Phoenix, there's a couple of heavily traffic streets that server the downtown corridor. They got busy enough that a decade or so ago, the city made the center lane one-way no-turns in the morning, and one-way the other way no-turns in the evening. 7th street - a mile east of Central, and 7th avenue - a mile west of Central.
[Phoenix is, largely, a grid. Major thoroughfares are every 8 streets, even on the east side, 16th, 24th, 32nd, 40th... and odd on the west side, 19th, 27th, 35th with the exception of immediately downtown where 7th is the major street both ways. Someone can say 35th and Camelback, and you know it's a west-side address.]
At the same time they make 7th street and avenue support an extra lane each way they put in HOV only exits on I-10 for 3rd street and 3rd avenue. Not only could you take an HOV-only exit, but you could take a less populated street. Those exits were so successful that the residents on 3rd street and 3rd avenue petitioned the city for speed bumps and roundabouts and reduced the number of entry and exit points to their neighborhoods to completely push all traffic back to 7th street and 7th avenue.
These same neighborhoods petition to get "no parking 11am-2pm" signs posted when restaurants move into their neighborhoods, because, presumably, they'd prefer it go back to check cashing joints and "tarjetas de teléfono aquí" signs in the windows.
NIMBY MOTHERFUCKERS!
I live in a somewhat exclusive neighborhood in Phoenix -- the Ahwatukee foothills. They're extending a freeway around what is often referred to as the World's Largest Cul-de-sac. I'm going to miss my little city island, but the price of progress must be paid.
Yeah, I'm not sure why people don't understand this.
If you're a new Wazer, your reports have less weight. You get more weight as a Waze driver/reporter by submitting verified/thanked items.
If you wanted to fake the Waze system, you'd need multiple accounts generating real reports, or at least circle-jerk clicking/thanking other people's fake reports. Then, you'd move your GPS up the street at 3mph just before rush hour, while all your fake accounts all pressed "heavy traffic" together and thanked each other's reports.
Caltrops only do 1 hit point of damage, but they do halve your movement speed.
Are you sure that lowering our taxes as I suggested would lower GDP?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Those "real road planners" have numerous freeway entrances and exits in residential areas. Only in LA can you have:
house
house
house
freeway onramp
house
house
Absolutely, if you fail to build additional road capacity with the money that you shifted from taxes to tolls.
My city didn't really exist until after WWII. A lot of neighborhoods that are now bad were built in the fifties, sixties, and even into the seventies with the grid plan, while other neighborhoods built with less rigid designs from those same periods enjoy a lot less crime and poverty. The oldest homes closest to downtown are one of only a very small number of prewar neighborhoods, and for that particular neighborhood, despite having the grid they're some of the most valuable homes in town given their proximity to the downtown white-collar offices and the entertainment venues in the area.
Not all cities followed the "white flight" model.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Ha! +1 if I had any Mod points!
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
My brother and I were actually heading down to the Sunset Strip a couple weeks ago for a concert and my brother decided to try the Waze route. We spent far longer than we would have taking that route, back through the hilltop Hollywood neighborhoods--tight windy roads up and down steep hills, tons of low to no-visibility corners, single-lane available width a lot of the way. Seriously dangerous, particularly since it was at night and was raining hard.
Yeah, never again.
Yes, I think given a choice between an uncongested freeway or residential streets that take 2-3 times as long to navigate, people will mostly choose the freeway, even if it costs money.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Where I live it used to be like that until they blocked off a bunch of streets to reduce Chicago west-siders entering Oak Park. I'm not saying this is right, since it seems like bigotry to me, but if a neighborhood wants to eliminate undesirable traffic they absolutely can.
Anyone in the area with a Waze account has the ability to modify the map. There are a few things you can try... Make sure the road is the lowest level of road below highway. Heck make it a dirt road; still routable but Waze should skip it. Make the turn-off red to disable it. Of course other people might complain and want it back on, but if you have active moderators in the area they should know why it's off. Waze is doing what it's supposed to do. It notices a faster route and directs people to it. Any GPS app would have the same problem. As stated above, if you don't like it, get the city to change the road.
-AlPhAbEt
My lifelong friends in my city aren't in my neighborhood, as they're based on common interests, not on geographical proximity, and the distance to drive to leave my neighborhood to find a major road to head their way is a negligible portion of the trip. I am friends with my immediate neighbors, but that's as a result of being immediate neighbors and sharing a common interest in having a nice neighborhood. As they are my immediate neighbors I don't have to drive or even bicycle to see them, I can walk the few feet needed for that. Even when I had to go around the oddly-shaped block to attend a blockwatch meeting, it was still only a walk of a quarter-mile.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Kinda depends on what/who was there first
No it doesn't. The freeway and the side-streets are public spaces, and no one living on a public street has a right to demand that anyone else not use it as they like, so long as they follow the laws of the road. If you want a private street with no traffic, live in a private neighborhood (gated community), where the builders do spread the community cost among the homeowners. The roads were paid for by taxes collected from everyone. Your taxes don't pay for the roads directly in front of your house, and therefore you have (and rightly so) no right to dictates who can use it. Most of the road-work money comes from gasoline taxes, so its fair game.
Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.
One of the reasons I live where I do is because I'm close to work, about 4 miles away. Lets me bike in. That way I don't have to deal with the expense and clusterfuck that is parking on a big campus. 4 miles is a very easy, short, ride so it is no problem. You don't need to change or anything, you don't work up a sweat.
I lived in this area for about three months and made exactly one round trip on this section of freeway during rush hour. I don't use Waze, but on my way back, taking the route through the neighborhoods seemed obvious and probably saved me about an hour coming home.
Rich people don't live on streets adjoining the freeway even in California.
Unless they share the cost with everyone else on the bus.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
"Waze has caused trouble for LA residents by redirecting traffic from Interstate 405 to neighborhood side streets paralleling the interstate. "
Exactly, that is why I use Waze, so when the highways get backed up, I can go around them on the surface streets!
If you can't take the traffic, move to the suburbs!
In Chicago, they have "solved" this by putting tons of speed bumps on almost every street that isn't a thoroughfare. However, Waze occasionally still tries to send you down these streets and destroy your shocks / wheels / bumpers.
LA didn't have this problem in the past. The problem has gone up as density has increased beyond what a city of its civic design can handle.
LA is not New York. There is more then one way to design a city. LA is entirely viable at specific density levels.
The other big problem in LA is that commute distances have increased as the city has stratified. We have segements on the west side that are very economically prosperous and lots of people work there because the owners of the companies tend to live there. But the workers often have to travel from the Valley. And that means going through the pass. Everyone that commutes from the Valley to the West Side has to drive over the pass every day twice. And that is a fucking a problem.
The city used to have lower density and much shorter commute distances.
Ideally, the city should zone to restore that balance.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So where did all that traffic go? All you did was make it more expensive to take a triop that the people must take (unless they quit their jobs). There's not a lot of elasticity in rush hour demand. The people who could choose to travel earlier or later already did because of the traffic.
The real issue in Los Angeles though is that the population density is too high.
You've got that backwards. As others have mentioned, the problem is that there is so much sprawl and its resulting low population density severely reduce the viability of mass transit. Trips are longer and along more congested pathways than they would otherwise be in a region with higher density.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
The easy solution is to make highrise apartment and office buildings illegal through zoning.
Or make high-rise apartment buildings LEGAL so that more people live closer to their job instead of in the suburbs.
LA has too many parts of its "urban" area zoned as single-family residential (compare with Manhattan).
Widening freeways doesn't solve traffic problems. Short version on Wikipedia, longer version on Wired.
