The downside of building your city around the car

Source: KTLA 5 news report

Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest city, and as opposed to the nation’s largest city (New York City), it blew up its extensive rail system (the largest in the world in the 1920s!) and rebuilt itself nearly exclusively around the automobile.

Like other major cities, LA has a lot going on, all at once. What is unique here is that many large events happening all at once become news stories and warnings about traffic armageddon; because we lack quality pedestrian infrastructure (wide, non-broken, shady sidewalks), lack quality bike infrastructure (a network of protected bike lanes), lack a holistic rail system, and lack a network of bus lanes, what happens is everyone tries to get everywhere all at once in an automobile.

“Traffic nightmare” news stories only exist in cities that lack viable alternatives to driving everywhere. How do we fix this?

1. Continue to support Metro Los Angeles’ ambitious rail and bus expansion plans — the most ambitious in the country, by far, thanks to voters passing Measure R and Measure M.
2. Continue to oppose Metro’s highway expansion plans — that money could, instead, be used to accelerate rail, bus, and bike projects, and highway expansions make traffic (and climate change) worse.
3. Stop asking everyone for permission to do the right thing! We know that a network of protected bike lanes would be used extensively, as has happened in cities around the world (most with much worse weather than LA). We know that having mass transit that operates on 2–5 minute headways gets used a ton by the public. We know that highway expansions only make things worse. We need to elect political leaders that have courage in their convictions and don’t delay projects (recent example) or kowtow to NIMBYism.

Wondering who to vote for that will change the LA area in the right direction? Head over to Streets For All’s handy voter guide.

It took decades of making the wrong decisions to get to the current state of affairs— but we can undo that and go in the right direction, if we get the right people in office. We don’t have to live like this.

Here’s the a Channel 4 “traffic trouble” report — let’s make reports like this a thing of the past: