You should not be able to get around with a car, you are so far gone you think it is not a bloody war, thinking bikes and trains and highrises can coexist with personal cars. Idiocy
Something I think more people need to mention about public transportation is, it’s not about being against cars, but being for more options. For instance, many of us have elderly parents or grandparents who are too old to drive anymore, so they must rely on friends and family to get around despite being perfectly healthy to walk. But if they have reliable and close by public transportation options, they could retain their locomotive liberty much longer into their twilight years, and the same could be true for all of us as we get older.
LA does desperately need a public transportation system, after it got trashed generations ago.
Good. I look forward to a future where people who fought transit have their lives improved by it, even if they’re too small minded and foolish to recognize it.
I can offer a preview of what the future holds: People-oriented areas of the city that are beautiful, interesting, safe, and pleasant to spend time in. The carbrained people will want to go there, but they will carp endlessly about the lack of parking. The connection between lack of parking and the desirable destination won’t occur to them.
There’s that political cartoon that’s like two people on bikes through a beautiful downtown, and one says to the other “If anyone tried to add bike lanes like this back home, I’d murder them”
I’ve spent time in three cities with excellent public transportation (relative to LA): New York City, Tokyo, and Osaka. I was a vacationer so maybe it’s different for residents but being able to access pretty much any part of the cities at almost any time of the day without worrying about parking or gas was like a superpower. Meanwhile when I lived in Pasadena, taking the train to Santa Monica was only slightly faster than biking there.
Pasadena to Santa Monica is a really long ride though. I think what makes that line slow is the sheer number of stops it has.
Toronto is also quite walkable and has good transit!
This must be a joke. Toronto’s transit is only outshittified by it’s highways.
Having moved here from NYC:
- Walking and transit are my primary forms of transportation
- The busses are infinitely more reliable than NY’s and far better connected to the subways
- The street cars are lovely when it’s not rush hour, I wish we had them back in NY
- Subway coverage is pretty expansive, especially now that we have 5 lines. Delays are not unlike anything in NYC
- You can get from Union to the airport in 20 minutes via the UP train, far better than dealing with the clusterfuck of traffic in that area
- Light rails connect to surrounding cities as is typical. Going from Toronto to Ottawa feels like going from NYC to Boston
- While my partner and I do have a compact car for occasions, we hardly ever use it
They said Mamdani wasn’t experienced enough either. Experience doesn’t matter when you’ve done nothing noteworthy with all your supposed “experience”.
But I’ve been failing to do my job for decades! Clearly, this is better than someone who hasn’t gotten the opportunity to try yet!
Every city needs to be doing this.
Affordable gasoline is a thing of the past. Affordable cars are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Soon, the $7 minimum wage will be older than the newest generation of voters, and no one in Congress is honestly considering passing a living wage.
Bikes, e-scooters, walking, and public trans are going to be essential in the coming years.
Affordable cars are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
I’m afraid that’s not true. As in, literally, I’m scared that that’s not true. BEVs are only getting cheaper over time, as they’ve only recently been mass-produced at anything approaching the absurd scale of ICE car production, and because li-ion/sodium-ion batteries basically didn’t exist before the 90s and were 100x more expensive 20 years ago.
Once everyone switches to electric, that will only further encourage car-centric development.
We will witness the rise of the Taxi Cash Conduit. They do not exist as a human being - simply a process by which oil is burnt by the demands of capitalism.
The oil is burned to extract more oil, which is then used in the Uber driver’s car. The driver pays exactly as much in gas costs as he charges for rides. He does not eat, and he sleeps in that car. When it breaks, he breaks. The passenger would just walk, but the city was built to specifically punish non-riders.
The uber driver and passenger will each get one free ride a year, for the specific purpose of driving to city hall to vote against a bike lane.
I couldn’t agree more
Much has been written about the generational gap in LA’s mayoral race. Bass, 73, tried to paint Raman, 45, as inexperienced; “not ready for prime time.” When Raman takes office — and statistically, it’s looking more like a blowout — LA will have a mayor, city attorney, and city controller with an average age of 38. Younger voters, who turned out in big numbers this election, care deeply about transit and were overwhelmingly supporting Raman. But the gap is about more than just age and transportation habits. The complacency of car dependency is what’s propping up the establishment Democrats; it’s the same reason corporationsand tech companies are spending big on them to keep us from the city that we deserve.
That’s going to take decades and a lot of money.
Decades? Pribably. A lot of money? Not as much as you’d think, a lot of the improvements can be made usung the dutch method of implementing new designs when old roads need replaced. And although certain public transit projects have large initial buy ins they typically cost much less than normal car infrastructure as you can extract part of the maintenance costs from fees and the maintenance is generally cheaper for things like trams and trains.
My understanding is that that’s a very tall order for LA.
Its metro system is actually really good now. The real problem is that there are holes that still need to be filled. The core is there already, but there are only a few lines that go farther out into the county so they may not be useful to you if you live too far from them and are unwilling to use buses to get to them.
The only way I see that being possible is if you tore down the entire city and rebuilt it from the ground up.
It’s such a glaring flaw when you visit LA. You’d think a city that fixated on its image would improve transit just to save face if nothing else. Car culture is a beast.
You know, like a city.
To be fair, the US has only a handful of cities, such as New York. Mostly, it has urban agglomerations, like Los Angeles.
Yep. NYC and San Fran are the only real dense, urban areas. Everywhere else is an assortment of towns that have grown outward over time and maybe have some urbanish zones. I might be willing to concede on Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia too.
I wish something like this would work near me, but I don’t know how it will. The nearest city doesn’t pay enough for a minimum wage worker to live within the city, but also lets low paying jobs discriminate against people who use the bus or a bike to commute because it’s “not reliable transportation”.
I’ve been out of work for a few years now because I get randomly dizzy and refuse to drive, but that’s made me unemployable.
not reliable transportation
Neither are a lot of people’s cars. I’ve personally been known to buy beaters that should’ve long been discarded and keep them running for a few more years, sometimes they even leave me in better condition than they came to me but that’s because I need to repair them because they have a tendency to develop issues after hundreds of thousands of kilometers (current one actually isn’t even that old, only a bit above 400k km). Usually issues that don’t leave me stranded, but still issues that can take a week or 2 worth of nights to fix as a single dad who can’t work on his car until the toddler’s asleep.
I’ve had breakdowns on bikes too (my legs have too much torque and I dislike shifting down all the time to accelerate so I’ve literally broken a bunch of pedals among other things), but bike repairs are quick and cheap. And when the bus breaks down, a replacement one is sent - something I’ve experienced multiple times in my life.
So I wonder in what universe would a bike or bus be a less reliable method of transportation than a car, unless it’s also specified that the car must be max 5 years old or something.
Yeah, you get fired for having an unreliable car too. I lost a job once because my beater broke down after work Friday, and I couldn’t get another one by my shift on Saturday. You can’t even register a car over the weekend, because the government doesn’t work weekends.
It doesn’t help that the last bus home leaves the station at 6pm, but low-income jobs require flexible scheduling so you can do clopening shifts. I’ve been advocating for bus expansion for the past fifteen years, and keep running into the neolib bullshit about how urban areas “deserve” transit because they’ve got money and I don’t.
I would bike to work, but there’s not even shoulders on the two-lane highway that connects the rural area to the urban area.