The problem in LA is more accurately described as too many people in one place, all having places they want to go. Other less dysfunctional cities either have better mass transit or a lot fewer people wanting to go a non-trivial distance. Hell, all you have to do is look north to San Francisco and Oakland, where BART siphons off enough demand from the freeways to keep them flowing much more cleanly than in LA, the only real exceptions being the choke points where trains are at maximum capacity at rush hour (the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube) or where the BART line ends where there's still a lot of commuter traffic on the parallel freeway (I-80 in Richmond).
Not saying that NIMBY isn't a problem — it's ridiculous how it keeps many cities/regions on the West Coast from having coherent plans that work for the benefit of the public at large — just that wider urban freeways aren't part of the solution. They were the panacea of the 1950s, but with the population of metro areas now and the much higher percentage of people who have the option to drive, that approach is obsolete.
Actually, I was born in Los Angeles and have lived there most of my life.
So... you obviously don't know what is obvious... Right?
1. The city didn't have this problem initially.
2. Something obviously changed between point A and point B.
3. What changed?
saying that the only solution is to turn LA into New York is not helpful. What will happen is that you'll just increase density PERIOD. The commute distances will remain an issue. Look at New York. Do people commute from New Jeresy and the outer burrows? Yes. So increasing density does not stop long commute distances.
However, if you limit density, then there can only be so many offices etc in a given area. Which means at a certain point only so many people could possibly commute there. Which ultimately limits how much of that happens. Increasing density will first and foremost increase it in the areas where we have the most commuting which will make the problem worse.
You increase the density, and the roads will become non-functional. We'll need to have massive mass transit just to keep pace. And that will not fix the issue with the roads. They'll be more clogged then ever. Look at New York with their congestion taxes. What you'll instead have done is created a lot of additional density that can only be serviced by massive cattle car transit systems. But the underlying issue of having too many people commute will not have been addressed.
Urban sprawl if managed properly avoids this issue by not pushing things to that point. You have a general background commute pattern with some choke points that need to be expanded into proper arteries. But web itself is entirely healthy if density is controlled.
Keeping all buildings under 3 stories is a good start. Will people commute still? Sure... but you're not going to have a skyscraper worth of people commute to a 3 story office building.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"Except Local Traffic" doesn't work because to enforce, an officer would have to follow the driver from the moment they entered the neighborhood until they left,
check your license. it has your address on it.
Software could rate limit side-road detours, giving priority to (1) law-abiding drivers who follow speed limit regulations and come to a full-stop at stop signs or (2) drivers who pay a premium for the application or (3) click on high-value advertising. They could (4) abstain from sending drivers onto side-road detours during the specific times and areas that children are travelling to/from school (even (5) detecting this by use of commonly available cellphones for school-age children). Traffic that's at a complete standstill might be (6) targeted for high-value advertising, or even (7) offer a detour for a fee. Detours could be prioritized based on carbon or other pollution emissions - depending on whether one prefers (8) to incentivize low-carbon vehicles or (9) temporarily reduce emissions on those "spare the air days" by getting high-pollution vehicles to their destination more quickly.
If Google/Waze failed to create these modifications, they could be imposed by local or state legislation, and/or agreed to by a standards working group to encourage universal compliance. Legislators could even use "virtual HOT lanes" as funding sources, raising "sorely needed funding for high speed rail" or "community improvement projects."
Now who's being evil?
I think the spirit of that "Except local traffic" is pretty much for discouraging commercial vehicles (trucks, etc.) from using a corridor of a road for thru-traffic.
This wouldn't work in a typical passenger vehicle case as you have described, but if enough people in the neighborhood are seeing/reporting a number of trucks routinely without making delivery to the area, that would be a different story...
By that logic, GDP would peak if we paved over all the land with roads and parking lots and removed all the stores, factories, and office buildings.
No, I think GDP would peak long before then. We may already be past that point.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Sorry, but I used to work at a transportation planning agency. Building more freeways DOES result in more traffic five years later. (Baring some major problem, economic crisis, etc.) It also results in longer commutes, as when the freeway is new people locate further from jobs, and then don't move again when the freeway clogs up.
OTOH, gas prices have risen significantly since we studied this, so it may no longer be true. But that's not the way to bet. People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast. A better solution would probably be to improve the rail lines so that freight would make it easy to relocate jobs to where people want to live...but that's not something the Department of Highways can dedice.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Officer, I thought my friend lived here but I now realize I was wrong".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Train will extend from downtown all the way to the beach in Santa Monica soon!
Once the construction is done, all it takes is a few exploratory drivers with Waze turned on (such as locals going outside the neighborhood), and it will quickly learn that the roads are open again. Have you never had a problem with ants? This is how ants work, only they leave scent trails behind instead of needing an internet connection.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The easy solution is to make highrise apartment and office buildings illegal through zoning. Grand father existing structures of course... but when new construction happens, make it clear that it cannot exceed a certain height. Do that and the density is capped. And if you keep the density capped then you won't need to build subway systems etc to handle over development.
that's absolutely the WRONG thing to do. transit only works in densely packed cities / communities because that's when it's cost effective. if you cap density you get urban sprawl which makes everything more expensive ... utilities, law enforcement, fire, garbage, and so on. not to mention, all of those people that are forced to live in the boondocks because of the capped density still need to commute into the city for their job.
Toll lanes are not a good solution. Traiins have limited value as person traffic relief. Unless you have a really good transit system, which I've never seen. (I don't have wide experience, so I admit the possibility.)
The real problem is the commute distance. That needs to be drastically reduced, which is quite difficult when both jobs and families are mobile.
For businesses that are small my favorite answer it to redo the zoning code, and give a good tax break to owners who live in the same building as their place of business. Also give a distance related tax break to people who live near their job. Unfortunately, most zoning systems actively work against this answer. And most taxation isn't locally controlled (but property taxes could be adjusted).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
i suggest you try out that methodology then get back to me.
"office, i didn't notice i was going 85mph in a 45mph. i realize now i was, sorry."
"officer, i don't know anything about this meth in my backpack. i'll throw it out as soon as i get home. i promise."
"officer, i thought this was my house and my laptop, i realize now i'm in the wrong house."
if the cop was dumb enough to fall for that once, how many more times do you think it'd work on them?
i know the solution. no roads = no traffic.
is going to reveal Sony's role in this. Despicable.
Is this "LA" a reference to Los Angeles? In California? Since 2010, Los Angeles freeways *have* been widened to the tune of many $B and years of traffic delays. Opposition and complaints were simply ignored. Some surface streets have been widened in a major way (e.g. Santa Monica Blvd.) and most other major surface arteries are being repaved and "optimized." Ditto about opposition and complaints. Traffic control & signalling has been vastly expanded -- just look at the level of detail available on Google Traffic now vs. 2 years ago. And just try (like my very politically connected and organized neighborhood did) to cut down on local traffic -- all you'll get is city administration's sympathy, but then they add that the roads must roll and we should actually expect our local traffic to increase significantly.
Yes and no.
It's more related to the time period in which those neighborhoods were built, and how they were built. Grid street patterns were normal before WWII, along with smaller houses (Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, etc.). "Subdivisions" didn't become common until the postwar era, when sprawling ranch houses with two-car garages and big yards were popular.
Not coincidentally, those postwar subdivisions were also getting built at the same time as the civil rights movement: at the time, black people were "blockbusting" in those grid-street neighborhoods, while the white people were moving out to the curved/cul-de-sac subdivisons to get away from them. In fact, the restricted number of subdivision entrances/exits, along with the higher housing prices (enforced in the zoning code by minimum lot sizes, which forced lower-density development) were, in part, tools to keep out those perceived to be undesirable.
Very nice post, and very true.
I recommend watching an interesting, newly released documentary: Spanish Lake. It explains blockbusting very well, as well as the dynamic of white middle class families staying vs. moving out of neighborhoods.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You are correct but the city has to post it and how legal they are is another question.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Wrong. Increasing density does not reduce commute distances. People commute from long distances in very dense cities. Look at Tokyo or New York City. You have people commuting to work in both of those cities from at least as far as you have them commuting in Los Angeles.
