Photo: The Toe StubberTime to bring the quiz to a close. We’ve seen in past posts that, by the standards of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not sprawling, has a fairly extensive transit system, and is decidedly light on freeways. The smog situation has vastly improved. The final two stereotypes await.
Thanks to the great distances between far-flung destinations, and perhaps Angelenos’ famed “love affair” with the car, Angelenos drive considerably more miles than most Americans.
Facts and Fiction
Eric Morris discusses stereotypes about Los Angeles transportation in this six-part series.
Answer: False.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, Angelenos drive 23 miles per resident per day. This ranks the Los Angeles metro area 21st highest among the largest 37 cities. The champions (or losers) are probably Houston, followed by Jacksonville and Orlando, all of which are over 30 miles per day. New Yorkers drive the fewest miles (17 VMT per resident per day), thanks in large part to relatively high transit ridership and lots of walking trips.
Despite our reputation, we Angelenos don’t exhibit any particularly great predilection for freeway travel either. Los Angeles ranks 14th out of the 37 largest metro areas in terms of highway miles driven per resident per day. To be sure, this is above the median, but it hardly points to the sort of unique freeway fetish Angelenos are accused of harboring.
This leaves the answer you’ve all been waiting for: Angelenos spend more time stuck in traffic than any other drivers in the nation.
True.
According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2005 Mobility Report, Angelenos who traveled in the peak periods suffered 72 annual hours of delay. This was number one in the nation, by a large margin.
The T.T.I.’s methodology has some issues, but it is probably safe to say they got this right. I have studied Los Angeles traffic conditions for an 18-year period. My conclusion, to put it in formal transportation terminology, is that Los Angeles traffic really, really sucks.
Not that this eases our pain much, but San Francisco and New York, cities that supposedly show Los Angeles how transportation and urbanization should be done, are tied for second and 15th respectively in most hours of congestion delay.
Moreover, New York’s situation may be even worse than this implies. Instead of driving, many New Yorkers are riding transit, which is generally considerably slower than travel by private vehicle. Thus the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey reports that New Yorkers have the longest commutes in the nation, at 34.1 minutes. Angelenos rocketed to work in a mere 28 minutes. By the commute-time criterion, New York’s transportation system could be considered more dysfunctional than ours.
But pointing fingers at others does nothing to change our grim reality. As anyone who’s ever sat on Wilshire Blvd. at rush hour or experienced the frustration of trying to lead police on a high-speed freeway chase during peak travel hours can tell you, Los Angeles’s traffic jams do indeed live up to the legend.
However, the reasons for Los Angeles’s problems are murkier than they may seem. In fact, it’s quite possible to make a plausible case that Los Angeles’s traffic woes stem from the fact that it doesn’t sprawl enough and has overinvested in costly rail transit at the expense of developing its undersized freeway network.
Congrats to those of you who guessed correctly that Los Angeles is a traffic nightmare. Now if you really want to prove your acumen, have a technologically feasible, politically palatable, fiscally responsible solution on my desk by the morning. And for those of you who have stuck with the quiz, I have a special treat: a bonus myth, which will bite the dust in the next post.
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The answer to LA’s problems is in LA. Instead of a subway, there’s a busway that is remarkably effective in the San Fernando valley. A busway is just a street spanning multiple neighborhoods that only allows bus traffic. At intersections, the lights are co-ordinated to give the bus the right of way. LA could save billions by extending busways instead of building a subway in the seismically challenged region.
What you forget to mention is that busway was built on an old railroad ROW. We could have fixed up the tracks and run a train on it for what we spent paving it over for a bus. A train wouldn’t need coordinated lights–gates come down and the train gets preemption, every time. The bus (have you taken it, really?) has to jam on the brakes and slow to 10 mph at every intersection. As a result, our rail lines are roughly twice as fast. The parking lots by the LRT, MetroLink and Red Line stations are full by 8 am. The parking lots by the busway are nearly empty. Converting traffic lanes into bus-only lanes/bus ways is a great idea. Taking an old railroad that spanned the Valley from East to West (and could have offered one-seat service all the way to downtown via the Red Line or MetroLink tracks) is tragic stupidity.
This entire series has been biased. The author picks statistics that debunk the myth that LA is a transportation nightmare, but then the comments quickly point out that the author is using bad measurements.
Although libertarian and biased toward toll roads as a solution to just about all transportation issues, the Reason Foundation (www.reason.org) has comissioned some fairly extensive research on congestion in major metropolitan regions around the country. The site is worth a visit (see drop down topics on Mobility Project, Transportation/Tolls, etc.)
Yeah, but the Reason Foundation is funded by the oil companies. Every policy they support burns more gasoline. They omit data, spin statistics, and often just make s*)$t up.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-08-03/opinion/29845116_1_200-mph-trains-tgv-california-high-speed-rail-authority
They also take money, by the way, from tobacco companies and then publish studies showing that second-hand smoke is harmless. They’re just an influence-laundering/PR group. Know your sources.
I work in transportation demand management and this is the first time I have ever heard someone advocate for more highways as a way to reduce traffic. Common understanding in my field is that if you build more highways you fail to reduce traffic. How would this work differently in LA?
I’m tired of reading these articles comparing LA to the rest of the US and saying it’s not that bad. While I don’t agree with all of it- much of this is true. LA isn’t that much worse than the rest of the US, and plenty of things are exaggerated about LA.
The problem is that comparing LA’s traffic and public transportation infrastructure to other American cities isn’t really what we should be looking at. We should compare LA to the cities in the world with the best transportation, the best public infrastructure, the most efficient population centers, and ask ourselves “How can American cities, like LA, be better?”
While the public transportation in Boston and NYC is reasonable, and comparing LA to those two is an almost fair comparison, none of those three cities have the quality of transportation found in other places as a whole (parts of Boston and NYC have great public transport)
If you build it they will come. The more highways you build the more cars will clog them. You can never catch up. The Long Island Expressway had debilitating traffic jams before it was even completed in the 1950′s. People will move farther out of town as long as the commute is less than 1 1/2 hours.
Wash DC traffic jams are pretty bad. A few major interstates feeding cars into old country roads that got consumed by suburban sprawl. It’s worse for out-of-towners because the highway signs are very misleading or missing entirely so you always miss your exits with no easy way to backtrack.
Maybe if would be cheaper for highway departments to give everybody a GPS instead of maintaining road signs.
LA has two major problems to overcome
1. the huge influx of 1st and 2nd generation drivers who are not well practiced in driving.
2. the huge amount of Illegals who drive like timid rabbits to avoid the “man” noticing them.
until they figure this out it will continue to get worse.
to #14: “Maybe if would be cheaper for highway departments to give everybody a GPS instead of maintaining road signs.”
When technology divide meets socialist regime.