
LA’s new trains have not lessened the time spent stuck in traffic - edward
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/02/06/angelenos-are-happy-to-pay-for-public-transport-but-loth-to-use-it
======
dkarl
I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It
took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have
taken 15 minutes by Lyft. About twenty minutes of that was spent walking and
waiting in <40ºF weather, not a big deal if you're properly dressed, but I
know that's something many people will not tolerate if they have a choice. Ten
minutes of it was apparently due to unreliable service; Google Maps had me get
off to make a connection and but quickly rerouted me to get back on the same
line I was on (luckily high frequency, hence only 10 minutes lost) because the
next bus on the connecting line was half an hour away.

I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal
of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself
and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why,
but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a
bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I
have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm
thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit
a bump I might draw blood.

I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of
public transit, I should know about it firsthand.

~~~
rayiner
This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are
under 30 minutes: [https://www.geotab.com/time-to-
commute](https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute). Just 7% of public transit
commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S.
public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking
public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5%
take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public
transit):
[https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell...](https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf).

I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-
rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at
Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I
dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during
rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day
care. Maybe in an electric car even.

~~~
bobthepanda
> Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5
> minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street
> from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.

Personally, I find you need some kind of minimum time separation from work,
otherwise you don't get the sense of separation between work and home life. I
had a 5 minute walk from my house as a work commute once, and I much prefer my
30 minute bus ride today, because by the time I get home I'm in "home mode".

The main issue with transit time in the US is that American cities have made
intentional policy decisions that result in land uses being far apart and
sprawling areas, so a nonstop car trip is the only reasonable option. But
everyone making nonstop car trips doesn't scale, which is why the Lincoln and
Holland have hour-long waits into the tunnels more often than not.

~~~
njarboe
Tunneling could let nonstop car trips scale. If the Boring company can produce
a similar improvement in tunneling costs that SpaceX is on launch costs, it
could be a reality.

~~~
bluGill
They can't though. There isn't enough 3d space under the earth that can be
practically reached.

~~~
bananabreakfast
What? Sure there is. There's an enormous amount of space under every city to
dig through before it becomes impractical to reach.

~~~
bobthepanda
The problem is access/exit points to the surface.

Graded ramps are high capacity but take up a lot of space since the grade
can't be all that steep.

Elevators don't take up a lot of space but are really slow, and have worse
reliability issues due to the moving parts.

How many spots on the surface exist that you could just take a chunk out of
for either? Most land in existing cities is already being used for buildings
or roads or sidewalks.

~~~
njarboe
You can have stations underground where the automatic cars/busses stop and
drop off people and then the people exit to the surface.

~~~
bluGill
IE a subway. Which works well for trains. No need to call them cars or buses,
since they never leave the guide way and there are advantages to trains in fix
route situations

~~~
njarboe
They can leave far out in the suburbs and other areas of low density and then
switch in areas of high density. This would be something new. Hard to realize
but a hybrid of the current system that can be the best of both.

------
mayneack
I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after
ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my
life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes
rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in
traffic.

Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the
right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate
that.

The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road
diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but
takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.

~~~
naravara
How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or
covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or
if there are delays?

In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is
to use.

~~~
pfranz
10 years ago they had GPS maps on the bus showing your current location, but
afaik you couldn't access that when waiting for the bus. There were covered
bus stops, just none of the ones I used were. They were only "ok" at marking
stops when routes changed. The bus schedule (for the routes I used) was
sparse.

So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite
at the level of being pleasant.

~~~
bobthepanda
These days, that kind of thing is offloaded to third-party smartphone transit
apps. Most people have working smartphones, and are probably using them while
waiting for the bus anyways, so it's more helpful (and cost-effective) than to
provide signage at every stop.

------
bluGill
That is expected, as any transit planner can tell you. Transit only makes a
difference to traffic at the very edges of rush hour. For every person who
gets out of their single occupancy car there is enough space for one person to
leave just a little latter and still make it in time, which in turns leaves
their space for someone else until finally you are out of rush hour entirely
and there is nobody to take that time/space slot.

Or to put it a different way: everybody wants to arrive to leave at 7:30am and
arrive at 8:00am. (you can subtract a few minutes from the leave time for
people who live close to work). Anybody working some other schedule (who has a
choice of when to work) is doing it because they are avoiding traffic. Thus if
transit makes traffic a little better someone on the edge will adjust their
schedule to account for that and bring traffic back to where it was.

Until you get to a city where rush hour lasts for 15 minutes transit will not
make a measurable difference in time spent in traffic.

~~~
jessriedel
In general yes, but in this case the trains are not being used:

> Even as its budget has expanded, the number of people actually using public
> transport in la has collapsed. Total ridership is down almost a quarter
> since 2013. Three in four Angelenos travel to work on their own in a car,
> the highest figure ever.

~~~
downerending
Recently stayed in a hotel in LA that had a direct view onto a light rail
station. (Cool!) I glanced out the window from time to time over several days
and never saw a single train. That suggests that they're not running often
enough to be useful to real people.

Train, bus, whatever--if I have to wait longer than eight minutes on average,
it's useless.

(And don't even get me started on the geniuses that decided that light rail
shouldn't have an LAX terminal.)

~~~
gamblor956
We're you staying in Long Beach? That line was down for 9 months for a
complete renovation.

~~~
icedistilled
wow so they forced everyone to find alternate means, i.e. cars for a good
number of them, and then expected them to come back after 9 months of car
habits?

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Can't speak to this exact instance, but in other cities, I've seen them run
buses along closed routes.

------
webkike
I would love to use LA public transport but it’s simply not usable to get most
places I want to go. I live a block away from an expo line and I can’t even
make it all the way to little Tokyo without making a transfer. Getting to West
Hollywood via the metro is basically not possible.

The only solution to this problem is a lot more lines

~~~
ravenstine
Exactly. And if it can get you where you want to go, you have to transfer
through multiple buses or taxis. The hassle kind of burns you out and you just
want something simpler. Unlike other cities, there's not a whole lot in
downtown that I need to visit on a regular basis. Most of what I want to do is
peripheral to the actual city of LA. Everything is so spread out, and there
really isn't much we can do to undo that at this point. We're never going to
be the pedestrian paradise that is San Francisco. (I don't want to live in SF
again, but boy was it nice to be able to walk and take light rail everywhere)

I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious
enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out
of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting
at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole
benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every
day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening
people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There
were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the
platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and
rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around
the corner and then drop him off around the block.

~~~
butterthebuddha
> I don't want to live in SF again

Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?

~~~
ravenstine
I'll boil it down to a few things:

\- The rampant homelessness and mental illness

\- Cost of living

\- Feces and urine everywhere

\- Lots of rats and cockroaches

\- Rotting garbage in the streets

\- Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in
other cities like LA.

\- Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f __* you
" if you ask them a simple question.

It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but
it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but
the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.

~~~
bxparks
Yup, we left SF for pretty much the same reasons:

1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine,
and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing
homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally
ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to
sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so
fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless
problem.

2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome.
Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80.

3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new
development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same
people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building
aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these
protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows
sitting completely empty.

I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of
food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to
get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant.
I'm happy we left.

~~~
macdamaniac
Your experience and GPs are definitely valid, but I will say that there are
many different San Franciscos if you try out places that aren't downtown or
the Mission.

The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never
have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute
is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do
have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need
to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great
food, services, etc in walking distance).

If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but
slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other
great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people
with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as
Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights.

Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really
love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are
honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its
neighborhoods.

------
giantrobot
That's because the trains in LA suck for actually getting anywhere. The city
is so spread out and car oriented the trains are useless for most people.

Many train stops in LA proper are at retail/consumer locations rather than
commercial centers where most people work. So you take a train into the city
and you then need to catch a bus or cab to where you actually need to go. So
you skipped some freeway traffic but get stuck in road traffic.

It's more of a pain if you're in the suburbs around LA. Because of the sprawl
the trip from your home to a train station isn't a walkable distance. If you
take public transit for that portion of your commute you're not seeing any
sort of time savings. If you drive to a train station you have all the
expenses of a car and the crappy commute time.

Because you basically _need_ a car in most of Southern California you might as
well use the freeways. The traffic sucks but at least you have your own radio,
AC, and ability to get off and grab a coffee. The sprawl imposes a sort of
fixed commute time for any given distance. You might as well be relatively
comfortable in that commute.