All increasing density does is require the construction of massive cattle car transit systems. And these do not aliviate the road situation. The roads if anything become more congested as the congestion taxes prove. However, you now have an additional problem on top of that because you are now also utterly dependent on an additional transit system.
Reducing density reduces the number of people that can commute to a given area. You can't have a skyscraper worth of people commuting to a three story office building.
What is more, you can also zone existing commercial space to residential/apartment space. If I turn an office building into an apartment, then you're not going to have people commuting to that office building... and now a big building exists that can sell apartment space. Two birds with one stone.
Increasing density does not solve the problem. It makes it worse. IF you have too many people commuting to an area, then either reduce the size of existing office building permits or rezone existing office space to apartments to shift the balance to something more healthy. Keep doing that until the commuting patterns become more reasonable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Ethics is an interesting discussion. The road is a finite resource for which demand exceeds supply. As a result, there is already rationing taking place - in the form of waits times to use the road: congestion. This is, on the surface, very "fair" and "egalitarian", but also very wasteful of time, gasoline, pollution, and wear-and-tear on equipment.
On the other hand, a system that lets poor people get where they want to go, albeit by bus, faster and more cheaply than before also could be deemed "fair". You'd have only affluent people driving, so that would create a societal divide.
I guess my answer is: I don't know.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wrong. If you increase density you will not stop long commuting distances or patterns. Look at any hyper dense city and tell me if there are not commute distances at least as long as you find in Los Angeles?
There are. Increasing density does not solve the problem. The problem is density and an imbalance between office space and living space.
Another idea if you don't like reducing density which is actually required here... but if you don't like that, then another idea is to rezone office buildings into apartment buildings.
In one stroke you reduce the amount of jobs in an area that people can commute to while at the same time increasing the amount of living space. In doing this, you make it impossible for more people to work in that area while making it inevitable that more people will live there. This automatically will reduce the commute issue.
If the system is out of balance, then increasing density will not alleviate it. You fix an out of balance system by balancing it.
First, you balance density by limiting it to what local services can handle. You do not allow density beyond what the roads, water, power, schools, police, etc can handle.
Second, if you have massive commutes, then you reduce office space in areas where people are commuting to and increase residential space... until the system comes into balance.
Balance. It requires wisdom, discipline, and patience. Just increasing density infinitely is moronic.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Wrong. Transit works everywhere. Massive cattle car transit only works in hyper dense environments... but why is that desirable?
Does massive cattle car transit reduce commute distances? Nope. Commute times? Nope.
So what is the point?
To allow for greater density.
So mass transit is a solution to how to allow for more density but it doesn't actually solve the problem you had before you increased density. That being the commute times and distances which basically remain the same or if anything increase.
Look at the Japanese bullet train as an example. It allows people from the distant suburbs of Tokyo to commute to work every day. But do they get to work faster then people that go to work in Los Angeles? Nope. Takes about the same amount of time.
You're viewing density as an end unto itself which is insane because density is actually very inefficient in many ways. It also has serious political, cultural, and civic drawbacks.
Democracy doesn't really work in major cities. The population is too high. The city employees amongst others tend to own the political system in major cities and not the actual residents who are by and large hostage to the process.
Density made sense in the early 20th century before airplanes and the internet. But today it makes no sense besides offering a superior dating pool for young people. Once you're settled, the urban environment is typically counter to your interests. Which is why most people that are married try to move to the suburbs where they can get a more reasonable environment.
Los Angeles is interesting because it is a major suburban city. It is all sprawl. And the sprawl is beautiful. But for it to work, density has to be controlled and the balance between work space and living space must be kept in balance.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Los Angeles is full. No more building permits.
If it was a water or sewer system, the health department would slap a moratorium on permits. Transportation is just another utility. It's all used up. No more.
Have gnu, will travel.
check your license. it has your address on it.
"Local traffic only" doesn't mean "residents only" it means "only vehicles which have an origin or DESTINATION" here.
All that proves is you don't -live- there. It doesn't prove you don't have some destination there.Perhaps your visiting or picking up a friend to carpool with. Another poster mentioned simply driving by a house for sale you might be interest in buying... etc.
Worse the only way an officer would be able to catch you would be to follow you from start to finish, pull you over, and then hope you can't think fast enough on your feet to come up with a reason for being there better than "my gps suggested this route to work".
Ladies and Gentleman, we have a time traveller from 1948!
Just so you know, that whole "Outlaw high rise buildings, cover the entire country in parking lots and freeways" thing you and Robert Moses advocate was tried. For about 50 years in fact. In fact, in most of the US it's still the default. The problem was it made transit and other alternatives to the car commercially unsustainable, drove up the cost of living, has had immense social and economic costs, and it's actually the underlying cause of the problem being described by this article, which is that too many cars are on the road, not too few.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
And be there to do it, while it's happening, which means you and your zombie Waze army need to either all spoof GPS or be there at 3pm when evening traffic begins it's 5 hours of sucking.
I'm not going to permit you to strawman me by associating me with someone else I've never read and do not attach myself.
If you want to argue against my position, then argue against my position. Not someone else's position.
As to your statement about commute distances and congestion, that is caused by imbalances between working space and living space.
Rezone portions of areas that suffer too much commuting TO them to be residential and zone areas that suffer too much people commuting FROM them to commercial space. The system will balance out if you keep doing it.
People cannot commute to a place that has no jobs. You cannot have a skyscraper of commuters to a three story office building.
The math is unavoidable.
The issue in Los Angeles, is that you have some very desirable real estate in the west where wealthier people live. They have their businesses there because they don't want to commute that far. Then all their employees have to commute from very far away to go to work every day.
Your solution is to increase density to such a point that their workers can live about as close to the businesses as their bosses.
Well, does that work in New York City or London or Tokyo? Nope. Properly values skyrocket and apartments shrink to the size of closets while commute times and distances tend to remain the same.
Your solution does not solve the problem You've just masked the issue by expanding your problem and necessitating additional infrastructure to compensate for the additional problems your density created.
Consider an alternative approach. What if there is less commercial/office space in the area everyone is commuting to? What if instead of asking the employees to commute to the boss, you instead force the boss to commute to the employees? Instantly the system becomes more sustainable. You reduce office space in areas that have become congestion problems and increase residential space while also keeping an eye on density so that you don't exceed what nearby resources can handle.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, you do, that's 100% correct.
As a home owner, you sometimes choose a street where there is minimal traffic to enjoy that, the lack of traffic.
The recent solution I've seen effective is speed bumps, and they were tall one's. Keeps traffic at bay on one street.
Another is, speed limits that are enforced, sometimes severely (IE: out of the car, roadside safety check... )
I've seen 1 street block entirely reduced to 10MPH due to a family of deaf children, I bike past it every weekend, I don't think that anyone drives on that block.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
I always thought that they should build two layered freeways, bottom layer for the shorter routes, and the top layer with VERY limited on and off choices for mid/long range commuters. The number one reason for traffic problems is people weaving in and out of lanes to hit their offramp.
Because weaving in and out of traffic gets you there a whole minute faster!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Once is good enough.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Even though I work closer to the outskirts of the city than to its core, I actually moved closer to the core when buying the most recent house. Traffic outbound is light in the mornings, and traffic inbound in the afternoon is light until one reaches the actual center. Plus, if work ever does change and require me to go inbound in the mornings, I start closer-in than I would have before.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I agree but there is a good and a bad. I don't live in a gated community but my neighbors and I do have a "private road" I suppose when the lots were originally sold and the houses originally build people desired to not have drive ways running right up to US-11.
