Los Angeles consistently ranks among the most traffic clogged
cities in America.
LA is always in the top three or four sort of most congested
metropolitan areas in the country.
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted that trend, but
traffic is returning. LA is a big city. It is more dense than
it might seem. And it has some natural features, specifically
mountains, that create traffic bottlenecks.
Los Angeles has been trying to reduce its traffic for decades
and nothing has worked. Transportation researchers and
economists say they have an idea that might work but drivers may
find it a bitter pill.
Los Angeles was one of the fastest growing cities in the
world for much of the 20th century. In 1900, 50 years after
the city was incorporated, LA was home to 100,000 people.
In 2020, the city itself was home to nearly 4 million.
Folks forget how big the LA basin is. How much obviously
north to the Valley, how much east into Riverside and Ontario.
You're talking nearly 20 million people in total, most of them
living in automobile oriented designed neighborhoods, which is
a shorthand or longhand way of saying, you've got to drive
everywhere.
In other words, Los Angeles is a city that came of age during the
era of the automobile.
LA originally was actually centralized in terms of a city
and connected by streetcars to surrounding neighborhoods, which
eventually became suburbs, or not became adopted into part of
the central city. So LA came up similar to how New York, Chicago
and Philadelphia did. What's different is that Los Angeles,
due to its age, and its kind of long-term vision invested more
heavily in highways than many of its eastern and midwestern
peers.
A popular explanation for the city's brutal traffic is that it
did not build enough freeways to accommodate drivers in the 20th
century. Others blame early automakers for undermining mass
transit systems to make the city more car friendly. This story
which claims that automakers and other companies conspired to
kill mass transit in Los Angeles has endured. It was actually a
plot point in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit.'
There may be a kernel of truth to this somewhere, but it really
doesn't explain LA's traffic problem. Los Angeles did have
plans for a far more expensive freeway and highway system in
the 20th century than the one that eventually got built. And
yes, a consortium of companies invested in automobiles,
including automaker General Motors, bought up streetcar
routes in LA. At the time, the streetcars formed perhaps the
best mass transit system in the world. This consortium converted
streetcar lines into bus routes. But streetcars were already
struggling by the time they were bought up by this consortium at
fire sale prices. And their decline in Los Angeles was very
similar to what we've seen elsewhere in the US, including
in cities where this consortium did not operate.
It seems persuasive to argue that if the streetcar lines were
not torn up in LA, the city would still have a far better
transit system than it does today. And a population that is
accustomed to riding public transit rather than driving. But
mass transit does not save a city from congestion.
If you look at some of the the places in the world that have
the absolute best transit systems and the highest levels
of transit ridership, I guarantee you, you are also
looking at places with terrible traffic congestion, and New York
is one of them. Again, what transit does is it gives you the
option of avoiding congestion. But that's different. Most of
the time when we talk about reducing congestion, what we
mean is, I'm going to get in my car, and it's going to go
faster, there's going to be less traffic. Right? That doesn't
describe New York, it doesn't describe Tokyo, it doesn't
describe Hong Kong.
Another common explanation is that the freeway system, as it
had been planned in the late 1950s, was never completed.
The freeway system ran out of money starting in the 70s. And a
combination of those funding shortfalls, and some resistance,
local resistance to extending it, means that if you look at
the map of what LA's freeways were supposed to look like, we
have a freeway system that is incomplete.
But that doesn't really explain it.
We have also, with the freeways we have, we have widened them
many times, we have added to them. None of that makes a dent
in the level of congestion, right? So you could
simultaneously believe that had our freeway system been built
out to the measurements that we had initially anticipated, it
would be a more effective freeway system. But also
understand that it would be every bit as congested. And of
course, there would be tremendous human and
environmental cost to us. Having built that out. The freeway
system was very destructive in many ways. And so it's probably
just as well that we didn't build it out.
When a city is considered the most congested it typically
means it is the place where drivers on average spend the
longest amount of time in their cars getting from one place to
another. All other things like distance being equal.
