Human Transit on Los Angeles

The Human Transit blog has an excellent recent post on Los Angeles, and how it could well become the next great “transit metropolis”. There are some pretty big plans floating around Los Angeles at the moment to expand their rail system. The expansion of the rail network is shown in the map below: Los Angeles is, of course, a far far bigger city than Auckland. But in other respects there are some similarities. Both cities are currently extremely car dependent, both cities have widely distributed employment patterns (and therefore relatively weak CBDs) and both cities have higher densities than one would think at first glance (particularly in the case of Los Angeles).

Jarrett, from Human Transit, explains that just because Los Angeles doesn’t have a single, strong CBD, that doesn’t mean it’s not a suitable urban form for public transport:

When I talk about North American public transit to people here in Australia or New Zealand, I don’t talk much about New York or Boston or other old cities where the depth of urban history approaches that of Europe; Australians and New Zealanders already know Europe better than most Americans do. I talk a bit about Portland, because of its land use laws, extensive light rail, and special downtown. I talk about Vancouver, becuase of SkyTrain, and its growth management, but above all because of its dramatic densification over the last few decades.

But when I really want to surprise them, and shift their thinking, I talk about Los Angeles. Educated Australians, like educated Europeans, have mostly been there as tourists, and they remember it with the kind of fascinated delight that could just as well be called horror. Even if they haven’t been there, they know it as the car capital of America, the city they’d least think of as the next great transit metropolis.

Los Angeles may still seem hopelessly car-dominated today, but it’s fortunate in its urban structure, in ways that make it a smart long term bet as a relatively sustainable city, at least in transport terms. Two things in particular: (a) the presence of numerous major centres of activity scattered around the region, and (b) the regular grid of arterials, mostly spaced in a way that’s ideal for transit, that covers much of the city, offering the ideal infrastucture for that most efficient of transit structures: a grid network.

Because Los Angeles is a vast constellation of dense places, rather than just a downtown and a hinterland, it’s full of corridors where there is two-way all-day flow of demand, the ideal situation for cost effective, high quality transit. In this, Los Angeles is more like Paris than it is like, say, New York. Much of the core area between downtown and Santa Monica is covered by a braid of major boulevards, all with downtown at one end and the naturally dense coastal strip at the other, every one a potentially great transit market given appropriate protection from traffic. Near the coast, the massive dense nodes of Westwood/UCLA and to a lesser degree Century City, Santa Monica and Venice offer further anchoring to the western end of these markets. On a smaller scale, similar anchors are found throughout much of the region. While gathering people to a transit stop will still be difficult, it will be especially easy to grow an everywhere-to-everywhere network in Los Angeles, because of these patterns.

The low-end but extensive network of frequent limited-stop buses, the Metro Rapid, grew from this geography, and someday, the busiest rail transit lines in the American West will prosper from it. One of the most interesting long-term questions about Los Angeles is how to fit high-quality transit to a city of great, wide boulevards — another crucial feature in which the city is more like Paris than New York. All or most these boulevards will ultimately need to give over two lanes to crowded and efficient transit services, which will move far more people per hour than car lanes do. But there is much fun and quarrel to be had working out the details. (Light rail or buses? Side lanes or center lanes? Stations configured how, in what relation to the streetscape? Local or rapid stops? The questions abound.)

Densities in many places are lower than ideal, but Los Angeles, more than any city in the world, has a virtually inexhaustable supply of infill opportunities, even if typical middle-class and wealthy suburbs are set aside. If a divine hand prohibited the paving of one more square inch of California, the Los Angeles region would keep growing without a pause.

A lot of this could be said about Auckland too, perhaps with the exception that aside from the central part of the Auckland isthmus, our street pattern generally isn’t that much of a grid. I find it interesting that having a dispersed number of activity/employment nodes can be considered an advantage, because it means that there is an all-day two-way flow of demand. It’s certainly possible to imagine this in Auckland, with areas like Albany, Manukau City, New Lynn and Takapuna becoming increasingly important over time. Already it often seems as though congestion is worse on the harbour bridge and the northern motorway in the non-peak direction flow (obviously exacerbated by there being only three lanes over the bridge, but still).

Having two-way demand for public transport is really really useful, as it means that you can use the public transport resource far more efficiently. It is not an efficient use of buses and train to have them running empty for half their trips, with people only using them to travel into the city in the morning and out of it in the afternoon. Obviously with a dispersed trip pattern it is essential for the public transport system to form a true “network“, but it seems as though Los Angeles is making progress on that, as hopefully Auckland will in the long run.

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