Los Angeles consistently ranks
among the most traffic clogged cities in America. LA is always in the top three or
four sort of most congested metropolitan areas in the
country. The Covid-19 pandemic has
disrupted that trend, but traffic is returning. LA is a
big city. It is more dense than it might seem. And it has some
natural features, specifically mountains, that create traffic
bottlenecks. Los Angeles has been trying to
reduce its traffic for decades and nothing has worked.
Transportation researchers and economists say they have an idea
that might work but drivers may find it a bitter pill. Los Angeles was one of the
fastest growing cities in the world for much of the 20th
century. In 1900, 50 years after the city was incorporated, LA
was home to 100,000 people. In 2020, the city itself was
home to nearly 4 million. Folks forget how big the LA
basin is. How much obviously north to the Valley, how much
east into Riverside and Ontario. You're talking nearly 20 million
people in total, most of them living in automobile oriented
designed neighborhoods, which is a shorthand or longhand way of
saying, you've got to drive everywhere. In other words, Los Angeles is a
city that came of age during the era of the automobile. LA originally was actually
centralized in terms of a city and connected by streetcars to
surrounding neighborhoods, which eventually became suburbs, or
not became adopted into part of the central city. So LA came up
similar to how New York, Chicago and Philadelphia did. What's
different is that Los Angeles, due to its age, and its kind of
long-term vision invested more heavily in highways than many of
its eastern and midwestern peers. A popular explanation for the
city's brutal traffic is that it did not build enough freeways to
accommodate drivers in the 20th century. Others blame early
automakers for undermining mass transit systems to make the city
more car friendly. This story which claims that automakers and
other companies conspired to kill mass transit in Los Angeles
has endured. It was actually a plot point in 'Who Framed Roger
Rabbit.' There may be a kernel of truth
to this somewhere, but it really doesn't explain LA's traffic
problem. Los Angeles did have plans for a far more expensive
freeway and highway system in the 20th century than the one
that eventually got built. And yes, a consortium of companies
invested in automobiles, including automaker General
Motors, bought up streetcar routes in LA. At the time, the
streetcars formed perhaps the best mass transit system in the
world. This consortium converted streetcar lines into bus routes.
But streetcars were already struggling by the time they were
bought up by this consortium at fire sale prices. And their
decline in Los Angeles was very similar to what we've seen
elsewhere in the US, including in cities where this consortium
did not operate. It seems persuasive to argue
that if the streetcar lines were not torn up in LA, the city
would still have a far better transit system than it does
today. And a population that is accustomed to riding public
transit rather than driving. But mass transit does not save a
city from congestion. If you look at some of the the
places in the world that have the absolute best transit
systems and the highest levels of transit ridership, I
guarantee you, you are also looking at places with terrible
traffic congestion, and New York is one of them. Again, what
transit does is it gives you the option of avoiding congestion.
But that's different. Most of the time when we talk about
reducing congestion, what we mean is, I'm going to get in my
car, and it's going to go faster, there's going to be less
traffic. Right? That doesn't describe New York, it doesn't
describe Tokyo, it doesn't describe Hong Kong. Another common explanation is
that the freeway system, as it had been planned in the late
1950s, was never completed. The freeway system ran out of
money starting in the 70s. And a combination of those funding
shortfalls, and some resistance, local resistance to extending
it, means that if you look at the map of what LA's freeways
were supposed to look like, we have a freeway system that is
incomplete. But that doesn't really explain
it. We have also, with the freeways
we have, we have widened them many times, we have added to
them. None of that makes a dent in the level of congestion,
right? So you could simultaneously believe that had
our freeway system been built out to the measurements that we
had initially anticipated, it would be a more effective
freeway system. But also understand that it would be
every bit as congested. And of course, there would be
tremendous human and environmental cost to us. Having
built that out. The freeway system was very destructive in
many ways. And so it's probably just as well that we didn't
build it out. When a city is considered the
most congested it typically means it is the place where
drivers on average spend the longest amount of time in their
cars getting from one place to another. All other things like
distance being equal. We're very comfortable saying
the traffic in LA is worse than it is in Montpelier, Vermont.
