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| 5/28 |
| 2008/5/5-9 [Reference/BayArea] UID:49887 Activity:high |
5/5 LA, #9 worst city for commuters.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/24/cities-commute-fuel-forbeslife-cx_mw_0424realestate3_slide_3.html?thisSpeed=15000
http://promo.realestate.yahoo.com/best-and-worst-cities-for-commuters.html
\_ What you should have noted is that SF came in at #10 for all of
the talk about how SF does things right and LA doesn't.
\_ *LAUGH*. You can escape SF by going to San Mateo, Sunnyvale,
San Jose. But with LA, you never really arrive or leave
LA, it is just a big blob of land that never cease to
end. LA is everything and anything. Santa Monica, Culver City,
San Dimas, Pasadena, Walnut, Chino, etc. That's all LA.
You never get to LA, nor do you ever leave LA.
\_ WTF?
\_ No shit. If you want a real taste of LA, drive some street
like Foothill or Rosemead from end to end. It is amazing
how you can drive and see 20 miles of strip malls.
\_ And this is just so totally unlike the Bay Area. Not.
\_ I have never seen anything like it anywhere else.
What do we have like that? East 14th Street?
\_ Have you never driven south out of San Francisco
into Silicon Valley or east to Livermore?!
\_ Weak comparisons. Sorry.
\_ You know, I will accept Camino Real as a pretty
good comparison.
\_ That is not really SF, that is Bay Area they are talking about.
No one already in SF needs to cross a bridge to get to SF.
\_ The topic is "worst cities for __commuters__". No one in
downtown LA needs to commute to get to downtown LA either.
\_ You do if you live in The Valley and work downtown.
\_ Are you dense? Reread what I wrote.
\_ You're the dumb fuck. It's not clear what
LA means in the URL. !op !pp
\_ What does this mean:
"No one in downtown LA needs to commute to get to
downtown LA either." ?
Where does The Valley factor into that?
\_ not the op but The Valley is an unincorporated
city of LA, and therefore, it is LA.
\_ BUT IT'S NOT DOWNTOWN
\_ Not even unincorporated. Most of the Valley
is in LA proper. So plenty of people who
actually live in LA have hour long commutes
downtown. No one who actually lives in the
city of SF does.
\_ That's just because SF is tiny, not
because it's somehow better. Think
of SF as "downtown Bay Area" which
it is functionally. Besides, it
doesn't take an hour to get from
Studio City or Encino to downtown.
\_ Google maps says "up to 1 hour
and 20 minutes in traffic" from
Encino to Downtown. 1 hr and 30
minutes from Encino. The whole
minutes from Northridge. The whole
point is that SF is built to human
scale and LA is not.
\_ So "human scale" involves
commuting from Pleasanton to
your job in downtown SF? Please.
The Bay Area is just as sprawling.
Don't focus on political
boundaries to make a point
about how SF is so much
better. I mean, hey, we might
as well compare SF County to
LA County but that ignores
all of the people who work in
SF but don't live there which
people seem to want to count
to prove SF is a 'big city'
but exclude when it makes SF
the 10th worst city for commuters.
Still better than LA, but not
as much as SF residents make
it out to be. I think it's
interesting that:
1. 8 cities were worse than LA
2. SF was only one place below
BTW, LA is so sprawling
because of the street cars.
Without public transit it
would probably be much more
compact. Public transit
screwed up LA.
\_ don't let the facts get in
your way:
http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/lary.htm#map
-tom
\_ I knew you would come
running. However, you
don't know much about LA.
That's obvious from all
the discussions we've
had on MOTD. Look at
this map:
link:tinyurl.com/6dlgk4
According to Wikipedia
the Red Car system
extended all the way to
Riverside and San Bernardino.
LARy or the Yellow Cars
(your map) were just
the trolleys that made
up a small part of the
system (the most dense
part). Google "Red Car" or
"Pacific Electric Railway".
I know a lot about the
railway system and as
you would expect
development happened
along the PER routes,
which is exactly what
Mr. Huntington wanted
as he bought up the
land around the routes
in advance. People
would have never
developed so much so
far away from the city
center in those days
(~1925) without the
existence of the PER.
