Probably the main reason I've never visited LA is the lack of public transport. I see those 6-lane highways on TV, people cutting in and out of traffic, and it scares me shitless.

I remember an English guy posting an AskMe once where he said he'd just passed his UK driving test and was flying out to LA, planned on renting a car and driving from the airport through LA. I wonder if he's still alive ...

Heh. The funny thing is, freeway driving isn't really that much different here than any of the other major U.S. cities I've ever driven in -- lots of 4- and 6-laners in every big city, I've found, with the terrifying dodging from one side to the other when you've got to make an exit on the right a quarter mile after you've merged onto the highway from the left.

It's worse on some freeways than others in L.A.; I'll avoid the Harbor/Pasadena freeway like the plague in certain parts (especially going through downtown) because of the perpetual need to careen across 4 or 6 lanes to get where I'm going. But I'm on the Hollywood freeway daily, and I almost never have to do this. So it's dependent on where you're going and which route you're taking to get there.

Anyhow, I thought the article was interesting, in that it explains really clearly what the overwhelming problem in L.A. is, in terms of any plans to improve public transport -- and that is the total lack of centrality. It's not just that the city is massively huge; it's that it's totally dispersed. I can literally go months without ever having to be downtown, so a public transportation plan centered around downtown would, by it's very nature, be useless for me. This is fundamentally different from cities like Chicago; I think that L.A. became such a sprawl in the postwar era in part precisely because it no longer had a public transportation system that would keep development and expnasion tethered to a sense of centrality, unlike other cities that never had public transportation removed from the equation in the first place.

It's almost like there would have to be multiple "regional" systems within the city that centered around a series of major hubs to even make it work efficiently and effectively for the majority (or even a large minority) of the city's population.

I remember an English guy posting an AskMe once where he said he'd just passed his UK driving test and was flying out to LA, planned on renting a car and driving from the airport through LA.

Yeah, place that in the "Solid Pair of Brass Ones" file.

Anyhow, I thought the article was interesting, in that it explains really clearly what the overwhelming problem in L.A. is, in terms of any plans to improve public transport -- and that is the total lack of centrality.

That's what I've always thought. It's easy to extrapolate from the NY experience and say that if it works here, it should work everywhere. But NYC is more built up than almost everywhere else in North America.

It would take a radical restructuring of LA in order to make it amenable to traditional transit systems and I don't see that happening without some kind of Oil Apocalypse.

Thanks for all of your contributions. Much obliged!