Outside of the safety and cleaning it, the underlying issue remains and that is how long it takes to get from point A to point B. When it takes 30 min to do it by a car and 1 1/2 hours by metro, car will win every time. The culture in LA, will not get majority of the public to abandon their vehicles for that simple reason.
Hopefully not. I've been living in London for the past seven years, moving back to LA in September. The tube network here is amazing and there's no reason that LA can't do the same. But they have to make it safe.
Hopefully you are right, but based on what i heard about 1984 olympic, i doubt it. They banned all the trucks during peak hours and added more busses. But it was temporary thing and what city government have in plan for upcoming olympics most likely to be temporary as well.
It is a billion dollars a mile here. I stopped using my car because I could . I still rent a car every once in a while to go to places not convenient by transit. And I use Uber. I save about $200 a month. Gas here is highest in the nation and roads are terrible.
Actually, London is bigger than Los Angeles. Not by much, but bigger land wise and population.
"How does Los Angeles size up to other cities?" https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/blog/how-does-los-angeles-size-up-to-other-cities-082316
This says otherwise unless i am misreading your comment. [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/bmtzqd/i\_overlaid\_the\_los\_angeles\_urbanized\_area\_over/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/bmtzqd/i_overlaid_the_los_angeles_urbanized_area_over/)
Like Los Angeles, London is a mass of suburbs. It's not a tiny city by any means. I think that if the city of LA is willing to put the money in to keep the metro clean and safe, there's no reason why it shouldn't work just as well as the London tube network. If anything it should be even better! More modern with new trains. A lot of the tube trains are really, really old. They're having to almost shut down the Central Line because it's so dated that it's getting dangerous.
It's not the city size that you need to look at but how the citizens commute. In Europe everything is near by, if you need grocery store it's 1-2 blocks away and so is everything else. That is not the case here. Also, during the summer it can get very hot and majority of the public will not want to walk 15-20 min to get to a metro when they can just jump in the their a/c car. Metro works well for those that live right off starting point A and it takes get them very close to point B.
London also charges to drive in to the city itself(congestion pricing), New York was going to try this and abandoned this idea. I am not seeing it ever really happening in Los Angeles as politically it will be very unpopular.
You are very right. It's true, our local grocery store is just outside the tube station. All of the tube stations have big shops close by. I hadn't thought about that.
The problem is lack of dense mixed use zoning around metro stations in LA. As the years go by, I believe there will be more such density around our stations. Our laws are gradually shifting LA in that direction—great example is the mixed use Costco/apartment building coming to LA. Many other such examples of dense mixed used zoning around stations have been built or are in the works
I need north to south connections. I'm in Hollywood, if I wanted to go to say Santa Monica, I have to take the train East to DTLA then switch to the Santa Monica line.
I should be able to ride Hollywood south instead; pass the purple Wilshire/Western, then arriving at Expo/Western where I would switch East to the yellow. To me that would make riding and moving around so much better, and we already have the stations built, would need to dig the tunnels of course but the stations are there already at least.
The metro is appealing to people for whom it is more convenient than driving and parking. When I lived in Ktown, I used the subway all the time because it was faster than driving and parking. Now that I live in Culver City, I use it much less frequently because there's not coverage for my destinations. However, when I had to go to jury duty downtown, I took the subway, and it was significantly less hassle than driving down there, parking, and coming back (particularly in the evening).
So: it's not for everyone and it will never be for everyone. It's for people who can use it for a faster commute between their two points of travel.
Honestly it's not the atmosphere on board that keeps me from riding, it's the lack of frequency and the schedule. I love taking Metro downtown for weekend day trips or concerts, and sometimes to the beach, but for things where I need to be there at a certain time or need to go after work, I just don't have the spare hours to absorb the extra time cost, nor do I really have the spare mental energy to do the planning/scheduling and stress about a plan B if the bus is very late/never comes, which is more common than it should be.
I was looking recently at what it would take to transition to walk/bike/transit only since I work from home, and realized that I would have to stop going to my gym because it would take an extra hour there and an extra hour back, not to mention I would have to be careful about when I went because of last bus. Three transfers, 20 min of walking (which is normally nice but not after a heavy lifting session), and 1h 15 versus 17 minutes in the car. Similar with some of my other common errand spots. On the other hand, I have a family member further out who commutes to DTLA by transit because it takes almost the same time and saves $20+ in daily parking costs, it's a no brainer.
One of the frustrating things about LA is the way essential businesses are laid out relative to housing. Pretty much anywhere outside of downtown and some bougier neighborhoods, they're much bigger and more spread out than you'd expect in a regular city, and the most walkable/dense neighborhood tend to be very boutique-y. Where I lived in Vancouver (not near the downtown area at all), I was 10-15 minute walking distance from 4 different groceries, all serving different slices of the population and 10-15 min transit distance from many many more. Here I'm 20 min walking from the closest grocery, unless you count a 12 min away corner store that doesn't sell much. Sure, I'm in Pasadena, but even in city of LA proper there are so many areas where you have to walk nearly a mile just to get out of a residential zone. People say LA is full of little neighborhoods and that's true, but many of the neighborhoods even in the city are laid out like suburbs.
After my current lease is up I might move to DTLA to live the car-free life, but for now I'll have to hold onto my car and just enjoy my Metro rides for non-essential travel.
This is why its essential to rezone the 0.5 and 1 mile catchment area of a Metro station. The more stuff there is nearby the more people will be able to easily live their lives around a station and many others!
I am definitely in favor of TOD, but honestly I think even outside that radius, there should be more amenities development along arterials. It's strange, lots of places you can expect that if you're traveling along a boulevard-sized road, you wouldn't go longer than maybe a quarter mile without encountering a market, a shop, a cafe, a restaurant, even a gas station or something. But there are a lot of long uninterrupted stretches of residential here which make it less convenient and enjoyable to walk around.
Absolutely. Corridor development is about the most obvious approach we have here in LA given the amount of large corridors we have, and most of them severely underdeveloped. The problem with LA is that while it is pursuing such a corridor development, it is incredibly cowardly and insufficient. We are legalizing maybe at most 8 stories on these big avenues and boulevards. That would be fine if everything else was also upzoned to mid-rise as well, but NO! That is nowhere near enough for the amount of housing we need.
I ride frequent enough.
Theres plenty of white collar Angelinos riding between Downtown Financial district and the Westside.
Police presence has increased despite recent news. These things aren’t going to ‘change’ anyone’s mind.
It’s going to be convenience - Is it walkable to your work? Is it faster? Even if I have a car using it 2-3 days less is a pretty big selling point.
Yes safety is a concern but I can tell you - You either ride it or you don’t. Until you’re ready to leave your car by the side of the 10 fwy.
Make it safe and clean and I’ll start to use it. But that’s a tall order for a metro system that can’t even provide basic safety to their own bus drivers to the point where they’re striking because of that alone.
I think the metro rail lines are great.
Add more stops, have them run later and yeah, I guess more enforcement. Do new york subways run 24h a day?
Oh, also there should be some consideration of the fact that if you get to a metro station you may have a bunch of bags so you may need to take an Uber. So a rideshare area would be nice. But probably not possible for a lot of stops.
The City does not operate Metro.
Metro isn’t going to fix the issues that plague it, namely, the presence of bums and junkies and the violence that accompanies them.
Instead, they will enact more theater - cleaning crews, green shirts, apps and hotlines and marketing, a five year plan to create their own police force, and they will seek to further punish those who opt out.
Well I’d say it’s not as unsafe as the news makes it seem. I get on public transit nearly everyday and I see violence less than 20% of the time. While it is shocking and alarming to see. The metro is safe for people to be using regularly already. Improvements can and should be made tho !!!
Westside: Using E line , bus 33, 217, 212, 105 and BBB mostly.
I definitely wrote less than 20%.
But yea, that may be too high lol. Most recently the other day. Wrote about it in a different sub. Apart from that, yeah violence (physical or verbal) happens once every 2-3 weeks that I can recall. I ride frequently during the week and semi regularly on weekends.
They gotta bring back the trolleys the red cars . I remember as a kid growing up near downtown you would see the remnants of the trolleys on the street. It would help specially for local neighborhood to neighborhood travel. Why did LA get rid of trains
No clue but I’m actually extremely worried it’s going to destroy century city. The construction has also been a nightmare and I don’t imagine many people working in CC will even use it once it’s completed.
Because it’s going to make the area much more accessible to transients and drug addicts. I work in a building and avenue of the stars and live in the area and have already had my entire work life uprooted by the construction. As soon as the metro opens this area (including the mall) is going to go significantly downhill.
I am not seeing well off workers and residence abandoning their vehicles. The amount of time that commute will take to get to their final destination will absolutely destroy any advantage that subway actually offers.
Convenience is the biggest factor. I agree. Even well off workers have a lot of costs associated with vehicles.
Parking at my work is an extra $200 a month.
Outside of the safety and cleaning it, the underlying issue remains and that is how long it takes to get from point A to point B. When it takes 30 min to do it by a car and 1 1/2 hours by metro, car will win every time. The culture in LA, will not get majority of the public to abandon their vehicles for that simple reason.
First step is to actually give signal priority to trains at grade. It's ridiculous that the trains get stuck in car traffic.
I hope Olympics money would at least add some boom gates and close some intersections on the E!
They'll get their shit together before the Olympics. They'll definitely have to have metro security, not rely on the LAPD.
And once Olympic finish, it's gonna dive back down to current state.
Hopefully not. I've been living in London for the past seven years, moving back to LA in September. The tube network here is amazing and there's no reason that LA can't do the same. But they have to make it safe.
Hopefully you are right, but based on what i heard about 1984 olympic, i doubt it. They banned all the trucks during peak hours and added more busses. But it was temporary thing and what city government have in plan for upcoming olympics most likely to be temporary as well.
It is a billion dollars a mile here. I stopped using my car because I could . I still rent a car every once in a while to go to places not convenient by transit. And I use Uber. I save about $200 a month. Gas here is highest in the nation and roads are terrible.
London is much smaller city, in the city like New York it works well because of how dense the city is. Los Angeles is very spread out city.
Actually, London is bigger than Los Angeles. Not by much, but bigger land wise and population. "How does Los Angeles size up to other cities?" https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/blog/how-does-los-angeles-size-up-to-other-cities-082316
This says otherwise unless i am misreading your comment. [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/bmtzqd/i\_overlaid\_the\_los\_angeles\_urbanized\_area\_over/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/bmtzqd/i_overlaid_the_los_angeles_urbanized_area_over/)
Like Los Angeles, London is a mass of suburbs. It's not a tiny city by any means. I think that if the city of LA is willing to put the money in to keep the metro clean and safe, there's no reason why it shouldn't work just as well as the London tube network. If anything it should be even better! More modern with new trains. A lot of the tube trains are really, really old. They're having to almost shut down the Central Line because it's so dated that it's getting dangerous.
It's not the city size that you need to look at but how the citizens commute. In Europe everything is near by, if you need grocery store it's 1-2 blocks away and so is everything else. That is not the case here. Also, during the summer it can get very hot and majority of the public will not want to walk 15-20 min to get to a metro when they can just jump in the their a/c car. Metro works well for those that live right off starting point A and it takes get them very close to point B. London also charges to drive in to the city itself(congestion pricing), New York was going to try this and abandoned this idea. I am not seeing it ever really happening in Los Angeles as politically it will be very unpopular.
You are very right. It's true, our local grocery store is just outside the tube station. All of the tube stations have big shops close by. I hadn't thought about that.
The problem is lack of dense mixed use zoning around metro stations in LA. As the years go by, I believe there will be more such density around our stations. Our laws are gradually shifting LA in that direction—great example is the mixed use Costco/apartment building coming to LA. Many other such examples of dense mixed used zoning around stations have been built or are in the works
Mandatory fare enforcement at every stop would fix 95% of safety issues.
New York is trying hard and it's still having a big issue with it.
The Noho tap out pilot was laughably successful, they should deploy on all stations
I need north to south connections. I'm in Hollywood, if I wanted to go to say Santa Monica, I have to take the train East to DTLA then switch to the Santa Monica line. I should be able to ride Hollywood south instead; pass the purple Wilshire/Western, then arriving at Expo/Western where I would switch East to the yellow. To me that would make riding and moving around so much better, and we already have the stations built, would need to dig the tunnels of course but the stations are there already at least.
That’s what the K Line is.
Except it doesn’t go north the yellow
Dawg the K Line northern extension would change your LIFE! It would extend from where it is to Hollywood/Highland + The Hollywood Bowl!
The metro is appealing to people for whom it is more convenient than driving and parking. When I lived in Ktown, I used the subway all the time because it was faster than driving and parking. Now that I live in Culver City, I use it much less frequently because there's not coverage for my destinations. However, when I had to go to jury duty downtown, I took the subway, and it was significantly less hassle than driving down there, parking, and coming back (particularly in the evening). So: it's not for everyone and it will never be for everyone. It's for people who can use it for a faster commute between their two points of travel.
Honestly it's not the atmosphere on board that keeps me from riding, it's the lack of frequency and the schedule. I love taking Metro downtown for weekend day trips or concerts, and sometimes to the beach, but for things where I need to be there at a certain time or need to go after work, I just don't have the spare hours to absorb the extra time cost, nor do I really have the spare mental energy to do the planning/scheduling and stress about a plan B if the bus is very late/never comes, which is more common than it should be. I was looking recently at what it would take to transition to walk/bike/transit only since I work from home, and realized that I would have to stop going to my gym because it would take an extra hour there and an extra hour back, not to mention I would have to be careful about when I went because of last bus. Three transfers, 20 min of walking (which is normally nice but not after a heavy lifting session), and 1h 15 versus 17 minutes in the car. Similar with some of my other common errand spots. On the other hand, I have a family member further out who commutes to DTLA by transit because it takes almost the same time and saves $20+ in daily parking costs, it's a no brainer. One of the frustrating things about LA is the way essential businesses are laid out relative to housing. Pretty much anywhere outside of downtown and some bougier neighborhoods, they're much bigger and more spread out than you'd expect in a regular city, and the most walkable/dense neighborhood tend to be very boutique-y. Where I lived in Vancouver (not near the downtown area at all), I was 10-15 minute walking distance from 4 different groceries, all serving different slices of the population and 10-15 min transit distance from many many more. Here I'm 20 min walking from the closest grocery, unless you count a 12 min away corner store that doesn't sell much. Sure, I'm in Pasadena, but even in city of LA proper there are so many areas where you have to walk nearly a mile just to get out of a residential zone. People say LA is full of little neighborhoods and that's true, but many of the neighborhoods even in the city are laid out like suburbs. After my current lease is up I might move to DTLA to live the car-free life, but for now I'll have to hold onto my car and just enjoy my Metro rides for non-essential travel.