You are welcome.
\_ I bet LA wishes it had
that railway system now.
\_ Well, yeah, since
the city was built
around it and then it
was dismantled.
However, it would've
been better had it
never existed at all.
\_ yeah, like Phoenix!
\_ I don't want to
get into
defending
Phoenix, but I
will note it was
not on this list
and SF was.
\_ Pleasanton is the exception
in the Bay Area while The Valley
in the Bay Area while The
Valley
is the standard in the LA area.
It is quite hard to find decent
places to live near work in LA,
though they do exist (Silverlake
though they do exist
(Silverlake
Hancock Park, Santa Monica) but
it is easy in the Bay Area. They
it is easy in the Bay Area.
They
both have sucky sprawl, it is
just worse in LA.
\_ Actually, San Francisco
proper seems to be the
exception. Nowhere else
in the Bay Area is similar
and geography plays a big
part in why that is so.
\_ Oakland, Albany, Berkeley
are all very much like the
and Daly City are all
very much like the
residential parts of SF.
\_ Not really. They
are just from the
same era and so
the architecture
is similar. I
don't think anyone
would confuse Albany
with SF.
\_ Look, dimwit already told you that
\_ You haven't been to
the Westwood Park
neighborhood in SF.
The important thing
is the density and
land use patterns,
not the architecture
\_ I don't think I
have. So you're
telling me that
there's some
atypical
neighborhood in
SF which then
typifies what?
/
It is not that atypical. There are many more similar
It is not that atypical. There are dozens more simlar
to it. The truth is, you don't know much about SF, so
you say all kinds of silly things like "SF is similar
to downtown LA" Do 824k people live in Downtown LA?
\_ SF is similar to downtown LA. There are suburban areas close
to downtown also. Sure, downtown LA is only 40K people but
it is still apt to say:
SF:Bay Area::Downtown LA:Greater Los Angeles
There are a lot of reasons this doesn't hold (main one being
that downtown LA is not really the hub of jobs that SF is)
but you also have to realize that LA is bigger than SF, too.
I could say: "Do 3M people live in SF?" or "Is SF 470 square
miles?" It is reasonable to view SF at the center of the
larger Bay Area. The Bay Area is considered to be 7000 square
miles. LA is considered to be 5000 square miles (actually
34000, but lots of that is boonies). I think in terms of size
the regions are comparable and so it is not fair to single out
SF for better or worse when discussing the Bay Area. Direct SF
(city) versus Los Angeles (city) comparisons do not make sense,
which is why it makes more sense to compare the dense parts of
the Bay Area (SF) to the dense parts of LA (downtown to Santa
Monica) or to compare the sprawling parts of the Bay Area (East
and South Bay) to the Greater LA Area.
and South Bay) to the Greater LA Area. I know SF pretty well
given that I went to school at UCB and spent a lot of time
there. I won't claim to have been to every single area in SF,
but I went to enough to know that low density single story SFR
housing is not that common in SF and is very common in, say, Albany.
No. It is not just SF that has land use patterns that
enable a walkable neighborhood with good transit. I
agree that some, maybe even most of the Bay Area is
as spread out as LA, but not all of the Bay Area
outside The City is. I am kind of curious, are you
starting to come around to the idea that planning
is a good idea, or are you just arguing for the
sake of it?
\_ Where did I ever allude to planning being a bad idea other than
the ridiculousness of "master planned communities"? Without
zoning you get Texas.
\_ Look, dimwit already told you that
his work/living arrangement is unique
in LA and that he's better off than
90% of the Angelenos, hence LA is a
good place to live. Stop trolling ,
asshole. -dimwit #1 fan
\_ Actually, it does sound like dim has
a pretty good arrangement. If everyone
a pretty good arrangement.
If everyone
in LA lived like him, it wouldn't
have the problems that it has.
\_ I would live in LA in a second
over the crappy Silicon Valley
area, which is why I moved.
Silicon Valley is like SF's
Orange County except it doesn't
have any beaches. Yuck. Does
anyone really like San Jose?
