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ChineseIs L.A. Hurting For Parking, Or Is Parking Hurting L.A.?
It seems there’s never enough parking.
A reader over at Curbed LA was stressing over the loss of his street parking spot and one particularly bitter commenter chimed in with this cheery response:
Nevermind that there is no public transit, and that parking is a basic amenity provided in abundance just about anywhere in America that’s not SF/Manhattan/L.A.
You have no rights, the city planners have spoken.
Of course, with the middle-class fleeing this city like rats from a sinking ship, one would think that making this place user friendly and offering MORE parking might be a priority, so that people will get out more and use more goods and services and bolster the economy. But it seems like our city government is hell-bent on driving all but the most masochistic individuals and companies out of state.
Which got me thinking. Parking most certainly is a basic amenity in this day and age, it clearly takes precedence over many other amenities like, say, public restrooms, water fountains, or benches. And it is very much offered in abundance, according to Donald Shoup there are at least 3 parking spaces for every vehicle in the United States. In Tippecanoe County, Indiana, according to Salon, there are 250,000 more parking spaces than there are vehicles. Let’s hope L.A.’s fleeing middle class heads to Tippecanoe, because they’ve clearly got a surplus of parking. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has got to be hurting for parking.
According to data[PDF] provided by the California Highway Patrol, in 2005 Los Angeles County had 7,136,393 registered vehicles. If the typical curbside parking space (among the smallest types of spaces) takes up 160 sq. feet (according to Wikipedia), that means that 40.9 sq. miles of space is required just for those cars to have a single parking space. In other words, if we built a surface parking lot for every registered vehicle in Los Angeles County, it would span 40.9 sq. miles, an area almost twice the size of Manhattan. Actually, if we were to build a parking lot, it would require about 70 sq. miles, since even the smallest parking stall requires at least 275 sq. feet of space when taking into account the space required for circulation areas. Either way, it’s a huge amount of space.
The thing is, people generally buy cars to drive them to other parking spaces. At the minimum people need a space at home and a space at their place of work. This doubles the minimum amount of space taken up by the 7 million cars in Los Angeles to 82 sq. miles. Almost four Manhattans would fit in that area, or twelve Griffith Parks. Of course, most people use their cars for more than just getting from home to work and back. They drive to go shopping, to go to school, to run errands, to have fun… and for a place to be a place that a car would go, it must have space for parking. It is clear we can fit many more Manhattans and Griffith Parks into the space used for parking in this city.
Speaking of Manhattan, in the five burroughs of New York City, there are 1,738,970 registered vehicles which require at least 10 sq. miles for just a single space. New York City has a population of 8,274,527 people. If the ratio of people to cars was the same as in L.A. County (70%), NYC would require another 23 sq. miles of space (an entire Manhattan) just to give those cars a single parking spot.
If middle class of Los Angeles County requires Tippecanoe style parking (11 spots for every vehicle) to keep from fleeing, they are asking for 450 sq. miles of space, or almost the entire land area of the City of Los Angeles, to store their cars. Is this reasonable, practical, or sustainable?
No, no, and no.
Too much of our space is already given to parked cars. This is space that could be used in the way Manhattan uses its space or Griffith Park uses its space. It’s space the could be used to increase our productivity, our economy, and our quality of life. We must reclaim this space once it opens up as the middle class flees, because they’ll want it back once they realize that even in Tippecanoe, there’s never enough parking for those who feel entitled to it.
Discussion
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Agreed. If there was more limited parking, then our traffic would be reduced. People dont’ see that concept, they think more parking garages allow for less traffic. But, if we continue making parking more abundant and convenient, there’s less of an incentive to take public transit. Is there a good reason why LA doesn’t have much pocket parks? We need the same square footage requirement for developments within a certain area, for a parking spot. If that guy wants parking, he should pay for it in a nearby lot. Hopefully with increased parking, high gas prices, insurance, maintenance, car costs, etc…they’d see the investment in public transit would be more reasonable. We have to get rid of this god-given free parking or ample parking.
I have an idea, how about we freeze the spaces that we have for parking as is, and all developers would pay the money that it would have taken to build new spaces and put it into the transit fund. So if there is a requirement for 2 spaces for every unit and lets estimate spaces cost $10,000 per space(more for underground and structure, less for surface). Think about how many housing units are built in LA each year. SCAG at one point said that LA County needed 50,000 units per year. That’s $1 billion a year for housing alone! Obviously i just did a back of the envelope calculation. It could be much more or much less. Add in retail and office spaces and you have some cash!
Automobile-entitlement and middle-class status are not the same thing despite car commercials and advertising. Many people in major world metropolis’ have middle class lifestyles without personally owning or driving an solo-occupied automobile.
It’s fine to want a suburban, middle-class, automobile-based lifestyle, but in the future a high-quality embrace of that lifestyle will have to be done in the actual suburbs, not in Los Angeles itself.
