
To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls - awiesenhofer
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-ol-traffic-toll-lane-freeway-20170303-story.html
======
reillyse
LA doesn't have a traffic problem. People just have overly high expectations.

As someone who has also lived and commuted in lots of cities around the world,
LA just doesn't have that much of a problem.

What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15
miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an
hour (I'm using as reference Downtown LA to Santa Monica at 9am, typically
takes 35 to 1h 5min according to google maps). Good luck in London, Paris, NYC
or Tokyo never mind Delhi or Beijing.

The line made famous by clueless that everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes is
completely true, with the caveat being, so long as you don't drive during
traffic. This reality is what people are comparing their rush hour commute to,
they know that if they are lucky enough to avoid traffic they will get there
in 20 minutes, but when they hit bad traffic it takes an hour. (Obviously I'm
ignoring stuck on the 405 for 5 hour nightmare stories here, I'm just talking
about day to day driving.)

LA is a victim of having too good a car infrastructure, it allows people to
make ridiculous commuting decisions and get away with it the majority of the
time. Adding more traffic infrastructure just makes the problem worse. People
can drive from further away and save money on their housing and they will.
They'll also work in places that are further away, the problem is as much
about where businesses are located as it is about where people live.

~~~
xenihn
>What other major city in the world would you expect to be able to drive 15
miles through the centre at rush hour and get to your destination in under an
hour

It takes thirty minutes to go a mile in traffic where I'm at (West LA, near
Brentwood and Santa Monica).

Then an hour to go 5 miles in any direction on the 10 or 405.

It's really bad.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I just moved to LA (westwood) from Beijing last August. The traffic here is so
light in LA compared to Beijing, and the air is really clean as well. In
Beijing, it could take me a couple of hours to get home on 4th ring, 3rd ring
was worse! And the traffic didn't disappear at 7PM, maybe 8 or 9.

------
bit_logic
The true solution to LA traffic will never happen. And that solution is buses.
But not the current underfunded system that barely limps along. A massive
number of buses, like 5x the current number. And combined with tolls for cars
to get cars off the road. The large number of buses is critical because it
greatly reduces wait time between transfers. It also allows adding express bus
lines between major areas. But buses have a really bad reputation in LA. They
are trying to build more rail which doesn't have the bad reputation, but that
will always have the last mile issue.

Since the bad reputation of buses will likely never go away, it seems rail +
uber pool/lyft line might be an alternative. It won't be as good, but could be
good enough. I wish there was a company other than uber/lyft which focused on
just this first/last mile issue for rail. Or maybe the metro here could just
start a service like that themselves. Something like Rail Pool to get people
from/to the rail stations. It combines the best of both transports (the rail
covers 90% of the trip, the extensive road network is used for the first and
last miles).

~~~
nradov
Buses in the LA region have a bad reputation because of other bus passengers.
If you ride the bus you might have to sit next to someone who smells bad or
plays loud music or acts out in inappropriate ways. That's why everyone who
can afford it drives their own car: to be alone. The reputation would improve
if they could get more "regular" people riding, but it's kind of a chicken-or-
the-egg problem.

~~~
martinald
Have you seen the central line at rush hour in London? It's horrendous[1]. We
are talking >7people per sqm, plus significant waits to even get on the
trains. But yet, 100k+s use it every day of all socioeconomic backgrounds. I'd
imagine mostly middle class/upper middle class professionals.

Why?

1) Traffic is terrible. It will take 1hr+ to do a journey the central line
does in 15-20m.

2) Even if you want to drive, parking costs around $1500/month in the square
mile.

3) On top of that, you have the congestion charge for entering central London
(£11.50/day - soon to be £25/day if you have a particularly polluting
vehicle).

You're looking at about $2000/month if you want to drive, which takes 4x as
long and costs about 15x more than the train.

This is what happens when you price effectively for the externalities of
traffic congestion. People will switch to transit en masse, and 'loud music'
will not be seen as a problem.

[1]this also means there is the political will to build massive transit
infrastructure, like crossrail, which will relieve the central line at a cost
of around $20bn.

~~~
tapatio
London sounds terrible to live in, way too many people.

~~~
ghaff
Commuting at rush hour can be pretty awful in just about every major city--New
York, London, Paris, Tokyo... I wouldn't call any of those places terrible
but, yes, there are a lot of people and it can be pretty mobbed if you try to
travel at peak times.

~~~
Pica_soO
How about extra pay for distributed commuters? Start your day early, end it
early, start late, end it late and receive a bonus?

~~~
ghaff
Many cities (including London) have peak fares for transit, trains, etc. The
problem is that if you're a typical commuter you probably don't have a lot of
control over your schedule. If you're asking why don't companies do this, why
would they? If anything, they probably prefer people to be in the office at
the same time.

------
Osiris
This is just a band-aid. Same with adding buses, lanes, trains, etc. When
something goes wrong in software we usually try to resolve it by finding a
root cause.

There are a lot of cars on the roads. Why? People live far away from their
work. Why? All the office buildings are in one central place. Why? ... Etc.

The solutions to the root causes, whatever they are, are, unfortunately, a lot
more complex and expensive than adding lanes or tolls. However, knowing the
root cause allows us to implement policies and laws that can incentivize
behaviors to address the root cause in the long term.

For example, change zoning laws for a better mix of commercial and residential
within smaller areas.

Increase the cost of vehicle registration or gas taxes to encourage workers to
prefer jobs closer to their home. Tolls on major highways rather than smaller
streets can be part of this.

Provide free public transit in areas that meet requirements of
commercial/residential mix.

These are just ideas. I don't know the real root causes, but a single policy
won't help unless it's part of a comprehensive plan to reduce the NEED to
travel and travel long distances.

~~~
tomjakubowski
> Why? All the office buildings are in one central place.

No! The defining feature of the LA megapolis is that the offices and
workplaces are _not_ all in one central place. Just within LA County, there
are major business districts in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, Burbank,
Pasadena, Warner Center, Playa Vista, downtown, Westwood, Century City, … it
goes on and on. As Human Transit says, Los Angeles is a "vast constellation of
dense places." [1]

This feature actually makes Los Angeles a prime candidate for mass transit. In
highly centralized "hub and spoke" metropolises like Chicago, packed trains
rush towards the city center all morning, while no one travels the reverse
direction. In the afternoon, the situation is flipped. This is an inefficient
use of transit infrastructure.

[http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-
metr...](http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-
metropolis.html)

~~~
wa2flq
There is significant reverse commute and congestion from Chicago into the
suburbs The travel times are typically longer than the conventional flow.

Suburb to Suburb mass transit is bus but challenging for long transits. There
are only two major ring type highways. Attempts to get a suburban ring "STAR"
train or outer Chicago "Circle" Loop line never get past the study stage.

~~~
hermitdev
I'm one such commuter. I go from western Chicago burbs to north. There is no
legit public trans option. It's 3 hours one way for what takes me 30 mins in
no traffic.

What i really hate is the variability. Good days its 30 min. Bad days, may be
over 2 hours. And, you cant always tell before you get on the road.

~~~
officelineback
So the conditions change so quickly that opening Waze just before you leave
doesn't at least give you a ballpark estimate?

~~~
drewbug01
Yes, actually. Crashes, for example, can't be predicted via Waze and
periodically f __* up your commute in an epic way. And they happen very
quickly and the effects ripple through the system equally quickly.

~~~
hermitdev
One other thing. If you get on at 22nd street, headed north on 294, past the
Cermack toll (and 290/Roosevelt ramps), you have no exit available for about 8
miles. So, you're committed. And, once you've made it that far, you might as
well stick it out, because it'll open up to 80-90 mph as soon as you get past
the Touhy toll about 2 miles away.

------
sizimon
One of my favorite little-known tidbits of Los Angeles traffic history is the
Alweg monorail proposal in 1963. The Alweg Monorail Company offered to finance
and build a 43 mile monorail system, which would be repaid with MTA revenues.
The proposal got derailed when Standard Oil lobbied heavily against it.

I'm convinced that if this proposal had gotten approved and built, the
trajectory of public transportation in Los Angeles would have been
significantly different, and the city would probably have a very efficient and
extensive monorail system now. Los Angeles seems to be the perfect place for a
monorail - it can be built around existing structures and doesn't require
underground tunneling. I'm not sure that Los Angeles would be a 'car city' now
if we had started building this monorail system 50 years ago.

[http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/LA1963.html](http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/LA1963.html)

~~~
piplgobde
Wow, thank you for this.

What a shame it wasn't built.

------
adrr
Problem with LA is that we build horizontally and not vertically. We keep
adding more homes in suburbs and not building up in the cities that have the
jobs. There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They
have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot
transit village(on a rail line too). Today we're voting on initiative that
prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more
expensive and traffic will get worse.

To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are
located and that means building upwards.

~~~
bufordsharkley
But _why_ is this the case? Largely because land use (powerful local zoning +
low holding costs for land) incentivizes sprawl over infill.

Consider cities that do better for transit by building upward. This is usually
a case of a more sane zoning system, like in Tokyo[0], or ownership residing
in the municipality, like Hong Kong.[1]

[0] [http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-
zoning.html](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html) [1]
[http://www.hkclic.org/en/topics/saleAndPurchaseOfProperty/ba...](http://www.hkclic.org/en/topics/saleAndPurchaseOfProperty/basic_knowledge_of_land_ownership_in_hong_kong/)

~~~
remarkEon
Fun fact: _most_ zones in LA County require developers to build parking on a
per-bedroom basis, so they tend to build ~2.5 stalls per unit, and most of the
time that ends up being subterranean. That'll add ~$100k in development costs
per unit right off the bat. They can sell the stalls individually (I believe)
but because of the economics of the market it just doesn't make sense to build
anything but luxury. That one rule is a significant cause of both sprawl and
car addiction here, as well as more negative trends in housing availability.