I think people in the Bay
Area like to pretend San Jose
is not part of SF Bay Area because
they are so ashamed of it.
\_ San Jose isn't very different
from Irvine. One does have a much
higher HOA and restrictions though
from Irvine. One does have a
much higher HOA and
restrictions though.
\_ I wouldn't live in Irvine
either, but Irvine is
much nicer than San Jose.
\_ Commuting from the Richmond to downtown could easily take 1 hour
on the 38 Geary. Even from North Beach which is only 2.5 miles, I
on the 38 Geary. Even from North Beach which is only 2 miles, I
have waited 40 min for an F Castro trolley.
\_ Funny, I commute from Richmond (the city) to downtown SF, and it
typically takes an hour, most of that on BART. -ERic
\_ Hey, if you walked, it might take even longer. How long would
it take if you crawled on your hands and knees?
it take if you crawled on your hands and knees? From end to
end on the 38L takes 33 minutes. Only a tourist or a moron
would try to commute on the F.
\_ I lived a block from the F, dimwit. And 33 minutes to travel
4 miles. Yeah, that's really reasonable. How crowded do the
38L's get again?
\_ You cannot speak badly about glorious San Francisco,
comrade. The BART is always on time and never full
when it arrives and the citizenry smells like roses.
\_ Whether 33 minutes is reasonable or not is tangential
to the fact that it is considerably less than 1 hour.
I would rather stand for 1/2 hr on a crowded, swaying
bus, than sit for 1 1/2 hrs on a hellish freeway, but
each to their own, I guess. You should have walked to
the 10 and taken it instead of the F, by the way.
\_ I prefer 2 hours in my comfy Honda Accord Hybrid
to/from Pasadena than 1/2 hour smelling a bunch of
hippies and communists. Oak Grove Dr is a heaven
compared to say, BART.
\_ I prefer a half hour walk along tree lined
streets to riding in a vehicle at all. |
| 5/28 |
|
| www.forbes.com/2008/04/24/cities-commute-fuel-forbeslife-cx_mw_0424realestate3_slide_3.html?thisSpeed=15000 Los Angeles area traffic is legendary, and drivers have visceral reactions when you mention Interstate 5 The average driver spends 72 hours annually stuck in traffic delays, the worst in the country. But what serves LA well is that a surprisingly high percentage of drivers get to their destinations in under 20 minutes (34%), which is only the 13th worst rate in the country. All those office parks and strip malls dotting the basin make it easy for people to commute between suburbs as opposed to a central downtown location, and that makes commutes shorter in mileage terms. |
| promo.realestate.yahoo.com/best-and-worst-cities-for-commuters.html com looked at the 75 largest metro areas in the US and evaluated them based on traffic delays, travel times and how efficiently commuters use existing infrastructure, based on data from the Texas Transportation Institute and the US Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey. The worst commutes were those that ate up the most hours and were the least reliable. The best commutes were in cities with short, dependable treks to the office, where fellow commuters efficiently use transit options to reduce congestion. Boston's commuter rail and "T" systems, part of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), are better able to put area commuters closer to their jobs than an identical train system could do for Los Angeles commuters. Public transit systems like the MBTA work best when they limit congestion by taking cars off the road, and thus reducing delays, travel time and increasing the predictability of a commute. Since carpooling can often accomplish the same feat, we measured a city's commuting efficiency by adding the number of people who carpool, those who take public transit and those who walk to work, and divided the sum by the city's total number of commuters, based on Census Bureau figures. Driving alone is more expensive than carpooling, which is typically more expensive than public transit, which is more expensive than walking. Sweet crude oil is currently selling at more than $110 a barrel, and the less dependant commuters are on it, the cheaper the commute. Next, we factored in delays, which are often the result of inefficient infrastructure. Los Angeles commuters may be willing to carpool or take public transit, which takes pressure off roadways, but this isn't enough to make a dent in the volume on the area's roads. The Department of Transportation measures capacity by looking at highway miles per 10,000 people. Los Angeles ranks near the bottom, with 473 miles of highway per 10,000 people. Houston, near the top, has 954 miles of highway per 10,000 people, and even a dense metro like San Francisco has 586 highway miles per 10,000 people. Congestion results in places that don't have enough highway miles to handle the commuting population. To show lost time, we