Clash of Subways and Car Culture in China: Are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27transit.html

by fleaflicker • 17 years ago

13 16 17 years ago

mkelly• 17 years ago

The way I see it, if the cities are sprawling (like LA), then cars will rule. If they are compact (like NY), then public transit will at least have a chance.

It's not a matter of if they can build the metro fast enough. If you have a sprawling suburbia, you can't effectively cover enough area to make public transit competitive. (I think this applies to all public transit, not just subways.)

Retric• 17 years ago

IMO, the secret to effective public transport is having an independent system so you can avoid traffic jams. The reason Bus systems fail is they don't save people time. However, taking the subway tends to be faster than driving when you include parking time etc.

yummyfajitas• 17 years ago

Dedicated bus lanes provide a partial solution to this problem, and they tend to be cheaper than subways.

On the other hand, they reduce the speed of traffic outside of the dedicated lanes...Whether that is a bug or a feature depends on whether you are an economist or social planner.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

In Minneapolis, light rail to the airport works for this reason, even though it is subject to stopping for traffic downtown. Once past downtown, the train takes precedence, so it really does save time. (Since I have no car in Minneapolis, the light rail makes everything feel like an extension of the Airport/Mall of America.)

randomwalker• 17 years ago

I never thought to question LA's image as a byword for sprawl until I saw this series on the Freakonomics blog.

"According to the Federal Highway Administration, of the 36 largest metro areas, Los Angeles ranks dead last in terms of freeway lane miles per resident." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/los-angeles...

"But while the situation is far from ideal, the numbers from the California Air Resources Board make it clear that Los Angeles has come a remarkably long way toward cleaning up the air." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/los-angeles...

"As of the 2000 census, the Los Angeles region’s urbanized area had the highest population density in the nation. Yes, that was the word “highest,” not a smudge on your monitor." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/los-angeles...

"But compared with the majority of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not a transit wasteland. The region is second in the nation in transit patronage, behind only New York. Even on a market share basis (passenger transit miles traveled as a share of all miles traveled), Los Angeles’s ridership rate is relatively high: 11th among the 50 largest urban areas." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/los-angeles...

The myths appear to arise from a multitude of factors, such as confusing downtown density with overall density, and viewing the city through the eyes of Hollywood. Also, once a city acquires a reputation (such as NYC and crime), it takes forever to lose it.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

It seems like there's a lot of room for fudge factors in the numbers though. How are they defining metro areas? By many definitions, the NYC metro area extends out to the tip of Long Island, which is nearly all farmland, forest, and beach. The forks of Long Island have a combined population of 125,000 (1/10th of Manhattan) on land area of 564 sq mi (almost 20 times bigger than Manhattan).

Similarly, the Boston metro area is often considered to extend out to Worcester and southern New Hampshire, which includes towns like Dunstable (3000 people on land area that's about the size of downtown Boston). But there's a very big difference between a metro area like Boston where most of the people live within a dense urban core and then it drops off to farmland and open space quickly, vs. one like LA where it's medium-density suburbs all the way through.

Zev• 17 years ago

When looking at Long Island as part of the NYC metro area, usually Suffolk gets split in half. At least from my perspective as someone who grew up on LI. Though that probably doesn't happen when looking at census data.

(If you're familiar with Long Island, the metro area in Suffolk would be Suffolk - anything south of the Sunrise Highway up until Westhampton (going up north through Riverhead), and anything east of that boundary)

russell• 17 years ago

Actually there is a standard definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Metropolitan_Statistic...

baguasquirrel• 17 years ago

Agreed. If we were to look at the cities' population density the figures are stark.

Los Angeles pop: 3,849,378 dens: 8,205

New York pop: 8,274,527 dens: 27,147

Vancouver pop: 578,041 dens: 13,817.6

London pop: 7,556,900 dens: 12,331

The kicker is that these figures obscure the fact that the core of LA just 3 million. In other words, only 1/4 of the people live in the core, and the core is still more spread out than these other cities.

By contrast, half of the people in the NY Metro live in NYC proper. In London, greater than half of the people live in it London proper.

LA's profile is most similar to Vancouver's, which is a city with fewer people in its greater metro area than LA has in its core.

biohacker424• 17 years ago

100 L.A.s didn't bloom in Europe. The car is similar to other fads, it's exciting and everyone wants one first, but later people start to get tired of it.

What's unique about the US west coast is that the cities there were not much older then the automobile, that's why the are so much more car oriented.

chiffonade2• 17 years ago

> but later people start to get tired of it.

I assure you this is not the case in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, anywhere that car culture is the culture.

Once a place grows up with car culture, it very rarely loses it. That's the point of the article.

biohacker424• 17 years ago

Both Tokyo and Berlin suffered major destruction and were rebuilt after the invention of the car.

I was thinking more along the lines of European towns like Zurich.

anamax• 17 years ago

> What's unique about the US west coast is that the cities there were not much older then the automobile

San Jose, LA, and San Francisco are all 100 years older than the automobile. Seattle, Sacramento, and Oakland are 50 years older. (Wikipedia says that the Seattle area has been inhabitied for 4000 years.) I didn't check any other West Coast cities.

biohacker424• 17 years ago

I don't doubt that Seattle has been inhabited for 4000+ years, but I don't think the bulk of was built quite that long ago.

Clash of Subways and Car Culture in China: Are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?

Related Stories