The middle class may be fleeing, but a new middle class is emerging from the immigrant communities around LA. This is normal, natural, and desirable.
People will simply have to get used to paying for parking. Get enough people doing that and the political will to build more transit will follow.
Fred, 275 sq ft is for parking structures. Parking lots are more like 210 sq ft per space.
Can we at least accept that these parking spaces are productive and do contribute to certain aspects of a quality of life and we are only speaking of debatable degrees? What would happen to the 3rd Street Promenade if Santa Monica tripled parking fees? Who would complain loudest? The merchants.
Shoup is an idiot. No, I don’t mean that in the usual dismissive insult way. I mean profoundly stupid in the “free parking is evil” way. Somehow he seems to think tenure and repetition of disproven assertions equals competence.
LA County is 4,752 sq mi of which 691 sq mi are designated water/waterways. There is more than 6 times as much water as roads. Any benefit to getting rid of either?
Hey jackass, Los Angeles isn’t Manhattan.
We’re far more spread out than that silly little island.
Your argument doesn’t discuss the possibility of multi-story parking decks, which are pretty much single handedly responsible for the resurgence of downtown Santa Monica and downtown Culver City, which are now far more desirable than they have ever been.
Assuming that there are existing parking spaces for 90% of the existing cars, converting flat parking lots to multi-level parking decks could actually provide MORE parking with LESS use of our valuable space.
Pass an ordinance requiring every multi-level parking deck to use it’s roof deck as a garden, playing field, or mini-park, and you’d actually provide BOTH green space AND parking, which would benefit everyone.
But no, you’d rather have drivers circling the block for hours generating MORE smog by looking for parking, or stuck behind slow moving city buses.
And anyone that thinks the skilled middle class that’s leaving L.A. is being effectively replaced by the immigrant “middle class” coming in needs to have their head examined. This is why immigrants with skills are heading to Dallas or Atlanta where they can get more for their money.
Well of course they are part of our economy and “quality of life” - we’ve made them into a necessary evil. But they aren’t really necessary are they? Only because of our car addiction are they necessary.
What would happen to the 3rd Street Promenade if the same people who park there now could easily get there without cars, and the space used for parking was replaced with stores, housing, jobs, parks, etc?
Hey fucktard:
Space is space, okay. Obviously there’s not a 40 sq. mile parking lot for all the cars. Obviously the space is spread out between curbside parking, parking lots, parking garages, etc. Multi-story parking decks are clearly a better use of space than surface parking lots, just as multi-story residential is a better use of space than single-family housing. But you ignore the point of my article, and this website, which is that the car-culture is inherently wasteful and self-propagating. Providing more parking, whether surface lots of multi-story parking lots, only brings more cars, which means you will still be circling for stupid parking spaces. Didn’t you read the Salon article I linked to.
Welcome to the world of the automobile! Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s not quite like what the car companies advertise!
Oh what a vision for the future. Why not pass an ordinance that everything be built upon multi-level parking structures. Cater to the car first, everything else will follow.
And in 10 - 20 years those cities will be no different from Los Angeles today. They follow the precedent started by Los Angeles, and will face the same fate. Just wait till 17 million people live in Atlanta or Dallas metro. We’ll see how great the car culture works out for them then.
OK shithead,
Who exactly wants to take public transport?
Surveys of public transport users in L.A. CONSISTENTLY show that the vast majority of the ridership would prefer to drive, but can’t afford to.
Given that L.A. is a city built around the automobile, and people who live here know that and generally LIKE THEIR CARS, why not figure out how to build a more car friendly city with more green space and less pollution (benefits for hybrids / high mileage / PZEV vehicles, rooftop gardens, etc.), rather than try to force a public transit system that most Angelenos don’t want, down our throats?
When even the people who use public transport say they’d prefer not to, it’s probably better to figure out how to make a car-friendly city more environmentally friendly, rather than trying to convert the views of the 9.5 million Angelenos who think public transport sucks and don’t take it unless they have to.
Decent public transit in L.A. is still a generation away, if ever, so let’s not punish drivers now for wanting to get from place to place in an efficient manner.
Personally I get pissed at the movies and TV shows that universally pull up and jump out. Imagine if we watched the principals circling for 20 mins of a 23 min show like in reallife™.
Fred, love the “fucktard” comment. Sometimes there is just the right wword and it needs to be used. Fucktard though he may be I do like the idea of slapping an extra story on top for greensward or solar. Unfortunately I think we’d run out of frisbees and golden retrievers real fast if we tried to use them as parks.
I’m sure everyone loves ponies too and wanted one at one point, but you gotta clean up all that crap they produce.
Sure, but if you can get a cleaner pony of your own, there’s no point in forcing everyone to ride somebody else’s slower pony that doesn’t take you where you want to go.
