LA used to have a lot of little cut throughs and stairways going up and down the hillier neighborhoods during the streetcar era. Some of them are still around of course, but they are pretty secret as their original use case (getting to the street car stop) has been gone for 60 years.
New builds don't really consider the pedestrian or the neighborhood, and are generally hostile to the cohesiveness of the area. They are massive and take up sometimes the whole city block (while only building 5 or so stories generally), and the only way to bypass them is to go all the way around them which can take 10 minutes sometimes (vs. like 2 if there was a cut through).
Due to the homeless, most apartments also gate their parking lots so you can't cut through there either. My current apartment is one of these places and walkability is severely limited because there are only two exits (despite the place taking up nearly a block). If the surrounding fencing was removed or at the very least I had an exit on every cardinal direction and not just to the east and south west, I'd be able to walk to the subway that is NNW of me 10 minutes faster(calculated by google maps).
New builds don't really consider the pedestrian or the neighborhood, and are generally hostile to the cohesiveness of the area. They are massive and take up sometimes the whole city block (while only building 5 or so stories generally), and the only way to bypass them is to go all the way around them which can take 10 minutes sometimes (vs. like 2 if there was a cut through).
Due to the homeless, most apartments also gate their parking lots so you can't cut through there either. My current apartment is one of these places and walkability is severely limited because there are only two exits (despite the place taking up nearly a block). If the surrounding fencing was removed or at the very least I had an exit on every cardinal direction and not just to the east and south west, I'd be able to walk to the subway that is NNW of me 10 minutes faster(calculated by google maps).
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