
L.A. Is Creating Traffic Jams to Push Commuters to Ride Bikes and Rail - trothamel
http://reason.com/reasontv/2017/11/20/los-angeles-war-on-commuters-road-diet
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jacobolus
LA has been suffering from traffic, car crash deaths, and car air pollution
for decades. Having each individual person travel to and from their job every
day for 30+ minutes each way riding on a fire-propelled 2-ton metal block is
incredibly inefficient and damaging. If they can start to push back on that it
would be great. It’s a pretty uphill battle though.

> _about one percent of Los Angeles ' commuters bike to work. Sixty-seven
> percent drive._

Yeah, because the way the city has been configured, it’s incredibly
inconvenient to make trips any other way. The only way to improve that is by
adding transit (which they have been trying to do) and reconfiguring roads to
be more pedestrian/cyclist friendly (which this article is complaining about).
If these experiments which have been successful in other countries turn out to
not work in LA, they can try something else next time.

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adrr
Road diet listed in the article was on my preferred way to work. They
literally removed a lane of traffic in each direction to put a bike lane in
even though there's a paved bike trail less 100 feet away that runs along the
beach and up Ballona creek. People complained and they reverted back. Millions
of wasted of dollars.

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revelation
So it goes nowhere and has a bunch of pedestrians. But god forbid average
speed in the commuting ratrace goes from 15 mph to 13 mph.

~~~
qta
That was my preferred way of commuting as well, coming from the South Bay
going to Playa.

Sadly it did not only change from 15mph to 13mph, more like 30mph to 5mph in
addition to creating a really dangerous merger on a downhill turn. In the 1-2
months they had this "improvement" 9 accidents occurred.

~~~
revelation
This is the normal for car roads. Vehicle commuters expand to fill up
available space at which point speeds drop precipitously.

In a year or two it will be back to 5 mph only this time round you can't blame
it in dem cyclists or 21th century street design.

~~~
qta
Sure, I'll raise my first to the sky and yell "Damn Cars!".

This worked pretty well for the past 3 years I've been commuting there, and
never has been an issue. Local Business in Playa / Marina took a hit. I went
to some of the townhalls that were held, and besides the carted-in cyclists
(that probably were driven in by a car (OH GOSH!), as none of them lived
remotely close to the South Bay), the general populous was pretty active about
getting back our 2 lane street.

Edit: The main grief for me, was the shady reason they slimmed the road down.
It was cited, that a young woman died in a car accident on this road 8 years
ago. Yes, that is true. Sadly, the council-member in charge of this road died,
failed to mention that she was heavily intoxicated & running across the
street, when there was a crossing 300ft down the road.

~~~
adrr
Did you actually see bikes use the bike lane? I use the strand bike trail
frequently but rather not be riding on the roads sucking down exhaust.

If LA wanted to encourage cyclist, they should build dedicated bike trails
away from the roads and make the side streets shared lanes where cyclist can
use the whole road to prevent us from getting doored or hit by a car pulling
out of a driveway. There is no reason to put bike lanes on major arterials.