Man, tough audience. Not even a smile at the imagery of a retriever going over the side after a frisbee?
Ummm… I do. Many other readers of this site do. Many Angelenos would love to have the option.
This is because public transportation in the car-culture world is nothing more than mobility welfare, made necessary precisely because of the exclusive nature of the car-culture. Obviously a shitty lowest-common denominator welfare transportation system is going to pale (at least superficially) in comparison to the glamorous car-culture that car and oil companies spend billions annually to make look amazing to us.
First off, no one is trying to FORCE a public transportation system on you. The car-culture is a transportation system that uses FORCE. The main reason most people don’t ride transit is because they don’t have the option. They are FORCED to drive in cars. They are FORCED to spend a huge portion of their income on cars. Businesses are FORCED to provide parking. Drivers are FORCED to be tested and registered in order to get around. Our environment is built so that humans are FORCED to drive if they wish to get around. Car distances are usually not walkable or bikeable, and if they are the infrastructure is built for 2-ton machines, not frail humans or bicycles. Car-culture has built our environment so spread out and decentralized that mass transit is nearly impossible to implement. The car-culture forces us to be part of it… whether we like it or not. Proving public transit and building our communities around transit will at last provide people with transportation CHOICE, instead of being FORCED to get around using only one mode… the automobile.
Let me throw some numbers out here for you. Metro Bus and Rail has some 733,000 riders a day. Let’s get them off the transit they hate and into a city with plenty of parking that you dream of. We give them each a car. That means 733,000 new cars on the streets of Los Angeles. We want them to have at least 3 parking spaces, so at 160 sq. feet per space, that’s 12.6 sq. miles of parking needed. Actually, the number is more like 21.6 miles, because parking garage spaces require about 275 sq. feet. As you noted, this isn’t one big surface parking lot, these spaces will be in parking structures to save our precious space. The 7-story parking structure at The Grove has 3,500 parking spaces and has a footprint of about 137,500 sq. feet, or 3 acres. This means if we want to provide ample “eco-friendly” multi-story parking (3 spaces - home, work, and elsewhere) for these ex-transit users we’d have to build 628 new 7-story Grove style parking structures. According to USA Today, construction costs for parking structures (not including the land they sit on) averages at about $13,900 per space. So means an individual structure costs about $48.6 million, for a grand total of about $30.5 billion to build all the parking for our transit users. Those parking structures would also take up about 3 sq. miles of land.
Now think about what this means with the population projections for Los Angeles County. You think driving, parking, and the environment are bad now. How many $50 million dollar parking structures will have have to build to accommodate 3 million more people, each with a car and a desire for ample parking, by 2050? Can we afford to spend that much money and give up that much prime land for a mode of transportation that has proven itself inefficient in urban areas of tens of millions of people.
Nah, I appreciated it. Funny thing about rooftops and parks. Sad but true, one of the best views of Los Angeles is from the top of the stupid Grove parking lot. I can’t think of a more depressing place to admire a cityscape from.
Gee, the automobile-entitled feels they have to resort to swearing and name-calling because their arguments do not hold water.
The fact that this has been a car based city over the last sixty years doesn’t mean it will be in the future. In fact, you’re whole premise that public transit riders would drive a car if they could has no basis in fact other than your own mind. Show us these “surveys” if you would, please.
The car culture is unravelling whether you like it or not. The fact that you’ve developed an sense of entitlment to your automobile and certain quality of motoring due to sixty years of social engineering in favor of the car culture is utterly irrelevant to the future of Los Angeles.
Three millions more people are projected to migrate to Los Angeles County in the next 30 years. The economic and environmental limits of sprawl, congestion and motoring have been reached. That means one thing, density, leading to re-centralization, meaning an ever-declining quality of motoring whether we build a mass transit system or not. There are no roads to build that will preserve the car culture you love.
Hmm. More swearing. Again, with the inability to have a rational discussion because you don’t have any facts.
No, it’s not. It ain’t San Diego, Fresno or Dallas either. Peddle that phony argument somewhere else. Los Angeles is more like London than New York, which is also a vast sprawl, butt has a dozen subway lines, dozens of commuter lines, a vast and comprehensive bus system, light rail and even ferries, a congestion charging zone, and no sense of entitlement to drive and park your single-occupancy vehicle on-demand conveniently and affordably in time and money.
Here is a map of the past Los Angeles that was built on rail before sixty years of social engineering in favor of the automobile.
See Los Angles wasn’t “built around the automobile”. It was built around rail. Sorry to break the news to you.
Los Angeles is changing whether you and I like or not. The only question on offer is whether or not we will have enough of a mass transit network to keep Los Angeles economically and environmentally sustainable. If you want your traditional atypical suburban-within-urban lifestyle, I suggest you move to the actual suburbs. Southern California couldn’t continue social-engineering in a way to preserve the car culture even if it wanted to.
