Can LA end its love affair with cars? | Hacker News Reader

Can LA end its love affair with cars?

ft.com

3 pointsmikhael3 comments

It is doing the right thing in densifying and it has much better public transit than people give it credit for.

LAX is probably the easiest big city airport to walk out of in the US with the very strange exception of San Diego. There's a freakin' shuttle bus that rides the HOV lane on the freeway to the downtown with a view that would have inspired The Jetsons. It drops you less than a block from the subway which in turn drops you off right at Hollywood and Vine with a large amount of accommodation in a two block radius.

People say "nobody rides the bus" but when you get on one it is packed, service is not bad at all. If you need a cab occasionally, the service is just great.

In movies like Barbie you see people walk from Venice Beach to the downtown, it's a very long walk (15 miles!) but it's a fairly comfortable walk where you won't encounter any difficult obstacles unlike the average American city.

I certainly agree with your first sentence (though I wish it was densifying and building subway more aggressively), but taking the bus in LA sounds awful, and I am not sure how you are defining "obstacle" and "comfort" here: "it's a very long walk (15 miles!) but it's a fairly comfortable walk where you won't encounter any difficult obstacles unlike the average American city."

Nobody should make that walk, IRL lol

I’ve had times when I regularly walked 6 miles at sunrise and 6 miles at sunset so a 15 mile walk doesn’t intimidate me in fact I see the time on Google Maps and know I could do it in at least an hour less. That 15 miles is a product of Los Angeles just being a freaking huge city, not because it's particularly wasteful of space but because there are 12.6 million people in the metro area.

Comfortable = continuous sidewalks, lots of palm trees, no places where the road goes up into a flyover without a shoulder never mind sidewalk. I doubt you could go 5 miles in Atlanta without encountering one of those. (Which is NOT an accident)

Now I am not recommending that particular walk for walkers in the bottom 95% but I’d say that much of the city is like that and walking 1-2 miles is usually easy —- note the walk of fame is one of the great walking destinations anywhere. Sure LA drivers run red lights like Jack Bauer in 24 but Atlanta drivers will kill you on the sidewalk.

To be fair I have spent time in places like Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Beverley Hills, it might not be so good in the “bad” parts of town.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com