<story><title>To fix L.A.&apos;s traffic, we need tolls</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-ol-traffic-toll-lane-freeway-20170303-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nradov</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s why everyone who can afford it drives their own car: to be alone. The reputation would improve if they could get more &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; people riding, but it&amp;#x27;s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg problem.</text></item><item><author>bit_logic</author><text>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&amp;#x27;t have the bad reputation, but that will always have the last mile issue.&lt;p&gt;Since the bad reputation of buses will likely never go away, it seems rail + uber pool&amp;#x2F;lyft line might be an alternative.  It won&amp;#x27;t be as good, but could be good enough.  I wish there was a company other than uber&amp;#x2F;lyft which focused on just this first&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x2F;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).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>martinald</author><text>Have you seen the central line at rush hour in London? It&amp;#x27;s horrendous[1]. We are talking &amp;gt;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&amp;#x27;d imagine mostly middle class&amp;#x2F;upper middle class professionals.&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;p&gt;1) Traffic is terrible. It will take 1hr+ to do a journey the central line does in 15-20m.&lt;p&gt;2) Even if you want to drive, parking costs around $1500&amp;#x2F;month in the square mile.&lt;p&gt;3) On top of that, you have the congestion charge for entering central London (£11.50&amp;#x2F;day - soon to be £25&amp;#x2F;day if you have a particularly polluting vehicle).&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re looking at about $2000&amp;#x2F;month if you want to drive, which takes 4x as long and costs about 15x more than the train.&lt;p&gt;This is what happens when you price effectively for the externalities of traffic congestion. People will switch to transit en masse, and &amp;#x27;loud music&amp;#x27; will not be seen as a problem.&lt;p&gt;[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.</text></comment>
<story><title>To fix L.A.&apos;s traffic, we need tolls</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-ol-traffic-toll-lane-freeway-20170303-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nradov</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s why everyone who can afford it drives their own car: to be alone. The reputation would improve if they could get more &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; people riding, but it&amp;#x27;s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg problem.</text></item><item><author>bit_logic</author><text>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&amp;#x27;t have the bad reputation, but that will always have the last mile issue.&lt;p&gt;Since the bad reputation of buses will likely never go away, it seems rail + uber pool&amp;#x2F;lyft line might be an alternative.  It won&amp;#x27;t be as good, but could be good enough.  I wish there was a company other than uber&amp;#x2F;lyft which focused on just this first&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x2F;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).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slg</author><text>I have sat next to plenty of people who &amp;quot;smell bad or play loud music or act out in inappropriate ways&amp;quot; in London or NYC.  The differentiating factor (for me at least) is that those cities provide a legitimate service level with public transit that can get me to almost any place in their city in a reasonable time frame.  That allows more &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; people to forgo cars completely in favor of public transit.  In LA it is much more difficult to live without a car and rely totally on public transit.  Therefore many have already invested in a car. This makes the choice between using that car over public transit for any individual trip much more slanted in favor of using your car.</text></comment>