Human Transit

Beautiful pictures. They're even more impressive once you see the illusion. Even the fake greenery and curb and gutter seams are still hard to pick out even when you know they're there. And the lighting is excellent.

But the look -- aside from car styling -- isn't a matter of charm and innocence. It's a way of life that has been outlawed in America.

The mix of residential and commercial land use is illegal in almost all American communities, especially at the scale pictured. A few big cities still permit residential over commercial but whatever is left in most of America is grandfathered. If it's taken down, you can't rebuild it. In fact, my whole neighborhood is like that; if an earthquake hit, not one 1920s American railroad suburb bungalow on my block would meet zoning to be rebuilt.

Also, almost none of those commercial establishments has parking in front and surrounding it. The minimum requirements in almost all of America is about double as much space for parking as for all building interior space. Floor area ratios and landscape buffers usually require even more space around parking lots because they're so ugly. Today, even the shots with parking wouldn't have nearly enough and almost all the commercial buildings would be illegal. I don't see any of the residential buildings with the 2-3 independent parking spots usually required, either. Most of them -- for the sake of charm -- don't have any off street parking. Also, driveways usually can't abut the property…

I drive my personal car in Los Angeles rarely enough that I should probably sell it. Bicycling, subway, light rail, the occasional bus, and Lyft satisfy 90% of my "long distance" or "carrying lots of stuff" needs, and the remaining trips could be taken care of by Zipcar or rentals.

At least as a person without children, the need for and experience of using a car is simply a matter of where I live and work (and for the weekends, where my friends live). When I lived in Pasadena, commuted to Irvine 3x a week, and didn't have a personal car, yes, life was miserable. When I lived in Venice Beach and drove downtown for work, the tedious, heavily trafficked freeway commute exhausted me by mid-week.

Also, for what it's worth, greater Los Angeles has the highest average density of US urban areas by a pretty healthy margin. Yes, it's denser than the New York or San Francisco urbanized areas. And LA's decentralized commercial districts make it a prime candidate for an efficient, extensive public transit network [1]; there's just heaps of toxic cultural momentum to overcome in order to restore that former feature to our metropolis.

[1]: http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-metropolis.html

Transit riders see mostly see full busses & trains because they're riding the heavy-ridership routes through dense neighborhoods. People driving in spread-out neighborhoods mostly see empty busses & trains because they see the busses mandated to serve sprawling neighborhoods to serve people who can't drive or to provide service to all of the transit system's tax base, even if those neighborhoods aren't built in such a way anyone would ride transit by choice.

Here's a paper & a couple excellent blog articles on the topic:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692308000586
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-buses-serve-a-purpose/
http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit-isnt-green-because-of-empty-buses-story.html

From the paper's abstract:
"Public transport faces an increasingly intense conflict between patronage goals and coverage goals. Broadly speaking, patronage goals seek to maximize patronage of all types, while coverage goals lead to the provision of service despite low patronage – to achieve social inclusion objectives for example."

It would be much more efficient to legalize apartments in LA than to run high speed trains to bedroom communities. Digging tunnels would blow out the cost by itself.

Dropping infinite resources into stretching commutes across vast distances is not realistic. Taken to its logical extreme everyone should commute by private jet. The larger the transportion network, the more it costs, or at the same cost the less convenient it becomes because intervals between vehicles increases.

The most efficient form of transportation is avoiding the trip in the first place through telecommuting. Then walking or biking. Then mass transit which works best with areas with lots of riders (dense cities). https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe.

Think of train service like a pancake. For a given amount of batter you can make a normal pancake, or you can spread it thinly over a large area, or you could make a small and thick pancake. If you want great service over a huge area you must massively increase resource expenditure.

Cars are also tremendously space inefficient. The Tesla Model 3 is nearly as big (93.8 sq ft) as 3 Queen Size beds (33.3 sq ft).

There is the classic set of pictures showing how much space is needed to transport 60 people by bus, by bike, and by car.

https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everything.html

On my (pre-covid) morning commute to the office, most of the cars crawling along the highway had one person in them. The slowness is the result of people trying to merge into the highway, not "bad drivers".

Another way to illustrate how much space cars take up is to look at suburban office parks. There will be a small building (usually 1 or 2 stories) surrounded and dwarfed by a parking lot.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2014/04/Picture-24.png

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Lake,+WA/@47.6731508,-117.0865244,671m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x5361de8fa7347d63:0xc3a62004f5d8a26a!8m2!3d47.6743428!4d-117.1124241

The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.

Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership means you focus on a smaller number of straight-line routes that are highly useful and run them at high frequency so that a smaller pool of people come to rely on them and use them regularly, instead of as a last resort.

A primer from transit consultant Jarrett Walker: https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe