It would take me an hour and a half to get to work via mass transit vs the half hour it takes me now in a major city. It’s 9 miles. Mass transit just isn’t compatible with most American cities.
Point being, it's both the infrastructure and a small number of problematic people that make this untenable for most of us.
It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media.
Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center.
But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion).
It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto"
Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.
Old Money Palo goes to Woodlands, Woodside Priory, and Menlo School, or Palo Alto High
Lots of parents would buy houses or rent in crappy parts of East SJ to save enough money to sends both kids to Harker
The reason that new money (like me) tries to buy a house in Palo is so we can send our kids to PAUSD.
A lot of the born and raised crowd who were kids of hippies are fairly racist to the newer generation of Asian, Pacific Islander, Israeli+Eastern European, and Latino Americans on the Peninsula.
At this point I might as well buy a semi-rural house in San Benito County and spend the same amount donating a couple department libraries and Named Lecturer positions to my Alma mater for legacy benefits tbh.
In 1920, the population of LA was less than 600,000 (https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php), and the built up area was a lot smaller (https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a...)
I guess its population density also was quite a bit higher, making it harder to serve the population well with public transport using vehicles that can transport many people at a time.
> Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people
Having said that, mass transit includes buses. There are zillions of roads in LA. On the main roads dedicate one lane in each direction to buses or, better, light rail.
Main problem will be how people would get to stations. You could change one lane on minor roads to a bidirectional bike lane, but such bike lanes would not only be unattractive to ride on, but also dangerous because they’d frequently cross huge roads. So, I don’t think that would solve this problem well enough.
“…but investing in it now will yield dividends in the future”
LA is so much better suited to it weather and topology wise but the roadways are dangerous. I feel you!
If the answer is “robotaxis”, why build expensive tunnels? Dedicating existing road lanes on the surface to robotaxis then should work, too, at much lower cost.