But when you get down to trying to measure congestion between
the Washington DC metro area and Boston and Seattle and LA, you
end up making a lot of judgment calls that could really tip the
balance one way or the other. GPS technology company, TomTom,
ranked Los Angeles in 2020 as the worst city in the country
for traffic and the 85th worst in the world. According to that
study, in 2017, Angelenos spent nearly five entire days and over
$2,600 sitting in traffic. The pandemic upset these kinds of
rankings a bit. INRIX, a transportation analytics firm,
publishes a widely cited global traffic scorecard every year. In
2021, LA was the sixth most congested city in the United
States and ranked for 33rd for the whole world. Among American
cities, it came in behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Boston and Miami. Its reduced ranking was due in large part to
the circumstances of the pandemic, and Angelenos still
spent about 62 hours stuck in traffic in 2021, compared to the
national average of 36. It was still top and at least
one category: the most congested stretch of road in the US was
still the Interstate-5 highway in Los Angeles from Euclid
Avenue to Interstate-605 with 22 minutes of delay at the four
o'clock pm peak hour. And though LA's congestion may not be quite
as bad as it is in New York, the city's layout spreads the
aggravation of traffic congestion across a wider swath
of the city. Traffic is terrible in the
densest parts of New York City, but it quickly thins out as the
city gives way to suburbs. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has
miles and miles and miles of moderate density. In some ways, what we've done
with our development patterns here is given ourselves the
worst of all worlds. Right, we have a region that's low enough
density where you have to drive, but high enough density where
the driving is miserable. LA is also bisected by
mountains, a problem few other American cities have. Those
mountains create some of the worst bottlenecks in the city.
One example is the Sepulveda Pass on the 405 freeway where
traffic has to come over the hill to get to Santa Monica,
Venice and West LA. Additionally, Angelenos are more
vulnerable to traffic than New Yorkers or Chicagoans are,
primarily because they have fewer options. New York alone
accounts for 40% of all transit ridership in the entire US. In Los Angeles, fewer than 5% of
trips are made on transit. If you live in New York City, if
you live in downtown Boston, you are in probably one of the most
congested parts of a very congested region. But you also
have a way to avoid it. The chances are some of your trips
can be made by walking, some of your trips can be made by a
pretty effective public transportation system. The same
is true in San Francisco. That's not nearly as true in Los Angeles. One thing a lot of planners and
economists are skeptical of, if not downright opposed to, is
just expanding or widening freeways and roads. There is a
concept known as induced demand. It basically means if you build
it, people will come. The idea is that improving capacity seems
to alleviate traffic temporarily, but eventually
highways become clogged again. Essentially, bad traffic deters
people from driving in the first place. If more roads are built a
lot more people may decide to drive or they may take more
trips than they otherwise would. Perhaps the most famous example
of this is the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas. It costs $2.8
billion to build and has 26 lanes at its widest point. This
was the result of a massive expansion plan that was meant to
alleviate traffic congestion. But some analysts using
government traffic data found that congestion worsened after
widening the freeway. If you go from a three lane
highway to a four lane highway, even if it not as congested as
it was before you're still moving 33% more people by adding
that lane than you were before. So as far as a volume metric of
how much traffic, or it's like expanding a pipe for water, you
know, you'll get more water through even though it flows at
the same rate. Transit can at least offer some
alternatives to being stuck in traffic as it does in cities
like New York, Angelenos have said they want more of it. A
recent example is the Los Angeles County traffic
improvement plan, also known as Measure M. It was a large
transportation sales tax approved in 2016 by 71.5% of
the county's voters. The measure raised the county sales tax by a
half cent and also made an earlier temporary transportation
sales tax increase permanent. Proponents estimate it will
generate $860 million a year or more than $120 billion over 40
years. 65% of the funding will go to improving transit,
although a lot of the money will also funnel into improvements
for road and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. In general, traffic is almost
impossible to solve because all you have to do is look in the
mirror every morning. You are the traffic. It's not just the
people around you. So what we've learned, not just in Los
Angeles, but in mega cities across the planet (London,
Tokyo) is that the only solution to traffic is to give people
choices. And that's something that Los Angeles has previously
struggled with, but is now making generational investments
in. There's no real room for new highways and they would quickly
fill up anyways, all around Los Angeles and the surrounding
counties. But giving people more transit alternatives, in
particular for higher speed rail lines, that actually could get
people out of their cars and using LA MTA for many more of
their trips. Many researchers and economists
suggest charging people for using the road. Congestion
pricing is already at work in some countries, including
Singapore, Sweden and the UK. It means drivers pay to drive into
certain parts of the city. This payment might work through
things like the EZ Pass Tollbooth transponders that
electronically charge drivers a toll when they pass through a
toll gate. It could also be a relatively manageable tool. If you can charge a toll at a
busy time, that's just high enough to deter 5% of the
vehicles or something from getting on the road then, you
can actually make speeds improved by, you know, 15-20%.
