I owned a bike while in LA and it’s a very hostile city towards bikers. You feel like people are genuinely trying to hit you and bike theft is very common. I actually stopped riding my bike because someone totaled it trying to steal it. The city would need to address all these problems in order for people to feel comfortable riding a bike.
I brought my bike with me when I moved to LA, and within the first 2 weeks I was hit by a car which then drove off. The message was loud and clear: bicyclists don't matter in this city
I got an ebike 8 months ago and it's changed my relationship with the city. It makes short trips less than 4 miles actually enjoyable instead of worrying about traffic and parking. Unfortunately the bike infrastructure makes some trips overly complicated to try to avoid busy roads, and many intersections need to be bike friendly.
You should do this same presentation at a city council meeting. I’m with you on this one. I’ve been thinking for a while that if cars had never been invented, Southern California could have been one of the best places in the world to live. Look at the historic downtown built in the gilded age. Absolute masterpieces of architecture. In 1950, LA had the best public transit in the world. And then the car came along.
So it wasn't the invention of the car that ruined L.A., it was the corporate centered, racist and classist policies promulgated by the Democrat-dominated federal government in the 1930s to 1970s and Republican-dominated federal government since then.
Same thing - to a lesser extent - for us on the Lakes. People talk all the time about the East, West, and South coasts, completely forgetting about the Lakes which, when put together, have a coastline of about 4,500 miles for just the USA. To put that in perspective, the 14 states on the East Coast have about 2,200 and California's got about 1,300. With it all being fresh water, and the climate being either chilly or warm most of the year, we've got the potential to turn this whole region into the manufacturing capital, breadbasket, and/or happiest place to live in the world. So much potential, yet little to show for it, sadly. Chicago was headed in the right direction, and back in the day it was compared to Paris! Now it's just another generic parking lot like all the other cities in this country. After WW2 the whole region really kicked off and boomed more than California did, but after the manufacturing left due to globalization so did the money. Now it's called the rustbelt, just to add insult to injury. I had to join the Navy and move to South Carolina to get an education, even though my home region has more potential than Scandinavia.
LA is far from flat. Very hilly city, but I understand the idea and agree. The best thing quarantine did was allow the expansion of outdoor seating permits on business. Made street seating abundant and in some neighborhoods, completely shut down streets making things very communal. LA would benefit from it, but it needs to loose about half its car population for those changes to even start
I agree that LA has potential, but I think you've overblown the perfect weather bit. A lot of "anti bike" people use bad weather as a reason for not having bike infrastructure, but there's little to no correlation between biking and weather. The only thing that determines how many people bike is how much bike infrastructure you have and how well you maintain it.
Idk man, pretty sure I’d be more inclined to ride a bike if it never rained or snowed ever. Minneapolis has some of the best biking infrastructure in the country but it barely gets used in the winter because, you guessed it, the weather sucks and nobody consistently uses it when there’s slush on the ground
@@DiegoMagengo I dont' think that is 100% it. There is a city in Finland with year round bike users (oulu). th-cam.com/video/Uhx-26GfCBU/w-d-xo.html I think an important part of the video is bike lane maintenance in the winter. Minnesota probably doesn't properly clear and salt the bike lanes.
@@advokatie or the lack of a bike lane in itself. Or the parking in the right lane of the road. Or the asshole drivers who’ll pass on the right at 45+ mph making biking especially at night frightening. There will likely need to be over +10 billion spent in order to make the changes needed
Wow, I can't believe it. A video that's actually highlighting a potentially positive thing about LA instead of tearing it down. Very nice video! I enjoyed it. Keep up the good work.
Unfortunately I think we still have a long way to go. I see way way way too many NIMBYs on NextDoor complaining about Bonin's half-ass road diet along Venice Blvd that just added a partially protected bicycle gutter. We need public attitudes around bikes to change and these people are the loudest.
1:02 I’m working on undertunnel extensions on highways + roads on top of highways + flying cars to 5-6x layers of cars flowing everyday with mass traffic cuts + autonomous use when idle + menial druv8ng when in the open or doing your own route n stuff, look up mikeohawk labs and atom former related documents + atom hover vehicles docs today
Great video! If you visit LA, try to come during an event called “Ciclavia”, where the city shuts down several roads to cars to allow cycling. It’s wonderful to experience this kind of potential firsthand.
@@cjspeak So true, I also noticed I discover more of the small businesses along the routes. I wouldn't have noticed these places otherwise because I'm usually driving quickly past in a vehicle.
@@nfc3478 No, its an LA re-spelling of Bogota, Columbia’s Ciclovia events. Every month or two a stretch of ~5 to ~15 miles of streets are closed off to cars for a day.
I briefly studied urban design and was planning on being a city planner. The city of L.A. actually had that one opportunity going back 100 years ago. The Olmsted Bros, the same ones who created Central Park had plans to do the same in Southern California where there would be a series of mini Central Parks spread from the Long Beach area as far west as Malibu, north to Burbank and as far east as the budget would've allowed. The second was the buildings itself. Angelinos in the 1920s wanted a city that didn't replicate the "gray jungles" of the east. Which explains why the city is spread out and the first skyscraper didn't exist until the late 1920s. Lloyd Wright, son the the famed architect, Frank Lloyd Wright also designed a downtown for L.A. in the early 1920s that did not look like any of the established skyscrapers we knew at that point in time. It was suppose to be a cohesive unit similar to what you remember from the 1970s movie, Logan's Run where a series of monorail would lead from the outskirts of the valleys into the city that would've looked like a dome where the parking structure and monorail station would be located underneath the entire city. There would be one main street where visitors.could.easily access the different buildings and have its separate operating walkway like.an escalator, except it moves.horizontally. The rivers. L.A. in the early 1900s suffered from lots of floods. Which was why they cemented the main arteries of their rivers. What they should've done instead was work with the Olmsted idea and create mini lakes to go with the parks. The foot of the river near the mountains should've been a.damn where they could've used for.electricity purposes.and provided for their own fresh water system and have better controlled river flow. The reason this didn't happen was the 1920s LA Council simply thought it was too radical. Money was not yet an issue and the Great Depression would not happen until the late 1920s. The most controversial reason was the oil issue. Oil tycoons sought to take advantage of the growing auto industry. Freeways/highways did not exist yet until Pres Eisenhower made it law in the 1950s. The oil tycoons alongside Ford Motors saw a booming market where cars and the gas industry would first see its initial national push. And I believe L.A. was ground zero for this. NYC, Chicago and SF were already established with their own subway system and skyscrapers. L.A. didn't have this yet. So instead of utilizing the monorail and mini central parks, it would not surprise anyone if those same oil.tycoons paid off that 1920s LA Council from accepting those alternate and sound proposals mentioned earlier. And so here we are today.
You mentioned how NYC, Chicago, and SF were already established with their own subway systems and that LA didn’t have this yet but that’s not true. LA had the Pacific Electric Railway, aka the red cars, that was the largest electric railway system in the World.
Also the dam wouldn't stop the river from flooding. The rain in the city falls everywhere, not just on the foothills and mountains. So, still needed to be paved. To keep from flooding
As a New Yorker visiting LA, I could see the potential. I’d probably won’t go back for a long time, the heavy dependence on cars and the insane amount of homeless people is a big turn off.
True, I actually live here and want 2 leave. I want 2 live in a place where I can walk to a store or restaurant from my house. As long as the internet is good I will live almost anywhere.
People are dependent on cars because the area is so vast and spread out. Even tho NY is more populated it’s no where near the size of LA county and surrounding areas. You need a car to live in Southern California and have a life
@@liberalsocialist9723 not many places in the us have walkability. I would say Philly, Chicago and NYC are the ones that come to mind. Puerto Rico also has some great areas especially if it’s a colonial town.
Being Dutch and informed about cityplanning. You briefly mentioned that cars and the places people go to should be more connected. I find that quite the understatement. You really have to not only redesign the infrastructure, but moreso the disolution of districts as a whole. In most Dutch cities including Amsterdam and Western Europe. People have mixed communities, residential, business, schools, restaurants, cafe's, shops, public spaces and parks are always close by. That's why there is no need to drive a car everywhere. Ofcourse we use cars here and have suburbs, but not in the extend as in the US. It's so normal here to go to work, go to the supermarket, go to uni/school, go to the gym, meet friends later at night, go on a date or clubbing. All on the bike that same day. Because most of those amenities are within a 5km (3mile) radius. - Though our country is flatter than a pancake which makes biking more suitable to do so and since LA is much larger. The public transport should commute people from cityhub to cityhub, so the overall distance to anywhere usefull would be deminished. I fear that the mindset of the people should also change, if the citizens are not aware of the benefits or the benefits to do so are scarse, it won't change much I'm afraid. The state gouvernment could also play it's part there I think. - Thank you for your insights anyways Thomas. Greets from the other side of the Atlantic😉
@Moon Shine LA is not bigger than the Netherlands, the Netherlands is 16,000 square miles while even LA county is only around 4,700 square miles, unless you mean Amsterdam specifically in which case yes LA is larger
Its more of a cultural thing mate. American culture was built around the individual and one will see that almost all american cities don't have a city center or square like europe. Americans are fine with getting in their cars and driving to "cultural" or "shopping" centers. So North America will continue to build its grid cities wide as there is still plenty of land on this continent.
I agree. The mentality of the people in LA needs to change first. We have a lot of crime here too. I would never ride a bike here, not because I don’t want to, it’s because I’m too scared of the homeless, crazy people walking around like zombies in drugs, and drivers constantly hit and kill cyclists and pedestrians. It’s just to uncivilized here, people here are way behind the time’s mentally.
Nah we got a nice metro system that is quickly expanding the problem is there are unstable and tweaked out homeless people that make it almost unusable literally a homeless shelter on wheels
@@moonshine8255 stop with that bs excuse of "US TOO BIG". That's a massive oversimplification. It's the way the land is used that's a problem (urban sprawl) and can be fixed
Another Dutch trick: Make it impossible for cars to go through a neighbourhood. Say you want to go by car from the south side to the north side of the neighbourhood. The only way to do this is to go around the neighbourhood, because the direct route is blocked for cars. On bicycle and foot you can take the direct route. This keeps a lot of car traffic out of the neighbourhood, and makes it more attractive to cycle or walk to your destination.
Cul-de-sacs could have a bike path or at least a walkway that continues on and connects to the other side of the block. I've seen this done in the Salt Lake area and I thought that was a great idea.