The car culture is based on the no longer true assumption that you are entitled to drive and park your single-occupancy vehicle anytime, anyplace, anywhere on demand, conveniently and affordably in time and money, and that everyone else you know and want to know will do the same, and that those who don’t are just poor people who would if they could or the marginal that aren’t worth consideration. The unraveling of the car culture means that you too will change your lifestyle even if you don’t and won’t ride public transit yourself. You will have to consider transit accessibility in all of your professional meetings and social engagements because not everyone will be will willing or able to drive a car anywhere and everywhere.
I know this is hard to accept to the automobile-entitled who mistakenly assume that a suburban-within-urban, car based lifestyle is part of what you’re entitled to as a resident of Los Angeles. But social historians will see the car culture as a phase. The future will still have millions of cars and choking congestion. However, it also needs to have mass transit. The car culture is itself is not a lasting phenomenon. The comments of people like John show it will not die quietly, but with the rage of spoiled children who see their entitlements taken away.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. You may not like the new Los Angeles, but it will come whether you like it or not. The only question is whether or not it will come will sufficient transit to make it liveable.
You’ll always welcome to take your high quality, car-based lifestyle to the low density suburbs where it actually belongs. Or not, the choice is yours. Sit in ever-worsening, evermore-expensive, ever-longer commutes or adapt. No one is forcing you or anyone to ride transit. But the past isn’t coming back anytime soon. The best days of motoring in Los Angeles are forever behind us. Sorry.
Notice how I never once swore at you or called you a name. I don’t need to because I trust my arguments on their own merit.
asshole,
los angeles isn’t manhattan, gosh that’s funny. didn’t realize it myself, thanks for clarifying. but wait, new york city isn’t composed of just manhattan. sakes alive! it’s got a whole 5 boroughs. in fact, the new york metro area is pretty fucking spread out, and when you consider that it has subway links to new jersey, mta to connecticut, lirr all the way to montauk, your epiphany looses all credibility. that’s public transportation touching 3 fucking states, broseph. so this “los angeles is too spread out, whaaaaa” nonsense is bullshit!
parking your behemoth is a privilege, not a right. and unless tards like yourself realize that the convenience your car brings is actually a morass and subsequently put the ego away for a minute to think of, cooperate on, concede and actualize a solution, la is fucked and the middle class moves to dallas and hot-lanta.
you wonder why public transportation is always a generation away? cuz people like you refuse to accept that you are ever going to have use it. you cling to and demand that your precious little heiny be catered to, instead of demanding that a realistic alternative gets built yesterday. since no-one is demanding an alternative, it’s always gonna be on the backburner, cuz politicians are only motivated by what people demand. well, except in the case of george bush.
boohoo about your impending anguish, attached to your attachment to your beloved automobile - smallest violin in the world. no, really. i feel sorry for you. seriously. it’s no way to live.
good luck in dallas, the next suburban catastrophe in denial of it’s future!
dan, the man!!! that is awesome!!!! thanks for sharing and caring
I’ve never understood why L.A. can’t accommodate both the car and build mass transit. It isn’t either/or. Some people want to drive, others prefer to take transit (providing it is reliable, safe, and clean). Why limit choice by forcing people to drive?
But here’s what most people don’t understand: current L.A. parking regulations don’t reflect reality, even in L.A. New market condos require 2.25 parking spaces per unit (or, in some cases, 2.5 spaces or even 2.75 spaces in special districts), regardless of the size of the unit. That literally means that the expectation is that every single household has 2 cars and every other household is having someone over for dinner every two nights (0.25 guest spaces). Since this doesn’t reflect reality, what we get are a lot of empty spaces in new buildings.
In most cases, parking requirements — not density — is what limits how many units of housing can be built. You literally cannot park the required number of cars on the site, so you build fewer units than is allowed. In many cases, you can only build about 75% of the number of units allowed by zoning. We are literally choosing to house cars over people, because the more cars you house, the less housing units you get. What’s worse: because it costs so much money and space to build the required parking (and because they can’t get the number of units allowed on the site), developers are forced to build bigger units, which means there are few smaller (and thus more affordable) units available.
But here’s the rub: if you look at the number of cars vs. the number of multi-family housing units in L.A., you find that on average, there are about 1.4 cars per unit (which is to say that about half of households have 1 car and half have 2 cars). Adding 0.25 guest spaces per unit and the actual number of spaces required per unit is 1.65. Now, let’s be clear: 1.65 spaces per unit is a very high number. In New York City, there are 1.7 million registered vehicles for 3.4 million housing units — a ratio of 0.50 per unit — 3.3 times fewer than the 1.65 required in L.A. So, indeed, L.A. is a driving city. But we need only 1.65, not 2.25.
Think about it, we could reduce the parking standard by 25% — from 2.25 to 1.65 parking spaces per unit and still accommodate all the cars required in L.A.; this would allow us to build 25% more housing units without even changing the density (since in many cases, as I said above, you can only build about 75% of the allowable units).