Right? So it doesn't have to be this sort of astronomically high
toll. It just has to be enough to sort of nudge a small
proportion of people into reconsidering making that trip
at that time by car. It does, however, have one
important problem: drivers hate it. It's very difficult to get
people to pay for something that had been previously considered
free. And most people consider using the roads to be free. Adopting congestion fees
anywhere in the United States has been really challenging from
a political angle. Famously, during the Bloomberg
administration in New York City, the mayor was blocked by the
state and Albany from adopting a congestion fee. And that is in
one of the easiest places in theory. You're dealing with an
island where the major central business districts are, you also
have real rail alternatives so people could get out of their
cars and still have pretty time competitive options into the
city. And even there, it was challenging. Some critics considered a kind
of regressive form of taxation that can be more of a burden on
the poor than the wealthy. Some toll lanes have been called
Lexus lanes after the luxury Japanese car brand. It also
opens up the question of what you do with the money. That creates a whole new
situation, where, should it be reinvested into that road? Or
should users of one road pay for another road? Or should users of
that pay for something like transit. Most drivers don't want
to see that money go into a slush fund for something, they
want it to benefit them somehow. What's essential from learning
from our European and Asian peers, is to take those tax
revenues and invest them back in other forms of transportation,
most notably public transportation, and also bike
lanes, and actually just giving people other discounts for
driving. So those who are most susceptible to price hikes, but
don't necessarily have the time to donate, will be given real
competitive alternatives to driving. So you actually can
rebalance how people travel. Congestion pricing is already
active in the form of high occupancy toll lanes on
freeways. These are basically lanes that allow carpoolers to
ride for free and others to buy their way into the lane with a
toll. New York City is also on its way to instituting
congestion pricing following cities such as London, Singapore
and Stockholm. There are also pilot programs under
consideration in Portland, San Francisco and other cities in
America. Supporters say it is a market driven solution.
Currently, traffic exists because cities give away
something for free, that is limited: space on the road. When
a resource is offered for free, it will quickly become scarce
and people will pay for it in some other way. In this case
with time. Time is the thing you can't get
back. And so right now, the way we run our surface
transportation system is we ask people to squander their
absolutely most precious resource, and give them in
return a bad road system. The Covid-19 pandemic has also
changed a lot. Traffic is up near pre-pandemic levels even in
Los Angeles, but there are some meaningful differences. Credit
rating agency, Moody's, said in March of 2021, it expects a
permanent 20% drop in transit ridership in cities around the
world, though the effect will be softened over time by new
riders. And while INRIX said Angelenos
lost 62 hours to congestion in 2021, they still saved 41 hours
over pre-pandemic levels. There are still many unknowns and that
has implications for cities that are trying to plan improvements
to their roads and transit systems. I think we need to find a way to
build some flexibility into our planning and into these systems.
We don't know how much telecommuting is going to take
off. We don't know exactly when transit is going to come back to
pre-Covid levels, you know probably a few years. We don't
know what travel patterns are going to look like.
Off of the freeways, badly synced signals can cause massive backups. Properly fixing that regionally would be a start...
Fix zoning so that we can build more housing near job locations and encourage companies to have WFH policies.
Because of all the cars
I like how they point out that areas with good public transit also have lots of traffic. I think that point tends to get lost. Nowadays most know that building more or wider roads won’t solve congestion. But sometimes people claim building light rail will. It won’t. All of these things allow more people to travel at peak periods. And give some people options. But none will greatly reduce congestion. Pricing could but potentially at a cost higher than the cost of the congestion.
I feel like the roads were designed by someone that didn’t expect LA to get popular and it just snowballed out of control.
One thing not mentioned is also not flexing working hours.
Being a military veteran, I can tell you how stupid it is to make everyone on base report to work at 0700 or PT at 0600, which instantly clogs the gate every morning.
Having your office meeting at 0900 and letting people choose to decide their working hours makes life easier for everyone.
There's 4 million people
There's 4 million people
There's 4 million people
THERE'S 4 MILLION PEOPLE
Because everyone drives everywhere because we refuse to make public transit faster than driving make bicycling safer.
You're not stuck in traffic; you ARE traffic.
More than half of car trips are under 5 miles. The cheapest and easiest way to reduce traffic would be to install lots of well-designed, safe (I.e. protected) bike lanes. We have the best weather in the world. Why not take advantage of that?