It’s not a single massive project like the Big Dig, but there are plansto accelerate transit development across the entire city, and a big part of that is speeding up construction of the subway.
Right now they’re working on extending the Expo line to the west side, which will take some pressure off the 10. And the Purple line extension through the Wilshire corridor will follow as soon as the people in Beverly Hills stop being pissy about the right-of-way under Beverly Hills High School. Once those two lines are in place there will probably be a push to run an elevated line through the Sepulveda pass parallel to the 405, connecting the valley to the west side and LAX. That would make a big difference.
The reason you can’t fix L.A.'s congestion with a single “Big Dig” is that the problem spans the entire city. There’s congestion almost everywhere.
The only long-term solution is to increase density and keep expanding the train system as quickly as possible. More freeways at this point won’t help. The 405 is already 10 lanes wide and it’s bumper to bumper for large chunks of the day.
I once heard building highways to solve a congestion problem compared to buying a bigger belt to solve an obesity problem.
When people think of car traffic and locations, they seldom think and make their decisions in miles (space), they make them in minutes and hours (time). If you make it faster to go from one location (like the home) to the locations they want to go to, you make it more likely that they’ll move farther where land is typically cheaper and where low density has some other advantages. More highways will mainly mean people moving farther out since “the highway allows me to get where I want to go quickly”. Which it doesn’t to a significant extent, when so many other people are using it.
As Hamster King says, the solution to too many cars being used over too long distances isn’t to make it easier to use more cars over longer distances. It’s to increase density and partially replace individual cars with alternatives like walking and public transit.
Density is actually increasing pretty rapidly in LA. All across the city people are tearing down houses and putting up condos and apartments. With more people in a smaller space you can support lots of small, local shops, eliminating the need to drive so much. For example, my neighborhood in LA has a walkability score is in the mid 90’s. That’s close to what you get in places like New York.
That’s why it’s so crucial that we build mass transit as fast as possible. High density + cars = more congestion. High density + trains = less congestion.
That’s way oversimplified. By that logic, any road would be a net negative. The problem goes much deeper, and has a lot to do with poor (or at least, suboptimal choices) about zoning, and the “Build One Huge Road Right Through The Middle Of Everything” issue so many cities have. OK, LA doesn’t have just one big road, but even so they have a tendency to funnel everything and everything too tightly.
The other thing I question is your time analysis. It’s not exactly false, but the fact is that Mass Transit usually isn’t faster than driving, which makes that something of a non-starter. It’s convenient, not efficient.
A built road can be a net positive, but because it allows for motor transportation from one point to another, either as the first way to get there or as a more direct way than currently exists. The (it’s true, oversimplified) statement isn’t meant to say that an additional road gives no utility but that it does little to reduce congestion. A road can be useful for reasons other than lessening congestion.
Mass transit isn’t much faster than car travel for any individual who has to choose between the two but it can be faster in the aggregate.
By that I mean: If someone in Manhattan has to choose between his car and the subway, the subway may quite well not be any faster than the car. However, if most people in Manhattan took their cars instead of mass transit, taking your car in Manhatttan would be ridiculously slow.
There is likely to be a dynamic equilibrium reached between mass transit and cars. Mass transit means less people are taking their cars, which makes car travel faster and therefore more attractive. This increases the number of cars which, at the margin, reduces the attractiveness of car travel and increases the use of mass transit which reduces the number of cars, making car travel more attractive etc.
Think of car travel as shouting and mass transit as speaking softly. For any one person who has to choose between shouting and speaking softly while most others speak softly, shouting may be more advantageous than speaking softly. But if too many people shout, then shouting isn’t such an advantage anymore.
I thought a lengthy tunnel was one of the options being considered to take the 605 under South Pasadena.
The Harbor Freeway on the west edge of downtown is on the verge of being decked over in some places. Wouldn’t surprise me to see buildings or small parks across it in the next 20 years.
Despite its popular perception, LA has the lowest freeway miles per capita of any US metro area. It has a lot of freeways—but it has a really lot of people.
We have to distinguish between 1) which mix and option A and option B is most advantageous for one person within a particular Nash equilibrium and 2) Which Nas equilibrium (composed of option A and option B) is most advantageous for an aggregate.
It’s likely that in areas where congestion is a problem, high mass transit use and low car use would result in lower average travel times than low mass transit use and high car use, even though using one’s car is still usually faster than using mass transit for any one person. This is called a collective action problem. A very efficient, if bitching-inducing, way to solve it is taxes.
L.A. has been the densest urban area of the U.S. for a couple of decades–particularly the census tracts just west of downtown, and it’s not because of new construction. I live in an area that’s 98 on the “walkability” index, which was that way even before the subway arrived.
I’d be wary. The Boston “Big Dig” has now cost over $22 billion-thats BILLION!-for 3.5 miles of road. THe tunnels are already leaking, and serious flaws in the design and execution are now coming to light-in particular, all 24,000 tunnel lights will have to be replaced ($54 million), because galvanic corrosion is rusting them to the point where they fall off the ceiling (some MA DOT “engineer’” couldn’t figure that one out).
There are serious concerns about the walls that support the tunnel roofs- saltwater is infiltrating and rusting the rebars.
All in all, an example of Democratic pork barrel projects-immense costs, little sound engineering, and enormous future costs-but heck-if you have the money-go for it!
You’re right, there’s nothing us Democrats like better than wasting money on projects that don’t work, and ignoring good scientific processes. :rolleyes:
The old joke about LA being 27 suburbs in search of a city is true - it is so sprawling that there really is no quick fix for any stretch of freeway. The minute you would build a new one, it would be full and nobody would notice much of a change five minutes later.
One of the reasons I sadly moved away from LA is the traffic - it was getting ridiculous to spend 45 minutes to an hour to drive SEVEN MILES to work from West Hollywood to Santa Monica to work (on the Santa Monica Blvd.). BTW, that was on a good day - if it rained, or if there was a minor accident, it could take 90 minutes or more.
That same trip late at night only took about 10-15 minutes, tops.
You would pretty much have to rip up half of LA, create new subways and new above ground rail lines, plus some safe bike lanes. This would cost a fortune, you would have to destroy entire neighborhoods and if they started today, it would still not be finished in your grandchildren’s lifetime.
With self-driving cars LA could double or triple the capacity of the freeways without spending any public money. You can form trains of self-driving cars travelling bumper to bumper at full highway speeds. It sounds futuristic, but BMW is supposed to market a car that can auto-drive on the freeway next year. Creating a car that can handle surface streets is complex, but freeways we can handle now and the they would be much safer than current manually driven autos.
You might be interested in Brad Templeton’s blog on Robocars. He also discusses ultralight cars that haul 1 or 2 people around and get over 100mpg.
Yeah. Not only could CA even afford the project L.A. is just under 10 times the size of Boston. (There are close to 70 times as many people, but Boston is only 2 square miles larger than the town I live in.)