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LA is quite probably the worst layout for a city in America (as in the whole continent), and possibly the worst designed city on earth (by the standards of the premise of a city, i.e., things being close together for human use).
and possibly the worst designed city on earth (by the standards of the premise of a city, i.e., things being close together for human use).
I'd like to introduce you to any Texan city where half of the downtown core is either parking lots or parking structures
Yesterday in a voice call someone asked me if I lived near where the LAPD basically bombed a neighborhood with fireworks, and I looked it up and said something like "oh that's south LA, like 30 miles away from me"
Love living in a city where not-even-the-northernmost-part is 30 miles away from not-even-the-southernmost-part
Heading south on I-5, you'll pass a "San Diego City Limits" sign, and not long after that you'll see a sign saying "San Diego - 21 miles."
Update: for funsies I decided to use the google maps measurement tool; I was actually pretty close, the northernmost part where people actually live (Sylmar) to the southern part of the "mainland" (Lynwood) is about 30 miles. For those who don't know, the official city of LA is almost gerrymandered, because south of that there's a narrow sliver only a few blocks wide that surrounds the freeway down to San Pedro/Long Beach, which are also officially part of the City of LA. Measuring from the absolute northernmost part of the city (5/14 freeway split) to the port, you can get a line of up to 45 miles as the crow flies! Though I think at points you'll be going over non-LA areas
Edit: Also that's basically just the length of Sepulveda Blvd which runs next and parallel to the 405 lol
When I flew over it, I was shocked at how big it was. Complete urban failure.
if gta v was accurate it would take an hour to get 10 blocks during the day.
Traffic was like a once in a while programmed thing but never a consistent thing
What kind of scale are we talking about here? It looks so massive I can't properly comprehend what I'm looking at
The upper left portion is the San Fernando Valley. The bottom middle is South Central. In a car, it's about 40 miles.
Here's an even bigger mindfuck - LA is one of the densest, most walkable and transit accessible urban areas in the US. The majority of Americans live in cities far more spread out than this.
Technically LA is the most dense metro area in the country. Places like NYC are obviously more dense in the core but the further you get away from the core the density drops of rapidly, but because LA needs water the homes never get too spread out and you get a consistent sprawl.
LA only gets a reputation for "sprawl" because it gets directly compared to NYC, and to a lesser extent SF and Chicago. Detroit is far more sprawling than LA, was built at basically the same time as LA with even more single family homes and sprawl, and Detroit, which has worse public transportation that a college town, always gets credit for being a "rust belt pre-car city" whereas LA gets lumped in with Phoenix and Houston unfairly.
Does LA have decent public transportation at least? I know NY has the subway and Chicago has their L trains but no idea about LA.
It's ok in certian areas, it's pretty awful overall.
There's one major subway, 3? Light rail lines, and 2? BRT lines. For a city as big as La that's terrible, but there's a few regioal bus lines that are ok.
there’s a few regioal bus lines that are ok.
That's good at least. I would like some more buses in my area; we've got just one bus that comes whenever it damn well feels like it.
That's how some of the bus lines in LA are. There's quite a few on busy streets with no bus lane that you'll have none for 45 min and then 2 at the same time. It needs a lot of work. Lol
Busses need more love.
I like when a visitor asks us a question about distance we answer in time.
"Plan on taking the family to Disneyland. How far away is it?"
"45 minutes"
So like bashing of LA aside, how would you guys (in good faith) fix or amend the layout, because the giant urban sprawl you see is like several dozen cities put together
Orbital artillery strikesIncrease the city's density by building high-rises and have people concentrate there, mass transit by way of trams, buses and trolleys (while also increasing their frequency to 5-10 minute intervals), either reduce the size of the city size (and grow nature in the free space) or utilize it for industrial areas and higher-density pockets.R E N T C O N T R O L
DECOMMODIFICATION OF HOUSING - "Maoist execution of landlords"
My dream Los Angeles would be every downtown core area in the LA Valley be super dense and entirely walkable areas, separated by giant greenbelts of indigenous plantlife used for hiking and to make clean air, all connected by trams
Los Angeles has the ability to retrofit almost any building to be safe against earthquakes and we have skyscrapers here anyways that are good with earthquakes.
Its all property development bullshit.
LA would be fine if they brought back streetcars and actually developed the metro. The "cool" parts of Los Angeles and a lot of the working class suburbs and satellite cities are actually a great example of reasonably dense urban planning.
Move people out of the city center, replace 1 story buildings with 4+ story ones, shops on the ground floor apartments above, make the apartments public housing to move the people back in and repeat with the next block.
The hard part is politics, and I have no idea what to do about those.
I would also recommend leafy public squares (california oaks, citrus trees, etc.) for people to congregate and the inclusion of more stuff to do that doesn't require money to participate. Get people talking and meeting eachother again
idk but can we raze Beverley Hills (except for the really good pizza restaurant by the museum of dream space I'll die for it and I don't even live in LA)
Make Berverly Hills accessible to all, retrofit the mansions into shared living spaces where people can live communally and turn those acres of lawns into permaculture gardens