@@sunandsage From 1975-85 culs-de-sac neighbourhoods were very popular in NL (socalled 'cauliflower neighbourhoods'). One Big difference was, that the most direct roads in those hoods are dedicated cycle paths, with many exits. Vehicles had to drive winding narrow streets with a selected nr of exits ... And the same with a lot other neighbourhoods are (re) designed as Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) with one way streets for vehicles, bollards preventing rat race thru limited access. Usually cars are forced to make a limited detour, while there are many direct routes for bikes and pedestrians..
American cul-de-sacs tried doing this but in their designs completely disregarded pedestrians and cyclists as there are basically no short-cuts for them. By making all these long and circuitous routes therefore incentivizing driving...
Tried that it london ,they are called low traffic neighbourhoods and is a limited a success causing traffic congestion and diverting traffic to poorer neighbourhood .
@@juliantandoh4042 How come that did not happen in Holland or Denmark ?! It is hard to judge for any individual case, junction or street.. But these claims are myths (ab)used by 'Car Brained' opponents. Or maybe not even deliberite , but caused by the 'Observer Effect' : after the LTN change any congestion is labeled as caused by the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods .. There was even an EMS officer who mentioned longer response times .... but his own organisation could not find any systematic problem with their response time by the ltns . Imperial College did a study in 3 ltn areas in the Islington Boroughs. Just as within the ltns traffic decreased in the surrounding areas (50% & 13%)and NO2 levels even more so than within the ltns (5.7% & 9%) ! It is also not true that ltn are mostly in well off areas. The opposite . There are more in like Hackney , Lambeth and mentioned Islington. How that develops in the future is to be seen, as real estate prices rise faster in ltns, because they are popular (scarcity is a thing, just like in US with the few multi zoned mixed use neighbourhood to become pricy...) Although in London many ltn have been installed hastly and could have been communicated better, 63% of people living there appreciate it and 47% not living in ltn, would think it would improve living. In Walthamstow (the Mini-Holland, with a lot of ltns since 2014), the response time of Fire Brigade went down and the life expectancy has increased. According the British Medical Journey streetcrime went down 13%, 3 years after installing street filters and the risk on injury decreased by 75%. So it is not so strange that in a survey in 4 UK cities (LDN, BMH, Bristol, Leeds), 85% of households was in favour of traffic filtering and just 8% against..
Really shifting my perspective on LA as a San Franciscan. Whenever I visit it feels like a very hostile place for bikes, and I've never really imagined it to be anything else. Really love how you pointed out the density compared to Amsterdam in some areas. Imagining LA without the constant sound of the highway and cars in the background... Is surprisingly beautiful! That AI walkable street generator is a really cool project btw thx for sharing!
The most infurating thing about living in LA was that a 10 mile commute could easily take an hour. If everyone switched to bikes you could literally get everywhere twice as fast.
@@sunandsage since 48% of trips are less than three miles, and im sure a large portion of the rest are less than 10 miles, if many of those 3 mile and under drivers converted to biking it would make driving 10 miles much faster. By reducing the amount of cars on the road, you increase speeds to those further places. Obviously then it would also be important to increase the metro system, but even just by becoming bike friendly you would help the 10 mile travelers
@@sunandsage everyone switched to bikes it would benefit everyone I think they mean. But nothing wrong with a 10 mile commute. I used to commute 10kms by bike to work along an unbroken bike path. It wasn't hard at all. My mate does two and a half times it which is about 10 miles on the same stretch. We're not 'cyclists'. It was leisurely and took the same time as driving. Cause signed traffic speeds have nothing to do with average speeds, even when there's nobt traffic. I wasn't even getting jacked legs from it shame actually. 10 miles might have started getting me fit. But anyway most people would be doing like 2 or 3 miles and those who want to do 10 would still benefit
I’ve lived in LA my entire life, and over the past 20 years that I’ve been here the key reasoning you missed in why LA falls short when it comes to public transportation, parks, etc. is the housing crisis. It’s quite sad honestly, because homelessness has always existed in LA especially in the downtown Skid Row area, but has only been growing with the pandemic, the gentrification of LA from social media’s influencers romanticization of the city, and to add to insult to injury we’re entering a recession. The rapid growth of the city, and lack of housing growth has led to the massive displacement of our population where’s where the “Californians are driving up the rents” notion comes from. This homelessness issue has only stunted the growth of LA’s public transit by plaguing our public transportation system with stigmatization of it being unsanitary, unreliable, dangerous, and not worth the effort of investing into. As someone who’s taken public transportation my entire life these stereotypes aren’t completely wrong, but ignoring the issue as a whole definitely doesn’t help:/
@@ifetayodavidson-cade5613 True I am from California and would bike 2 college even though the walk lanes were narrow and at times I had 2 bike in the car lanes to get 2 the school. One time a homeless man attempting to swing at me while I was biking. Luckily I didn't get hurt, but that event lead me 2 stop biking and start driving.
oh those people with prejudices just because of homeless people in the subways need to grow a pair, New York and San Francisco have been dealing with much grosser transportation systems than LA has and everyone takes them still because it's still faster and more convenient than driving. If LA pivots to making it harder on cars, the people will follow suit.
I've lived in L. A. for over 20 years without a personal vehicle, utilizing public transit for my daily commute to work, and walking for almost all personal activities. Throwing the homeless population out there as a reason as to why Los Angeles is carcentric is definitely reaching and possibly an attempt to needlessly introduce a political flashpoint term into the conversation. The core reason Angelenos are car dependent is due to a lack of infrastructure that supports alternative transportation methods, along with little to no incentives to develop new habits and attitudes that ultimately adopts car free lifestyles.
I ride the Santa Monica Blvd bike gutter to work in Century City everyday and it's so terrifying with drivers going 55mph and 3 lanes right next to you! Really want the city of LA to step up its cycling game.
They need to create physical barriers between cyclists and car drivers - LA is such a car heavy city that this needs to be done for safety. It could also look really cool and green so that's a plus.
Hey bro, it was a pretty interesting/detailing story and the thumbnail was really nice and inviting.. Once I clicked on the video it was just as good as the inviting thumbnail and you kept my interest going till the end.. Best of Luck to you.. Looks like you got a great start..
as an "urbanist" Angeleno, this is a great video with honestly a pretty good counterpoint to most other urbanist youtubers (who I also still respect) who I think often don't know the city and don't want to bother to get to know or research it to give it a fair critique. LA has just long been the punching bag of the urbanist community, and is often treated as unsalvageable. I am a bit tired of all the hate given that, as you mentioned, LA has arguably been investing more heavily into transit than any other metro area in the nation; often imperfectly, but still, very stark improvements that, once things hit a certain inflection point and they solve the "last mile" issue for many commuters, will I think reap significant benefits. as of right now, the expansion in rail has been dramatic over the past couple decades, but still incomplete for a large city. It still needs time and further investment for it to become interconnected enough to reap the benefits (with many very good projects under active construction to that end, including the purple line extension, rail connection to the airport, and the regional connector downtown). and I think the city has proved open to constructive criticism: e.g., critiques regarding investment in rail versus the sprawling bus system, which I think the city has heard given their recent push to improve bus headways (again, as you mentioned). they seem to now be considering critiques regarding biking, and hopefully they will improve upon their current plans in the coming years. Look, urban tranist planning never goes 100% smoothly, but I'm very bullish on LA over the next decade.
As someone that lives in LA, I can say that the biggest obstacle to improving this city's transportation infrastructure is it's culture. I'm not just talking about car culture and the fact that people actually would rather be stuck in their cars and drive everywhere, which is a thing, but also this city's long history with classicism and racism. It's extremely segregated and that's not an accident. We used to have the largest street car network of any city in the world, but it was stripped out and paved over because affluent white people realized that black people couldn't come to their neighborhood if there was no public transportation because most black people couldn't afford a car at the time. That ideology still persists to this day: Beverly Hills fought tooth and nail to try to keep a metro stop from being added to their neighborhood in the most recent expansion of the metro. The other thing is that LA is the center of the entertainment industry, and in this industry, the appearance of wealth and connections is essential to actually getting wealth and connections. This means that the neighborhood you live in has become a status symbol that can affect future employment. Employers will ask job applicants in the interview what neighborhood they live in, and the way they answer that question matters. For this reason, people who live in good neighborhoods absolutely do not want to make it easier for people who can't afford to drive to be able to come to their neighborhood because they see that as a direct threat to their employment prospects.
Luckily, culture changes if it has to, LA hasn't always been a car-centric city and you just have to look at New York, and the many metropolises of Europe to see how the wealthy can shift their signifiers. Just because a city shifts its focus towards people and public transportation doesn't mean cars are eliminated altogether, it just means the cities won't be designed and have policies with cars in mind. Heck, a better focus on people means, the cars will be able to move even more freely because there's less traffic altogether.
@@josephbernados1649 To get rid of cars altogether is the best thing the world can do. Cars are unnecessary and should've never been built to begin with.
Love the sit-down format. Love the short cuts. Like the steady tone, I'm not a fan of the copy-paste sing-sing-y voice that annoys me in a lot of American TH-camrs. I abhor arrow thumbnails, but not gonna lie I do have an immense need to click on them. Keep it up, I'm happy the algorithm made me find you!
LA used to have a great street car/tram network. Rebuilding that would help provide for short inner city journeys that don’t justify getting a bus or metro. If the city builds for all the five ways of getting around (walk, bike, tram, bus, metro) then car journeys would drop dramatically across the inner city and all that valuable real estate lost to parking could be freed up!
It was called the red car. I've seen a map of how extensive that was. It's too bad they got rid of it. What the area has now is a good start but they need quite a bit more.
I've been saying this ever since I went to LA without a car for some medical things at UCLA. I traveled around purely by train and bus, and all I could see was tremendous potential for the city. I really believe it will turn out to be the best city in America in time. I know it's a car centric hellhole right now, but it has the foundation to actually fix that. And not just for weather, but the grid layout is amazing for bus lines and trolleys/light rail.
you are optimistic but I doubt it bc of the politics in Ca. It's too racist, classist, and divided politically. This traffic problem didn't just show up a few years ago and I know for sure bicycles have been around since before you and i were born. It's a corrupt city with a bunch of fake people. It's like finding a needle in a hay stack when you do find that unique gem of a really really good wholesome person.
@@supertenor561 luckily a lot of the needed reforms to allow density have just been done at the state level, and the city of LA has been continually investing in their transit system. I think making LA great again is already happening. But yeah you are right about the politicians there. Hopefully they don’t slow things down too much.
I enjoyed your video and I think the information was eye opening. Biking has been a great passion of mine and when I lived in DC I commuted by bike for 8 years. I liked that you included opposing arguments and your response to the specific arguments. The thumbnail for the video looked clean and professional. Fantastic job! I am going to subscribe!