Now imagine if we required all projects throughout the city (over a certain size, say 10+ units) to set aside 10% of the units as affordable. It’s a win-win for everyone. We accommodate cars at the ratio required for L.A. (1.65), developers get 15% more market units and we institute a mechanism to generate 10% affordable units for every new project in the city.
The irony is that some of the people who make that argument ridicule the BRU for arguing that transit money only be invested in buses.
Bus vs. Rail.
Car vs. Transit.
It’s not about being pro-car, pro-transit, pro-bus, pro-rail, or pro-bike: it’s about being pro-mobility. From the highway, to the subway, to the bikeway, it’s all the same transportation system. It’s success is dependent on capacity, infrastructure and speed.
I’m all for a reduction in parking space requirements, but not if it can’t be shown that the trips will be absorbed by other modes of transportation - which in this darn city with it’s policies is really really hard to do. Massive changes need to occur.
Great comment Greg.
And let it be known, I’m not saying TRANSIT or nothing. I’m all about choice. Our current auto-centric society gives us NO CHOICE when it comes to mobility. Fuck, in most places you can’t get anywhere using the damn machine god gave you, your legs and feet. I don’t want cars banned or to die. I ride in cars, I’m not like a transit vegan. I’m a Zipcar member, I’ll ride in taxis, I’ll ride in my girlfriends car, I’ll take road trips. Cars are sometimes a great way to get around. But they’re not the only way, and a lot of times they are a stupid way to get around. Especially when you consider their costs, both internal and external. But most people just don’t have a choice… you have to have a car or goddamnit you’re not going to be able to get around. That’s fucked up. And when everyone has to have a car to survive, and every car requires at least three 160 sq. foot spaces for them to rest in, and when everyone means 13 million people… well things just get really messy.
Agreed, but the most important thing we can do is to eliminate the need for “convenience” trips (which most trips are). Most people aren’t going to be able to live near where they work (although if you work downtown and live near the metro or gold line, you can), but we can build neighborhoods so that you don’t need to get in your car to get a carton of milk. That requires more investment in the retail strips or main streets near residential neighborhoods, and it means allowing conveniences like corners stores, bakeries, etc to be built in residential neighborhoods.
But let’s be clear. Reductions in parking space requirements is not about re-allocating trips to other modes of transport. It simply brings our parking requirements in line with what we actually need. Only by building capacity in other modes of transit can we shift trips to other modes of transport. Yes, it creates more housing, but again, provides parking for those additional units at 1.65 spaces per unit.
I also think we need to institute more fairness in mobility pricing. It’s bizarre that we make the poorest among us pay for buses and the metro, while those who can afford a car travel for free on the highways. A modest toll — similar to using the metro — that goes towards highway maintenance and transit expansion can be done quite easily, and with minimal public dollars. For example, in Toronto, they have a toll freeway with cameras on every on/off ramp and they take a photo of your plate logging you in and out, and simply send you a bill in the mail at the end of the month based on the distance you traveled. You can also have transponders for frequent users.
Yes, the Bus Riders Union represents low-income workers who saw the MTA only investing in fixed-rail transport to the suburbs. Again, balance is the key. Investments in rapid buses are needed, as well as rail.
Reductions in parking space requirements do not address what I see to be a fundamental problem: the subsidization of parking costs. Why have minimum parking requirements at all for buildings? Why not allow the market to provide the parking? By requiring parking you both increase the cost of housing, and enforce the need for a car by defining the type of construction as car-serving.
Anyone who uses a car can then park on the street or pay for a spot in a structure or in a lot.
Which is exactly why Donald Shoup isn’t as crazy as the auto-centric people make him out to be.
Oh and Rob I thought I’d give you credit for something that actually made me lol, not the fake lol that people always use online.
If balance is the key, no one needs to learn to honor that more than the so called Bus Riders “Union”. When they admit and allow for rail playing a valuable part of Southern California’s transportation future, then they too will be balanced. One doesn’t have to be anti-rail to support a strong bus service.
In fact, every person I know who supports increased rail also supports a wonderful comprehensive bus service. Cities with great rail systems like London, Paris and New York also have world class bus systems.
However, the BRU is not advocating “balance”.
True. But when the BRU first launched their suit against the MTA, the MTA was putting all their money for additional capacity into rail. Now, the MTA is raising rates substantially, which is primarily what they are fighting right now. The BRU needs to acknowledge the need for rail, but rail proponents also need to acknowledge the need for rapid bus.
Fair enough. But, the 1990s are over. They’ve long since used up their good will from the consent agreement.
Whatever the fights back then, I care about what the BRU is advocating today, and what they are advocating today is will not be very helpful in improving greater mobility for everyone.