used Texas Transportation Institute data to rank each city by how many hours the average traveler was delayed per year as the result of traffic. Size Matters Population plays an important role in an area's commute. By definition, congestion is having too many commuters on the roads. The high-capacity highway system implemented in Buffalo by Robert Moses is indeed efficient, but population loss has almost as much to do with Buffalo workers' easy commute as Moses' design. In 1950, the City of Good Neighbors had quite a few more neighbors (580,000) than it does now (280,000). Detroit, another city losing people, has one of America's worst commutes. Transit design in Motown is, not unexpectedly, tailored to the car--yet traffic patterns aren't smooth, since only 11% of commuters walk, carpool or take public transit. The average Detroit commuter is delayed 54 hours a year, more than residents in California's sprawling "Inland Empire" cities of San Bernardino and Riverside, who log 49 hours of delays; Even in Houston, where the car is king, 17% of commuters stray from the "one worker, one car" approach, among the country's highest rates. Let alone the environmental implications of single-worker driving, it's important to consider cost. Cars are least fuel-efficient when they're idling or stuck in traffic, and households beholden to the single commuter driving are the most adversely affected by rising gasoline costs. Based on commute times, we ranked each of the 75 cities we examined; they were scored positively based on the number of workers that got to work in under 20 minutes, and negatively based on those that took over an hour to get to work. But it's important to note the trade-off: Sprawl increases driving times, but results in lower home prices. Places like Atlanta and the Inland Empire, along with many cities in Texas, have long commute times but very affordable housing. Homes in San Bernardino are $150,000 less that in Los Angeles, at the median level, and homes in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas are all well below the national home-price average of $206,000. Of course, as gas prices go up, if we continue to rely on automotive transportation options, that affordable-home advantage becomes less valuable. |
| www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/lary.htm#map The Era of Zone Fares The Los Angeles Railway (LARY -- pronounced "Larry") was the streetcar system around which central LA was developed. LARY used a yellow paint scheme -- hence LARY was known as the "Yellow Car" system. Los Angeles area real estate and utility tycoon Henry Huntington gained control of LARY in 1898. The streetcar system grew rapidly through the first decade of the 20th century, when the population of Los Angeles more than tripled. After Huntington's death in 1927, the streetcar system was owned by the Huntington Estate (operator of the museum and library in San Marino) until its sale to National City Lines in 1944, at which time it was renamed Los Angeles Transit Lines. The Pacific Electric "Red Car" system has become legendary in the history of Los Angeles. But in reality LARY/LATL had a much higher ridership -- nearly three times as high. Total transit boardings in 1950: * Los Angeles Transit Lines: 320 million * Pacific Electric Railway: 109 million During the 1940s about a million people lived within about a half mile of the bus and streetcar lines of LARY/LATL. By 1950 some LATL bus lines penetrated as far as Beverly Hills on the westside, and the 5 streetcar line -- the longest line -- reached 13 miles south to Hawthorne. But for the most part LARY/LATL services were concentrated in the area that today would be called "central Los Angeles", and it covered this area fairly intensively. From the data above, we can infer that there were 320 boardings on LATL buses or streetcars in 1950 for every man, woman, and child in LARY's service area. A "boarding" is any occasion when a person got on a bus or streetcar, irrespective of whether they used a transfer, used a token, or paid cash. About a third of all boardings on LARY/LATL in the '40s were transfers. If you got on a bus and then transfered to a streetcar to get downtown, oridinarily we'd say that was just one "trip". To get a rough estimate of the actual trips, in the ordinary sense, we can look at the numbers of fares paid, and ignore transfers. So that amounts to a bit more than 220 annual trips on transit for every man, woman, and child in the LART/LATL service area. To put this in perspective, San Francisco is today one of the most transit-intensive cities in the United States, ranking with New York City. Currently the number of annual transit boardings (including transfers) per capita in San Francisco is about 270. Thus central LA in 1950 had a higher rate of public transit usage per capita than San Francisco does