LA will imo never become Amsterdam of the US, Car culture is entrenched here and the whole city is built for it. I think a better City might be Philadelphia and here in California we have cities like Santa Barbara, SLO, and Davis where a lot of trips take place on bikes
Thomas, the County’s Bike Master Plan focuses only on the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles. The city of Los Angeles has its own Bike Master Plan which comprehensively covers all communities within the city. Also, Metro is a regional transit agency which is separate from the city of LA.
This nicely illustrates one of the biggest barriers to good urban design in LA: our fragmented governance, and how y democratic that governance can be. We have a county of 10 Million with 5 elected Representatives, while a country like Finland has a parliament of 100 MPs for half that population. Meanwhile, we also have dozens of tiny cities with massive amounts of power over land use and transportation, but no incentive to work collectively or towards a common goal. Hell, some cities are literally designed to keep one family in power - looking at you, City of Commerce. It’s a nightmare that entrenches special interests and stops progress - fixing it on a broad level is going to be key.
Hey, this is a great video from a content and a production standpoint! Good to see that you spent your budget on a good microphone instead of furniture 😅. You're already doing a few things right: no annoying intro, good audio quality, use of B-roll. You may try ending the video sharply after your last point to help with retention , but you're already sort of doing that. Where I live, I totally agree with you: it is the good bike infrastructure that has the biggest impact on cutting my car usage, not just transit. Anyways, welcome to the Urbanist Movement!
As a kid L.A always was a dream city for me to live as a european I dont exactly trust politicians to be able to do this but if its possible ill pray for it to work.
I love channels like this because it entirely goes against the attitude I've seen around people in SoCal recently, that everything's just gonna get worse, there's nothing we can do about it, and we have to get out of here before it happens, when in reality, if we push hard enough, we can make LA the city it was always promised to be.
Well La isn’t exactly flat but I agree with you. I would love to see a lot more trains in our city. I’m originally from London and it’s something I wish US cities would take that from other cities.
Wanted to say thanks for doing a video that isn't trashing LA or California in bad faith. LA is a good city. There's a reason everyone from sultans to hobos call this place home. Hollywood kinda sucks bc of the type of person it attracts but there are some nice people there. Also little talked about is the large Hispanic population. Mexicans in particular set the tone of LA culture in a very positive way. LOVELY folks. It took me a while to get used to people smiling and waving asking me how I'm doing all the time outside. CA ain't perfect and people not from here sure love to point it out. Californians aren't even a little bothered by the hate which is forever hilarious. I hope we fix our transit system here in Los Angeles. So glad I live in a walkable neighborhood and don't have a commute. Don't miss those days. Oh and one thing is for sure: Coastal SoCal has the most weather in the US.
I like your optimistic can-do spirit. The map of high-density areas in central LA simply and graphically shows the city's potential to become less car dependent and much more bikeable and walkable. Thanks for pointing that out. The magnitude of wealth and time expended in car dependency is crazy. It's also weirdly dehumanizing when seen on the scale of major US metro areas. There's something apocalyptic about pictures of a perpetually jammed 405. Contrast that with Tokyo's endless car-free little commercial streets brimming with life...
Very accurate observation. LA has tons of potential if they can just reduce the amount of cars on the road and reduce the homeless population. Even with its problems I still think the quality of life there is better than any place in Texas, despite so many people moving to Texas thinking it’s gonna give them a better life. Sure you’ll have a big new home for much less than you would in California, but you’ll be stuck in your car even more than in LA, because of the car centric design of all the cities and neighbors in Texas and on top of that, the weather is terrible 90% of the time.
Exactly. The weather if bad, you’re stuck in a car more. And people STILL choose to move to Texas. Why? Sunk cost fallacy. Most people already have a car and use it for 1-2 decades. Also paying for parking is seen as taxing the poor. Multiple city council men and women from the richer districts of LA proposed limiting parking, and all the poorer districts said NO. You can find bike infrastructure in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica because they weren’t swallowed by the big city of LA and have wealthier citizens.
reducing the number of cars on the road consequentially reduces homelessness as car infrastructure chews up lots of space. There is more surface area in LA dedicated to parking lots than housing. This causes a housing shortage and drives up housing costs which increase homelessness. Another thing that will reduce car dependency is allocating more surface area of the city to mixed-use development. Why can't we have something as basic as a small grocery store that is a < 5-minute walk from where we live?
car centric cities are not good. but not being able to afford housing, having half your money stolen by a government , having a homeless problem unparalleled almost anywhere else in the united states … is much worse . and la is barely any better than austin or san antonio
I can vouch for the hellish weather in Texas. I live in New Orleans where it's torrid six months out of every year, but in '04 my partner and I evacuated to Texas for Hurricane Ivan and compared to urban New Orleans, suburban Houston was a blast furnace.
I used to live in that area. I don't recall the area having perfect weather year-round. It doesn't snow there but it does rain and it also gets quite hot during much of the summer, but you don't need perfect weather to ride a bike. People have been riding bikes to get around in northern Europe for quite some time. The lack of bike infrastructure is the major issue that keeps people from riding bikes, not so much the weather.
Ahh, yes. LA has grand weather, not perfect. But the temperatures are way cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than the interior. And yes, it rains occasionally, but it IS in a desert, so rain is welcome when it comes. Rain gives the generally-dry outdoors a good rinse. If you want a city with “perfect” weather build a really big dome.
No place truly has perfect weather, but coming from Texas, the weather in the LA area, where I've now lived for over 8 years, is phenomenal. Winter is still warm enough so that a bike ride can get your body to a reasonable warmth. Summer, with the exception of a few weeks, is manageable with some water for hydration, and the humidity is nothing compared to elsewhere. The point still stands. LA has incredible weather for biking when compared to elsewhere in the US.
Actually I don't know of any place that has perfect weather year round however I never claimed that any place did have perfect weather year-round. The main point I was trying to make was that perfect weather is not required in order to ride a bike, however a safe place to ride the bike is needed.
@@sunandsage That's a fair point. I think the weather is still a huge plus in convincing more people to ride bikes. It's something LA should absolutely leverage in its favor. Take every advantage you can get!
As an Angelino after 30 years (moved here from the Bay Area) I have come to love LA. This city does have the largest disparity of wealth of any American city. So I am glad we have a new mayor in Karen Bass who will hopefully succeed in making a difference for homeless people (>67,000 in LA County!). People here at all levels actually do want a more sustainable and green city. They want affordable housing. They want green space, less smog. So many of the new ideas and big changes are possible if we can get the troika of developers, planning commissions, and building trades and their NIMBY friends that oppose all the good ideas in this video. We need more "new urbanism" and less suburbanism.
the building trades and developers are definitely very much on board with denser development but theyre not the ones making the decisions. Zoning power has been devolved to such low levels of government its often just a dozen or so dedicated local assholes who have complete control over housing policy in a particular neighborhood. Fortunately the housing problem has gotten so bad that the city has started to just ignore their vocal protests because of how increasingly insane and out of touch they are
I really enjoyed this potential perspective. As someone who has recently moved from Seattle to Los Angela’s. I could not agree more on how much Los angels could benefit from upscaling there means of transportation. It’s also great that you pointed out how many people from Los Angeles spend more time in there car than actually have time to appreciate the road they’re on. One of the biggest contrasts I can take from being in Seattle and Los Angeles was that in Seattle I was able much more to enjoy the journey of the city. Encounter local shops and small businesses that I was able to not only cherish but in return, support. Where in Los Angeles it’s so crowded and hectic on the freeways and such that you’re just concerned about getting to point a to b and that is it. If you wanted to walk around it’s much more of a hassle because you have not only look for parking but spend a crazy amount just to park and enjoy your day which to now you are limited to financially. I’m Seattle all you have to is get on the link and head to pikes place and enjoy your morning/afternoon which only take about 5-20 minutes to get to mostly. I just think personally for a city that is more crowded than Seattle, they should definitely take some action on improving themselves on means of transportation. I’m so with this video lol.
I feel like this video is just on the cusp of absolutely blowing up and I really hope it is part of a movement to change LA's feelings about bike infrastructure for the better
I live in Los Angeles and I do occasionally ride my bike to work. But what's missing in this analysis is bike theft. I've had 2 bikes stolen from me. Because even if you chain it up outside, some in this town will eventually steal it. You have to bring it inside with you and most places won't allow that. So unless someone can solve the bike theft problem, I won't be riding my "third bike" to work anymore.
Big fan of the information you provide, I think the use of stock video along with a more welcoming / tighter frame on your coverage would really help the watcher’s experience Your content is still top tier as far as information/clarity
I completely agree. So much infrastructure is needed. Trouble shooting a specific case: My grocery store is half a mile away, and perfect to ride my bike to. The problem is that there’s nowhere to park my bike there. It’s impractical to take it into the store. I’ve chained my bike to the grocery cart return, but that’s in the way and not ideal. There’s plenty of unused pavement. How could I incentivize the grocery store to add bike parking? Second problem: I live in a second story apartment with no bike parking. I find that rolling a carrying my bike through the building and getting it through multiple sets of doors is a deterrent to me taking some trips by bike. How can I incentivize my apartment building to add bike parking?
Solid video! First time watching you. I appreciate the video from a coherent and well-paced thought expression towards your video thesis, which you do. Got me to subscribe. A lot of this style of video I listen audio-only rather than watch the video, so I don't have useful input beyond keep your arguments and ideas well-organized and well-paced, as you do already and you're off to a great start! You'll probably need to keep driving clickbait-ish titles because of the YT algo. The ones I see seem to balance not going to far and delivering is titles that allow you to deliver on the tease in the back half of the video. Good luck and I'll keep watching!
From the Philippines here. We mostly copied our urban planning practices mainly from how Los Angeles did theirs. We now have a somewhat large network of new bike lanes, thanks to the pandemic lockdowns. However, these are not enough, and there is a consistent fight at the local and national levels to keep them, especially when drivers have the mindset that it is a temporary thing and must be removed. I hope we'll be able to do things better this time.
You'll have to fight forever but it's a fight worth having. Drivers have had decades to get used to having complete supremacy and they won't give it up easily. Good luck though!
Does the phillipines and most Asian countries use motorcycles and scooters for transportation which takes less space than large American cars and thus less traffic
That is why Manila is such a mess. It followed LAs love for cars and roads. It should have followed the new York train culture or the Japan train culture. You will be getting the subway soon so that’s great news. New York has good bike system btw.
Jakarta was trending towards total gridlock because a past administration paved over the colonial tram network to "modernize" the country with cars. The BRT system (the largest in the world) only does so much, relief was more dramatic when it opened half of its first subway in 2019. COVID cycling finally compelled the government to install separated bike lanes and racks on many of the major thoroughfares 🚴🇮🇩
This video just confirms my feelings on how New York City is the best city involving transit, bike lanes, parking cars, the city grid system and everything except the rent prices 😂
Love this! Totally agree. LA has so much more potential than you currently see. Could have a much better quality of life. I have been going down such a rabbit hole lately with urban planning and walkability videos lol (and was very pleasantly surprised to see my home city has a walk score of 100) and have realised how important it is to me to be able to safely and comfortably walk places.
Wow I live in LA and as a NJB fan I thought this city was hopeless for any future without car dependency, but wow this video really gave me some optimism. Maybe my state won't be one of the most hated forever :)
Incredibly there used to be a dedicated bicycle freeway that went from Pasadena into the downtown LA area. This was in the 1890’s or thereabouts. I’m not sure how long it existed or what its fate was, but I’ve seen photos of it.
I love this video! Not only do you mention the potential, the good, and the foundations, you also point out the bad, the solutions, and what LA is doing right and wrong. This is a much better video than this other new LA TH-camr.
Something to consider: a lot of people in LA are wealthy and travel the world. They see new urbanism firsthand in other countries, meaning they are likely to support similar ideas back home
As a Angelino. Biclavia gave biking a big push 5 years ago. Now we have more cars that came with their owners from different states. Downtown has moved from car lanes to adding a bike lanes. But not many people use bikes. They use cars. Also deliveries off food by car is thriving.
You forget the fact that LA is massive. Bikes are great for those with short commutes, however a lot of people go grocery shopping after work, or to the gym, or to visit friends across the city. A lot of people here also have kids who have to commute farther than they do just to get to school, and there are less school busses here to take the kids so a lot of parents drive them. It sounds wonderful to have a lot less cars here, but not very feasible. Also, we have a lot of bike paths (separated from the road) and since they have been built I’ve seen no more people riding their bikes down them than when they were on the road. The difference between LA and Amsterdam is large, the culture is completely different here, and I don’t think that a lot of angelenos would trade driving in their car to work with riding a bike.
As someone from California. I don't bike because their is no good roads to bike for prominent destinations. I had 2 bike in the car lane 2 get to school. And biking to the grocery stores is a whole other set of problems. Build bike lanes to prominent places like schools, libraries, stores, and people will start biking.
More bikes means that people are able to use them for short trips and overall gets less cars on the road, alleviating traffic for those still driving long distances or with groceries. Ideally, it should be so that it isn't inconvenient to go to the grocery store once every other day with a handful of groceries instead of weekly with a car load and an expansive rail network for those cross city trips, but making it easier for people to bike is a good start to break the vicious car dependence cycle.
Exactly, LA became a bustling city after the availability of the automobile, with the film industry, and to a lesser extent, WWII manufacturing. Cities like London and New York, they were big cities back in horse and buggie days and were consequently more compact and walkable.
Have you heard of induced demand? If you take those people out of cars into bikes, new people from farther out will fill in the traffic that moved to bikes. The only 2 ways to reduce traffic are mixed use, and increasing connectivity of the street network. It will not matter how dense your place is, or how much biking there is, if everyone shops at walmart outside of town, traffic will still be there. I do like the reducing street parking, that is good, but until you have more mixed use, traffic wont get better. To beat traffic adding a general store to all neighborhoods, and connecting cul-de-sacs will do more to reduce traffic than doubling public transportation and increasing bike lanes will do, Public Transit and Bike infrastructure is great to increase mobility, but it won't reduce traffic.
I'm guessing you haven't been to Los Angeles. It's chock full of mixed use, the street network is VERY connected and almost all neighborhoods have general stores and/or supermarkets. That's also not what induced demand is. Induced demand refers to the practice of building more roads expecting it to alleviate traffic but instead more people just use the roads. Transitioning infrastructure away from roads and into mass transit and pedestrian friendly systems is a tried and true way to reduce traffic. And the thing about doing all of this work is that it does just that--TRANSITION the infrastructure. The bike lanes LA needs to build would replace parking, make lanes narrower and/or reduce lanes. It would disincentivize driving at the same time as it incentivized biking.
@@milkman82 Check out Strong Towns and Andres Duany's discussions on induced demand, it works both forwards and backwards, if you take lanes away, traffic will stay the same, if you increase lanes traffic will stay the same, if you get some people off the roads and onto transit, Traffic will still stay the same. A problem with alot of americans today is that we are so supply focused, both the roads people and the transit people, they both completely ignore demand, like how Traffic reduces demand for driving for people near the transit , and when you reduce it, people from farther out who stayed home, will now fill that new freeway capacity. It also doesn't matter if LA is mixed use and walkable if none of the suburban towns are, traffic will always return. It is a similar thing with housing prices, instead of worrying so much about the supply of housing in our big popular cities, why not cut demand by working on all of the other cities in the US, and improving many of the cities and towns across america that have largely been left behind or explicitly destroyed by government policy?
@milkman82 Removing parking space for cycling is not how you fix traffic congestion it is how you get the public to have a negative view on cycling as form of transportation instead exercise.
I lived in LA for a minute and absolutely agree with what you mention here. This place has the potential to be supremely bikable year-round due to the great weather and dense neighborhoods. I would ride e-bike to work in the morning 12 miles in each direction and it would take an hour or less. I figured if there were proper bike routes here it would be an extremely pleasant trip and more people would catch on. The problems are as you say though. The infrastructure isn't even built out for it and the safest way to get around is through the residential neighborhoods where car traffic isn't as fast, but there are clearly no dedicated lanes for it. I see that individual neighborhoods are starting to catch on with transit options like Santa Monica and Culver City (which is now going backwards thanks to pushback from the locals...) but I think there's a general sentiment that needs to change. Part of the reason that biking isn't safe isn't even because the infrastructure is that bad. It's literally the drivers. I can't tell you how many people ride around here, and equally I can't tell you how many times I've been brushed up, shouted at, or almost hit by drivers who are actually looking to knock you off the road. One particularly memorable one was riding in a neighborhood when some Karen decided to keep tilting her wheel to the right as I tried to get past, and once I got up to a light and caught up she just shouted out her window saying that the road was only for cars. How do you get a population of car-dependent and transit-ignorant people to suddenly explore and embrace new ways of getting around? That's gonna be the biggest challenge.
Most of what you're talking about has been implemented in Toronto in the last few years. We now have really good (but not yet great) network of protected bike lanes and street patios. The end result has been that a short trip by car now takes about twice as long. On the plus side the bike lanes are quite busy even in winter. We may be close to Buffalo but we get much less snow. Many of these new cyclists, myself included, are former car drivers fed up with the now longer trips by car. Overall the city folk are pretty pleased but the city-bound suburbanites not so much . Restaurants and shops along the main streets have seen a noticeable increase in business. There was resistance every step of the way but it was certainly worth it.
I live in East Palo Alto, CA And do notice the impact bike lanes being seperated has been safer in towns like Cupertino Sunnyvale Mountain View Your video is very useful and informative and gets the minds of others thinking for better future thanks for posting!
Yes I seen the same in places like Downtown Sacramento and Davis in Northern California are in the process of being more bike friendly in some areas. Note some of these changes will take decades to find out. But they make the neighborhood more friendlier. Yes I agree that the Bay Area has to be more advanced in making neighborhoods more Bike friendly like in San Francisco and Berkeley where I seen them as some of the more bike and pedestrian friendly place in the State.
Thomas, dutchie here. Nice try. However one has to start somewhere. It took Amsterdam more then 30 years to convert from car dependent city to where we are today. Including one of the most expensive Underground in the muddy soil on which Amsterdam had been built. So count with small steps forward for your dreams for LA bicycle lanes with inherent safety for cyclists and pedestrians. Please visit the you tube channel Not just bikes! Keep up the good work! Happy 2023.
Agreed! I was born and now live in South Los Angeles. I didn't own a car for 15 years when living in New York City. There's a video called "How cars ruin cities" that makes similar points. I don't bike because of pollution and how people drive. Buses and rail also improve accessibiliity for people who can't drive also.
The south side definitely has the most underrated biking potential. I bike from Inglewood to Koreatown pretty often and I'm always surprised at how pleasant it is. Especially compared to Inglewood which I think is one of the worst places in LA for cyclists
@@Liberperlo its a damn shame because the roads are plenty wide enough, but the city still uses 11 foot lanes. If they switched to 9 foot lanes every major street could have bike lanes with no reduction in car lanes :(
Agree! No snow in Los Angeles, flat roads so it can be the Premier to Biking and Public Transportation Capital of America. Imagine the air becoming freshest being least cars. Also, Businesses will flourish from the walkability foot prints. Let's make this City unique
I liked the more serious thumbnail for your type of content. Comparing it to Amsterdam made me interested and gave me more info than the circles arrows and question mark-y statements you used in previous videos!
I think you could also say Miami has a lot of potential as well. It has very good weather as well and more density plus Miami has lower car ownership than LA as around 19% of households in Miami have no car compared to 12% in LA. The only problem I see with Miami is that they aren't investing as much into public transit and bike lanes as LA.
Miami is redesigning their bus network (taking a while to implement but the changes are already finalized) and they're planning a metrorail extension for 2024. I still say they have a lot of work to do but they seem to be going full speed ahead with it. I just wish they'd put a light rail on the beach strip...
Just in case you see this, I just wanted to suggest using a mic that you don't hold, like one attached to your shirt, I think that looks better. Àlso put more emotion into your tones and /smile more haha. Your videos are really cool and well produced, I love this channel! We definitely need to improve American cities to become more urbanist, transit oriented and walkable/bikeable
The reason why the bike lane improvement map shows little planned for bike infrastructure is because you showed a map of Los Angeles County and their improvements to bicycle routes, which they can only do outside of cities in unincorporated areas. That’s why none of the planned routes are in the areas with a color different from yellow.
you mentioned long form being a priority, and I hope that serves you. but short form content can fan out faster, and cover more topics - that interconnect if you so choose. the subject matter can also draw topics together that shouldn't normally be attributed except for the thread of your interest and effort. congrats on the name change!
It’s true what you said about the car infrastructure. If your car is the only way to get around your car is not your freedom but your slavor with a good sales pitch.
Cars are freedom from being trapped in auto-oriented infrastructure without a car. But if the infrastructure was just designed to support people better, that would not be needed.
You don't even need Amsterdam level density for good cycling infrastructure. The entire Netherlands has it, from rural areas to small villages and cities. I agree that LA has potential in this area.
I'm willing to bet many NYC businesses recovered a lot because they were allowed to set outdoor spaces where cars used to take up space. Open Streets has been a fantastic idea.
I think you have a really good balanced take on this. A lot of people will make out cars to be an evil that needs to be completely removed, but they will always serve specific functions other modes of transport can't substitute for. The best way is to reduce the need for cars and provide alternatives to driving.
And a fun fact: from everything I see so far, cities around the world with less car dependence and more alternatives, whether it's biking or transit, is more pleasant driving. From Amsterdam to Hong Kong, to maybe even Tokyo, you can see that it's a better experience driving when the majority of the population isn't doing so, and driving have to 'compete' almost with other modes of transportation as other modes are so convenient.
@@davidfreeman3083 I was in Tokyo and it was pretty amazing how little traffic there was down the middle of the main centres because essentially everyone catches the metro. The beauty of it is that if you really need to drive that option is still there and it's really cool for car enthusiasts and everything. I don't entirely believe in the 'cities are only noisy because of cars' thing tho because I found that it was quiet more so because of how quiet the Japanese are. I walked past an American tourist group and they stuck out like a sore thumb because of that
Removing parking in my city just made the small businesses shutter even faster. Nobody wanted to deal with not being able to park at their local stores, and everyone started just buying into either food delivery apps or Amazon. Biking will never be an option because of geography and weather so all in all nobody really won from this decision.
Worked amazing in Vancouver even though every business thought it would hurt them and now their all pro bikes. Toronto even thou our infrastructure is abysmal there are so many bike deliveries already.
I owned a bike while in LA and it’s a very hostile city towards bikers. You feel like people are genuinely trying to hit you and bike theft is very common. I actually stopped riding my bike because someone totaled it trying to steal it. The city would need to address all these problems in order for people to feel comfortable riding a bike.
I brought my bike with me when I moved to LA, and within the first 2 weeks I was hit by a car which then drove off.
The message was loud and clear: bicyclists don't matter in this city
@I love your mom haha yeah so funny to put people's lives in danger
@Settler Watch I don’t live there anymore. I’m from Denver
@Settler Watch Did you forget about the California genocide
Californians don't know that bikers are entitled to a lane. They legitimately get angry. I'm a native Californian BMXER
I got an ebike 8 months ago and it's changed my relationship with the city. It makes short trips less than 4 miles actually enjoyable instead of worrying about traffic and parking. Unfortunately the bike infrastructure makes some trips overly complicated to try to avoid busy roads, and many intersections need to be bike friendly.
You should do this same presentation at a city council meeting.
I’m with you on this one. I’ve been thinking for a while that if cars had never been invented, Southern California could have been one of the best places in the world to live. Look at the historic downtown built in the gilded age. Absolute masterpieces of architecture. In 1950, LA had the best public transit in the world. And then the car came along.
So it wasn't the invention of the car that ruined L.A., it was the corporate centered, racist and classist policies promulgated by the Democrat-dominated federal government in the 1930s to 1970s and Republican-dominated federal government since then.
Same thing - to a lesser extent - for us on the Lakes. People talk all the time about the East, West, and South coasts, completely forgetting about the Lakes which, when put together, have a coastline of about 4,500 miles for just the USA. To put that in perspective, the 14 states on the East Coast have about 2,200 and California's got about 1,300. With it all being fresh water, and the climate being either chilly or warm most of the year, we've got the potential to turn this whole region into the manufacturing capital, breadbasket, and/or happiest place to live in the world. So much potential, yet little to show for it, sadly. Chicago was headed in the right direction, and back in the day it was compared to Paris! Now it's just another generic parking lot like all the other cities in this country. After WW2 the whole region really kicked off and boomed more than California did, but after the manufacturing left due to globalization so did the money. Now it's called the rustbelt, just to add insult to injury. I had to join the Navy and move to South Carolina to get an education, even though my home region has more potential than Scandinavia.
It wasn't cars that killed California.
LA not only had the best transit in the world but also the largest public transit system in the world
The car companies lobbied the government
LA is far from flat. Very hilly city, but I understand the idea and agree. The best thing quarantine did was allow the expansion of outdoor seating permits on business. Made street seating abundant and in some neighborhoods, completely shut down streets making things very communal. LA would benefit from it, but it needs to loose about half its car population for those changes to even start
It's flat as in it has only single story houses
West LA is fairly flat, and it's flanked by hills to the North and East. Still, it is possible to walk and bike in them.
I agree that LA has potential, but I think you've overblown the perfect weather bit. A lot of "anti bike" people use bad weather as a reason for not having bike infrastructure, but there's little to no correlation between biking and weather. The only thing that determines how many people bike is how much bike infrastructure you have and how well you maintain it.
Idk man, pretty sure I’d be more inclined to ride a bike if it never rained or snowed ever. Minneapolis has some of the best biking infrastructure in the country but it barely gets used in the winter because, you guessed it, the weather sucks and nobody consistently uses it when there’s slush on the ground
@@DiegoMagengo I dont' think that is 100% it. There is a city in Finland with year round bike users (oulu). th-cam.com/video/Uhx-26GfCBU/w-d-xo.html
I think an important part of the video is bike lane maintenance in the winter. Minnesota probably doesn't properly clear and salt the bike lanes.
@@DiegoMagengo I live here. biggest issue has been the lack of clearing on bike lanes, not winter itself.
Homie if you think you are ever going to get even a significant minority of people to bike in cities like Phoenix, you’re dreamin.
@@advokatie or the lack of a bike lane in itself. Or the parking in the right lane of the road. Or the asshole drivers who’ll pass on the right at 45+ mph making biking especially at night frightening. There will likely need to be over +10 billion spent in order to make the changes needed
Wow, I can't believe it. A video that's actually highlighting a potentially positive thing about LA instead of tearing it down.
Very nice video! I enjoyed it. Keep up the good work.
i agree with you wholeheartedly, and live in LA, but i think we are the minority in this debate
For now 😏
As an Angeleno I agree which is why I wanna leave this place and move to a city that's already made for not needing a car
Unfortunately I think we still have a long way to go. I see way way way too many NIMBYs on NextDoor complaining about Bonin's half-ass road diet along Venice Blvd that just added a partially protected bicycle gutter. We need public attitudes around bikes to change and these people are the loudest.
I’d say both la and lv have mass potential, also nyc but retain many old Sokol buildings and Florida mass potential too
1:02 I’m working on undertunnel extensions on highways + roads on top of highways + flying cars to 5-6x layers of cars flowing everyday with mass traffic cuts + autonomous use when idle + menial druv8ng when in the open or doing your own route n stuff, look up mikeohawk labs and atom former related documents + atom hover vehicles docs today
I'm an Angelino, and I think improving bikeabilitiy is a terrific idea, thanks. Yes, bike paths are NEEDED!
Great video! If you visit LA, try to come during an event called “Ciclavia”, where the city shuts down several roads to cars to allow cycling. It’s wonderful to experience this kind of potential firsthand.
Ciclavia is my favorite LA day of the year!
@@aresinnet yea it really shows the desire that many people have for good bikeability in LA
@@cjspeak So true, I also noticed I discover more of the small businesses along the routes. I wouldn't have noticed these places otherwise because I'm usually driving quickly past in a vehicle.
Do they have anything to do with the italian ciclavia bike brand?
@@nfc3478 No, its an LA re-spelling of Bogota, Columbia’s Ciclovia events. Every month or two a stretch of ~5 to ~15 miles of streets are closed off to cars for a day.
I briefly studied urban design and was planning on being a city planner. The city of L.A. actually had that one opportunity going back 100 years ago. The Olmsted Bros, the same ones who created Central Park had plans to do the same in Southern California where there would be a series of mini Central Parks spread from the Long Beach area as far west as Malibu, north to Burbank and as far east as the budget would've allowed.
The second was the buildings itself. Angelinos in the 1920s wanted a city that didn't replicate the "gray jungles" of the east. Which explains why the city is spread out and the first skyscraper didn't exist until the late 1920s. Lloyd Wright, son the the famed architect, Frank Lloyd Wright also designed a downtown for L.A. in the early 1920s that did not look like any of the established skyscrapers we knew at that point in time. It was suppose to be a cohesive unit similar to what you remember from the 1970s movie, Logan's Run where a series of monorail would lead from the outskirts of the valleys into the city that would've looked like a dome where the parking structure and monorail station would be located underneath the entire city. There would be one main street where visitors.could.easily access the different buildings and have its separate operating walkway like.an escalator, except it moves.horizontally.
The rivers. L.A. in the early 1900s suffered from lots of floods. Which was why they cemented the main arteries of their rivers. What they should've done instead was work with the Olmsted idea and create mini lakes to go with the parks. The foot of the river near the mountains should've been a.damn where they could've used for.electricity purposes.and provided for their own fresh water system and have better controlled river flow.
The reason this didn't happen was the 1920s LA Council simply thought it was too radical. Money was not yet an issue and the Great Depression would not happen until the late 1920s. The most controversial reason was the oil issue. Oil tycoons sought to take advantage of the growing auto industry. Freeways/highways did not exist yet until Pres Eisenhower made it law in the 1950s. The oil tycoons alongside Ford Motors saw a booming market where cars and the gas industry would first see its initial national push. And I believe L.A. was ground zero for this. NYC, Chicago and SF were already established with their own subway system and skyscrapers. L.A. didn't have this yet. So instead of utilizing the monorail and mini central parks, it would not surprise anyone if those same oil.tycoons paid off that 1920s LA Council from accepting those alternate and sound proposals mentioned earlier. And so here we are today.
Thank you for this in-depth report.
hearing all this makes me so sad, i grew up in LA, the potential is and was just incredible
A youtube comment with usefully info! Poggers!
You mentioned how NYC, Chicago, and SF were already established with their own subway systems and that LA didn’t have this yet but that’s not true. LA had the Pacific Electric Railway, aka the red cars, that was the largest electric railway system in the World.
Also the dam wouldn't stop the river from flooding. The rain in the city falls everywhere, not just on the foothills and mountains. So, still needed to be paved. To keep from flooding
As a New Yorker visiting LA, I could see the potential. I’d probably won’t go back for a long time, the heavy dependence on cars and the insane amount of homeless people is a big turn off.
True, I actually live here and want 2 leave. I want 2 live in a place where I can walk to a store or restaurant from my house. As long as the internet is good I will live almost anywhere.
People are dependent on cars because the area is so vast and spread out. Even tho NY is more populated it’s no where near the size of LA county and surrounding areas. You need a car to live in Southern California and have a life
@@liberalsocialist9723 not many places in the us have walkability. I would say Philly, Chicago and NYC are the ones that come to mind. Puerto Rico also has some great areas especially if it’s a colonial town.
I mean I tried everything there speed most of my money
Love the channel. More long-form content please.