We're very comfortable saying the traffic in LA is worse than
it is in Montpelier, Vermont. But when you get down to trying
to measure congestion between the Washington DC metro area and
Boston and Seattle and LA, you end up making a lot of judgment
calls that could really tip the balance one way or the other.
GPS technology company, TomTom, ranked Los Angeles in 2020 as
the worst city in the country for traffic and the 85th worst
in the world. According to that study, in 2017, Angelenos spent
nearly five entire days and over $2,600 sitting in traffic. The
pandemic upset these kinds of rankings a bit. INRIX, a
transportation analytics firm, publishes a widely cited global
traffic scorecard every year. In 2021, LA was the sixth most
congested city in the United States and ranked for 33rd for
the whole world. Among American cities, it came in behind New
York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Miami. Its reduced
ranking was due in large part to the circumstances of the
pandemic, and Angelenos still spent about 62 hours stuck in
traffic in 2021, compared to the national average of 36.
It was still top and at least one category: the most congested
stretch of road in the US was still the Interstate-5 highway
in Los Angeles from Euclid Avenue to Interstate-605 with 22
minutes of delay at the four o'clock pm peak hour. And though
LA's congestion may not be quite as bad as it is in New York, the
city's layout spreads the aggravation of traffic
congestion across a wider swath of the city.
Traffic is terrible in the densest parts of New York City,
but it quickly thins out as the city gives way to suburbs. Los
Angeles, on the other hand, has miles and miles and miles of
moderate density.
In some ways, what we've done with our development patterns
here is given ourselves the worst of all worlds. Right, we
have a region that's low enough density where you have to drive,
but high enough density where the driving is miserable.
LA is also bisected by mountains, a problem few other
American cities have. Those mountains create some of the
worst bottlenecks in the city. One example is the Sepulveda
Pass on the 405 freeway where traffic has to come over the
hill to get to Santa Monica, Venice and West LA.
Additionally, Angelenos are more vulnerable to traffic than New
Yorkers or Chicagoans are, primarily because they have
fewer options. New York alone accounts for 40% of all transit
ridership in the entire US.
In Los Angeles, fewer than 5% of trips are made on transit.
If you live in New York City, if you live in downtown Boston, you
are in probably one of the most congested parts of a very
congested region. But you also have a way to avoid it. The
chances are some of your trips can be made by walking, some of
your trips can be made by a pretty effective public
transportation system. The same is true in San Francisco. That's
not nearly as true in Los Angeles.
One thing a lot of planners and economists are skeptical of, if
not downright opposed to, is just expanding or widening
freeways and roads. There is a concept known as induced demand.
It basically means if you build it, people will come. The idea
is that improving capacity seems to alleviate traffic
temporarily, but eventually highways become clogged again.
Essentially, bad traffic deters people from driving in the first
place. If more roads are built a lot more people may decide to
drive or they may take more trips than they otherwise would.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Katy Freeway in
Houston, Texas. It costs $2.8 billion to build and has 26
lanes at its widest point. This was the result of a massive
expansion plan that was meant to alleviate traffic congestion.
But some analysts using government traffic data found
that congestion worsened after widening the freeway.
If you go from a three lane highway to a four lane highway,
even if it not as congested as it was before you're still
moving 33% more people by adding that lane than you were before.
So as far as a volume metric of how much traffic, or it's like
expanding a pipe for water, you know, you'll get more water
through even though it flows at the same rate.
Transit can at least offer some alternatives to being stuck in
traffic as it does in cities like New York, Angelenos have
said they want more of it. A recent example is the Los
Angeles County traffic improvement plan, also known as
Measure M. It was a large transportation sales tax
approved in 2016 by 71.5% of the county's voters. The measure
raised the county sales tax by a half cent and also made an
earlier temporary transportation sales tax increase permanent.
Proponents estimate it will generate $860 million a year or
more than $120 billion over 40 years. 65% of the funding will
go to improving transit, although a lot of the money will
also funnel into improvements for road and pedestrian and
bicycle infrastructure.