Edit: If people are interested, here's the list of zoning requirements for
Residential Zones in Los Angeles County.

[http://planning.lacounty.gov/luz/summary/category/residentia...](http://planning.lacounty.gov/luz/summary/category/residential_zones/)

~~~
dublinben
Residential (and commercial) parking minimums need to be abolished. Set
parking maximums if you must impose some rules, and then allow the market to
settle on appropriate amount of parking for a new development.

~~~
remarkEon
I'm sure there's some research on this somewhere, but parking minimums have
got to be one of the most distortive policies to ever emerge in urban
planning.

~~~
oftenwrong
This is pretty much the definitive book on the subject:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/193236496X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_NMZ...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/193236496X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_NMZVyb8WPJC3C)

~~~
remarkEon
Very nice, thanks for the recommendation.

------
wwweston
> The reason that electrical power and air travel don’t fail every time they
> get crowded is that we raise prices to manage demand.

Air travel and electrical power:

(1) Are easier to add capacity for during times of peak demand

(2) Actually _do_ fail (even though tolled!) when demand exceeds capacity
(brown/blackouts for electrical power, cascading delays easily exceeding those
for ground traffic when weather knocks down capacity).

On top of that, it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free --
gasoline and associated taxes are immediate costs for every mile driven, and
most people know at some level that each mile also has an additional total
cost in terms of insurance and impact on maintenance/lifetime of the vehicle.

And people still _choose_ to make it more expensive in the form of higher-end
(and often lower MPG) automotive purchases.

If there's a solution to the traffic problem, instead of attempting to make
driving particularly more expensive, it probably involves:

(a) make other transportation options more affordable in terms of reach, time,
and money

(b) making the housing market more liquid and affordable, so people can more
easily choose locations convenient to their living activities

~~~
yequalsx
People do know that it costs to drive a car but the cost is hidden in some
sense. I think few people actually calculate how much driving really costs.
When I drive 10 miles I don't think to myself that it's going to cost me $5.40
(using IRS mileage rate). Gasoline taxes do not come close to paying for the
road system. I remember when gas hit around $5 a gallon in the U.S. some years
ago people did think about driving cost a lot more.

I suspect if the costs were more apparent people would be more apt to support
public transportation and reconsider their driving habits.

~~~
logfromblammo
When dreaming up new ways to tax cars, please bear in mind that wear on
roadways from vehicles is proportional to miles driven times per-axle weight
_to the fourth power_.

A gas tax is already proportional to miles driven times vehicle weight times a
fuel efficiency factor.

Congestion, on the other hand, is a more difficult thing. Vehicle length
certainly plays a factor, as well as width, acceleration, and braking
distance. Number of passengers is an obvious factor. Trip routing efficiency
has a role. I really don't expect local legislators to understand the
mathematics of traffic. If they don't commission a study by traffic experts,
and do exactly what those experts recommend, they might just end up making
things worse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox#Traffic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox#Traffic)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave)

~~~
justinmc
Do you have a source for your roadway wear formula? Just interested to read
more.

~~~
sampo
If you just google something like 'per-axle weight to the fourth power' you
find lots of sources.

~~~
logfromblammo
The AASHO Road Test is the ultimate source for the 4th power rule.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHO_Road_Test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHO_Road_Test)

------
u801e
Collecting money via tolls has a higher administrative cost compared to
collecting money via the gas tax [1]. The infrastucture to collect the gas tax
is already in place. In contrast, there are a lot of things that need to be
done before tolls can be put in place (legal, contracting, setting up
collection points, etc). Plus, the public-private partnerships that some
governments get into for these types of toll roads don't always work out [2]
[3] [4]

It would make a lot more sense to just raise the gas tax to achieve the same
effect.

[1]
[https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/24/2438.asp](https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/24/2438.asp)

[2]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-22/indiana-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-22/indiana-
toll-road-seeks-bankruptcy-as-traffic-declines)

[3] [http://kxan.com/2016/03/02/company-that-runs-sh-130-toll-
fil...](http://kxan.com/2016/03/02/company-that-runs-sh-130-toll-files-for-
bankruptcy/)

[4]
[http://www.virginiaplaces.org/transportation/pocaparkway.htm...](http://www.virginiaplaces.org/transportation/pocaparkway.html)

~~~
sahaskatta
I wish it was that simple. Raising the gas tax isn't the solution. The gas tax
will not work for to much longer because it doesn't accurately correlate to
the number miles traveled.

\- A old compact car from 2007 may only get 20 mpg while a new car from 2017
may get 40 mpg.

\- Someone would a plug-in hybrid such as a Chevy Volt may only fill up their
tank once every few months as they start off with a 50 mile battery range each
morning.

\- And those with pure electrics like a Tesla do not get taxed at all.

Raising the gas tax also unfairly punishes the lower income bracket who often
drive older vehicles with worse MPG.

~~~
wapz
Is that a bad thing? There is a reason the government subsidizes pure electric
cars and requires car manufacturers to make electric cars (albeit they only do
it to meet the quota).

I understand it's going to punish those who really can't afford a decent car,
but for ~$4000 in the bay area you can get a pretty decent used car that will
get you 30+ mpg.

------
P3R3
The article falsely assumes that the HOV lane has spare capacity. During rush
hour here all lanes are equally clogged, and sometimes the HOV lane is
actually slower than the other 4 lanes. The only way to fix LA traffic with
current infrastructure is self driving car pools. If/when they can get to the
point in which they are safer than normal drivers, and safe for the riders
(crime inside of self driving cars) LA traffic will be solved. This will
eliminate the necessity of having a car allowing for increased taxes on car
ownership, reducing traffic on the roads.

~~~
twblalock
If the HOV lane is gridlocked, that means the price to use the HOV lane is not
high enough. Keep raising the toll until traffic in the HOV lane moves at the
desired speed.

~~~
jedberg
They set a max price on those lanes because otherwise poor people would get
stuck in even worse traffic while rich people would be able to move quickly.
That's already true but they are trying to minimize the disparity between rich
and poor.

~~~
aianus
They can redirect the toll money to things that benefit the poor while
allowing rich people to save their time which is objectively worth more.

~~~
jedberg
You could also make the argument that a rich persons time is worth less
because they can afford to hire people to do what poor people have to do
themselves, like clean the house or go shopping or drive their kids around.
They are also more likely to have a job that can be done from home.

------
donatj
The problem as I see it is that we force everyone onto the freeway. Need to
get somewhere a few miles from here? They make it very difficult to get there
without getting onto the freeway.

There was some point in the last 30 years where city designers decided the
best way to handle local traffic was just to force everyone onto the freeway.
It's horrible.

There should instead be a reasonable main grid of smaller (2 lane max) low
stop count streets such that I can get across town without getting on the
freeway.

A large number of small roads can handle a lot more traffic than a small
number of large roads.

~~~
r00fus
Maybe we should also consider the concept of mass transit? The increased
likelihood of injury or death from increased transit time in automobiles alone
is a health hazard.

~~~
nickthemagicman
LA is getting better with mass transit. The problem is it's not running 24
hours. It shuts down around 1am so you it's not really good for doing things
at night like in NYC.

Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people, or
kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code
enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a
dude, I bet women feel even more so.

Also need more train tracks!

Fix those problems people will ride transit way more. Thats the way to solve
the traffic problem.

~~~
vkou
> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people,
> or kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code
> enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a
> dude, I bet women feel even more so.

One of the ways to improve the public transit, as a whole, is to make people
of all socioeconomic classes take transit. Consider New York, for instance,
where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people
on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.

Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't
support any solutions.

~~~
duderific
Driving and parking in New York is so incredibly difficult and expensive
compared to mass transit, especially the subway. In the cities where that is
the case, there isn't the same class division between those who drive and
those who take mass transit.

In LA, it is exactly the opposite: mass transit is incredibly difficult, slow,
and in some cases more expensive than driving. How can you "make people of all
socioeconomic classes take transit" in that scenario?

~~~
vkou
Tear up all the parking lots, and half the roads.

Or, actually, just tear up the parking lots. You can do it by taxing under-
utilized land.

It's obviously never going to happen, so people will keep spending
~$3-5,000/year on vehicles, and ~$1,000-2000/year on parking, for the dubious
privilege of spending up to two hours a day in traffic. On the bright side, if
you live that far from work, your housing is probably cheap.

~~~
xienze
> On the bright side, if you live that far from work, your housing is probably
> cheap.

And that's exactly why things are the way they are. Shockingly, given the
choice, most people would happily trade a long commute for the ability to
spread out and not pay through the nose for the privilege of being crammed on
top of other people.

~~~
vkou
Only because the costs of that lifestyle are socialized - either someone else
pays them, or you can't opt out.

Surburban sprawl is unsustainable, but is paid for by new development, parking
is free, or cheap, highways aren't tolled, costs of pollution aren't factored
into your bill at the pump... When you live in the city, you still pay these
costs, but you don't get to reap any of the benefits.

------
ahh
Before we ask about methods...has any American city ever fixed a traffic
problem?

No, I'm serious: has any city in the US ever had traffic at some (bad) level,
implemented some set of new policies, then had traffic drop substantially
while maintaining the same population density (i.e. I won't count the
abandonment of Detroit.) I certainly don't know of any, which makes me
doubtful about _anyone_ 's proposals to fix traffic.

~~~
Tiktaalik
Vancouver, BC a "North" American city has had the same traffic volumes
entering/exiting its downtown core since the 1960s even though the amount of
jobs and people living in the area has massively increased during that time.

This was accomplished by: 1\. Never building a freeway and never expanding any
road capacity at all. (This is a strong disincentive to drive to downtown) 2\.
Building rapid transit. 3\. Building residential housing in and adjacent to
downtown so that people can just walk to work.

~~~
oftenwrong
See also: _Canadian Cities American Cities: Our Differences Are the Same_

[http://www.jtc.sala.ubc.ca/newsroom/patrick_condon_primer.pd...](http://www.jtc.sala.ubc.ca/newsroom/patrick_condon_primer.pdf)

------
Asturaz
LOL the same arguments where used in Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg, worked
for a few months, the traffic is worse again. It was just a great lie for the
the public to finance other prestige projects.

~~~
biehl
[http://hub.jhu.edu/2017/03/02/health-effects-for-children-
sw...](http://hub.jhu.edu/2017/03/02/health-effects-for-children-sweden-
traffic-tax/)

~~~
Symbiote
It would have been worth quoting from this article, since it shows what
nonsense the original claim about Sweden was.

"When Stockholm, Sweden introduced a "congestion tax" to discourage driving in
the center of town, traffic eased and the pollution level dropped by between 5
and 10 percent.

There was one other result that was unexpected, but welcome nonetheless: The
rate of asthma attacks among local children decreased by nearly 50 percent,
according to a Johns Hopkins University economist's study of the tax and its
impact."

------
Wonderdonkey
The trouble is the only thing our state and cities ever do is widen freeways,
and that never works. The core of the problem is traffic management, which
technology can solve without added tolls. (It's the same with city streets.
There is absolutely no reason in 2017 why we should ever hit more than one or
two red lights in intra-city travel.) It's just that the state and city
governments seeem truly oblivious to any new ways of thinking about the
problem.

Tolls are regressive and will have a greater impact on poor people who have to
commute to work. Second, public infrastructure is paid for by by both taxes
and use fees/licenses/fines. That's a bit different from a utility. If the
feds and state gave me back the money for the roads I've already built, I'd be
fine switching to a pay-as-you-go model. Another consideration: This state is
already funneling too many public funds to private toll road operators — to
the tune of billions of dollars. I'd really hate to see more of my money go to
people who are already charging the public way too much for setting up booths
on the roads I paid for and charging me to drive on them.

As a side note, I've always thought California was leaving some big revenue
opportunities on the table by not issuing special licenses for high-speed
driving and creating high-speed lanes for people with those licenses. It would
be a neat experiment. We could try it out on the 15 between LA and Las Vegas,
were people are driving 100 anyway.

------
lewis500
To people who feel pricing roads is wrong because of equity, what about
pricing cars, gasoline, transit, parking, etc? Virtually all prices are hard
on the poor but there are rarely calls to do away with prices where they
already exist. It doesn't make much sense to say that it's equitable to put a
tax on gasoline, an input to driving, but not driving itself. Moreover, are we
supposed to make all street parking or public parking garages free at all
times? What I see is status quo bias. Driving on a crowded road at rush hour
doesn't deserve to be price free any more than a ride on a subway, an hour in
a parking garage, a court appointment, the water bill of a publicly owned
utility or any of the other commodities for which government charges some
price. It's especially funny to see people complain tolls are big government.
Tolls are supported by virtually every conservative think tank. They are
central to trump's infrastructure plans.

~~~
Neliquat
Lets take average Joe. He can choose to buy a car or not, but he depends on
the value roads provide with his life and employment. Does he not have the
responsibility to contribute? Police do not arrive by train, we will always
need roads, and discrete transport, and they will always benefit everyone,
driver or not. Toll only funding just leads to worse basic services, and
technical inflation.

------
myowncrapulence
Imagine how much more expensive living in LA will be. Instead of fixing their
god awful public transit (like NYC) they want to punish people for using the
only reliable mode of transportation?

~~~
bkeroack
By far the most efficient mechanism humanity has ever come up with for
distributing scarce resources (such as room on freeways) are free markets. The
article is 100% correct that pervasive tolls are the only effective and fair
way to reduce what has become monumentally oppressive traffic congestion in
LA.

~~~
lj3
Tolls are a monopoly granted by the government, which makes it the opposite of
a free market. The real result of a free market would be private roads or
highways that would compete against each other for tolls. Neither are a great
solution. Simply throwing more public transportation at the problem isn't
going to help either.

If LA wants to improve their traffic problem, they need to address the root
cause: bad urban planning and zoning laws. Where people work and where people
live are in completely different areas of the city, requiring you to commute.
They need to make local traffic easier (ie: not force you onto the freeway)
and they need to reduce the need to drive all over the city every single day.

~~~
VintageCool
People will use free highways until they're at capacity. Throwing more public
transportation at the problem does increase the number of people that can
travel down the freeway, but it won't reduce traffic because any car taken off
the highway by a driver switching to public transit will be replaced by
another driver taking up the commute.

------
endianswap
Aren't tolls like this an incredibly regressive tax that further hurts the
poor?

~~~
skybrian
The article covers that.

~~~
cnnsucks
Here is the article covering that:

"Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas
taxes and every other way we pay for roads."

It then goes on to sort-of suggest that despite this new pain the net benefit
will be better for "working-class" people......somehow. No thoughts were
offered on how to keep the toll revenue from just padding out civil servant
pensions and benefits while the traffic and roads muddle on.

~~~
skybrian
As I understand it, the idea is that if you're already collecting sales and
gasoline taxes to pay for roads, collecting the same amount of money through
tolls instead isn't any more regressive (it replaces one regressive tax with
another), plus it cuts down on traffic.

On the other hand, replacing income tax with tolls really would be regressive.

(But I don't know enough about taxes to say if that's really true.)

------
kazinator
"To fix traffic, we need tolls"

Tolls are just a form of paying people to go away (if you don't take the toll
road, you're paid by getting to keep a few dollars in your pocket).

It only reduces traffic for you if you are one of the ones that didn't go
away.

If the toll discouraged you, then the traffic problem isn't solved for you;
you're taking a bunch of non-toll roads riddled with detours and
intersections.

We can't call that a solution to the traffic problem. That's like saying, "we
can reduce congestion on this ethernet switch not by better firmware and
protocols, but just getting people to stop web surfing and watching videos,
and go do something else".

~~~
CodeWriter23
The cost of vehicle ownership is a sizable toll people already pay. Even a
beater is $300/mo. for insurance and maintenance, not counting the fuel. We've
dumped our second car (2010) to shed about $900/mo. in insurance, maintenance
and loan payments.

And then you've got this double-edged sword that Lyft is cheap enough to be
competitive with vehicle ownership + parking (for commutes up to about 8
miles), and the Rideshare cars have automatic free access to the HOV lanes. So
those people get to ride fast without removing a car from the road as the HOV
program intends.

~~~
dikdik
I drive a beater, it cost me $4k 6 years ago. I spend $40/month on insurance
in a big city - liability only, about $150 a year on maintenance (2-3 oil
changes, plus misc.), and generally have 1 big repair a year that runs me
$300-500. All-in-all that's $75-95 a month plus gas. It's really not a huge
toll, even for poor people.

------
sandover
Some observations:

\- LA is densifying fairly quickly.

\- More road capacity will not, in general, be added; road capacity is
actually being removed.

\- Average car velocity is slowing and will likely continue to slow.

\- Freeways at capacity, such as the 101 in the morning, move at approximately
bicycle speed.

\- Most bus routes in town move at slower than bicycle speed.

\- The slower the traffic is, the safer a bicycle trip feels, subjectively.

\- LA has 300+ days of great weather a year, making it pleasant to be outside.

\- Air quality in LA gets better every year.

\- Battery technology is the subject of intense R&D right now.

\- 2-wheeled vehicles are never stuck in traffic.

\- Consider the future of electric 2-wheeled vehicles in LA.

~~~
ariwilson
I've been riding a road bike for 8 years in LA (4 miles, Santa Monica ->
Venice) and it's been great. Yesterday I tried out an electric road bike for
the first time to test out a longer commute (14 miles, Redondo Beach ->
Venice) and it was great @ 45 minutes mostly on the beach. Not even tired!

Compare that to my test car commute on the 405 from Redondo Beach -> Venice
last Monday. Same 45 minutes but much more stress due to merging, bad drivers,
people trying to make left turns last minute, etc.

------
secult
Even though adding tolls is a good idea, it will just make people angry
without giving people an alternative. And the alternative has to be there at
the time of raising the price for the road use, not 10+ years later (so buses
are in, trains are out, maybe in the later phase). Buses are also a better
alternative because of the nature of U.S. suburban areas - the grid layer, low
point density housing.

------
zhoujianfu
I really, really hope this happens to all of LA's freeways (or really all
highways in the world)!

It'd be cool if they could even do different pricing for different lanes (e.g.
Left lane is $X/mi, 2nd lane is .6X/mi, 3rd lane is .3X, the rest are free).

I also wonder what the algorithm is they use for pricing. I remember reading
something about the 110/10 HOT lanes that they were targeting no slower than
45 mph or something? It might be smarter to target max revenue instead though.
Like every 30 minutes you raise or lower the price depending if you made more
or less money in the last 30 minutes after doing the same thing.

~~~
l1ambda
This is what is done in Minnesota. Pricing is dynamically adjusted every 3
minutes to keep traffic flowing at a minimum of 45mph (in practice more like
60+mph). When there is more traffic, the toll is priced higher. Electronic
sensors monitor the traffic density and tolls are changed every three minutes.
The best part is, it works!