The lack of balance is mostly coming from the BRU’s end. But it’s a bit of a straw dog that you are setting afire. I don’t know any rail advocates who are “anti-bus” or who don’t support a strong bus system as well. The same cannot be said for the BRU.
Southern California Transit Advocates and the Transit Coalition are two organizations which support BOTH a strong rail and a strong bus network.
“Why have minimum parking requirements at all for buildings? Why not allow the market to provide the parking?”
Because there are certain amenities that people, especially the type of people with common sense and funds to invest in and build a community, like to have as a matter of course, without having to pay additional fees for them.
Free parking and useful roads, like clean air, are two of those amenities.
Make a given area hostile to those who prefer individual mobility, and they will move and take their residential and business tax payments with them, leaving public transit riders to pay ever larger fares.
More light rail and greater freeway and parking capacity is a recipe for civic success.
Increased density with less mobility (both public and private) is a recipe for blight over the long term.
as a rule of thumb, the value of land within areas of higher population densities is generally higher than less populated areas. this isn’t always the case, but in areas, like la and san diego, where population density is waxing, the value of available space rises with density. this is why the skyscraper exists. louis sullivan and other dudes from the chicago school of architecture realized that they had to squeeze as much use out of areas with little or no available land. hence the need to build upward.
as has been established earlier in the post, autos take up an excessive amount of room. an amount that is incompatible with current trends of increased density in urban areas. cars need wide freeways and roads for maximum throughput. the more people and cars, the greater the need for wider highways. freeways by their nature reduce density and are incompatible with urban environments. this is not an opinion. this is fact.
so two things will happen - the amount of available parking will be reduced due to lots becoming condos and such and what available parking is left will become more and more expensive.
yet another increased expense associated with the convenience of driving.
I take the bus by choice, but I am routinely reminded why most Angelenos believe anyone who rides the bus is insane.
The trouble is that most of the pro-transit element is allied with the socialists that want us to suffer with our third-world visitors. They want us to be standing-room-only on a bus with closed windows, a bus driver that turns on the heater instead of the air, being blasted by “Transit TV” in spanish, surrounded by folks who either didn’t bathe or didn’t wipe.
Its bad enough when the MTA changes routes based on time of day, but never conveys the change at the bus stop, and closes their switchboard so you can’t inquire. But its even worse, when the coach simply fails to show, and you add two hours to your trip, walking.
Big Blue is no better. Try riding the bus on a Saturday evening. 50 people waiting at a stop for an hour, only to be passed up by a full bus.
I’ve sat on consumer panels of “non riders”, and all related a negative experience attempting to use public transit - whether sitting next to a bum, a stinky person, encountering rude operators, being passed up, or the bus simply not coming, they all learned quickly that one must drive a car.
No amount of painting buses red, letting them skip stops, calling them “Rapid”, is going to convince the average LA resident to use them.
They must be made safe and clean, and they must move with deliberate speed. That will not happen without dedicated bus lanes 24×7, without signal preemption. It will not happen without transit police riding buses. It will not happen unless operators are re-educated on polite behavior, as well as their responsibility to maintain order on the bus.
Since all we generally get are slogans, labels, and “buses that look like trains”, I don’t think we’re going to eliminate people driving cars in LA, even at $8 a gallon. I’m actually shopping now for a car, I’m so fed up, and I’ve been taking the bus for a decade.
#29 John says “there are certain amenities that people, especially the type of people with common sense and funds to invest in and build a community, like to have as a matter of course, without having to pay additional fees for them.”
My point is that you ARE paying for them in the cost of the housing. Removing parking REQUIREMENTS from construction does not remove the OPTION of building WITH parking. But requiring parking does remove the option of building without. This is a parking subsidy.
Los Angeles did remove parking requirements from new downtown residential buildings recently, but that does not mean every new building will have no parking, all it means is that with increasing density, there will be more housing built, because it becomes more affordable to build without that extra cost. I am not advocating doing this everywhere, but it does make sense where there is already a significant transit infrastructure.
#27 Greg: “rail proponents also need to acknowledge the need for rapid bus.”
The BRU OPPOSED the Rapid Bus project as well as the rail projects. Later on, they have changed their tune, because of the obvious benefits. I don’t know any rail proponents who oppose rapid bus, but given the choice between BRT and Light Rail, Light Rail is often the better choice. Look at the Orange Line. It hit capacity within months of opening. Now it needs to be converted to rail to carry more passengers.
All I’d like to add is: where the fuck are the local politicians in L.A. on this sort of issue? Even the most die hard environmentalist liberal vegan douche bags I know don’t support this type of anti-car rhetoric and policy.
To me, the solutions to most of our transit issues (and quality of life issues) have been known and independently developed by at least two generations of Angelenos.
What is missing is a political means of putting this crap together and getting a bunch of chuckleheaded career politicians to vote how we want them to.
