I'd say split it half and half, 6 months LA to learn the pain of the wrong way, then 6 months in a place with proper transit like Amsterdam or Seoul, then they come back with a vision of what could be.
In Southern New Hampshire people drive almost as far although there is hardly anything to drive to. The confluence of Route 101 and I-93 south of Manchester is as bad as anything you'll find in a city 100 times Manchester's size leaving the question of where the hell all these cars are coming from and where they are going.
(The answer is that the population is dispersed over a large area with a hierarchical road network that, as much as possible, wants to be like your lungs. Thus you always get stuck in traffic at several bottlenecks on your drive that you can't avoid.)