~~~
chadgeidel
Wow, I hadn't heard of this! Very interesting. Trying to find more info about
this but not finding it on Minnesota DOT (the MnPASS site doesn't have results
data) or other sites. Can you share a link?

~~~
l1ambda
Here you go:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MnPASS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MnPASS)

[http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/howmnpassworks.html](http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/howmnpassworks.html)

[http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/pdf/mnpass-existing-and-
fu...](http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/pdf/mnpass-existing-and-future-lanes-
map.pdf)

------
georgeecollins
Please put a toll on the 405. I remember when I was a kid I would drive around
for fun, just to get the experience of driving, even in traffic. If it cost
even a $1 to get on a freeway I would have stayed off. How many people on a
congested freeway would avoid it if it cost anything?

I know this is a regressive tax, but it could be mitigated many ways. You
could use the tolls to subsidize buses or registration fees for the poor.
Better still: homeless shelters. Tax me please!

------
bbarn
Tolls do not reduce traffic. Chicago's (and when I say Chicago, I mean it in
the same vein that the author uses "LA", a massive metro area) installation of
toll systems in my life here have caused the infrastructure to perpetually be
under construction for the last 20 years I've been here.

At best, tolls remove large trucks from the roads - which is not the problem
in L.A. Mostly though, they just make the situation worse, and more expensive
for users that have little alternative.

The solution is the same as it's always been: stop building areas with car
travel as the only option. The little things like bus routes dropping off at a
stop that has no sidewalks and no legitimate way to cross a street without a
mile long detour for a pedestrian are what make buses not work. The same
features that funnel cars into shopping centers disregard the human walking
element and make it all but impossible to move in this suburban sprawl.

The physical distances people typically go in one of the most beautiful
climates in the country, cooped up in a car, makes me also wonder why there
isn't more of a push to create safe cycling routes? I ride 11 miles each way
to work here in Chicago, all year, and in the winter extremes it can be
occasionally miserable, but one thing I don't have much problem with is
safety. I have a path or lane almost my entire commute, and other than the 1
mile of the heart of the loop, it's basically stress free. If I had this
safety with LA's climate, I would literally become an evangelist for bike
commuting.

------
Ryxax
Any Houstonian can tell you this is a lie. We have HOV lanes (HOT lanes) which
often move at slower speeds than regular lanes because minimum speed limits
are not enforceable. You might remember a man getting arrested for driving
with his son on a riding lawnmower in a HOV lane before the Super Bowl.
Frequently, I've been stuck behind hybrid car drivers who don't want to exceed
a certain speed to improve their gas mileage or tourists pointing out
landmarks to passengers.

Regular toll roads don't work either. They'll sell you on the idea that they
can build more roads by charging drivers who use them. But the tolls never go
away. Houston's toll roads have paid for themselves many times over yet toll
prices only increase. Once the government has a source of revenue, they'll
never let it go.

Across the US, cities are gentrifying, increasing taxes to push the poor
people out allowing developers to rebuild neighborhoods, increase the property
value, and then resell for profit. This means poor people have to commute into
the city for work congesting the roads. Building toll roads just hurts them
more.

If you want to cure traffic congestion make inner cities affordable again.

------
samscully
I've never been to LA so I'm speaking from ignorance but some of the
objections raised in this thread seem like they have obvious solutions to me.

1) Tolls are regressive. I believe cities in the US have power over some
taxation so why not offset the extra cost by reducing another tax? e.g.
property taxes in low value areas could be cut, or sales taxes. Alternatively
spend all the toll revenue on heavily subsidising public transport so that it
is cheap and plentiful.

2) Other cities have had tolls and it did not effect the traffic. Why not just
raise the toll until it does effect the traffic? In London the charge for
breaking Ultra-Low Emission Zone requirements will be £130/$160 after 2020.
Raise the toll to $100 and it will have an effect.

Sounds though that the underlying issue is that LA's urban geography doesn't
lend itself to public transport so that whatever you do people will still have
to use cars if they want to travel any reasonable distance. Short of
undertaking a Shanghai-metro level of construction (from nothing to the
world's largest rapid transit system in 20 years.)

~~~
OliverJones
In MA ya get a state tax deduction for tolls on your transponder. They also
issue special transponders to people who live in certain places where they're
dependent on toll roads that mostly carry through traffic; those people get
discounts on certain tolls.

------
OliverJones
Are there any behavioral economists on here?

Isn't there a well-proven positive (meaning unstable) feedback loop between
the increased supply of roads and the demand for them? Is there any way to
introduce an effective negative (stabilizing) feedback loop into the system?
Congestion pricing is an attempt to do that.

How about introducing some kind of net metering into the system? Not only
could people who use the road at peak times be charged a toll, but people who
travel off-peak could get a credit. It should be possible for somebody who has
an off-peak commute to actually earn a bit of money.

Yes, I'm proposing the transponder-age version of the toll-booth person
handing money to the driver.

With respect to Mr. Musk, his tunnelling proposal is nuts: on many things he's
good, not this. We did some tunnels in Boston in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Caissons! Flooding! Cooling systems to freeze the mud so the buildings near
the project don't fall down! Ventilation systems! Rats flushed out by the
tunneling projects! Buried utility lines! In LA, several layers of underground
storm drains! Cost overruns!

------
soheil
What about the poor? LA for most parts, against popular belief, is a pretty
homogenous city when it comes to wealth, sure you have Beverly Hills and
Malibu but LA is so vast that majority of it doesn't feel secluded. Now if you
toll the non-wealthy (the rich will not notice the toll) you remove that
dynamic, that headline should really say let's remove more poor people from
the freeways.

~~~
fsargent
With any Pigouvian tax[1] you encounter the problem of progressivity. The
answer is to make sure that the tax revenues are directed towards making it
easier for low income people to have better transit options. Whether that
means improved transit systems or income based toll exceptions, it's
relatively easy to offset the detrimental impacts that tolling may put in
place.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax)

~~~
soheil
I just think A) we have to be honest that is only a tax on the poor B) then
have the rich pay in a different way, maybe it should be a limit on duration
of travel or miles by humans, ie. no matter what car you drive or who drives
you you're not allowed to travel more than x number of miles/day. (this is
beginning to sound really odd)

------
Spooky23
Sounds like a great way to solve other people's problems. I drive through D.C.
often enough. Their congestion scheme seems to do little for the schmucks who
can't afford to pay.

It makes a hell of a lot of money though. And it's defiantly a help for people
driving through.

------
kin
Having toll lanes don't help with anything. Look at what the 10 freeway don't
rush hour. Equally clogged. No form of public transit is going to help with
the traffic, it's only going to give people an alternative to avoid traffic.

The problem lies in just bad freeway design. If you look at the 405 North at
the 10 intersection. You're going from 6 lanes to 4 and then adding long
merging lanes as Santa Monica, Wilshire, and Sunset come up.

Now let's look at the 10 freeway Eastbound past downtown. The freeway
immediately splits in 4 with traffic merging into the center. An on ramp in
the center of a freeway!? Unless the entire intersection is completely rebuilt
traffic will never be fixed because the bottleneck is unavoidable.

------
suyash
"Nobody likes paying for anything they are used to getting for free, and
freeway tolls are no exception. But why are we willing to pay for electricity,
gasoline or air travel, but not for roads?"

\- The author has a false assumption here that roads are free, there are
various forms of taxes you are paying to Gov (City, State, Fed) in forms of
gasoline tax, DMV registration tax, federal income tax where your dollars are
supposed to maintain and develop infrastructure. It's just that Gov is doing a
horrendous job managing it. Paying in the form of tolls is a really bad idea
specially stupid if you think you are not paying for using roads (freeways
etc) at the moment.

~~~
Kluny
I guess the way it is now, property taxes go into a common municipal budget
and then a share gets put toward road maintenance, right? I wonder if it would
work to reduce property taxes by the amount that's currently spent on roads,
and replace it solely with tolls that go into a fund that is dedicated to road
maintenance and nothing else. So taxes for everyone would fall by 43% or
whatever it is, and only drivers would pay tolls. I suspect it wouldn't work
because current property taxes are already insufficient to pay for roads. I
still like the idea though.

~~~
Neliquat
So everyone but the wealthy (defined here as property owners in LA) still gets
screwed?

------
JBlue42
Why do we drive?

\- Unaffordable housing. If you are able to be a homeowner, you'll most likely
live further away from where you work and not have as many travel options.

Median individual income: $28k; Median house price: ~$600k.

I personally think the market is inflated but I have no idea how or if it will
crash.

\- Unaffordable rents. You find a great place to live, that you can afford,
that might be rent control, and it doesn't make monetary sense to move
elsewhere. Or you just can't afford to (like if you work in SM/Venice).

\- Geography. For example, look at The Valley. If you have to come into
central LA, your options are pretty limited. If you wanted to use good public
transit, there's an express bus and the stunted Red Line. Not much of the rest
of the Valley is served.

There are of course other reasons but I think these are main drivers. I think
dedicated bus lanes could alleviate these issues but, when I asked someone at
Metro about that, she skirted the issue by saying there are no plans to widen
any streets in LA. Which I'm ok with - I'd prefer to see some of them reduced
or reconfigured. It seems their focus is mainly on rail. Sadly, it's also
still focused on a hub-and-spoke system pointing downtown instead of something
more nodal around other job centers/geography.

Tolls aren't going to help. They're only going to be another nickel or dime to
help overwhelm the poor and middle class here. As someone else pointed out,
it's not going to be an issue for Mr. Audi and Mrs. Land Rover to pay them,
but when Jose and Juanita come over to cut their lawn and babysit their kid,
they will suffer.

And Jose and Juanita, and all the rest of us already suffer each time there's
a new measure to increase sales tax to pay for public transit so that we can
hopefully, maybe, one day have a decent, less dangerous, less stressful way to
get around. I'm not super-familiar with all the consequences of Prop 13 but
I'm assuming that because the city can't extract it's fair share of tax
revenue from the housing stock that that is why everything is based on sales
tax increases.

At least Measure S was voted down yesterday.

------
amclennon
I recently attended a transit planning meeting in Austin where they discussed
the idea of combining demand driven tolls that provide free access to express
buses.

I think this approach provides an excellent alternative to trains (which
Austinites keep voting down) because:

\- It addresses the issue where buses are slowed down by other traffic.

\- It has the potential to convince people to take buses when total travel
time is faster than driving and the cost of the toll is too great to use
routinely.

\- It has a low financial impact on tax payers, making it more likely to be
approved.

------
robotjosh
People have no problem spending $20,000 for a car, $3k/year for insurance,
thousands more for gas and maintenance. For some reason, people freak out when
anyone tries to add or increase toll roads. If you want to see a comment get
epic downvoted, propose a GPS based tolling system to replace the gas tax.
Every road is passively tolled so everyone pays for what they use. People
freak out, everybody feels entitled to free roads.

------
lorenzorhoades
Does this article think that Elon Musk is going to donate all the tunnels to
the city for free? What he is creating is a network of toll roads, under the
city. I'm sure he did his research and saw that adding one lane to the freeway
cost 1.6B, and noticed that it was probably a lot cheaper to dig under the
city, instead of paying incredibly high prices for land and supports.
Billionaires love to act like "This morning I came up with this idea in the
shower, and i thought it was cool so I'm going to move forward with it." Lets
take a minute and think about some of the moves he's recently made. He has an
electric car company, that is developing self driving car technology. He's
stated that you could only use the self driving car through "Teslas network"
for Uber like service. If tesla has the electric/self driving car market, a
vast network of uncongested roads they will essentially have such a
competitive advantage in major cities, that you'd be stupid to not use their
service. More and more people using "Tesla Uber", will automatically declog
the roads until theres a natural balance.

------
stretchwithme
People should pay for what they use. And the price for what they use should go
up when demand for it is high.

After all, the most expensive construction is done to satisfy demand when
demand is high.

And paying for what you use will spur people to use less of that valuable road
space. Alternatives will increase as more people seek to avoid paying the
actual costs for they had been using.

Yes, we do pay gas taxes. But that effectively translates into a subsidy for
traveling when demand is high. It's not a reality-based price.

Imagine if government provided all the hotel rooms and you always paid the
same price. Peak demand would be much higher than it is now. And there would
be political pressure to build many more hotel rooms. And this construction
would require higher taxes because the additional rooms would be the most
expensive to build while also only being used when demand is higher.

Of course, we don't usually think of road space as space we are occupying,
just like we occupy a hotel room. But it is.

How would we implement this? Regular commuters could have a fixed price they
pay in advance. But they could get paid to delay their trip when traffic is
particular bad. And those not planning ahead would pay a spot price, which
would go up enough to deter non-planners from traveling and/or convince
commuters to delay.

And if there is an uproar about making people pay to get to jobs when they
cannot control when they start work, make the employer pay for these workers.
If it costs workers more to do a job, the employer will have to pay them more
to do it anyway, so why not get the support of those workers who don't
understand this reality?

------
cletus
Tolls simply aren't the answer. At best they end up being a regressive tax.
$10/day means nothing to someone living in Malibu. It can be a huge deal to
someone who comes into Culver City to clean a house.

But the real problem with tolls is that there really is no alternative to
driving and it's going to be irresponsible and ineffective to pretend like
there is.

Other posters have mentioned the concentration of businesses downtown as a
problem but there is some spread. And commercial districts tend to cluster for
a reason. Supporting infrastructure, proximity to other businesses and so on.

What LA needs--and any other sprawling city for that matter--is for high
density, affordable living close to employment centers such that car ownership
may eventually become optional.

This requires changes in zoning (which current landowners will fight tooth and
nail) and probably an adjustment to the property tax system to pay for new
public transit infrastructure such that the property tax is a function of the
land area you occupy inversely proportional to your distance from downtown
(and maybe several other important points).

Basically you need to tax people who own large lots close to the city center.
This effectively means the rich and again they'll fight it tooth and nail.

Everybody wants to live on a half acre lot (or bigger). They want it to be
affordable and close to work. Well that doesn't work in a city of X million
people.

Additionally outer areas may need to be treated like commuter towns are in
NYC, meaning rail transport from there to, say, downtown where there's
essentially just one stop in the "town". Too many stops and it just stops
working at anything over, say, 20 miles or so.

------
sebringj
Money seems to incentivize people one way or another as I'm exactly like this
and I'm sure others are probably too. I hate the toll roads and avoid them
even though I can afford them. Lots of times it ends up costing me because I
cross a toll road without paying accidentally then get something in the mail,
forget to pay it, then end up with some fee. I really really hate toll roads
however I can't control if they exist or not. If they are all over, I would
really think twice about the type of transportation I take, especially if I
didn't want to shell out the dough or had a smaller budget to work with.

Alternatively, the money obtained via the toll roads (basically a tax) should
be then funneled to "cheapifying" mass transportation or subsidizing it to be
more affordable and a better experience as well so it has greater appeal over
just saving money. You then get ying and yang motivation.

This just reminded me of how taxes work, for example, you can shape the way
companies pollute by having a carbon tax and promote green by having it
subsidized, well, I'm just copying that idea.

------
squozzer
The author's thesis depends pretty heavily on drivers having alternatives. I
place little faith in the Peak Travel Study --
[http://www.travelbehavior.us/Nancy-
pdfs/Peak%20Travel%20in%2...](http://www.travelbehavior.us/Nancy-
pdfs/Peak%20Travel%20in%20America%20final.pdf) \-- who in their right mind
would drive in rush hour traffic except to work or school -- except for the
naive out-of-towner who realized too late they would arrive in The Big City
during Rush Hour en route to their ultimate destination?

Moreover, the HOT lane idea, which my city (ATL) has implemented in a couple
of places, only reduces traffic in the HOT lane. The other lanes become MORE
crowded by the people who prefer to suffer for free.

Once, I think the toll hit $35. If I were heading home, maybe I would pay it;
heading to work, not so much.

------
ravenstine
Why does L.A.'s traffic need fixing? We have some of the slowest freeways in
the country, yet everybody manages to get to work. They aren't _that_ bad,
even the 10.

Elon Musk says a lot of things. That's no reason to think there's a problem.

Our public transportation isn't that bad either. I agree, our bus system SUCKS
in contrast to other states and countries. But the Metro system is actually
pretty good. They arrive frequently and have been expanding to new areas. The
fact that I can hop on the Gold Line from East Pasadena and take the train all
the way to the Natural History Museum, or DTLA, or Santa Monica, or Long Beach
is pretty nice.

The problem, if you can even call it one, is in the culture. In LA, we choose
to live far away from public transit vessels. It's just what we do; we've
chosen to build lots of freeways and we're probably going to stick to that
long into the driverless-car revolution. It's also not very hard to find
somewhere to live along the Metro line and find a workplace nearby a stop.
I've done it a few times. Sure, I'm a programmer but, well, choice is a perk
you get from having marketable skills.

As others have said, one thing that keeps many folks away from public transit
is the lack of enforcement; without a doubt, you'll have to sit near one or
two sleeping homeless individuals any time you take the Red or Purple Lines.
They always smell terrible, and average riders often get tired of this. The
Gold Line has more enforcement, but I don't recall ever seeing people in
orange vests once on any of the other lines. Metro doesn't seem to care.

People in L.A., on average, have it good, and we're spoiled. We should all try
living in SF, or NY, or Boston, and then think about complaining about traffic
again.

------
antimatter
Does anyone know if there are any tax benefits to companies who allow
telecommuting in LA? I used to deal with 2 hours of LA traffic per day for my
commute and it was absolutely soul crushing. My current company allows
telecommuting and even though I'm only 18 miles away, it's a blessing to not
to have to deal with LA traffic on a daily basis anymore.

------
kelsus
I wanted to read these comments to see whether HN readership was with or
against this argument, and instead everyone just decides they have better
ideas or different arguments.

For what it's worth, I think this would be a great first start. It's an easy
MVP (thinking agile here) to get data and then decide what the next
potentially more costly step might be.

~~~
sebringj
well maybe some of them but you didn't read all of them ;)

------
abbottry
Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up
barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got
in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane.
The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'

------
XorNot
Tolls do little suppress traffic. They do a lot to divert it as people seek to
avoid the toll, as Sydney discovered stupidly when it tried to use road
closures to force traffic through privately built inefficient roads (public-
private partnerships might as well have been rewritten as "legal corruption").

------
CalChris
Ultimately we pay for the roads regardless. The point of a toll is simply to
make that payment a visible use tax. You can pay at the pump, pay on 4/15, pay
with your Fastrak, it's all the same and then all taxes are fungible.

I would like to but I do not think this will improve LA traffic. It will
divert it somewhat. Improving infrastructure won't help either; as the opinion
piece points out, that's been tried.

Ultimately, LA has to either get people out of their cars or they have to get
more people into their cars.

One thing I'd love is an Uber quality app for transit. It would unify transit
systems. Maybe it could tell about overcrowding (6:30 first train out of
Fullerton to Union Station was packed to the gills). Maybe it could be unified
with Uber/Lyft/Yellow.

Metrolink is not that app. SmartRide is not that app. Amtrak is not that app.

------
codylem
Great opinion, continue to price individuals out of existence.

