Why Traffic Is So Bad In Los Angeles

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Off of the freeways, badly synced signals can cause massive backups. Properly fixing that regionally would be a start...

👍︎︎ 50 👤︎︎ u/nobody1231231 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

Fix zoning so that we can build more housing near job locations and encourage companies to have WFH policies.

👍︎︎ 90 👤︎︎ u/likesound 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

Because of all the cars

👍︎︎ 80 👤︎︎ u/WhiteWalls22 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 27 👤︎︎ u/send_cumulus 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

I feel like the roads were designed by someone that didn’t expect LA to get popular and it just snowballed out of control.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/zerobluesmaint 📅︎︎ Jan 03 2022 🗫︎ replies

"Why is traffic so bad?"

There's 4 million people

"Why are houses so expensive?"

There's 4 million people

"Why is crime so high?"

There's 4 million people

"Why come..."

THERE'S 4 MILLION PEOPLE

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 11 👤︎︎ u/greyvagabond 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies

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?

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/nirad 📅︎︎ Jan 02 2022 🗫︎ replies
Captions
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.
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Channel: CNBC
Views: 720,579
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Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, top gear, motortrend channel, chrisfix, doug demuro, carwow, scotty kilmer, la traffic, las Angeles traffic, why is traffic so bad, how does traffic happen, traffic costly, California traffic, traffic cars, highway traffic
Id: S76lKWeU_xc
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Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)
Published: Sat Jan 01 2022
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