today. LARY's Seamy Side During the era of Huntington control (1898-1944), Los Angeles Railway had a poor reputation among ordinary Angelenos. When working class Angelenos compared the crowded and aging streetcars to Huntington's reputation as Mr Moneybags, the result was often resentment. And it didn't help that Huntington's labor strategy was based on keeping wages low -- and breaking unions. Huntington made it clear that anyone who joined a union was asking to be fired. During a major strike wave in 1919 -- telegraph operators and telephone and shipyard workers were already on strike -- the LARY and Pacific Electric workers walked out in unison. This almost became a city-wide general strike when railroad workers on the steam railroads that connected to PE started "hiding" freight cars bound for PE on isolated sidings around the region, to support the PE workers. The LARY and PE strikes were broken with massive hiring of scabs and heavy police support. After another strike was broken by LARY management in 1934, the Amalgamated Streetcar and Bus Workers Union worked with the People's Transit Committee to put an initiative on the ballot to set up a competing city-run bus system. They got this on the ballot three times -- in 1935, 1937 and 1939. But in 1939 the union tried another tactic -- they got an initiative on the ballot to require both a driver and a fare-collector on all streetcars. At that time LARY was trying to cut costs by converting to one-man operation, with the driver collecting fares. Although the voters approved this measure, the California Supreme Court threw it out. In July of 1942 the workers were able to take advantage of a wartime labor shortage in yet another strike -- this one finally successful. Scene During 1919 LARY Strike In the '10s LARY was notorious for the overcrowding on many of its lines. The shot at left was taken, however, during a 1919 streetcar strike. Because the Huntington management broke the strike by hiring untrained scabs, service continued to suffer from overcrowding for months afterwards. Overcrowding and strike-breaking were reasons that municipalization of LARY had strong support in the '10s and '20s. During World War II scenes like that at left returned to Los Angeles on the U line, serving Central Avenue, with reports in the press of people hanging on the bumpers and clinging to the steps. Line-by-Line Statistics for 1940 This is an incomplete listing. Click on the line letter or number to see photos of that line. Map of Streetcar Routes The map below shows the Los Angeles Railway streetcar lines, and population density, in 1938. However, the P and U lines generated enough profit to overcome the losses of the other streetcar routes. In 1944 LARY became LATL -- a subsidiary of the infamous National City Lines consortium financed by motor bus suppliers (General Motors, Philips Petroleum, Mack Truck, Standard Oil of California, Goodyear). Through vigorous cost-cutting, fare hikes, and replacement of streetcars with buses after World War II, LATL was generally able to generate a return on invested capital in the vicinity of 5 percent until purchased by the state of California in 1958. In 1958 LATL was combined with Metropolitan Coach Lines (the bus system that replaced Pacific Electric) under state ownership, forming the first MTA The combined LA bus network was generally able to pay all of its operating costs from fares until the inflation of the late '60s generated operating losses. But this "self-sufficiency" had a certain price: * You often had to wait a long time for a bus. not even for amenities like covered shelters, bus stop lighting, or map and schedule displays at bus stops. The first taxpayer subsidy for public transit in Los Angeles was finally instituted in 1971 when the state legislature passed the Transit Development Act, which provides a quarter-cent of the state sales tax for public transit systems. The RTD bus system expansion of the late '70s, with a growth of more than two-thirds in weekday passenger boardings, was financed through this thin sales tax support. The Era of Zone Fares The Los Angeles Railway and its various successors (LA Transit Lines, the first LA MTA, the RTD) charged additional amounts depending on the distance you wanted to travel. This was enforced through surcharges for crossing fare zone boundaries. For example, in 1972 the base fare for the first four miles was 35 cents and each additional four-mile zone was an additional 7 cents. The following map shows the Los Angeles Transit Lines bus and streetcar lines, with fare zone scheme, circa 1954. Riders found this system very annoying, and it slowed down operation as the driver had to examine the "zone checks" or transfers to make sure everyone had paid to go into the next zone. In 1974 RTD decided it was not worth the bother and instituted a flat fare. |