~~~
blowski
Isn't that kinda the point - price them out of existing _on the road_. Make it
more cost-effective to work closer to home, or outside of rush hour.

I have no idea how effective it will be, or whether the advantages will
outweigh the disadvantages.

~~~
mikeyouse
And we all know the people who can't afford to pay tolls can definitely afford
the cost of moving which includes losing their likely rent-controlled
apartments.

------
amai
Why not use more helicopters for commuting, e.g. like Putin in Moscow?

[http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-to-commute-to-
work-i...](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-to-commute-to-work-in-
helicopter-to-help-ease-moscow-gridlock-dg3vcd63f80)

------
tankerdude
Simplest way: $5/gallon gas.

When the costs for the road increase in that manner, there was a drastic drop
in commuters and a big jump in mass transit.

It has happened in the past when gas was steep. Perhaps it is time again to
help reduce congestion.

Right now, its not much more expensive to drive than to use light rail.

~~~
edko
So what happens, for example, with neighboring counties, where there isn't any
mass transit? Do they also pay $5/gallon, to help solve LA's problems? Or do
they keep current gas prices, and get their roads clogged with Angelenos
looking for cheaper fuel?

~~~
tankerdude
Gas taxes are state level based at this time. But let's say they become county
based. Ensure that taxes are across multiple counties as LA really is a
metropolis that spans many counties.

To see the effect you are talking about, you would see it and it has happened,
in Primm, Nevada.

Some people make the effort to go get gas past the state line but really, it
was never worth their effort.

------
sqldba
> But why are we willing to pay for electricity, gasoline or air travel, but
> not for roads?

Because we already pay for roads through taxes, and car registration fees, and
drivers license fees! Meanwhile the money that gets put into tolls doesn't get
returned to infrastructure we agree with. It goes into company pockets who
then monopolise the roads for decades and providing awful service.

It also penalises the poor; everyone in a BMW/Audi can pay the tolls and
travel in comfort but the rest of you need to go to cattle class in the bus.
Ummm, subsidised by everyone else of course.

You don't get to make money off of the commons just because you're unhappy
that - you know - commoners are using it "too much".

------
pitaj
One thing I've noticed about some freeway systems is that they add more lanes,
but don't plan correctly. For instance, in my home city, there's a connector
that runs from downtown to the main interstate. When the two meet, 8 lanes
have to merge into four. This creates a crunch situation, one that it seems LA
suffers from as well.

Instead, the lanes should be decreased ahead of time, before the merging
occurs. Lanes can be reduced by making the rightmost lane exit-only at
upstream exits, or through an upstream merge of the leftmost lane into the
lane to its right.

By reducing these two roads to two lanes before the merge, they can completely
avoid this crunch.

------
jedberg
As an interesting aside, the CHP hates HOT lanes because they are very
difficult to enforce. My friend is CHP and he says it's hard to read the
lights as the cars pass and then make sure the car has a carpool in it if they
skipped the toll.

~~~
gph
I always thought HOV lanes were a bit of a joke during rush hour or traffic
jams. It's nearly impossible to effectively enforce the rule and there's
simply too many people willing to ignore the rule.

~~~
jedberg
They work a little better in LA than elsewhere, but yeah. In LA they have
solid lines, so if you see a cop and jump out, they can nail you for jumping
the line.

Anywhere else, they can only nail you for the carpool violation if they catch
you, but you aren't as suspicious as someone jumping a double yellow.

------
amyjess
I'm from Dallas, and I'm considering a move to the LA/OC area in the second
half of this year, so I've been doing copious research about what it's like to
live in LA. Doing my research, I've noticed some things about the way the LA
area is laid out that surprises me, and not in a good way. Dallas has just as
much sprawl as LA, but without the ridiculous traffic problems. Perhaps LA can
take some inspiration from Dallas here:

\- In Dallas, all arterials are six-lane divided highways, and even a large
chunk of our collectors are four-lane divided highways. Bidirectional turn
lanes are virtually nonexistent. In the LA area, very few surface streets are
divided, with only Orange County making heavy use of divided highways, and
bidirectional turn lanes are used all over the place. Bidirectional turn lanes
slow down traffic, and divided highways help prevent accidents. LA should kill
the turn lanes and start installing medians.

\- North Texas has spent most of the 21st century retiring its old cloverleaf
interchanges and replacing them with five-level stack interchanges, which are
more efficient and allow traffic to flow through faster. Is LA doing that?

\- Virtually all freeways in Texas have frontage roads equipped with Texas
U-turns [0]. You don't see that in California.

\- In the Dallas area, most tech companies are located in the suburbs, and
virtually all companies moving their HQ to Texas from out of state are
building their campuses in the suburbs too. LA, on the other hand, insists on
stuffing most of their tech industry in the Westside. Let's get these
companies out of the city and into the SFV, OC, SGV, and Inland Empire.

\- Sadly, LA is screwed because of its natural boundaries. The mountains may
be pretty, but they get in the way of commuting. I don't think there's
anything that can be done about that. Palmdale and the area north of it is the
future of development of Los Angeles County... just make sure it's self
sufficient so nobody has to commute across the mountains.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_U-
turn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_U-turn)

------
touchofevil
The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted
about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way. That
might not sound unreasonable, but nearly the entire commute was freeway
driving, which should have been much faster.

I don't know if tolls are the answer, but it's probably worth a try. Also
massively expanding the metro system would be fine with me. LA needs to try
whatever it can to solve the traffic problem. Traffic makes living in LA a
huge drag and I found that friends often wouldn't bother to get together even
on weekends because the traffic and parking are just so unpredictable.

~~~
ryandrake
> The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted
> about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way.

Amateur! :-) My Bay Area commute is ~50 miles and takes around 2-2.5 hours
each way, all freeway. If tolls ended up being a significant cost of living
expense, it would actually have the effect of making me move even farther away
to an area I can afford taking the extra cost of tolls into consideration.

I'd be all for expanding public transport though. Currently no form of PT can
beat 2-2.5 hours for me.

~~~
touchofevil
You poor soul...a 2+ hour commute each way is just mind-blowing. I worked with
some people who did those kind of commutes and I don't know how they did it
(especially because we were doing minimum 10 hour days). I would spend or
sacrifice pretty much any amount of money not to do a 2+ hour commute.

------
FullMtlAlcoholc
This is a terrible solution. This will disproportionately affect the working
poor. Think of all the people who work in Malibu. Hardly anyone who works a
service job there live in the 'Bu.

This is effectively a tax on lower income people who had to move away from the
city because they couldn't afford it. Buses aren't a good solution, as they
double the amount of transit time vs a car. Advocating buses would be another
tax on time.

There are no easy solutions LA traffic which is why it remains such a problem.
An expansion of the subway system would be a good start, but eminent domain
needs to trump NIMBY-ism to keep the costs down.

------
taternuts
I moved to LA about a year ago from DC, where the traffic is notoriously bad
as well, and I have to say that LA traffic is leaps and bounds worse. I've
never seen gridlock like this where you literally DO NOT MOVE. In DC, you'll
move maybe a couple inches here and there, maybe average 2-5 MPH in a
gridlock. Here, you sit completely still. When you're up to turn left, there's
not even room to turn in because everyone jammed the cross section because
they've been behind that same like for 30 minutes. I basically just use
delivery services for any thing between 4-7pm

