LA actually has decent public transportation now, and it's getting better. it's also the perfect city for biking, with lower temperature variances, elevation variances, and precipitation rates than most cities. we just need to convert on-street parking into bike lanes everywhere, and we'd be all set (with protected lanes built out over time).
LA may have been the poster child of poor planning in the 80's, but i'd suggest cities like phoenix, houston and atlanta have surpassed it in that regard.
With investment in public transit (i.e. approximately rebuilding the original streetcar network and building out the existing Metro system) and a high-quality protected bike lane network, LA could be truly amazing.
The a lot of the flat part of the city is pretty much a false flat though. The road system if you avoid arterials (which I do, who likes getting forced off Western Ave into a fruit cart by a truck loaded 10 feet wide with scrap metal?), is a labrynth of weird ends and incomplete connections. For example there is no great north south road that I've found at least. I take van ness but it ends in a three way intersection at third, so I do some other weird maneuvers to find another road like serrano to take a little further, then that peters out in a similar fashion so I have to find another decent non arterial that doesn't dead end or do anything else weird, then I have to consider how I am crossing the 10, etc.
Biking in LA is great if you live in like Playa del Rey, Santa Monica, Burbank, Pasadena, or even Altadena, but in a lot of places it needs a ton of work to be seen as anything but a deathtrap in a lot of people's eyes. To say nothing of the rampant bike theft. I've lost one so far, knocking on wood.
Living carless in LA is getting better every year. Keep in mind the massive amounts of bike lanes being built, and perfect cycling weather year round. Along with the Metro and rideshare, it's pretty feasible to not have a car.
You wouldn't know it, but LA has a pretty decent transit system, in terms of one that can get you most places you'd want to go. It's largely bus-based, and can take a while, but it is effective. Compared to some mid-western and southern cities, it's worlds better.
Sounds like you live near the red or gold lines, I used to take those to work every day when I worked in Old Town Pasadena and lived in Hollywood (two very walkable areas also).
You're highlighting something a lot of people don't understand about LA - there are tons of walkable neighborhoods in LA, the problem is traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood takes forever and requires a car.
LA was originally a dozen different cities, all walkable, all connected by good public transport. It's very, very slowly returning to that ideal but light rail and subway are about 25 years behind where it could be.
With the accelerated transit programs/taxes (new light rail, new subways, new bus lines) currently underway, the gaining popularity of biking, and the increasing telecommuting, it'll get better. Eventually. :)
LA is actually very suitable for public transit: it's a city with multiple, reasonably dense urban centers. The greater LA as a whole is also pretty dense, denser than NY metro area. And the city is investing like crazy in new transit infrastructure. Give it 20 years and, at least in the central parts of LA metro, it will be much more convenient to move by transit.
Having lived in Los Angeles for 6 years and now having moved to Chicago, I think you totally nailed it.
Being so huge and distributed, Los Angeles is pretty much impossible to bike, where as Chicago not only tries to be bike friendly, but actively encourages it. A perfect example would be our Mayor's Divvy bike renting program where you can get a bicycle for $7 per day and drop it off and any of the other hundreds of divvy stations all over the city.
As a life-long LA resident, I say don't believe the hype. The article says that the centerpiece is the revitalization of the LA river. As far as I can tell, this isn't happening. Some bike paths were added along the river, which is nice, but that's far from what I'd call revitalization. The bike paths are still poorly lit, they still smell like shit, and they're not getting much use. There's a huge trainyard east of downtown (one of the coolest parts of the city, imo) called Piggyback Yard, which is owned by Union Pacific, who doesn't want to sell the land. It'd be hard for the city to do any significant revitalization of the river without turning the Piggyback Yard into a park that can provide flood control. Furthermore, the US Army corps of engineers controls the LA river, so the voters have no say in what happens here.
The metro extensions have been planned for decades, and there never seems to be much movement. Recently the blue line has been creeping steadily towards Santa Monica but I doubt this will have much of an impact on city life even if it does connect downtown LA to the westside beach communities. I used to encourage everyone to try taking the train, and I used to do it myself all the time, but I haven't hopped on the train at all in the last 12 months. The stations are too spread out, the paths of all the lines make little sense, the trains only come every 15-20 minutes, and a huge chunk of the city is totally cut off from the transit lines. As much as I don't like uber/lyft, they've made it much more enjoyable to live in LA.