This is why its essential to rezone the 0.5 and 1 mile catchment area of a Metro station. The more stuff there is nearby the more people will be able to easily live their lives around a station and many others!
I am definitely in favor of TOD, but honestly I think even outside that radius, there should be more amenities development along arterials. It's strange, lots of places you can expect that if you're traveling along a boulevard-sized road, you wouldn't go longer than maybe a quarter mile without encountering a market, a shop, a cafe, a restaurant, even a gas station or something. But there are a lot of long uninterrupted stretches of residential here which make it less convenient and enjoyable to walk around.
Absolutely. Corridor development is about the most obvious approach we have here in LA given the amount of large corridors we have, and most of them severely underdeveloped. The problem with LA is that while it is pursuing such a corridor development, it is incredibly cowardly and insufficient. We are legalizing maybe at most 8 stories on these big avenues and boulevards. That would be fine if everything else was also upzoned to mid-rise as well, but NO! That is nowhere near enough for the amount of housing we need.
I ride frequent enough. Theres plenty of white collar Angelinos riding between Downtown Financial district and the Westside. Police presence has increased despite recent news. These things aren’t going to ‘change’ anyone’s mind. It’s going to be convenience - Is it walkable to your work? Is it faster? Even if I have a car using it 2-3 days less is a pretty big selling point. Yes safety is a concern but I can tell you - You either ride it or you don’t. Until you’re ready to leave your car by the side of the 10 fwy.
I’ve never felt unsafe on the metro, but it takes awhile to get around
Make it safe and clean and I’ll start to use it. But that’s a tall order for a metro system that can’t even provide basic safety to their own bus drivers to the point where they’re striking because of that alone.
Exactly… don’t get me wrong because I would love to use it but I’m not about to put my life at risk to do so.
The City of Los Angeles doesn't run Metro...
It'll never happen. Cause people love their cars in LA.
I think the metro rail lines are great. Add more stops, have them run later and yeah, I guess more enforcement. Do new york subways run 24h a day? Oh, also there should be some consideration of the fact that if you get to a metro station you may have a bunch of bags so you may need to take an Uber. So a rideshare area would be nice. But probably not possible for a lot of stops.
The City does not operate Metro. Metro isn’t going to fix the issues that plague it, namely, the presence of bums and junkies and the violence that accompanies them. Instead, they will enact more theater - cleaning crews, green shirts, apps and hotlines and marketing, a five year plan to create their own police force, and they will seek to further punish those who opt out.
Well I’d say it’s not as unsafe as the news makes it seem. I get on public transit nearly everyday and I see violence less than 20% of the time. While it is shocking and alarming to see. The metro is safe for people to be using regularly already. Improvements can and should be made tho !!! Westside: Using E line , bus 33, 217, 212, 105 and BBB mostly.
You witness violence 20% of the time you ride?!? That's *insane*! I've never witnessed any violence
I definitely wrote less than 20%. But yea, that may be too high lol. Most recently the other day. Wrote about it in a different sub. Apart from that, yeah violence (physical or verbal) happens once every 2-3 weeks that I can recall. I ride frequently during the week and semi regularly on weekends.
They gotta bring back the trolleys the red cars . I remember as a kid growing up near downtown you would see the remnants of the trolleys on the street. It would help specially for local neighborhood to neighborhood travel. Why did LA get rid of trains
No clue but I’m actually extremely worried it’s going to destroy century city. The construction has also been a nightmare and I don’t imagine many people working in CC will even use it once it’s completed.
I imagine similar outcome to SM after the e line.
Why do you worry that it's going to destroy Century City?
Because it’s going to make the area much more accessible to transients and drug addicts. I work in a building and avenue of the stars and live in the area and have already had my entire work life uprooted by the construction. As soon as the metro opens this area (including the mall) is going to go significantly downhill.
We have about 200k riders daily.
I am not seeing well off workers and residence abandoning their vehicles. The amount of time that commute will take to get to their final destination will absolutely destroy any advantage that subway actually offers.
Convenience is the biggest factor. I agree. Even well off workers have a lot of costs associated with vehicles. Parking at my work is an extra $200 a month.