~~~
bsder
It also doesn't help that the trains are so terribly slow.

I semi-regularly have to go from San Diego to Orange County. I could put a car
at the Orange County terminus point so I'm not impacted by the bad
connectivity to the stations themselves.

It takes almost _2 hours_ to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it
spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. You'd be better off _driving_ to
Solana Beach, except that most of the rush hour traffic issues are between San
Diego and Solana Beach. So, once you reach Solana Beach, you might as well
drive the rest of the way.

It also doesn't help that parking at Old Town is a disaster--you either get
there by 7:00AM or you're not getting parking. Um, if I leave before 7AM, San
Diego to Irvine is roughly a 1 hour drive.

On top of that, the train is semi-regularly stopped because someone decided to
commit suicide by jumping in front of it. This means that your train is
stopped 3+ hours _AND YOU CAN 'T LEAVE_.

Why would I take the train at that point?

~~~
musicale
> It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it
> spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach.

The schedule seems to indicate that it takes 11-12 minutes to get from San
Diego to Solana beach. Where is the extra time coming from?

How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail
(Amtrak) ?

~~~
bsder
12 minutes is a bit fast from San Diego to Solana Beach--even at California
freeway speeds that's a 20 mile drive.

Amtrak shows me 29-39 minutes from OLT (San Diego Old Town) to SOL (Solana
Beach). I have _never_ seen it that fast--I would estimate 40-60 minutes is
the variance. Amtrak moves _pathetically_ slowly until Solana Beach. Maybe
something has changed recently, but I'm skeptical. I'm probably going to wind
up on the train again this month, so I'll be able to check that.

It's kind of funny, because if I could originate at Solana Beach, the commute
would be fine. The Amtrak flies north of Solana Beach (Amtrak shows about
65-75 minutes from Solana Beach to Irvine--and that's actually pretty accurate
and just about as fast as driving). The problem is that in rush hour _you can
't get to Solana Beach_\--it's basically due north of some of the worst San
Diego traffic chokepoints.

> How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail
> (Amtrak)

There seems to be some synchronization, but the buses go preferentially to
downtown and are very slow in other directions. Unfortunately, San Diego
Downtown kinda ... sucks. If you want to go east on something like El Cajon
Boulevard into interesting areas where your "environmentally conscious" folks
probably want to live, the buses take _forever_ \--something like 40 minutes
to go 8 miles.

Generally if I'm using Amtrak, I'm driving to the starting station and picking
up my second car at the ending station. This, of course, means that I'm now an
entitled car user complaining about lack of parking. :)

------
psychometry
If they would just come to peace with removing some parking, they could
convert slow bus lines to fast ones through protected lanes, signal priority,
and other cheap measures.

~~~
dhduwnsjsj
Unlikely anytime soon, California transit development is held back by the
hippies and soccer moms clamoring for green everything. My city took away a
ton of parking from a main road only to add dedicated, environmentally
friendly, bike lanes. Nevermind that four cyclists an hour use the lanes tops
or that it could have just as easily been a dedicated bus lane and done some
actual good for people with jobs. But this way we're encouraging people to,
like, take care of themselves man!