~~~
Neliquat
>delivery services

So you are paying make it worse for everyone but you. Brilliant.

~~~
taternuts
It's either me or them on the road so I don't see how it's making anything any
worse.

------
s0uthPaw88
This is a classic externalities problem[0]:

My use of roadway space imposes a cost on other drivers because they now have
less roadway to use leading to lower speeds. Currently, I do not have to pay
for this cost leading me to use more roadway space than may be optimal. Taxing
roadway use captures this cost and forces me to take it into consideration
when choosing whether to drive.

[0][http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/external.ht...](http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/external.htm)

------
luckydata
The author says "we've tried density" to fix traffic. It's just not true. Also
trying public transportation means it should be useful enough to be used: when
I was in LA that wasn't the case.

------
pif
Traffic is not a problem per se: commuting time is! Lower traffic is a
solution only as long as _the others_ have given up their cars. But what's an
empty road good for if I can't use it due to tolls?

On the other side, try and offer me a solution which takes me to work _faster_
than current crowded street, and you won't need any toll to push my car off of
the road.

Clarification: "faster" meaning a lower commute time _from door to door_.
Station-to-station doesn't matter, not at all!

------
mattbgates
LA has a light problem. I don't live in LA, but I have driven there: Why
wouldn't they put green arrows to let people waiting to make a left go first?
After those people go, then traffic can flow as normal. I remember the light
kept turning green, with no green arrow, and I had to keep waiting and waiting
until there were almost no cars. Had that left arrow been there, this could
have cleared up traffic along with the 20 cars waiting behind me to make a
left as well.

------
mulmen
Isn't the biggest problem with tolls the regressive impact it has on
residents? What do you do for people who can't get to work because they can't
afford tolls?

------
petercooper
I'm not sure I see this working, unless you toll every road or have a hidden
toll by enforcing a local gasoline tax. Surface roads are a very viable way to
make relatively long journeys in LA when the freeways are jammed.

When I fly into LAX and head to Studio City, I take La Cienega, Fairfax,
Fountain, and Cahuenga.. it's so much faster than than the freeway unless it's
night or weekend. ("Take Fountain" is even a cliche in Hollywood.)

------
ghuroo1
why do people keep comparing LA to any other city in the world?

that's the same logic of: my life is a mess, but my neighbour's is worse, so
I'm pretty alright.

I do think traffic is one of the main issues in our society because we still
have the same mentality about cars as we had 50y ago (or more). They should
never be a priority, we're a collective not a bunch of singulars, so investing
in good public transportation and keeping private cars out of the main areas
of interest should be the norm. This way of living messes up with our health
and life quality.

Here in Lisbon, Portugal, people complaint everyday about traffic and how much
time they spend on it..even public transportation is a mess because it's
schedules and quantity aren't that good. Fortunately, 2 years ago, I switched
to riding my bicycle for 50min (each way) everyday. The commute is by the
river and there's no description for how better my life got. But I recognise
we can't all do that, so at least we should invest in good public transports
and keep cars out of the cities so we can just walk a little bit once we got
out of the train, metro, bus, whatever or even bring our bicycles to make this
easier.

We will always be as lazy as possible if we allow ourselves to drive the car
everywhere.

Let's just stop thinking that the car are the solution for need, it should
never be. Cars and highways mess up our health, nature, landscapes, life
quality, noise, etc. etc.

(I was in Washington D.C. for 2 months and hell I was about to get crazy just
from the noise of cars and for the incapacity of being able to roam freely by
foot.. there were cars EVERYWHERE, huge roads everywhere. I honestly think
that cities like that aren't made for people who live or work there.)

------
intrasight
Driving technology is 100 years old. The article doesn't discuss at all what
technology solutions need to be deployed in order to make dynamic tolling
possible. Sure, it just a matter of having all cars in the LA region be fitted
with RFID. But I'll claim that with people behind the wheel that it just won't
work. Let's just focus on the correct long-term solution of getting rid of the
steering wheel.

------
bpowers
Educating drivers could have a large impact as some of the issues are caused
by the drivers themselves and has nothing to do with the volume of vehicles
moving at a certain point in time. If somehow we are unable to educate people
which would be the cheapest form of a fix, autonomous vehicles would basically
do the same thing. (merging, vehicle spacing, gawking, etc...) Sorry no data
to back these claims up.

------
jeffbax
Reason Foundation (obviously coming from a market/privatization point of view)
did a series of videos about these types of problems.

TL;DR:

Tolls make sense in the situation of "only highways" regardless. You can make
high-speed toll lanes/highways on/along side the existing highways (and put
buses there too).

Those who can afford the tolls pay for the speed feeding more money into the
system. Those who cannot pay more than they already do through gas tax and
such, deal slower traffic, but that traffic should be lessened due to people
paying for higher speed and hopefully on more buses. There's additionally
higher funding available to spend on increasingly

Current highways are effectively the tragedy of the commons, which is where
semi-private/public-private partnership toll roads could alleviate the
problem. Certain transit systems have pros and cons depending on area, and for
places like LA it is likely that at least for now highways should be the focus
of additional spending.

I'll leave the arguments to the videos, some are quite long (45+ min talks by
policy experts). Mostly passing along in case others are interested,
particularly those who might have strong opinions to the contrary (e.g.: the
'rail or bust' folks) I've enjoyed the rail system in Europe, but the
conditions here are very different so its important to not let one's perfect
ideal be the enemy of making something failing significantly better in a
bang/buck sense.

Highways vs. Rail (2011):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIG0M4WT0s0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIG0M4WT0s0)

Toll vs. Gas (2011):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrh8W2IFQ04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrh8W2IFQ04)

Funding/allocation problems (2012):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUULDlMPFYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUULDlMPFYU)

Market success in China (2012):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUPRlrVTd2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUPRlrVTd2g)

LA specifically w/ tunnels, over/under pass, and that LA has been building
"rail" for 25 years so far (2015):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry852YXH53U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry852YXH53U)

------
Theodores
The danger of this pricing scheme is that people that can't travel on their
ideal commute times hit the road earlier in the morning. They then realise
that if they set off another half hour earlier they would breeze in on
practically empty roads. So then a lot of people start doing this, leaving the
house at 6 a.m. for some epic 50+ mile commute. So then the next step is to
leave a 5.30 a.m. to beat the traffic, the traffic that people of their ilk
generated. What next, start your working day at 3 a.m.?!?

So this means everyone has neighbours banging car doors, revving engines and
doing disruptive stuff at some very early hour. The whole world gets noisier.
And all so that some people with cars can sit at their office desks doing
stuff they could have done at home.

If a bunch of homeless drug addicts made a similar amount of noise at such
anti-social hours then they would be dealt with by the police, the police
would make it clear to them how anti-social they have been. Office worker,
with some spreadsheets and emails to do, they are given a free pass on the
noise and other pollution at an un-godly hour.

Another thing that any big city should do is get people to swap jobs for
something more local. I personally work local to my home and ride my bike in,
but there are plenty of colleagues who come in from the far side of town, they
have to go through the city centre or round some ring road, taking more than 3
hours out of their day, every day.

My bike ride home is so enjoyable I have no idea how long it takes, never had
the need to look at the time whilst on the commute, no need to look at a phone
either or read one of those 'free' newspapers. I wish more people could have a
commute like mine, which is a gentle saunter along the river bank with the
joggers, dog walkers and other people 'not imprisoned by the commute' and
actively enjoying the great outdoors.

So how could a city get more people like me able to live and work locally,
never adding to the burden on the roads or trains? Job swaps. There is
probably someone doing a similar job to oneself a short distance from home.
This person probably lives on the far side of town where you work. So what if
you could swap jobs with that person, so both of you get 2-3 hours of life
back, every day?

A city with all the records of who pays what taxes for what could do the
match-making, saving everyone who takes up the scheme a lot of time, giving
their lives back.

~~~
zip1234
They need to change zoning to allow office space, restaurants, etc in some
areas where there is just houses.

------
df3
Better public transportation is part of the answer, but as another commenter
pointed out, even in cities with decent subway systems commute times can be up
to an hour.

The ideal solution would be encourage commercial and residential areas to
intermingle. In particular, less restrictive zoning in residential areas could
let companies locate themselves closer to workers.

------
marze
Free market approaches seem to work well generally. Why not for roads? Seems
self evident.

Anything you make cheaper will be used more, more expensive, less. Econ 101.

What would be an excellent solution is to make fast dedicated bus lanes, and
make every bus free. Improves employment, bus ridership, and is probably
cheaper than adding an extra lane to a single freeway.

------
tpae
When I was in college, we had this legacy system for class signups. During
class registration week, in order to prevent large amount of traffic, they
issued "registration passes" which were time blocked in different groups.

Instead of introducing tolls, why not have daily commuters be added to a pool,
and be issued a time slot for their commute?

------
tbrowbdidnso
For the love of God it's not the traffic its lack of public transport. Once
you hit a certain density CARS_DONT_WORK . Having lived in NYC, visiting LA
was a joke.

The first thing I did after my first cab ride from the airport was look up
public transport since I noticed traffic was worse than NYC. There wasn't any

------
pfarnsworth
Mass transit needs to take a page from Uber. The reason for declining
ridership is because there's not enough trains or buses, etc. Get some
funding, increase the number of trains by 5x, and people will start to go and
use them because they're convenient. We need VCs for public service projects.

------
jlebrech
Tolls to subsidise busses is the solution to any gridlock issue.

The problem is buses are now run by bus companies and not a public service so
the public are still charged too much to get on a bus and if they have a car
it might still be more tempting to take the car to work.

------
exclusiv
Tolls don't bother me personally. If it clears congestion and earmarks funds
so that the people that use them pay for them; that's a good thing. However,
isn't it a regressive tax? The price for the tolls will affect people with
little money the most.

------
dumbfounder
UberPool is going to lead us to the future. It kind of sucks right now, but
when self driving cars are prevalent, it will make ridesharing ubiquitous and
cheap and way better than driving your own car. The more people use it the
closer to optimal the sharing will get.

------
huangc10
Tolls or Holes?

Link to Elon Musk's tunnel plan:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-
musk...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk-is-
really-boring)

~~~
astrodust
Elon Musk might be a smart guy but this is a stupid idea.

> [Tunnels are] the only way we can rid ourselves of the scourge of traffic.

Yeah, well, one day you'll meet _induced demand_ and you'll understand that's
a big "nope".

------
mrfusion
Why not really big credits for companies that allow telecommuting? That would
be my suggestion.

------
tunesmith
What's the state of the art urban planning in terms of actually giving people
less reason to drive/travel? It seems you need more zoning pods in suburbs
where mini city centers (with jobs) can pop up, giving people less reason for
long commutes.

~~~
MK999
As I understand it the innovation is at the zoning level. In order to affect
change you need to change all of these zoning laws, and the keyword is Form
Based Code, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form-
based_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form-based_code)

Encouraging info from the wiki: The Cincinnati Form-Based Code adopted in 2013
is designed to be applied citywide in an incremental way, neighborhood by
neighborhood. The code establishes transect zones and specifies standards for
transects, building types, frontage types, walkable neighborhoods, and
thoroughfares that can be adapted to each neighborhood.[4][5]

------
cmurf
OK and what do you do with the toll money? Create a world class public transit
system? Or do you just dump the money into a general fund and piss it away, as
if classism is an ethical way to handle access to public infrastructure?

------
blackflame7000
California should really consider using some of those bullet-train to nowhere
funds to add at least one light rail system in west LA. That would be far more
useful than a train that stops in Burbank.

------
svckr
Try less, and smaller roads:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox)

------
cardiffspaceman
Toll roads interfere with the right to assemble, because they create
transactions. When there are transactions, there are records, and when there
are records there are subpoenas.