On the one hand its great. We know we can turn out of our drive ways safely. Our pets can run and there is little risk of them being hit by a cars, because there are only 7 of us along our dead end road. Naturally we all use it cautiously and respectful because we all know each other.
On the flip side its a couple miles of road that "we" have to maintain. Our little association has to pay to have it plowed and I suppose someday probably re-graded (its dirt). Until the plowman gets there we are snowed in the winter. We could probably get more prompt service but that would cost even more. We also get to pay sky high rates for home owners insurance because of the (perceived) greater fire risk. The insurance adjusters insist that responses may be longer because of the private road. I kind of doubt it, the guys at the local fire department know exactly where everything is and our road is probably at least as good as most of the public roads off US-11 in the area.
Now out in southern CA I suppose you don't have the snow concern. Still you got heat and I suspect lost of these "city folk" wont want a dirt road. Which means you going to have some sort of pavement that will require maintaining. That might prove fairly expensive. Our association considered paving the road some years before I bought in, from what I am told it was cost prohibitive to the point nobody had any interest in reviewing the idea when I brought it up.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Those reversible lanes ("suicide lanes") have been around in Phoenix since a lot longer, starting in the 1970's. http://www.azcentral.com/news/...
Phoenix is one of the few U.S. cities in the that realizes a) Public transportation doesn't work well in low density, post-WW2 US cities (aka, the sunbelt and west coast) and b) Grid pattern streets and excellent freeways are the only reasonable, cost effective short term strategy. What is the long term strategy? Nobody knows, except maybe to completely get rid of shitty low density cities, which will never happen. American people want their trucks and backyards, and they especially don't want to have to sit next to some poor person on public transportation.
the real simple solution is a simple increase in the gas tax by a thumping amount, hurts like heck, but it will reduce the load, make it so that more efficient forms of transport work.
In Miami, when gas broke to 4.00 per gallon, I would notice that the trains were fuller, then when it got to 4.25 it started to get packed. It peaked and now people have come to like the trains. We are now just full. It's nice to know that every day, maybe 500 to 1000 cars are not on the road.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Any proposed solution is moot. Climate change is going to push all these people inland soon, so they'll have another chance to decide where to live and how traffic will affect them. We either believe it, or we don't. Right?
sig: sauer
This isn't anything close to a new problem. About 30 years ago, I lived on a street that was severely in need of repaving. The reason that it was in that state was because the property owners along it pressured the city heavily not to repave it. It turns out that when the street was in good repair, too many drivers used it to bypass the bad traffic on a nearby thoroughfare. Keeping the street in poor repair meant that you couldn't safely drive down it going more than about 5 MPH, which meant that people who didn't live along it would avoid it.
If the tolls were used to offset another public good (public schools being the only other one that's nearly as expensive), it might work to encourage either people living in-town, or some businesses leaving town. Of course, that would only work if schools and the toll roads were under the same authority. (FYI, I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan where while we might complain about traffic and parking, we don't have anything like LA's situation. But being part of Michigan, we probably have the worst roads in the nation and a GOP/Tea Party dominated state government that's so tax-phobic that it's even more dysfunctional than the US House of Representatives.)
This city was built in mind to have a car, so there's no way to solve the problem with wider streets. Other megacities have solved this problem with better public transportation.
I think the point of the no-parking-11am-2pm signs is to get people that went drinking the previous night to pick their damn car up in the morning and not leave it until the following evening, and to stop the lunch-rush from turning into a living hell on those streets.
Downtown Tempe has a lot more restrictive parking rules; one has to have permits to park in many of the neighborhoods around the university, even if those neighborhoods have businesses in them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In most states, it's just silly to use surface streets when there's a freeway - even in rush hour, the freeway will be faster. But California is broken, and they just don't want to build big enough freeways (though LA at least tried, once).
I live in a much more rural state than California, but for most of most days using the freeway is the slowest of available options. Or, best case, it's no faster than using the surface streets (but a thousand times less pleasant). As a result, I have my nav system permanently set to "avoid freeways".
The freeway and the side-streets are public spaces, and no one living on a public street has a right to demand that anyone else not use it as they like,
Note necessarily. There are many jurisdictions that have "truck routes" where trucks that are not making local deliveries are allowed to drive. There are also hierarchy of streets. When secondary/tertiary streets are being used like primary streets then things get changed. Secondary/tertiary streets are narrower/windier than primary streets. There are many secondary/tertiary streets that are restricted to local traffic only. Do you really think it is safe for commuters who are trying to get to work as fast as possible to be routed through a residential area?
Florida must have some really kick-ass public transit, then! I live in a city that is often cited as having wonderful public transportation, including light rail, but after using it for a couple of years I never came to love it. I gave up on it altogether.
That's probably the most cost-effective and least annoying solution.
It might be cost-effective, but it's a far cry from "least annoying". Streets that change the direction of permissible travel based on time of day are much more annoying than just keeping them one-way all the time.
With the freeway running smoothly 24/7 and nobody ever being overcharged to use it
Any charge to use the freeway is being overcharged.
I'm sure different people use it in different ways based on their experience, but "blockbusting" was a tactic created and used by real-estate businesses, not "black people." It was neither invented nor particularly helpful for most black home-buyers. Real estate folks made a crap-load of money though off of convincing people to sell low in fear of new neighbours, and then jacking the price to others moving in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"Ruthlessly pursuing the idea that the accordion is just another instrument."
Around here, we use speed "humps" designed to keep you below 25mph. (yes, some cars can zip over them faster, but those people won't go in those neighborhoods.)
>Widening freeways doesn't solve traffic problems
Correct. It solves life satisfaction problems, if you read into the subtext on why induced demand happens.
The basic theory is that item X is desirable but costly. If the price for X decreases, its very desirability is the driver for increased consumption. One can either make the item shitty (decreasing desirability and thus satisfaction) or one can increase the price (decreasing the ability to get the item and thus decreasing satisfaction). Or one can neither make the item shitty nor keep the price high, thus increasing satisfaction.
Many use induced demand as a reason to keep roads shitty and encourage people to use a public transportation substitute. If public transportation were more desirable than personal transportation, we wouldn't have this problem. The question one should ask themselves is this:
Does your government keep the roads shitty so you use public transportation as the substitute, or does your government offer good enough public transportation (Or any other alternative! private transportation works in some places) that driving a car is seen as the substitute rather than the satisfaction.
Too many that push public transportation work on the earlier premise, too few realize that the optimum solution that leaves everyone satisfied involves public transportation that's better than personal transportation.
The goal isn't "reduce traffic", as the freedom to travel by cad is a great thing! The goal is to make life better. Removing traffic jams, getting traffic off surface streets and on to freeways, reducing bumper-to-bumper to improve air quality - all of these can be achieved by adding enough lanes to your freeways. Enough many be quite high number, butt hat's fine: building robust infrastructure to make life better is what my taxes are for.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled.
Baffled? Really? You never expected people driving on a highway RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR EMPTY ROAD to not figure out that maybe that way might be faster?
"The traffic is unbearable now. You can't even walk your dog,"
Why would street traffic affect walking your dog?
Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour.
Wait, so people are diverting onto streets that average two miles per hour? Are the highways only averaging one mile per hour?
The streets on the west side are no longer a secret for locals, and people are angry,"
PUBLIC streets aren't suppose to be a 'secret'. Duh.
Interesting. I've been driving in Phoenix for 30 years now and never realized the 7th street/ave lanes were there "forever." In my head, I imagined they got changed when the Deck Park Tunnel opened in 1990, which, since I'm getting old only imaged was "a decade or so ago."
When the DPT opened, 3rd street/avenue got their increased traffic and then neighbors did everything they could to push the traffic back to 7th/Central/7th.