~~~
duxup
Generally in my experience the folks pushing green options (this is admittedly
a large group) tend to be fans of busses...

~~~
montagg
I’m on a neighborhood council in LA, and this is not consistently the case.
You often see this flip when it comes to supporting denser development,
especially where it intersects with removing single family homes or rent
controlled apartments. The willingness to remove parking to get some other
benefit for the community evaporates. They’re making tradeoffs that make
internal sense, but it does mean you don’t just see soccer moms saying no to
removing available parking. It’s sometimes hippies vs urban planners.

~~~
duxup
I feel like denser housing is always a wildcard as far as any of the folks
interested goes.

Bussing much less so.

~~~
bluGill
Fortunately transit doesn't need density nearly as much as long straight lines
to run on. If you can just convince your local council put in long through
streets every half mile transit can work well in low densities. The much hated
cul-de-sacs is fine so long as there are direct walking paths to the through
streets so nobody is more than quarter mile from both an easy-west and north-
south street with transit.

(Note, in metric countries, go with 800 meters between through streets for 400
meters to a through street - close enough)

------
majormajor
I can't read the article, but am very curious about how they accounted for
overall growth.

That new Expo Line tends to be pretty packed at rush hour. But that east/west
commute continues to get more crowded overall. There have been ever-more
apartments and offices opening up along that line for the past 6+ years, so
it's no surprise traffic gets worse too.

------
kkhire
'Getting around the city' culture is just different here in LA. There's folks
in NYC who make half million a year and take the subway several times a day.

In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public
transport, I'm driving!

~~~
deaddodo
You're going for the wrong side of the chicken/egg.

People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen
that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be
desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely
manner.

The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to
fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines +
higher light rail coverage.

Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone
/ read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience
factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to
utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).

~~~
Seenso
> The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to
> fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines
> + higher light rail coverage.

And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the
pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general
have a bad reputation, it's going to take a _long_ period of sustained good &
convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.

> Most people I know would rather ride the train.

One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and
predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed
infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's
built.

~~~
twblalock
> One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and
> predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed
> infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's
> built.

Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.

~~~
bluGill
There is no reason any of those objections need to be true. They typically
are, but you can make a train even worse than a bus.

~~~
erik_seaberg
Caltrain has a lot of trouble because people are constantly driving or walking
onto the tracks. BART is either subway or elevated or fenced off between
stations.

------
cs702
Any reduction in commute time due to new infrastructure, capacity increases,
new technology, or other improvements, always proves temporary, as average
commute times in large population centers gradually converge to _Marchetti 's
Constant_:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant)

In the words of Bertrand Russell: _" Each improvement in locomotion has
increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person
who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must
still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance
that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original
situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area --
effectually cancels out the gain."_[a]

See also: [https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-
time-...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-city-
size-transportation-urban-planning-history/597055/)

[a] As quoted on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant)

~~~
helen___keller
Another way of looking at it, building transit doesn't get anybody to work
faster, but it does allow you to scale population density, which in turn
allows you to build more housing for a region that may be in a housing crunch.

If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every
building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a
multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what
happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the
roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of
the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to
live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes
would far exceed 1 hour.

Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if
every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is
basically Manhattan, after all.

------
blackrock
Maybe they should just let the public transit riders ride for free?

Those people will then bear with the hassles of using public transportation
for the rest who needs to use their cars. The city might even see a surge in
commerce, from people who can go to distant locations via public transit, that
they wouldn’t otherwise bother going to by car.

~~~
bluGill
Generally not. Most people are willing to pay a little for it, and people who
pay for their service are harder to justify cutting service to when times get
tight.