Very well made video. Wishing you all the best with future content brother
Being Dutch and informed about cityplanning. You briefly mentioned that cars and the places people go to should be more connected. I find that quite the understatement. You really have to not only redesign the infrastructure, but moreso the disolution of districts as a whole. In most Dutch cities including Amsterdam and Western Europe. People have mixed communities, residential, business, schools, restaurants, cafe's, shops, public spaces and parks are always close by. That's why there is no need to drive a car everywhere. Ofcourse we use cars here and have suburbs, but not in the extend as in the US. It's so normal here to go to work, go to the supermarket, go to uni/school, go to the gym, meet friends later at night, go on a date or clubbing. All on the bike that same day. Because most of those amenities are within a 5km (3mile) radius. - Though our country is flatter than a pancake which makes biking more suitable to do so and since LA is much larger. The public transport should commute people from cityhub to cityhub, so the overall distance to anywhere usefull would be deminished. I fear that the mindset of the people should also change, if the citizens are not aware of the benefits or the benefits to do so are scarse, it won't change much I'm afraid. The state gouvernment could also play it's part there I think. - Thank you for your insights anyways Thomas. Greets from the other side of the Atlantic😉
@Moon Shine LA is not bigger than the Netherlands, the Netherlands is 16,000 square miles while even LA county is only around 4,700 square miles, unless you mean Amsterdam specifically in which case yes LA is larger
Its more of a cultural thing mate. American culture was built around the individual and one will see that almost all american cities don't have a city center or square like europe. Americans are fine with getting in their cars and driving to "cultural" or "shopping" centers. So North America will continue to build its grid cities wide as there is still plenty of land on this continent.
I agree. The mentality of the people in LA needs to change first. We have a lot of crime here too. I would never ride a bike here, not because I don’t want to, it’s because I’m too scared of the homeless, crazy people walking around like zombies in drugs, and drivers constantly hit and kill cyclists and pedestrians. It’s just to uncivilized here, people here are way behind the time’s mentally.
Nah we got a nice metro system that is quickly expanding the problem is there are unstable and tweaked out homeless people that make it almost unusable literally a homeless shelter on wheels
@@moonshine8255 stop with that bs excuse of "US TOO BIG". That's a massive oversimplification. It's the way the land is used that's a problem (urban sprawl) and can be fixed
Another Dutch trick: Make it impossible for cars to go through a neighbourhood. Say you want to go by car from the south side to the north side of the neighbourhood. The only way to do this is to go around the neighbourhood, because the direct route is blocked for cars. On bicycle and foot you can take the direct route.
This keeps a lot of car traffic out of the neighbourhood, and makes it more attractive to cycle or walk to your destination.
Cul-de-sacs could have a bike path or at least a walkway that continues on and connects to the other side of the block. I've seen this done in the Salt Lake area and I thought that was a great idea.
@@sunandsage From 1975-85 culs-de-sac neighbourhoods were very popular in NL (socalled 'cauliflower neighbourhoods'). One Big difference was, that the most direct roads in those hoods are dedicated cycle paths, with many exits. Vehicles had to drive winding narrow streets with a selected nr of exits ...
And the same with a lot other neighbourhoods are (re) designed as Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) with one way streets for vehicles, bollards preventing rat race thru limited access. Usually cars are forced to make a limited detour, while there are many direct routes for bikes and pedestrians..
American cul-de-sacs tried doing this but in their designs completely disregarded pedestrians and cyclists as there are basically no short-cuts for them. By making all these long and circuitous routes therefore incentivizing driving...
Tried that it london ,they are called low traffic neighbourhoods and is a limited a success causing traffic congestion and diverting traffic to poorer neighbourhood .
@@juliantandoh4042 How come that did not happen in Holland or Denmark ?! It is hard to judge for any individual case, junction or street.. But these claims are myths (ab)used by 'Car Brained' opponents. Or maybe not even deliberite , but caused by the 'Observer Effect' : after the LTN change any congestion is labeled as caused by the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods ..
There was even an EMS officer who mentioned longer response times .... but his own organisation could not find any systematic problem with their response time by the ltns .
Imperial College did a study in 3 ltn areas in the Islington Boroughs. Just as within the ltns traffic decreased in the surrounding areas (50% & 13%)and NO2 levels even more so than within the ltns (5.7% & 9%) !
It is also not true that ltn are mostly in well off areas. The opposite . There are more in like Hackney , Lambeth and mentioned Islington. How that develops in the future is to be seen, as real estate prices rise faster in ltns, because they are popular (scarcity is a thing, just like in US with the few multi zoned mixed use neighbourhood to become pricy...)
Although in London many ltn have been installed hastly and could have been communicated better, 63% of people living there appreciate it and 47% not living in ltn, would think it would improve living.
In Walthamstow (the Mini-Holland, with a lot of ltns since 2014), the response time of Fire Brigade went down and the life expectancy has increased. According the British Medical Journey streetcrime went down 13%, 3 years after installing street filters and the risk on injury decreased by 75%.
So it is not so strange that in a survey in 4 UK cities (LDN, BMH, Bristol, Leeds), 85% of households was in favour of traffic filtering and just 8% against..
Really shifting my perspective on LA as a San Franciscan. Whenever I visit it feels like a very hostile place for bikes, and I've never really imagined it to be anything else. Really love how you pointed out the density compared to Amsterdam in some areas. Imagining LA without the constant sound of the highway and cars in the background... Is surprisingly beautiful!
That AI walkable street generator is a really cool project btw thx for sharing!
The most infurating thing about living in LA was that a 10 mile commute could easily take an hour. If everyone switched to bikes you could literally get everywhere twice as fast.
10 miles on a bike would be a pretty long commute but you could combine that with a bus or train.
@@sunandsage since 48% of trips are less than three miles, and im sure a large portion of the rest are less than 10 miles, if many of those 3 mile and under drivers converted to biking it would make driving 10 miles much faster. By reducing the amount of cars on the road, you increase speeds to those further places. Obviously then it would also be important to increase the metro system, but even just by becoming bike friendly you would help the 10 mile travelers
@@sunandsage everyone switched to bikes it would benefit everyone I think they mean. But nothing wrong with a 10 mile commute. I used to commute 10kms by bike to work along an unbroken bike path. It wasn't hard at all. My mate does two and a half times it which is about 10 miles on the same stretch. We're not 'cyclists'. It was leisurely and took the same time as driving. Cause signed traffic speeds have nothing to do with average speeds, even when there's nobt traffic. I wasn't even getting jacked legs from it shame actually. 10 miles might have started getting me fit. But anyway most people would be doing like 2 or 3 miles and those who want to do 10 would still benefit
@@sunandsage so if you’re on a bus, you’re still subjected to traffic.
@@harutyung3767 A bus carrying 20 people creates much less congestion than 20 cars going along the same highway at the same commuting hour.
I would love to see Los Angeles develop in the ways you are talking about.. change is needed. We deserve it
Definitely
Los Angeles is not a "flat" city. There are hills everywhere. Riding a bike is fun but not when it's 95° outside.
I lived in Minnesota and biked as a teenager. I remember the humid summers and hills. Nice try though.
I’ve lived in LA my entire life, and over the past 20 years that I’ve been here the key reasoning you missed in why LA falls short when it comes to public transportation, parks, etc. is the housing crisis. It’s quite sad honestly, because homelessness has always existed in LA especially in the downtown Skid Row area, but has only been growing with the pandemic, the gentrification of LA from social media’s influencers romanticization of the city, and to add to insult to injury we’re entering a recession. The rapid growth of the city, and lack of housing growth has led to the massive displacement of our population where’s where the “Californians are driving up the rents” notion comes from. This homelessness issue has only stunted the growth of LA’s public transit by plaguing our public transportation system with stigmatization of it being unsanitary, unreliable, dangerous, and not worth the effort of investing into. As someone who’s taken public transportation my entire life these stereotypes aren’t completely wrong, but ignoring the issue as a whole definitely doesn’t help:/
I agree. Many urbanists don’t discuss the role of Street harassment in discouraging walking, cycling, and using public transit.
@@ifetayodavidson-cade5613 them ignoring the issue is ideological and on purpose!
@@ifetayodavidson-cade5613 True I am from California and would bike 2 college even though the walk lanes were narrow and at times I had 2 bike in the car lanes to get 2 the school. One time a homeless man attempting to swing at me while I was biking. Luckily I didn't get hurt, but that event lead me 2 stop biking and start driving.
oh those people with prejudices just because of homeless people in the subways need to grow a pair, New York and San Francisco have been dealing with much grosser transportation systems than LA has and everyone takes them still because it's still faster and more convenient than driving. If LA pivots to making it harder on cars, the people will follow suit.
I've lived in L. A. for over 20 years without a personal vehicle, utilizing public transit for my daily commute to work, and walking for almost all personal activities. Throwing the homeless population out there as a reason as to why Los Angeles is carcentric is definitely reaching and possibly an attempt to needlessly introduce a political flashpoint term into the conversation. The core reason Angelenos are car dependent is due to a lack of infrastructure that supports alternative transportation methods, along with little to no incentives to develop new habits and attitudes that ultimately adopts car free lifestyles.
I ride the Santa Monica Blvd bike gutter to work in Century City everyday and it's so terrifying with drivers going 55mph and 3 lanes right next to you! Really want the city of LA to step up its cycling game.
The Santa Monica Blvd bike path is a joke. I can literally get around faster by riding in the street.
motor cycle LOLs. weave
Get a car brokie.
@@blitzy3244 you're a lame
They need to create physical barriers between cyclists and car drivers - LA is such a car heavy city that this needs to be done for safety. It could also look really cool and green so that's a plus.
Hey bro, it was a pretty interesting/detailing story and the thumbnail was really nice and inviting.. Once I clicked on the video it was just as good as the inviting thumbnail and you kept my interest going till the end.. Best of Luck to you.. Looks like you got a great start..
And BTW, I bike ride a lot in west Los Angeles, so it was quite informative vid to me. - :))
as an "urbanist" Angeleno, this is a great video with honestly a pretty good counterpoint to most other urbanist youtubers (who I also still respect) who I think often don't know the city and don't want to bother to get to know or research it to give it a fair critique. LA has just long been the punching bag of the urbanist community, and is often treated as unsalvageable. I am a bit tired of all the hate given that, as you mentioned, LA has arguably been investing more heavily into transit than any other metro area in the nation; often imperfectly, but still, very stark improvements that, once things hit a certain inflection point and they solve the "last mile" issue for many commuters, will I think reap significant benefits.
as of right now, the expansion in rail has been dramatic over the past couple decades, but still incomplete for a large city. It still needs time and further investment for it to become interconnected enough to reap the benefits (with many very good projects under active construction to that end, including the purple line extension, rail connection to the airport, and the regional connector downtown). and I think the city has proved open to constructive criticism: e.g., critiques regarding investment in rail versus the sprawling bus system, which I think the city has heard given their recent push to improve bus headways (again, as you mentioned). they seem to now be considering critiques regarding biking, and hopefully they will improve upon their current plans in the coming years. Look, urban tranist planning never goes 100% smoothly, but I'm very bullish on LA over the next decade.