Right. Because freeway lanes are cheap and easy to build, and cause no problems during their construction. Plus, where the hell are they supposed to get the space for these lanes? Time Lord science? Many of the freeways in CA are in the air already, so "just pave more lanes" isn't remotely possible. (re-painting (smaller) lanes is a very bad idea!)
Making them a toll-road (making not a "free way" anymore), will actually *reduce* the number of drivers willing to drive on it, thus pushing the crowd to roads even less capable of handling it.
I have a condo downtown by the ballpark, and parking on the streets behind it all have "neighborhood parking, by permit only" on them.
The particular neighborhood I was referencing is at 7th avenue and McDowell. On the corner there they built a plaza with 5 trendy "fast casual" restaurants in it. Jersey Mike's, Five Guys, How Do You Roll, Chipolte, and a ZOYO. Directly across the street they built out the plaza to include a NYPD Pizza and a PotBelly in the old "My Florist" building.
There's 65 parking spots for the small plaza. It's not enough.
The residents on Lynwood St petitioned to get "no parking 11am-2pm" signs posted as soon as lunch visitors spilled over into their neighborhood. I understand WHY they did this (NIMBY, MOTHERFUCKERS), but I assume they'd just prefer that corner go back to check cashing.
No. No. They. Won't. Just look at NC... "I"-540 south of I-40 is a toll road ("T-540"), and there's almost no one ever on it. Going north (clockwise) there's no traffic until you cross I40, and then it's a f'ing wall of traffic. Going south, I540 is packed all the way around the city... until you pass I40 and then there's almost zero traffic.
Because they bought a law to say so. Rich people can do that.
I watched it happen, at least at the endgame. The process also creates a ferocious overclass of white racists, who beget new generations of even more vicious white bigots, only using fancier language and more circumspect actions. Hence the pro-police suburbs who love cops and won't let them be convicted of killing black people, because they OWN those cops, and the city dwellers (excluding the in-city versions of the suburbs) who are regarded by the overclass as worthless and, let's put it bluntly, shootable at will because blacks-are-criminals. It is the story of America post the civil rights movement. This dichotomy fuels the non-Confederate Republican base, though no one will ever, ever talk about that on the news. The newspeople live in those enclaves.... those are their people.
In Wave you can actually report traffic jams manually via an icon. The information updates fairly quickly with other users once your account is established, which basically means you have a few miles on it. They don't seem to do too much to validate the information, rather just waiting for other data to contradict it.
In other words, you can lie easily and your lies propagate fast. It is of little practical use to motorists but residents might find that marking their roads as being at a standstill during rush hour has an effect. No need to even go outside, after all a standstill means 0 MPH.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Too many people trying to use too little land in a very stupid fashion.
Mathematically, if you keep increasing the numbers of people, you have gridlock and war over territory (that's what this is). Happens with deer, wolves, oak trees, bacteria, and hydrogen floating in interstellar space trying to form stars.
You control your numbers, or nature steps in and does it the only other way - the four horsemen, singly or in combinations. This will be solved with War - by another name. Laws, road blockages, software mandates, gates, lasers, STD spikes, moats, drawbridges, car-GPS tracking... they'll go to war, save their patches of land, and make the problem worse somewhere else, which will in turn push back.
In this case, the problem is racism, conservatism (cars uber alles), and a terrible transportation system that insists on moving people around in the own private houses on wheels because reasons. There is a numerical limit on the number of boxes moving around on ribbons at the same time and LA exceeded that limit long ago.
PS You don't own your neighborhood streets. That what "street" means. Not that it will stop them from "owning" them anyway.
LA is supposed to actually have quite good mass transit. Just underrated.
I seem to recall there was some reason a lot of people were off the roads, leaving them clear. And there were some races between mass transit and driving. The results (again without traffic) were within the margin of error.
Not sure if the test was rigged, or what, but it was interesting.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Ah, that brings back some memories. Thanks :)
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
... Other less dysfunctional cities either have better mass transit or a lot fewer people wanting to go a non-trivial distance. Hell, all you have to do is look north to San Francisco and Oakland, where BART siphons off enough demand from the freeways to keep them flowing much more cleanly than in LA, the only real exceptions being the choke points where trains are at maximum capacity at rush hour (the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube) or where the BART line ends where there's still a lot of commuter traffic on the parallel freeway (I-80 in Richmond)...
Another vexing problem LA commuters have to deal with, while those in San Francisco or Oakland do not, is the presence of Bus Pirates.
#DeleteChrome
Air quality declines, because you increase the number of cars capable of being on the road at the same time. Same with lowering gasoline prices. Make car riding easy, gas-burning increases.
Not so much. Most air-quality problems are caused by cars idling in traffic - the amount of driving people do isn't very elastic, while the amount of fuel burned to get to a given destination can rise dramatically if you spend 80% of the journey not moving.
As for a "better" lfe - first, dump the car. It makes you fat, makes your country go to war repeatedly to protect the oil,
Fuck you hippie. Shave that neckbeard, get a job, buy a car, and then you'll see. Then die in a fire, you fucking hippie.
P.S. Fuck you, you fucking hippie.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"The Grid" is fully intact here for the main arteries laid-out on one-mile increments, with two or three lanes in each direction. One can drive from any neighborhood to any neighborhood easily, but one cannot drive through neighborhoods easily. One has to use main roads to drive around.
I don't have a problem with this. It reduces traffic where neighborhood casual pedestrians are likely to be.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
10 mph is faster than rush hours on the 405.
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Chicago and NYC (and SF) have useable mass transit systems.
LA doesn't. It has a light rail system, but the sprawl is so bad you still have no reliable, timely way to get from your closest train stop to your home or office.
I worked in Simi Valley with a young engineer who lived in South Central. Great inspirational story of someone bootstrapping themselves. But he spent two and a half hours commuting by a combination of bus, train and bike to get to work.
Each way. Not very many people will tolerate it. But he did. Because he didn't want to move his mama from South Central to Simi Valley. He supported her, and the culture shock would have been too much for her.
Then he was killed when a [train] engineer missed a signal and collided with his commuter train coming the other way on the same track.
Most people would rather drive.
I can see the fnords!
Your chain of cause and effect is laughable. Violent people will be violent whether crowded or not.
Slums aren't prisons. Anyone with legs can leave.
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I can't tell if he's serious or not.
No, that was the point, expanding freeways doesn't remove traffic jams. I don't know where you're getting it from that it works that way.
(Also, if this is about your freedom to travel by car, why would you care about whether other people think it's a great thing or not, so long as the roads go where you need them to go? I hate driving in urban areas precisely because the traffic makes it feel like the opposite of freedom. Different strokes for different folks and all that, but I'm not getting the sense that you respect alternative viewpoints on this matter — e.g. that freeways make life worse when you're not driving on them.)
In many jurisdictions local homeowners have to pay to maintain public roads, too. In my own neighborhood the asphalt street is falling apart. The township and county simply aren't responsible. The township, though, can repair it by assessing each of the homeowners. The township (at its expense) arranged the bids, calculated the per-home costs based on frontage, and called us to a meeting to discuss the proposal and have a hands-up, informal vote.
In the end we rejected the proposal due to other concerns.
--Jim (me)
The Los Angeles metro area has 4 times the population of San Francisco's metro area. Solving the traffic problem would require 4 times the roadway that SF has: 4 or more superhighways from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica - Palos Verdes - etc. to replace 405, and 4 train lines down the Sepulveda Pass where there is nothing now. The cost would be astronomical - just acquiring the right of way from Granada Hills to Long Beach would easily exceed 30 billion dollars even if the whole distance were only through lower middle class residential neighborhoods. (My quick estimate.)
