In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!
People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone / read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).
Very true. There was an aphorism from (I think) the Mayor of Bogota who said something like "I'll consider the city prosperous not when everyone has their own car, but one where even the rich will happily take the train."
And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general have a bad reputation, it's going to take a long period of sustained good & convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.
> Most people I know would rather ride the train.
One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.
Light rail goes where it is politically beneficial and that rarely aligns where people need it. it the becomes such a money sink that other parts of the mass transit system are short changed to prop it up and in some cases bus routes are made worse in order to cajole people onto rail they don't want to use. then throw in the whole land cost and it just becomes silly, you could always raise the cost ten fold and go underground /s
There is only other reason to run light rail: you are doing bridge over a route that doesn't have any road bridges and want to ensure drivers won't take the bridge over.
That said, the LA MTA trains do seem to get pretty significant ridership, and voter support, so it makes sense to me to keep building them. Some people are able to make it work for them, and I'd guess more people over time will be able to find housing and jobs near enough to the lines that it makes a difference for them.
I doubt it's going to make a significant dent in congestion, but it might bend the curve a bit. If you increase transit capacity, and you don't limit population growth, congestion is going to get worse over time. The LA area in general doesn't have the same general resistance to high density residential as the bay area, and there's also always a lot of single family housing going up on the edges, and of course, nothing stopping people from having more people in a single unit, so population growth seems to be a given.