Great comment, but I’m wondering if you mixed up bearish with bullish. Bearish is pessimistic, bullish is optimistic
@@leeszikiat7953 lol I did mix that up. fixed, thanks
This is a well-made, well-argued video. I’m glad the TH-cam algorithm sent me your way, Thomas Y.
As someone that lives in LA, I can say that the biggest obstacle to improving this city's transportation infrastructure is it's culture. I'm not just talking about car culture and the fact that people actually would rather be stuck in their cars and drive everywhere, which is a thing, but also this city's long history with classicism and racism. It's extremely segregated and that's not an accident. We used to have the largest street car network of any city in the world, but it was stripped out and paved over because affluent white people realized that black people couldn't come to their neighborhood if there was no public transportation because most black people couldn't afford a car at the time. That ideology still persists to this day: Beverly Hills fought tooth and nail to try to keep a metro stop from being added to their neighborhood in the most recent expansion of the metro.
The other thing is that LA is the center of the entertainment industry, and in this industry, the appearance of wealth and connections is essential to actually getting wealth and connections. This means that the neighborhood you live in has become a status symbol that can affect future employment. Employers will ask job applicants in the interview what neighborhood they live in, and the way they answer that question matters. For this reason, people who live in good neighborhoods absolutely do not want to make it easier for people who can't afford to drive to be able to come to their neighborhood because they see that as a direct threat to their employment prospects.
As a non Angelino, this is the saddest thing i’ve read today. It actually makes sense tho
Luckily, culture changes if it has to, LA hasn't always been a car-centric city and you just have to look at New York, and the many metropolises of Europe to see how the wealthy can shift their signifiers. Just because a city shifts its focus towards people and public transportation doesn't mean cars are eliminated altogether, it just means the cities won't be designed and have policies with cars in mind. Heck, a better focus on people means, the cars will be able to move even more freely because there's less traffic altogether.
@@josephbernados1649 To get rid of cars altogether is the best thing the world can do. Cars are unnecessary and should've never been built to begin with.
It's a sad state of affairs how in this culture "can afford to drive" becomes synonymous with "have to drive". There's literally no freedom in that.
same problem in Chicago, Bay Area and many other American cities
Love the sit-down format. Love the short cuts. Like the steady tone, I'm not a fan of the copy-paste sing-sing-y voice that annoys me in a lot of American TH-camrs. I abhor arrow thumbnails, but not gonna lie I do have an immense need to click on them. Keep it up, I'm happy the algorithm made me find you!
LA used to have a great street car/tram network. Rebuilding that would help provide for short inner city journeys that don’t justify getting a bus or metro. If the city builds for all the five ways of getting around (walk, bike, tram, bus, metro) then car journeys would drop dramatically across the inner city and all that valuable real estate lost to parking could be freed up!
It was called the red car. I've seen a map of how extensive that was. It's too bad they got rid of it. What the area has now is a good start but they need quite a bit more.
Not a lot of that you should have a metro network rivaling NYC
@@sunandsage in a city with this kind of traffic light rail doesn’t cut it
La needs to build metro, not more trams and light rail
@@CABOOSEBOB I'm assuming by Metro you mean like Regional Rail such as the Metrolink. They do need more of that - quite a bit more.
I've been saying this ever since I went to LA without a car for some medical things at UCLA. I traveled around purely by train and bus, and all I could see was tremendous potential for the city. I really believe it will turn out to be the best city in America in time. I know it's a car centric hellhole right now, but it has the foundation to actually fix that. And not just for weather, but the grid layout is amazing for bus lines and trolleys/light rail.
you are optimistic but I doubt it bc of the politics in Ca. It's too racist, classist, and divided politically. This traffic problem didn't just show up a few years ago and I know for sure bicycles have been around since before you and i were born. It's a corrupt city with a bunch of fake people. It's like finding a needle in a hay stack when you do find that unique gem of a really really good wholesome person.
@@supertenor561 luckily a lot of the needed reforms to allow density have just been done at the state level, and the city of LA has been continually investing in their transit system. I think making LA great again is already happening. But yeah you are right about the politicians there. Hopefully they don’t slow things down too much.
It might also be an advantage that western American roads are wide as heck. I imagine it would be easier to find space for things.
Easier to build elevated metro too unlike the small roads in Europe everything has to be deep there
I enjoyed your video and I think the information was eye opening. Biking has been a great passion of mine and when I lived in DC I commuted by bike for 8 years. I liked that you included opposing arguments and your response to the specific arguments. The thumbnail for the video looked clean and professional. Fantastic job! I am going to subscribe!
LA will imo never become Amsterdam of the US, Car culture is entrenched here and the whole city is built for it. I think a better City might be Philadelphia and here in California we have cities like Santa Barbara, SLO, and Davis where a lot of trips take place on bikes
Car culture is always manufactured
Thomas, the County’s Bike Master Plan focuses only on the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles. The city of Los Angeles has its own Bike Master Plan which comprehensively covers all communities within the city. Also, Metro is a regional transit agency which is separate from the city of LA.
This nicely illustrates one of the biggest barriers to good urban design in LA: our fragmented governance, and how y democratic that governance can be. We have a county of 10 Million with 5 elected Representatives, while a country like Finland has a parliament of 100 MPs for half that population. Meanwhile, we also have dozens of tiny cities with massive amounts of power over land use and transportation, but no incentive to work collectively or towards a common goal. Hell, some cities are literally designed to keep one family in power - looking at you, City of Commerce.
It’s a nightmare that entrenches special interests and stops progress - fixing it on a broad level is going to be key.
Thomas this was a great video!
i would love to see a full video on Atlanta’s potential as the sun belt’s leader in public transit and walkability!
Racism ugh and they don’t understand how it backfires on them
@@qjtvaddict Atlanta has a sizable Black population and by some metrics, it's less segregated than some cities in the North.
@@qjtvaddict it's 2023, stop with this race baiting bullsh!t
@Stephen Crisafulli 2023*
Atlanta bike infrastructure looks pretty good.
Thanks!
Hey, this is a great video from a content and a production standpoint! Good to see that you spent your budget on a good microphone instead of furniture 😅.
You're already doing a few things right: no annoying intro, good audio quality, use of B-roll. You may try ending the video sharply after your last point to help with retention , but you're already sort of doing that.
Where I live, I totally agree with you: it is the good bike infrastructure that has the biggest impact on cutting my car usage, not just transit.
Anyways, welcome to the Urbanist Movement!
As a kid L.A always was a dream city for me to live as a european
I dont exactly trust politicians to be able to do this but if its possible ill pray for it to work.
You definitely got me excited for the future of LA. Well done!
I love channels like this because it entirely goes against the attitude I've seen around people in SoCal recently, that everything's just gonna get worse, there's nothing we can do about it, and we have to get out of here before it happens, when in reality, if we push hard enough, we can make LA the city it was always promised to be.
I've been living a biking life style in LA for over 10 years.
When I lived in LA, I biked everywhere and it was awesome! I lived pretty close to where I worked and I usually got there faster than if I drove.
the automobile has been a symbol of individual freedom, today it is a small prison on increasingly large and congested roads
Well La isn’t exactly flat but I agree with you. I would love to see a lot more trains in our city. I’m originally from London and it’s something I wish US cities would take that from other cities.
Wanted to say thanks for doing a video that isn't trashing LA or California in bad faith. LA is a good city. There's a reason everyone from sultans to hobos call this place home. Hollywood kinda sucks bc of the type of person it attracts but there are some nice people there.
Also little talked about is the large Hispanic population. Mexicans in particular set the tone of LA culture in a very positive way. LOVELY folks. It took me a while to get used to people smiling and waving asking me how I'm doing all the time outside. CA ain't perfect and people not from here sure love to point it out. Californians aren't even a little bothered by the hate which is forever hilarious.
I hope we fix our transit system here in Los Angeles. So glad I live in a walkable neighborhood and don't have a commute. Don't miss those days. Oh and one thing is for sure: Coastal SoCal has the most weather in the US.
I like your optimistic can-do spirit. The map of high-density areas in central LA simply and graphically shows the city's potential to become less car dependent and much more bikeable and walkable. Thanks for pointing that out. The magnitude of wealth and time expended in car dependency is crazy. It's also weirdly dehumanizing when seen on the scale of major US metro areas. There's something apocalyptic about pictures of a perpetually jammed 405. Contrast that with Tokyo's endless car-free little commercial streets brimming with life...
Very accurate observation. LA has tons of potential if they can just reduce the amount of cars on the road and reduce the homeless population.
Even with its problems I still think the quality of life there is better than any place in Texas, despite so many people moving to Texas thinking it’s gonna give them a better life.
Sure you’ll have a big new home for much less than you would in California, but you’ll be stuck in your car even more than in LA, because of the car centric design of all the cities and neighbors in Texas and on top of that, the weather is terrible 90% of the time.
Exactly. The weather if bad, you’re stuck in a car more. And people STILL choose to move to Texas.
Why? Sunk cost fallacy.
Most people already have a car and use it for 1-2 decades.
Also paying for parking is seen as taxing the poor. Multiple city council men and women from the richer districts of LA proposed limiting parking, and all the poorer districts said NO.
You can find bike infrastructure in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica because they weren’t swallowed by the big city of LA and have wealthier citizens.
reducing the number of cars on the road consequentially reduces homelessness as car infrastructure chews up lots of space. There is more surface area in LA dedicated to parking lots than housing. This causes a housing shortage and drives up housing costs which increase homelessness. Another thing that will reduce car dependency is allocating more surface area of the city to mixed-use development. Why can't we have something as basic as a small grocery store that is a < 5-minute walk from where we live?
car centric cities are not good. but not being able to afford housing, having half your money stolen by a government , having a homeless problem unparalleled almost anywhere else in the united states … is much worse . and la is barely any better than austin or san antonio
I can vouch for the hellish weather in Texas. I live in New Orleans where it's torrid six months out of every year, but in '04 my partner and I evacuated to Texas for Hurricane Ivan and compared to urban New Orleans, suburban Houston was a blast furnace.
Texas is one of the few places I've been where it's a coastal state but you still feel landlocked
Yup, this guy’s channel is gonna have over 100k by the end of the year.