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The conventional rule of thumb is that your standard freeway costs ~$1 million a mile, depending on the size and local considerations (e.g. prevalent natural disasters in the area). I don't even want to think about the cost of a 2 tiered system. You'd have the normal $1 million/mile for the bottom layer, and then the cost of engineering, building, and maintaining a completely elevated roadway. Not to mention the massive interchanges you need to connect these 2 tiered freeways to each other. I'd guess you'd increase the cost by an order of magnitude.
Also the number one cause of traffic is traffic density. The weaving just exacerbates it.
Sure, but that's a particular case, and not even about limited-access freeways that already exist, as they wouldn't be only 2-lane or 3-lane roads. It's certainly not the issue with the 405 in LA. The road-widening you're talking about isn't usually the issue in urban areas in general, even, unless you're talking about dense neighborhoods where the land values and walkability concerns make it prohibitive to expand roads. Where that's the case, it's almost definitely an issue of inadequate mass transit, since the greater the density, the more inappropriate it is for large numbers of people to be driving in and out of such an area.
People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast
Why are there only jobs on the coast?
I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.
But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Lol the bus on the 405.
If I could rearrange the keyboard, I'd put U and I together.
The metro is nice, but at the moment it barely goes anywhere compared to the massive size of the city of LA alone, never mind the urbanized area of the whole county. That means for the most part you have to rely on buses, and wherever the freeways are clogged, the surface streets are clogged, too, and the buses are even slower than a car stuck in that traffic. No complaints, though, about the reach of the bus lines — that's the sort of thing a lot of American cities could learn from.
That said, I'm glad to not have to be dealing with that anymore. The main problem is that so many different things worth going to are so far apart, regardless of how you choose to travel. It's not like, say, Chicago, where most of the jobs and all the fun parts are concentrated within a few miles of the city center and the rest is largely residential. The layout is impractical no matter how you try to use it.
Wrong. The fact that they are public residential roads does not mean that they're designed for the kind of traffic that's flowing over them. They were designed to service the residents who live there. It becomes a public safety issue when emergency vehicles cannot get where they need to go over city streets due to the streets being clogged with traffic they were never designed to handle. Also, the gasoline taxes do not cover the cost of the roads, especially at the federal level where the federal program is getting close to being insolvent.
My neighborhood was getting filled up by people parking for the nearby BART station when BART started charging fees for parking. They made it impossible for locals to park and were dumping trash all over the place and causing a lot of other problems. It made it impossible for construction vehicles to park or for people to visit. They went so far as to start cutting the local trees and bushes when they got in their way. The City said if 90% of the homeowners could agree for a no parking during a two hour window they'd implement it. They had no problem getting over 90% of the homeowners to agree to this. Other cities solve this using parking permits.
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I agree with your conclusion, but not with some of your premises: the demand is created primarily by the destinations, not the mode of transport. People don't generally drive on freeways to nowhere for fun. And I don't think it's a question of making roads shitty, it's about not spending money to polish a turd (i.e. clogged already wide urban freeways that won't get unclogged, no increased life satisfaction if that's the route we choose) and instead putting those funds toward the awesome public trans that you describe.
One of the freeways I take to work had a choke point where it went from 4 to 3 lanes. Once they expanded it 4 lanes the entire way traffic didn't move just 25% faster. It was more like 200% faster during rush hour. I'll never understand why people always wait for the very last instant to merge, slowing everyone down.
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I accidentally mis-modded this so posting to remove the moderation and compliment you on your funny and insightful solution :-)
Precisely why LA should be putting train lines in tunnels and in place of lanes on roads that are already wide. Trains are insanely expensive, but I think you vastly underestimate how many people can fit on one narrow two-track line, especially where the trains are long, the control is automated, and there are no level crossings.
I'd also gander than you don't need to go all the way to Long Beach from the SFV on that particular line. Who the hell does that commute, anyway? Traffic only starts getting really bad north of the 105 or thereabouts.
Even if you can get the same job in Sacramento that you can get in Silicon Valley, it'll pay more in Silicon Valley because the cost of living is so much higher there. As long as the price of gas is low enough that people can buy a much higher standard of living by commuting 2 hours to their job every day from a cheaper area, some people will do that.
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In Los Angeles, given the limited available land area and high prices and how painful it is to shut down lanes, freeways can be far more expensive to build, probably more like 150-00M/mile. And don't get started on rail. I think extending BART is costing upwards of $1B/mile in places. LA freeways also need to be built to withstand major earthquakes which also increases the cost, especially for bridges. With earthquakes, two tiered freeways are a lot more expensive or you end up with problems like this.
With all of the land being so densely populated, putting through a new freeway becomes extremely costly, especially since nobody wants their neighborhood to be split by a major freeway.
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Now that they know it is a shortcut/bypass, you will never be rid of them.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If expanding freeways doesn't reduce traffic jams you haven't expanded them enough If expanding 3 lanes to 4 doesn't help, you may need 7 lanes (7 lanes each way at chokepoints may still not solve it - sometimes you need overlapping offramps, express highways, and similar fixes).
I hate driving in urban areas precisely because the traffic makes it feel like the opposite of freedom
Exactly - lack of needed infrastructure has reduced freedom in those areas. Build more infrastructure; solve the problem.
but I'm not getting the sense that you respect alternative viewpoints on this matter
NIMBY can't be allowed to win, or we become a 3rd-World shithole with no infrastructure. Building infrastructure needs to trump NIMBY - in fact, it's the one legitimate use of Eminent domain.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's always worth spending money on infrastructure - it's the legitimate business of the government. It's the sign of civilization. It's the primary indicator of quality of life.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Causing a traffic jam isn't going to reduce peoples need to travel.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Naw, move up to Bel Aire. Not much traffic, the houses are bigger, and the grocery stores have better food. I honestly don't understand why all poor people don't move there, it's as if they like the slums or something.
Man, you remind me why I don't comment on the Internet more often. Too many people who don't seem to think they need to show respect to people they disagree with. I'd love to debate the issue with you, come up with new counterarguments to respond to what you have to say, pull up data and the like, but you look like you're more content to pound the table. Are you trying to get me to agree with you, or is this just dick-waving?
It is only better if you are not the one losing a home to make someone else commute better.
There aren't a lot of tall buildings in Los Angeles - a few dozen downtown, some along the Wilshire corridor. Beyond that, there are big hotels in some critical spots and not much else. If you limit new construction to 3 stories all that will happen is that 3-story businesses replace residential neighborhoods, and residential neighborhoods will move into the mountains and farmlands to the northwest, east, and south. Problems will be slightly worse than without the restriction.
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You are assuming that everyone who lives 30 miles away from his job lives in the same place. 'Taint so.
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If that's the case, then they aren't setting the price of freeway travel at market equilibrium like I suggested. Instead, they're setting the price above market equilibrium.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
...all of these can be achieved by adding enough lanes to your freeways. Enough many be quite high number, butt hat's fine: building robust infrastructure to make life better is what my taxes are for.
"Robust infrastructure" is good. "Adding lanes to freeways" isn't the only way to reach that goal--and it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective use of those tax dollars. Just laying down roadbed and asphalt isn't terribly costly; call it $10 million or so per mile of 4-lane interstate. Building wider bridges, digging supplementary tunnels, constructing complex interchanges, realigning adjacent utility conduits and ramps--well, that costs quite a bit more. Expropriating massive amounts of land adjacent to existing interstates in dense urban areas - or adding parallel routes, or building stacked or buried lanes - is extraordinarily, sometimes ruinously, costly. (Boston's Big Dig cost something like $200 million per lane-mile.)
And each lane gets you about 2,000 cars per hour, at best. If you have a million people in the suburbs who want to get to work between 8 and 9am, and they're all driving their own vehicles, your system grinds to a halt unless there are 500 live Interstate lanes into the city. Worse, each additional car you add to the city means more traffic on the roads in town, and demand for parking, and production of local air pollution, and so forth. "Build more lanes" is a solution that ultimately just doesn't scale.