I think the L.A. Chamber is too concerned with labor law and car-based retail to come around to supporting transit - but local business districts might be pulled together for political and fundraising purposes if a group could more or less guarantee their future success due to a move away from automobile-based transportation.
Maybe there is room for labor rights people to get involved as well - but labor people have hitched themselves firmly to the cocks of america’s ad men. Every union guy I know has a boat the size of my apartment and two huge trucks they drive from work to their home outside of L.A. to “the lake”.
No, it was calculated how much room was allocated to roads and parking. There was nothing proven that this was excessive. Indeed, with so very little used compared to other urban areas and the problems with parking it seems exactly the opposite is the case. LA has too few roads and parking relative to population.
But it is that last bit. Increasing urban density? LA yes but hardly anyplace else. Miami, SF, Dallas, Houston is about it.
There are not enough roads because the city is too dense. Even in the suburban areas the houses are packed tightly. Look at the suburbs of other cities, now there’s some space. No more freeways are going to be built here so the traffic is just going to get worse and worse. There is no sense in advocating a car-centric policy anymore, it just won’t work.
Again, I think it is worth repeating that we need to break out of this either/or mentality which seems to be creeping back into the discussion. Yes, L.A. is a spread out. And this pattern was established very early on when Huntington built rail connections to the hinterlands in order to sell real estate. So when the car came along, it was more convenient for people to use cars. And that’s fine when there aren’t that many people. But unless you want to build a wall around L.A. with security checkpoints like a medieval city, we cannot stop people from coming here. Nor would we want to, because discouraging growth means jobs and people relocate elsewhere and we lose investment. L.A. has gone back and forth on whether it wanted to be pro- or anti-growth, depending on the mayor and city council. But there’s little doubt that Orange, Ventura and Riverside Co’s benefited during L.A.’s more anti-growth periods.
For people who’ve been in L.A. their whole lives (or generations before), seeing L.A. change from a small suburban town to the second largest city in the country has been traumatic. Individual homeowners worried about property values and preserving their way of life are rightfully anxious about change. Homeowners in every city would like their cities to be frozen in time, but that’s not how cities — anywhere — work. They are dynamic places, in constant flux, changing along with flows in people, technology, and capital. L.A. is a city of neighborhoods and we can preserve their essential character, but there are vast swathes of L.A. that have been better days, are run-down and just plain unpleasant. Often these are along major thoroughfares, so they investment here makes good sense economically, not just because of planning considerations.
L.A. has its own unique identity, just as all cities do. It’s fundamental character — low, spread out — isn’t going to change. Anyone who uses New York (specifically Manhattan) to characterize change in L.A. is trafficking in fear. Encouraging 4- and 5-story mixed-use buildings along major transportation routes, and leaving the 1- and 2-story largely residential neighborhoods intact is nothing even remotely like New York.
I just wish we could have a more honest discussion in L.A. about change and growth instead of it resorting to the usual us vs. them binary.
Wow, I hardly think that is the case of the “most” pro-transit elements. Nearly everyone I know who is pro-transit, “socialist” or otherwise, wants you and everyone else to have a clean, comfortable, convenient and reliable ride. Most of the time that’s exactly what I get, as imperfect as our transit system is.
However, this sort of stereotyping about people who are pro-transit and what riding the bus is like discourages other people from even trying transit. Yes, I’ve had bad bus rides. I also had incredibly bad and demoralizing commutes in my car when I used to drive.
And, if you have that much aversion to hearing the Spanish language even being spoken, you really won’t like the future of the American Southwest. May I recommend Nebraska or New Hampshire as an alternative?
That’s the gospel right there. The whole point is that cars require a lot of space. A person with a car requires many time more space than a person without a car. This is fine when there’s not many people and a lot of space. But with millions upon millions of people in a limited space (at what point of sprawl is a city no longer a city), the space required to keep a car-culture begins to eat away at the space required to live a quality life.
I mean, goddamnit, is it a COINCIDENCE that virtually every major population center in the world (with the exclusion of Los Angeles) has an extensive and heavily utilized mass transit system? Of course not! It’s because places that don’t become immobilized by gridlock. The infrastructure required to give ample space for millions upon millions of cars to run smoothly is simply too great for any city, if that city wishes to retain any elements that make a city a city.
According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, each U.S. car requires an average of .18 acres of road and parking space. This means that to accommodate 7 million cars in Los Angeles 1,968 sq. miles of road and parking space is needed. To accommodate 10 million cars (population is expected to grow b 3 million by 2050) 2,812 sq. miles of space is needed. That’s almost 70% of the land area of Los Angeles county.
UCLA got it right, you have to pay if you eat up space; as in, you pay to park an automobile, but bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are free to park there. Note I emphasized a form of transportation that can take you places when public transit can’t and doesn’t eat up a lot of space.