------
fastaguy88
While there seems to be a lot of comments suggesting that no-one uses the LA
metro because it's too short and too inconvenient, ridership statistics
suggest otherwise.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership)
points out that LA is the 9th most used subway system in the US, with
riders/mile of subway beating out both the Washington DC Metro and Chicago's
L, which are the 2nd and 3rd most heavily used subway systems. So while most
of the commenter's here do not find it useful, about 140,000 people per day do
use it, despite it being only 17 miles long.

~~~
bart_spoon
Well given that LA is the second largest city in the country by population,
that seems to support the idea that it’s heavily under utilized.

------
pm24601
The article completely misses the point of public transit.

Transit is NOT about reducing congestion. Induced demand
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand))
clearly means that some people will driving so long the congestion is within
their tolerance level.

Public Transit is all about giving choices to people AND enabling people to
get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of congestion.

For my family, I have been fortunate enough that the last 15 years or so I
have been able to take public transit to my jobs. This has enable my family to
use a single car and save tens of thousands. This is significant money for me
and even more significant for someone making less than I do.

Public transit enables workers to keep more of what they earn because they
don't have to spend money on gas, car repairs, and they don't have surprise
expenses related to driving all the time.

Public transit is NEVER about congestion.

If the goal is "solving" congestion then:

* ban cars (Market Street in SF, 14th Street in NYC ([https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transport...](https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transportation-bus-lane-transit-priority))

* have an economic collapse

* reduce parking options

* congestion pricing

... etc...

 _

~~~
erik_seaberg
Adding capacity doesn't _cause_ demand. "Induced" demand is just latent demand
that became measurable when we reduced the backpressure in the system, and it
ends as soon as we adequately serve all the latent demand we have. But that
probably costs more per capita than a car, so we aren't voting to do it.

------
pacomerh
I live in Culver City and go to work to Santa Monica using the expo line, and
its perfect. But I do understand the routes do not cover important areas.
There's still a big gap around West Hollywood for ex.

------
johanam
Even in times of low traffic, patrol cars are known to slow down the flow of
cars in order to induce congestion. They do it because when there are so many
cars on the freeway, it’s safer if the vehicles move along slowly.

It seems that with our current infrastructure, even if we could reduce the
number of car users it would not be by such a margin that it would become safe
enough to not have these “traffic breaks”.

[https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8](https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8)

~~~
karthikb
The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an
opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to
completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having
driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every
4-5 years.

~~~
pfranz
It's just anecdotal, but I often saw it done in LA; weekly to monthly. Since I
would get stuck in them I'd often seem them start or end them. I never once
saw any correlation to road debris or emergency services.

Any staging for construction or emergency services were done with a slow
moving truck dropping cones or flares put down in a zipper-like fashion,
corralling cars into open lanes or into exits.

~~~
inferiorhuman
Yeah I see that kinda stuff at least a few times a year in the Bay Area.
There's so much detritus on the roads I imagine they're just trying to remove
the biggest of the hazards.

------
pfranz
Most of the article is behind a paywall so I couldn't read the whole thing. I
hate the argument I often hear that "more lanes were added, time spent in
traffic hasn't changed." As long as ridership is up, throughput increased
while latency stayed the same.

A public transit system takes decades of investment to see fruition. This
really clicked for me when I was in London and saw a sign saying a transit
stop was closed for the next 3 years. That has to be detrimental for the
businesses, people renting, and real estate owners who were established there.
A business lease averages 3-5 years. So you'd need zoning laws to change, real
estate to be built, a business owner willing to commit to 3-5 years, and foot
traffic and commerce.

I can't imagine any infrastructure project that would improve traffic--only a
recession.

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whalesalad
Trains can get you to like 2% of LA... that is why they're hardly used.

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gamblor956
Downtown, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena, long Beach, and Hollywood. So
the important 2%.

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api
That's because LA is growing. It would be a lot worse without the trains.

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drivingmenuts
I consider The Economist to be a high-brow, high-status publication, but when
I see them misspelling in the title, I have to reconsider. “Loth” is not a
word. “Loathe” is the word they’re looking for.

Find a better educated editor, y’all.

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bwanab
Loth is a valid British form of loathe:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loth](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loth)

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pasttense01
Doesn't The Economist change spellings between British and American editions?
For example: "color"\--American and "colour"\--British?