In contrast, bus rapid transit systems can achieve at least 10,000 passengers per hour and sometimes as high as 30,000 per hour depending on configuration. Light rail achieves similar passenger numbers. Metro (subway) systems typically top out north of 30,000 passengers per hour, per line; Hong Kong's metro system clears 80,000 per hour on its highest-traffic lines. (For those keeping score, that's enough to offset 40 Interstate lanes.)
~Idarubicin
Do this, and all the bicycles will be forced to ride on the main arteries. Then, the same people who were complaining about traffic on their streets will probably be complaining about arrogant cyclists who think they own the road and slow everyone else down.
Not a good idea.
You'll also increase population density which will put further strain on everything.
As to your claim that high density housing means people don't commute long distances or times... then your claim is that people in New York City, London, and Tokyo do not commute long distances to work. Factually inaccurate. Commute times and distances for those cities are comparable to Los Angeles. The difference is the number of people commuting over the same territory to the same places not the length of the wait or distance.
If you want to reduce the distance, then you need to reduce the ratio of work space to living space in that area. And if you want to make sure the roads do not get congested, then you need to keep the population density low enough that the roads are not stressed.
You are arguing against math. Stop it.
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You're missing the point. I threw out a number as an example. The point was to reduce density in areas that were having a problem.
What is more, if you have a lot of people working in a region but not enough of those people living there, then rezone some of the commercial space into residential space. Continue to do that every time you see a pattern of too many people commuting to that region. Eventually, either enough of those people will live in the area and thus not need to commute or there won't be any more jobs there to commute to thus ending the issue.
Likewise, areas that have lots of people commuting from them can have the opposite pattern worked on them.
The point will be to encourage bosses to commute to the office farther while their employees commute shorter distances. This is largely what is causing the problem.
The businesses people are commuting to are in nice parts of town near the homes of senior management. Their employees live on the other side of town and must commute to work. Reduce office space in the nice parts of town and they'll move their offices to the places where their employees live instead. This will largely address the problem so long as density is kept reasonable.
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I see, you're wrong about something and rather then own up to your ignorance like an adult, you're going to throw out infantile insults?
It is specifically people like you that are the worst thing on forums like this... you offer nothing of value. You don't even try to be useful. You are literally a waste of bandwidth.
And bandwidth is cheap.
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I see, so if I don't permit you to strawman me, then that is evidence of some inherent character flaw I have?
Eh, anonymous coward? You presume to judge me when you won't even reveal your fake name? What a pathetic piece of shit. For all any of us know you're off spouting racist bullshit half the time. But we'll never know because you won't permit a record of your horseshit.
As to whether my idea was tried and failed, it wasn't actually. Density was not limited and commercial and residential space was not balanced. So no you fucking waste of oxygen... I was not proven wrong.
As to the rest of the community being tired of me... big words for a troll that won't even reveal his fake name. That you believe such a transparent bluff has any weight is perhaps the most damning condemnation of your own intelligence. Only a complete fuckwit could believe such a statement would mean anything to anyone that wasn't likewise a fuckwit.
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No I am not. I am assuming statistical probabilities which will incline certain probabilities and patterns. Specifically, I am not inferring any given person will do any given thing. As groups, people are much more predictable.
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In European cities is not unusual for a road like that to be blocked for through traffic, but with a gap for bicycles.
install physical obstacles such as chicanes and speed humps to slow traffic down. These are surface streets, so getting planning clearance should be a local issue. Once the permanent slowdowns are in place, the app should soon catch up and stop directing traffic from the interstate to roads that should be fucking slower anyway!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
What's the matter with these people, choosing to live in shitty neighbourhoods instead of a mansion like you?
I mean, if you hate traffic that much, why not just take a break on your yacht for a few months?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Don't live next to the freeway if you don't like traffic
Sometimes that is the only place to live. Gating a community is not a better option either.
The solutions I have seen in other places include:
- narrowing the intersections to reduce speed of traffic
- making one way streets that locals know how to use, but end up diverting traffic back onto the main arteries.
- introducing speed bumps to slow traffic
- lowering speed limit on these secondary roads
- blocking part of the street with a park, to force traffic to have make more detours
- adding public transport lanes, while sacrificing car traffic lanes.
The solution will depend on the exact location and will probably end up being a hybrid
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It has nothing to do with wealth.
A quiet, kid-friendly neighbourhood street becomes literally a meat grinder.
I have lived twice near such streets. Once - juat as the street was transitioning from the "quiet, kid-friendly" to "meat grinder". Two kids were killed by speeding cars. Road bumps had only limited (and largely negative) effect: an idiot crashes his car on the road bump, traffic jam forms on both sides of the street and the whole city quarter is effectively blocked: no car can get in or get out.
The final solution community found was to cut the one "through" street in the middle, making out of it two dead-end streets.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Slums aren't prisons. Anyone with legs can leave.
Yes, it's so laughably obvious that it makes you wonder why there are slums at all.
Clearly, a lot of people must just enjoy living there. Living in a cockroach-infested slum instead of a fifty roomed mansion in its own park is just like choosing Coke instead of Pepsi, a lifestyle choice.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'll never understand why people always wait for the very last instant to merge, slowing everyone down.
Because most people are too stupid and selfish to understand reality.
It's a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.
Don't worry, The Invisible Hand will sort it out.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
stop being a snooty prick. You're a goddamned Mexican so no one here is believing the cops don't follow you around all the time.
Snooty prick? My 1982 Mercedes 300SD won't impress anyone, apparently, except cops at long range. Even when my tags are expired they don't pull me over, they follow me long enough to see if I've paid my fees, then if I have then they don't bother to pull me over. This is not about being a snooty prick. This is about recognizing reality.
Also, I am a secret Mexican. I look just like everybody white.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're right about London, Tokyo (you forgot Paris, Vancouver and a bunch of others).
Mr. AC is also right
I personally think that what both of you are missing is that as long as people allow the expansion of the state, people and corporations will always try to congregate around where they can pay their politicians off. Explain to me how London is the nicest place in the UK? It isn't. Same with Paris. The only reason people live in Paris, London, Tokyo etc and dream of being elsewhere is government
California is an exception (I know that Sacramento is actually the seat of government). There you have a problem with everyone wanting to be near Hollywood or SV or whatever. Which is a new, voluntary form of power. So perhaps people are just massively stupid, if we decentralized and capped density, people would just invent something new to worship and congregate there. My hope is that when anti-biotics stop working next year, all the congregates of $seats_of_power and $hollywood etc etc will just start dying from the over-concentration and be forced to go home and find some meaning in life.
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
I have seen that too. I used to live in a Cleveland suburb where the City avoided making any repairs to the street outside the local high school. This effectively held everyone to the 25MPH speed limit better than any deliberately introduced speed bumps ever could have.
I take it those were the "other concerns"
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
As someone who drove the 405 and these streets that are being discussed, "these" people that live on these streets must be high. This happens periodically in LA, especially around the 405 and always seemed to be cyclical. Some days the side streets would be better than others but the bottom line is the 405 (and the 10, 101, 110, 5 to name a few others) is basically useless at this point. Short of making it about 20-25 lanes across, nothing will alleviate the traffic on or near the 405 (ok - maybe flying cars :0 )
Also know as Smeed's Law (well part of it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
And where do you put all the cars when they get to the city? More parking spaces needed. This helps people move further out and require more transport to get to the city and requires even bigger free ways and even more parking. So all you end up doing is causing people to spend more time and money travelling. More on taxes for the ever larger free ways and ever more for parking when they get there. Yet it still will not remove the traffic problems. All traffic passing through the city (as in not stopping there) will still be screwed. And all to try to resolve a few hours a day when peak traffic occurs.