“The infrastructure required to give ample space for millions upon millions of cars to run smoothly is simply too great for any city, if that city wishes to retain any elements that make a city a city.”
There are a lot of people in LA who don’t want the city to be a city. That’s the biggest obstacle, and they have mucked things up pretty badly for the rest of us.
Understand that when I say “city” I don’t necessarily mean skyscrapers and a bad ass skyline… the stuff we superficially think of when we say “city”. What I mean is “city” in the broader sense of the word, as in a centralized area of dense population where all the elements of civilization (housing, industry, recreation) are easily accessible by its inhabitants. I mean, that’s the whole point of cities right? Putting all the elements of civilization in close proximity to people… a contrast to rural living, where the elements of civilization are separated by great distances.
Of course, suburbanism and exurbanism attempt to bridge the gap between city life and rural life, aided greatly by the personal automobile and auto roads, but as I’ve said it all falls apart once populations reach a certain threshold. Obviously we’ve lost the advantages of both city and the rural life in our attempt to combine the two. In “sprawl cities” with high populations, elements of civilization are too close to us to offer the open space and privacy of the countryside but too far to be easily reached without the aid of personal automobile (which requires large amounts of space, further spreading us from elements of civilization). So we basically become trapped in these places that have only the worst elements of rural life (isolation, inaccessibility, uncultured) and city life (crowded, dirty, artificial).
Mass transit means a system of vehicles available to provide shared-ride transportation services. These can be rubber-tired, steel-wheeled, fossil-fuel powered, electric, pedal- or animal-powered. They can even be airplanes, if you live in small island villages.
Rail is one subset of mass transportation. It is not mass transportation in and of itself.
And Los Angeles having mass transit that is neither extensive nor heavily utilized? Shocking. Funny, because I see transit maps and see some form of service available to all but the most mountainous parts of the county. Unutilized? Relative to the world, maybe. But North America as a whole has the lowest transit usage in the world. Canada, too, but that’s because of vast land with relatively few major population centers. The United States became this way through both public policy and social engineering.
North America is by no means a lost cause. There are hundreds of metropolitan areas, with virtually all having some form of regularly scheduled mass transit available. And you know what’s scary?
Los Angeles is near the top of transit utilization. We have the second most bus boardings in the country. As for our relatively small Metro Rail system, we went from zero boardings in 1990 to the sixth busiest urban rail network in the country today. Once Eastside Gold Line and Expo Line get completed, we may have higher weekday ridership than BART if ridership trends continue.
Don’t look at L.A.’s glass as empty. Look at what we do have, and how we can build on our success to make it better.
Right, my link to the underground systems was just showing that many of the major cities have expansive subway systems. The point I was making is that it’s not an accident that major population centers have extensive mass transportation systems. It just makes sense for cities.
Key words being “some form”. You and I both know that although the (bus) system is expansive, it’s not neccessarily the most efficient or usable, or else you wouldn’t have had such good ideas in your long range plan comments.
Yes, to the world, and also to other heavily populated cities in the United States. U.S. Census data from 2000 shows that Los Angeles is #34 on the list of U.S. cities in terms of transit usage. As you know, Los Angeles is #2 on the list of U.S. cities in terms of population. Los Angeles’s transit system and transit usage is just not in line when compared with other heavily populated first world cities.
We’ve got a lot of people. And unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of poor people. Most of the transit service in Los Angeles is welfare mobility, whereas in other major cities transit is actually mobility for the masses.
Hey man, you’re talking to a guy who started a blog promoting “The Los Angeles Transit Oriented Lifestyle”. I’ve got nothing but hope. But the cynic in me says I gotta be realist, at least about the current reality.
But, like I mentioned earlier, my whole point was to prove that heavily populated cities cannot survive on car-culture alone. A good mass transit system is the norm, not the exception.
rob dawg,
i knew i’d get into trouble by inserting a subjective value on to that particular. if “excessive” isn’t the correct adjective, please provide one that is.
thanks
d
The fact that this “John” is so rude indicates a step forward for the state of public transit. Before, it was just something that only a fringe group of crazies supported that could easily be ignored away. Now it’s a legitimate means of getting around, and also a threat to car entitlement. We can talk about congestion pricing all day but a more fairly priced parking system would be a much more effective way of making motorists compensate for the consumptive practice of driving a car in a city. Cars take space, space that could be used for other things, space that in a city is quite valuable. Anyone who has been to New York has probably seen that they do parking a bit differently there:
Free parking is nice if you have a car, but it propagates a system which is utterly ineffective at handling density.
And as far as putting parks on the roof of structures: why not just put the structures underground and the parks on top of that? I couldn’t imagine many people wanting to climb eight floors of honking and fumes to get to a park. Look at the google maps view of downtown LA, you’ll see that so much of it is used just for parking. put it all underground and use the land for something else, if not a park, then at least commercial space.
Two paragraphs of Fred’s post combined into one.