------
senior_james
I grew up in Detroit.

I travel to LA frequently for work and the traffic is not really that bad.
It's congested, but at least it moves.

Adding more barriers for the poor will not help the situation.

------
whb07
I think demand based pricing is the most efficient tool to deal with traffic.
That being said, assuming in 3-5 years cars will be self driven, traffic
_should_ be a thing of the distant past. Its already started where people no
longer own cars and use Uber and the like...now imagine if over 50% of drivers
did that? Picture a giant luxury bus with wi-fi and spacious seats driving all
around the city using an Uber pool like service. Prices in theory would be
vastly cheaper for the rider as a) there is no driver to pay and b) insurance
cost for bus would be cheaper. seems like a win win

------
monksy
A note to those using an ad-blocker: The site won't show you the article. They
want you to pay the toll to read the article as well.

------
dzonga
L.A needs a lot of people on motorcycles. Not uber but simple Motorbikes and
maybe scooters. LA has the perfect weather for that

------
CodeWriter23
Want to solve LA's traffic problems? Bring back the Red Cars. A Mayoral
candidate in Pasadena is running on this platform.

------
ibejoeb
I've always said that I'd run for mayor of LA on the platform of installing
left-turn signals.

------
kelsus
In phase 2 they can give people refundable tax credits to pay the tolls on a
sliding scale based on age.

------
gregors
I think it's a great idea - and I think all motorcycles should be exempt from
such tolls.

------
mhkool
We can debate a lot but is there any city in the world where tolls fixed
traffic jams?

------
jayarcanum
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Fix it... hahahahahaha. Excuse to take money,
oh yeah.

~~~
sebringj
The problem is in LA, traffic blows. Not only blows, its becoming a liability
costing productivity. If money is taken for this, money can be used for
something else promoting less traffic. It isn't about taking money at this
stage, I think that it way oversimplified. IMO LA is fubar in terms of traffic
which is just one of the reasons I work remotely even though I'm 20 minutes
away without traffic, meaning its fricken 2 am in the morning on a tuesday
type traffic.

------
teddyuk
We added tolls to London but traffic hasn't got any better

~~~
vkou
Has the population of the greater London area increased? That could be a
conflating factor.

------
juliantejera
Great, just charge the people more taxes. Terrible idea.

------
m3kw9
You need tolls but with public transit upgrades

------
transfire
Just be patient. With the advent of automated cars, Uber/Lyft services,
delivery drones, and eventually flying taxis, the congestion should finally
start to ebb.

------
stillbourne
Why can't we just raise taxes?

------
kingmanaz
>To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

...or less of Central America's surplus population on the United State's
roadways.

------
legohead
I'm convinced that the agencies involved with traffic problems don't
understand shit about traffic, and this article is one example why.

They mention HOT lanes. I need to see exactly where, and what time of day they
used to get their stats, because I can tell you, HOT lanes don't do shit if
you allow carpoolers on for free. The idea of the carpool lane is a nice
thought, but in reality it's a joke.

Any time there is actual "red" traffic (as you would see in Google maps), the
carpool lane(s) are just as backed up as the rest of the traffic. The only
time I've seen moving traffic alongside red traffic, is from a pure toll lane
alongside a regular highway, like The 91 FasTrak lane. And even STILL, those
lanes can be backed up during peak times.

Ask yourself, who uses carpool lanes? Carpoolers? Hardly. It's mostly
families, who will be on the road anyway. Then you have work vehicles, who
naturally have multiple people, and the ever annoying buses. My point is, the
vast majority of those who use carpool lanes were going to be on the highway
anyway. There aren't people saying to each other "hey, lets carpool so we can
use the carpool lane and get places faster". Even if for some reason we
decided to start doing this as a society, we would then realize it's bullshit
because the carpool lane just doesn't work.

Here's an idea: 1) set up cameras or road strips at several places along
problem highways 2) create a computer model using the traffic data 3) try out
road configurations using this data until you find something that works really
well. Or at least, use the traffic data to identify what's actually causing
traffic problems.

My guess is most of the time it's the shockwave effect from bad or desperate
drivers. It happens to all of us, even the experienced drivers, where we
suddenly need to get off the highway and we have to cut off people, which
inevitably results in a shockwave effect. Adding lanes isn't going to help
this, in fact it will probably hurt this particular problem. And now think
about this problem combined with carpools, where at least here in SoCal, don't
let you get off when you want. So now you are in the carpool lane, unable to
get off, and finally when your offramp is 1 mile away you are able to get off,
what are you going to do? You have 3+ lanes of traffic to get over. Good luck
and please drive nicely!

When I see these giant highway structures built for a single carpool lane [1],
it really depresses me. How did we allow it to happen?

[1] (two lanes, one for each direction of traffic)
[https://www.google.com/maps/@33.6871144,-117.8750226,97a,20y...](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.6871144,-117.8750226,97a,20y,46.07h,45.08t/data=!3m1!1e3)

------
rebootthesystem
> And yet we miss that this very same, simple system of pricing could solve
> our congestion problem.

This article is really bad. The above line is one of the worst.

People don't clog-up the freeways because they are having a good time. Nobody
wants to be on them. I drive the 405 with some frequency. It's hell. I don't
want to be on it. But I have to. Just like everyone else on it.

We have to be on the damn roads because of where work takes us. I have clients
and contracts that require me to traverse this pathway. Others are employed by
companies in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor. They don't have a
choice. They have to be on that hellish road. People can't just quit and move
to greener pastures, at least not at scale.

Elon Musk and his quest for tunneling are now used as examples of the
frustration. Well, SpaceX didn't need to be in Hawthorne. The company has,
what, 7,000 employees? That general area (anything around the 405) is hell for
traffic. SpaceX could have been out towards Ontario, in Mojave or farther
north or south somewhere. There are no inherently magical reasons for building
a company with 7,000 employees in Hawthorne other than perhaps the
availability of large buildings and amicable zoning and regulatory frameworks.

Not picking on SpaceX, simply using it as an example. The problem with Los
Angeles is this mass of businesses concentrated in that corridor. It attracts
tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people driving in from within a
50 mile radius in every direction. This is the problem.

Tolls are not going to fix this. They would only punish folks who would have
no choice but to pay-up and continue to go to work.

And carpool? Carpool is a joke. Carpool lanes only serve to waste 20 to 25% of
the road's capacity. The vast majority of users are those who are not
carpooling at all. For example, when we load-up the family in the car to go
somewhere. In other words, no appreciable number of cars are removed from the
road. Why don't people carpool? Because people are sprawled all over the place
and it is utterly inconvenient. If you can find just one person who lives near
you who can carpool you still lose freedom. What if you need to leave work
early or go late because your kids are sick? I can't even think of one person
I know who carpools.

My opinion is that LA would benefit greatly from providing tax incentives and
the appropriate zoning and infrastructure support to decentralize the centers
of employment. Give companies 10 years without taxes (NY state style) to
either move or start-up on the outskirts of Los Angeles proper in every
direction. Change traffic patterns this way and traffic will improve.

The rest will come with time. Autonomous vehicles will change the nature of
traffic in potentially significant ways.

Until then it's going to suck more with each passing year until it starts to
get better.

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phtevus
No we don't.

------
ouid
why can the latimes detect my adblocker?

------
ClearAsMud
et al London.

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digler999
Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using a
vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than N
miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds if
you use your car very little during a month.

Another option could be a centralized "smart-driving" app, that would act as a
hybrid between self-driving and manual driven cars. Each driver could be given
"hints"/instructions, and measured on their compliance rate. The reward would
be a measurable improvement in travel time. For instance, if 80% of the cars
on a block were using this app, preference could be given to hold a signal
light green longer for them. Drivers would see a benefit, and that would be
their only impetus to comply with its directions (slow down, turn left here,
park and wait 5m, etc). Someone who never listened to the thing would be
kicked off. Soon with enough users , you could organize mini "convoys" of cars
travelling through the city (say, all cars slow from 65 to 60mph for 2 miles,
so that the offramp signal could be ready and green at the exact moment of
their arrival and kept green for the whole convoy) and attempt to optimize
travel for them or give them other perks such as free parking. It wouldn't
solve all problems, but it would encourage cooperative behavior on the roads
which may go a long way to easing congestion.

~~~
ryandrake
> Some of the cost could be mitigated with "toll-free" options, such as using
> a vehicle tracker like EZ-pass and not charging you if you travel less than
> N miles (to encourage people to live near work), or giving partial refunds
> if you use your car very little during a month.

Don't know if LA is anything like SF, but here, the poorer you are, the longer
your commute is, generally. So this scheme would simply penalize people who
already can't afford to live close to work.

~~~
digler999
Good point, I forgot about that. I had it backwards thinking wealthy people
had more latitude to choose better jobs further away from home, whereas the
(non-driving) poor are more stationed in their neighborhoods. I agree 100%
though.

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tschellenbach
I doubt this has any effect, rich people don't care, poor people can't afford
to move somewhere else. Public transport is the only effective approach to
reducing the congestion.

~~~
CalRobert
Well, letting people build homes near jobs so the distances traveled are
shorter (or walked, or cycled) also helps.

~~~
jdhawk
So, change jobs and buy/sell your house?

Switching costs are high, even as rentors. (Moving Costs, Deposits)

~~~
CalRobert
Yeah. It'll take a while. Existing costs are high too (gas, insurance, getting
killed in crashes or by pollution, environment)

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masterleep
This is an excellent idea which is unfortunately too simple, fair, and
straightforward to have a chance in California.