Look up Smeed's Law (average speed part)
A question. Is not some of the underground in LA being extended? Last I saw was lots of people complaining about the potential noise of construction.
Yes, they're presently adding three stops under downtown that will connect light rail lines in the city. This particular project is expected to take FIVE YEARS.
A subway line is also being extended down Wilshire Blvd. (the main drag between downtown and the ocean). It will eventually connect downtown to west LA and Beverly Hills, in 2023(!!). As it is the rail systems all join in downtown, and downtown just isn't where most destinations are, people come from outlying areas like Burbank and Manhattan Beach to go to jobs in West LA or Santa Monica, areas that are nominally urban but are in fact intensely developed residential areas where everyone has a $2m house and getting transit built is a huge political slog. NIMBYism is bad but if someone told you a light rail track near your house might cost you $400,000 in home equity you might not be crazy about it either.
Nobody seems to know what they're going to do in the 405 corridor, they've been adding lanes like crazy over the past 5 years but it does nothing. They could add a train but the problem with the 405 is that it connects two very dense areas over a mountain pass, and there's about 6 miles of nothing in between and it's not a natural spot for LRT. Even if they started today, they probably wouldn't finish for 15 years. LA can't pull a Robert Moses, all of the most desirable routes go through very wealthy areas that are politically organized and simply cannot be eminent domained.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Have the city install road blocks to make traffic take a longer route. Europe has already figured that one out. (Makes it very difficult for tourists to figure out how to get somewhere).
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
they are doing it to get to or from jobs.
Just showing how difficult it is: the availability of functioning freeways makes people live further away from their jobs. So you could place a toll on it and expect people or jobs to relocate.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
And all to try to resolve a few hours a day when peak traffic occurs.
And all to significantly improve everyone's quality of life, by giving them back often significant chunks of time every day they used to spend commuting. It's a worthy goal!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As to your dreams of global pandemic, I can't support that. As to your notion that it is about political power bases... that is interesting. I think that is certainly why cities like to be tight because they are easier to politically control.
However, it doesn't explain why businesses cooperate with them. After all, businesses could more easily and cheaply bribe smaller towns then larger cities.
I think a lot of what makes cities attractive is that they're very useful for elites. People in the 1 percent can get everything they want and the price doesn't especially matter. I question whether they serve the other 99 percent however in the 21st century. Between the internet and airplanes I don't see why we pack people in that densely anymore.
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I didn't suggest that NYC didn't have an effective mass transit system. I instead said that the effect of that system was to allow for greater density... it did not and does not reduce commute times or distances.
The average commute in Los Angeles is about an hour both ways assuming you don't completely miss the rush.
And the average distance of commute might be anywhere from 10 to 20 miles.
Compare that to other major cities and you'll find the commute is not unusual or the distances unusual.
The only thing that is different is the density levels.
If you want to increase density and see density as an end unto itself... then mass transit is good. It makes density possible. However, mass transit does not reduce commute times or distances. So if you want to effect those then mass transit does not address the problem. All it does is allow for greater density.
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Thanks for answering. I have only been to LA a few times and it was always a pain wrt traffic.
Your quality of life may be improved if you did not have to commute into the city thus saving you valuable time, reducing your taxes by not having to build ever larger free ways, by not having to pay more and more for gas and parking each year. A more worthy goal?
Some people have to work were the retail centres are. Most other city business does not need to be done in a city centre any more. chucking more free ways at is does not solve the problem.
And those few hours are the rush hours. What you are asking for is to scale the roads to handle the maximum possible capacity when in reality outside those few hours a day they have a 5%(or whatever) usage. And you want your taxes to do that? Have you ever done that in any other situation and do you know how much it costs to have that much capacity which mostly stands unused. (roads cost a lot to maintain.
Most other city business does not need to be done in a city centre any more. chucking more free ways at is does not solve the problem.
You might be a liberal if your solution to an engineering problem is "everyone else just needs to change how they behave and the problem goes away!"
reality outside those few hours a day they have a 5%(or whatever) usage.
In California (which started this discussion), "peak usage" is the majority of the day. Rush hour is from 6am to 9pm. That's what happens when you won't build enough roads.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Your examples are all crimes. Not knowing where your friend's house is located is not a crime.
It does reduce travel. If it takes too long every day to get to work, people will look either for work more close to home, or they will look for a home more close to work, or they will look for a new workplace with affordable housing nearby.
And you are paying for the moving and the new housing, right?
That's awesome from you.
BTW, I have a few friends and we want to organise a Death Metal meeting in your living room. You don't mind right? You can jsut move somewhere else where there are no Dead Metal fans moshing :)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
What about those of us who don't work for the local McDonalds?
For those of us with a career many of our employers only have one premises per city, so choosing an office close to home is not an option. Neither is buying a new house every time you switch jobs. Your suggestion is not workable.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
No, it's crappy, like riding the subway back in 1978 in NYC, but not as smelly.
But what people have learned is that you can operate on a schedule and have relaxful time for yourself.
Trust me, driving in southern Florida is a horrible thing, best way to describe it, You will get hit if you don't pay attention ALL the time, in California you only get hit when you do something dumb. It's a stressful drive here. I would rather be stuck on the 405 doing 20, or on the LIE doing 15, then doing 30 to 95.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
"the real simple solution is a simple increase in the gas tax by a thumping amount,"
Or properly reinstate the public transport system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Almost nobody lives in Florida and commutes to Manhattan. Why is that? The pay is better in Manhattan and housing is cheaper in Florida.
oh but it takes 13 hours to get from jacksonville to manhattan. If it took 13 hours to get from long beach to culver city, people wouldn't try to live in Long Beach and work in Culver City, simple as that.
I am not saying crowded roads are awesome, but people make the decision every day to not work 13 hours from their home even if it doesn't "feel" like it.
It's an "established" neighborhood that is probably a bit above my social class. My cross-street had the "shortcut" problem so the voters pressured the city to do the ultimate "dick move" to the short-cutters. 4 lanes became 2 lanes + bike lane on each side, and they added stop signs at every other cross street.
It went from "oh lets avoid traffic" to "why bother?"
Speed bumps have only one proven effect. Slower emergency response. There are also more pedestrian fatalities on roads with speed bumps, but that wasn't statistically significant. But proving speed bumps "Bad" isn't politically correct, so nobody will fund follow-ups. Traffic calming doesn't work, but is a psychological tool to reduce complaints.
Learn to love Alaska
Most car journeys are under an hour. Nobody drives 13 hours to get to work, your argument is ridiculous.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
As someone then living in Studio City but working in Santa Monica, we all knew how to use the residential streets to get around blockages of the 405. Mulholland (which is very much residential) to Laurel Canyon, for example. We told each other about them. I personally knew five or six alternates.
This may be spreading the word among people who don't try things on their own, but it's been a problem for the residents for many years. They do all sorts of things, from speed bumps to parking their cars in the narrowest (legal) places possible to slow down traffic. We would still use these routes.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I don't know about you, but I don't need to travel a route more than a couple of times before I know it ; and for working out alternatives, I've got these things called "eyes" and "memory" for "reading" things called "road signs" which are cunningly positioned to direct people how to get from point 'A' (here) to point 'B' (somewhere else). I don't see any need to slavishly follow the directions of some application on my phone, or an appliance on my dashboard.
If I'm in a strange city - say I'm there for one day, for work, or 3 days as part of a vacation, then frankly it is easier to use a taxi than to fuck around hiring a car.
It's a solution in search of a problem. And I bet the problem it's solving is "how to expose adverts to users".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Fuck you hippie. Shave that neckbeard, get a job, buy a car, and then you'll see. Then die in a fire, you fucking hippie.
P.S. Fuck you, you fucking hippie.
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