Ciclavia is cool, but its just 1 day out of the year. LA is the worst city in the country to ride a bike. They claim to have more bike lines than any other city, but that's only on paper. Just because you paint a person riding a bike next to the gutter of a 2 lane street doesn't make it a bike lane. Yet that is exactly what the city has done in the name of adding bike friendly streets.
All of these projects are little more than photo-ops for city politicians.
In LA temperatures rarely fall below 50 degrees in the winter and are rarely above 85 in the summer. Yet LA is jam packed with cars and features traffic jams at any time of day.
I think LA is a perfect city for bike streets. There are underground gangs of byciclist in LA that periodically take over large streets by swarming them with thousands of bikes and completely shutting down car traffic. I am sure they do this to give city planners a clue, but the clues are slow to come.
It depends on what you mean by LA. LA itself actually has fairly decent public transit (by US standards, not NYC, but by nearly every other city) -- the RapidBus busses are actually fairly rapid (they can control stoplights so they always hit green) and the Metro is quite nice where it goes.
You must live in a different part of LA than I did. I spent a summer bike-commuting from Santa Monica along Wilshire Blvd to UCLA. It sucked. The cars were mostly going 50, the right lane was dangerous because of the 405 on-ramp and off-ramp, and the sidewalk was a slalom course of lamp posts.
The only real alternate route was to wind through Brentwood and around the VA cemetery. It was long, slow, and had its own hazard: there was a plant by the cemetery that made little spiky seeds that would deflate tires.
The Big Blue Bus was decent, but somehow longtime Angelenos in the early 2000s didn't believe that people who owned cars belonged on the bus.
LA resident here for eleven years (coming from ATL which has its own horrible traffic and is worse by miles for bike commuting, fwiw).
> I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city.
My not-so-pedantic comments to these facts are (a) LA is freaking HUGE (if ever fly into LAX at night, pay attention to when the earth becomes a solid carpet of city lights. It's a looong way from the shoreline). We aren't constrained by water on three or four sides like say, NYC/Manhattan or San Francisco.
And, (b), at LA's 101/10/405/surface street speeds, thirty minutes may only be three or four miles (or two, if you venture to travel at The Wrong Times), while you can get to one of the major secondary cities (Anaheim, for example) in about fifty minutes if you time it well.
So, while technically true, those points aren't representative of How Things Really Are, imho.
(me: exclusive transit/bike commuter here for 6+ years)
What part of the city? I used to work in Santa Monica and biking there, while not perfect, wasn't too terrible. There are plenty of tech jobs in SM, or Venice for that matter.
I agree that LA on the whole is a decrepit hellhole for cyclists, though.
I find most of LA really hard to spend time in. The mangled road network (Grids? Nah bruh, lets have lots of dead ends!), constant drone of traffic everywhere, and few things being walkable makes it not the most enjoyable place to visit.
Seattle is up there on the traffic scale, but at least in the neighborhoods there aren't 6 lane monster roads criss crossing every which way, with few pedestrian crossings and no lanes for bikes or busses. Traffic calming has helped quite a bit too, though I imagine reducing a 4 lane road to a 2 lane road with parking, a center turn lane and bike lanes would get the average politician recalled down in LA.
yes please. i have these conversations with people here in LA and they look at me like i'm an alien. but LA is really the perfect city for dense, multi-modal, mixed-use neighborhoods because of the perfect weather (esp. low humidity) and relatively flat terrain.
all we need to do is convert street parking into bike lanes, and build a few parking structures in the oldest neighborhoods that were built before onsite parking was common (this mitigates the biggest legitimate objection for getting rid of street parking).
LA has a good rail system on top of a crappy city. You could put the Tube in LA and it wouldn't go where you needed to go because everything in LA is ten times further away than it should be. It's mostly asphalt.
LA may have been the poster child of poor planning in the 80's, but i'd suggest cities like phoenix, houston and atlanta have surpassed it in that regard.
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