In general, traffic is almost impossible to solve because all
you have to do is look in the mirror every morning. You are
the traffic. It's not just the people around you. So what we've
learned, not just in Los Angeles, but in mega cities
across the planet (London, Tokyo) is that the only solution
to traffic is to give people choices. And that's something
that Los Angeles has previously struggled with, but is now
making generational investments in. There's no real room for new
highways and they would quickly fill up anyways, all around Los
Angeles and the surrounding counties. But giving people more
transit alternatives, in particular for higher speed rail
lines, that actually could get people out of their cars and
using LA MTA for many more of their trips.
Many researchers and economists suggest charging people for
using the road. Congestion pricing is already at work in
some countries, including Singapore, Sweden and the UK. It
means drivers pay to drive into certain parts of the city. This
payment might work through things like the EZ Pass
Tollbooth transponders that electronically charge drivers a
toll when they pass through a toll gate. It could also be a
relatively manageable tool.
If you can charge a toll at a busy time, that's just high
enough to deter 5% of the vehicles or something from
getting on the road then, you can actually make speeds
improved by, you know, 15-20%. Right? So it doesn't have to be
this sort of astronomically high toll. It just has to be enough
to sort of nudge a small proportion of people into
reconsidering making that trip at that time by car.
It does, however, have one important problem: drivers hate
it. It's very difficult to get people to pay for something that
had been previously considered free. And most people consider
using the roads to be free.
Adopting congestion fees anywhere in the United States
has been really challenging from a political angle. Famously,
during the Bloomberg administration in New York City,
the mayor was blocked by the state and Albany from adopting a
congestion fee. And that is in one of the easiest places in
theory. You're dealing with an island where the major central
business districts are, you also have real rail alternatives so
people could get out of their cars and still have pretty time
competitive options into the city. And even there, it was
challenging.
Some critics considered a kind of regressive form of taxation
that can be more of a burden on the poor than the wealthy. Some
toll lanes have been called Lexus lanes after the luxury
Japanese car brand. It also opens up the question of what
you do with the money.
That creates a whole new situation, where, should it be
reinvested into that road? Or should users of one road pay for
another road? Or should users of that pay for something like
transit. Most drivers don't want to see that money go into a
slush fund for something, they want it to benefit them somehow.
What's essential from learning from our European and Asian
peers, is to take those tax revenues and invest them back in
other forms of transportation, most notably public
transportation, and also bike lanes, and actually just giving
people other discounts for driving. So those who are most
susceptible to price hikes, but don't necessarily have the time
to donate, will be given real competitive alternatives to
driving. So you actually can rebalance how people travel.
Congestion pricing is already active in the form of high
occupancy toll lanes on freeways. These are basically
lanes that allow carpoolers to ride for free and others to buy
their way into the lane with a toll. New York City is also on
its way to instituting congestion pricing following
cities such as London, Singapore and Stockholm. There are also
pilot programs under consideration in Portland, San
Francisco and other cities in America. Supporters say it is a
market driven solution. Currently, traffic exists
because cities give away something for free, that is
limited: space on the road. When a resource is offered for free,
it will quickly become scarce and people will pay for it in
some other way. In this case with time.
Time is the thing you can't get back. And so right now, the way
we run our surface transportation system is we ask
people to squander their absolutely most precious
resource, and give them in return a bad road system.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also changed a lot. Traffic is up
near pre-pandemic levels even in Los Angeles, but there are some
meaningful differences. Credit rating agency, Moody's, said in
March of 2021, it expects a permanent 20% drop in transit
ridership in cities around the world, though the effect will be
softened over time by new riders.
And while INRIX said Angelenos lost 62 hours to congestion in
2021, they still saved 41 hours over pre-pandemic levels. There
are still many unknowns and that has implications for cities that
are trying to plan improvements to their roads and transit
systems.
I think we need to find a way to build some flexibility into our
planning and into these systems. We don't know how much
telecommuting is going to take off. We don't know exactly when
transit is going to come back to pre-Covid levels, you know
probably a few years. We don't know what travel patterns are
going to look like.