I used to live in that area. I don't recall the area having perfect weather year-round. It doesn't snow there but it does rain and it also gets quite hot during much of the summer, but you don't need perfect weather to ride a bike. People have been riding bikes to get around in northern Europe for quite some time. The lack of bike infrastructure is the major issue that keeps people from riding bikes, not so much the weather.
Ahh, yes. LA has grand weather, not perfect. But the temperatures are way cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than the interior. And yes, it rains occasionally, but it IS in a desert, so rain is welcome when it comes. Rain gives the generally-dry outdoors a good rinse.
If you want a city with “perfect” weather build a really big dome.
No place truly has perfect weather, but coming from Texas, the weather in the LA area, where I've now lived for over 8 years, is phenomenal. Winter is still warm enough so that a bike ride can get your body to a reasonable warmth. Summer, with the exception of a few weeks, is manageable with some water for hydration, and the humidity is nothing compared to elsewhere. The point still stands. LA has incredible weather for biking when compared to elsewhere in the US.
Actually I don't know of any place that has perfect weather year round however I never claimed that any place did have perfect weather year-round.
The main point I was trying to make was that perfect weather is not required in order to ride a bike, however a safe place to ride the bike is needed.
Isn't that the whole point of the appeal of Southern California? The perfect climate? What else is there to like?
@@sunandsage That's a fair point. I think the weather is still a huge plus in convincing more people to ride bikes. It's something LA should absolutely leverage in its favor. Take every advantage you can get!
Keep this up, what your saying makes so much sense!!
As an Angelino after 30 years (moved here from the Bay Area) I have come to love LA. This city does have the largest disparity of wealth of any American city. So I am glad we have a new mayor in Karen Bass who will hopefully succeed in making a difference for homeless people (>67,000 in LA County!). People here at all levels actually do want a more sustainable and green city. They want affordable housing. They want green space, less smog. So many of the new ideas and big changes are possible if we can get the troika of developers, planning commissions, and building trades and their NIMBY friends that oppose all the good ideas in this video. We need more "new urbanism" and less suburbanism.
People with money, you can give half your money to a deserving person. Poverty solved overnight
Get going!!!!!
the building trades and developers are definitely very much on board with denser development but theyre not the ones making the decisions. Zoning power has been devolved to such low levels of government its often just a dozen or so dedicated local assholes who have complete control over housing policy in a particular neighborhood. Fortunately the housing problem has gotten so bad that the city has started to just ignore their vocal protests because of how increasingly insane and out of touch they are
I really enjoyed this potential perspective. As someone who has recently moved from Seattle to Los Angela’s. I could not agree more on how much Los angels could benefit from upscaling there means of transportation. It’s also great that you pointed out how many people from Los Angeles spend more time in there car than actually have time to appreciate the road they’re on. One of the biggest contrasts I can take from being in Seattle and Los Angeles was that in Seattle I was able much more to enjoy the journey of the city. Encounter local shops and small businesses that I was able to not only cherish but in return, support. Where in Los Angeles it’s so crowded and hectic on the freeways and such that you’re just concerned about getting to point a to b and that is it. If you wanted to walk around it’s much more of a hassle because you have not only look for parking but spend a crazy amount just to park and enjoy your day which to now you are limited to financially. I’m Seattle all you have to is get on the link and head to pikes place and enjoy your morning/afternoon which only take about 5-20 minutes to get to mostly. I just think personally for a city that is more crowded than Seattle, they should definitely take some action on improving themselves on means of transportation. I’m so with this video lol.
Eliminate height requirements, eliminate zoning
I feel like this video is just on the cusp of absolutely blowing up and I really hope it is part of a movement to change LA's feelings about bike infrastructure for the better
I live in Los Angeles and I do occasionally ride my bike to work. But what's missing in this analysis is bike theft. I've had 2 bikes stolen from me. Because even if you chain it up outside, some in this town will eventually steal it. You have to bring it inside with you and most places won't allow that. So unless someone can solve the bike theft problem, I won't be riding my "third bike" to work anymore.
Do as we do in the Netherlands, multiple locks on a bike that's great to ride but to ugly to steal 😅
Big fan of the information you provide, I think the use of stock video along with a more welcoming / tighter frame on your coverage would really help the watcher’s experience
Your content is still top tier as far as information/clarity
I completely agree. So much infrastructure is needed.
Trouble shooting a specific case:
My grocery store is half a mile away, and perfect to ride my bike to. The problem is that there’s nowhere to park my bike there. It’s impractical to take it into the store. I’ve chained my bike to the grocery cart return, but that’s in the way and not ideal. There’s plenty of unused pavement. How could I incentivize the grocery store to add bike parking?
Second problem: I live in a second story apartment with no bike parking. I find that rolling a carrying my bike through the building and getting it through multiple sets of doors is a deterrent to me taking some trips by bike. How can I incentivize my apartment building to add bike parking?
Good job, you are so on the right track.
An earnest and intelligent summation of a great idea.
Solid video! First time watching you. I appreciate the video from a coherent and well-paced thought expression towards your video thesis, which you do. Got me to subscribe.
A lot of this style of video I listen audio-only rather than watch the video, so I don't have useful input beyond keep your arguments and ideas well-organized and well-paced, as you do already and you're off to a great start!
You'll probably need to keep driving clickbait-ish titles because of the YT algo. The ones I see seem to balance not going to far and delivering is titles that allow you to deliver on the tease in the back half of the video.
Good luck and I'll keep watching!
From the Philippines here.
We mostly copied our urban planning practices mainly from how Los Angeles did theirs. We now have a somewhat large network of new bike lanes, thanks to the pandemic lockdowns. However, these are not enough, and there is a consistent fight at the local and national levels to keep them, especially when drivers have the mindset that it is a temporary thing and must be removed.
I hope we'll be able to do things better this time.
You'll have to fight forever but it's a fight worth having. Drivers have had decades to get used to having complete supremacy and they won't give it up easily. Good luck though!
Does the phillipines and most Asian countries use motorcycles and scooters for transportation which takes less space than large American cars and thus less traffic
That is why Manila is such a mess. It followed LAs love for cars and roads. It should have followed the new York train culture or the Japan train culture. You will be getting the subway soon so that’s great news. New York has good bike system btw.
Jakarta was trending towards total gridlock because a past administration paved over the colonial tram network to "modernize" the country with cars. The BRT system (the largest in the world) only does so much, relief was more dramatic when it opened half of its first subway in 2019.
COVID cycling finally compelled the government to install separated bike lanes and racks on many of the major thoroughfares 🚴🇮🇩
This video just confirms my feelings on how New York City is the best city involving transit, bike lanes, parking cars, the city grid system and everything except the rent prices 😂
this video singlehandedly destroyed like half my pessimism when it comes to los angeles and other cities or neighborhoods with good bones
It just needs a little love 😭 it's a great city, but it can be the absolute best in the world
Love this! Totally agree. LA has so much more potential than you currently see. Could have a much better quality of life. I have been going down such a rabbit hole lately with urban planning and walkability videos lol (and was very pleasantly surprised to see my home city has a walk score of 100) and have realised how important it is to me to be able to safely and comfortably walk places.
Wow I live in LA and as a NJB fan I thought this city was hopeless for any future without car dependency, but wow this video really gave me some optimism. Maybe my state won't be one of the most hated forever :)
I think no matter what California does, conservatives will always find a way to hate on the state.
@@SSDConker2 You aren't wrong lol
Incredibly there used to be a dedicated bicycle freeway that went from Pasadena into the downtown LA area. This was in the 1890’s or thereabouts. I’m not sure how long it existed or what its fate was, but I’ve seen photos of it.
Excellent point!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Cycleway
I love this video! Not only do you mention the potential, the good, and the foundations, you also point out the bad, the solutions, and what LA is doing right and wrong. This is a much better video than this other new LA TH-camr.
Something to consider: a lot of people in LA are wealthy and travel the world. They see new urbanism firsthand in other countries, meaning they are likely to support similar ideas back home
Great video. I’m not a content creator so I’m far from an expert, but I will say your thumbnail caption got me to click.
As a Angelino. Biclavia gave biking a big push 5 years ago. Now we have more cars that came with their owners from different states. Downtown has moved from car lanes to adding a bike lanes. But not many people use bikes. They use cars. Also deliveries off food by car is thriving.
As a dedicated car guy living in central Los Angeles, I completely agree with the opinions expressed in this video.
Same
Brilliant video, ty for sharing. Hope all cities transform into bikeable walkable places
Great content! Keep making it!
Thank you, love to hear that!
Nobody in LA is going to give up their car!! 😂
very interesting video :)
As for the thumbnail - I don't know, it's the title that drew me in. Probably not useful feedback lol
You forget the fact that LA is massive. Bikes are great for those with short commutes, however a lot of people go grocery shopping after work, or to the gym, or to visit friends across the city. A lot of people here also have kids who have to commute farther than they do just to get to school, and there are less school busses here to take the kids so a lot of parents drive them. It sounds wonderful to have a lot less cars here, but not very feasible. Also, we have a lot of bike paths (separated from the road) and since they have been built I’ve seen no more people riding their bikes down them than when they were on the road. The difference between LA and Amsterdam is large, the culture is completely different here, and I don’t think that a lot of angelenos would trade driving in their car to work with riding a bike.
As someone from California. I don't bike because their is no good roads to bike for prominent destinations. I had 2 bike in the car lane 2 get to school. And biking to the grocery stores is a whole other set of problems. Build bike lanes to prominent places like schools, libraries, stores, and people will start biking.
More bikes means that people are able to use them for short trips and overall gets less cars on the road, alleviating traffic for those still driving long distances or with groceries. Ideally, it should be so that it isn't inconvenient to go to the grocery store once every other day with a handful of groceries instead of weekly with a car load and an expansive rail network for those cross city trips, but making it easier for people to bike is a good start to break the vicious car dependence cycle.
Exactly, LA became a bustling city after the availability of the automobile, with the film industry, and to a lesser extent, WWII manufacturing. Cities like London and New York, they were big cities back in horse and buggie days and were consequently more compact and walkable.
Like in GTA
I love your optimism, and I appreciate your breath of fresh air in the midst of smog!
Have you heard of induced demand? If you take those people out of cars into bikes, new people from farther out will fill in the traffic that moved to bikes.
The only 2 ways to reduce traffic are mixed use, and increasing connectivity of the street network. It will not matter how dense your place is, or how much biking there is, if everyone shops at walmart outside of town, traffic will still be there.
I do like the reducing street parking, that is good, but until you have more mixed use, traffic wont get better.
To beat traffic adding a general store to all neighborhoods, and connecting cul-de-sacs will do more to reduce traffic than doubling public transportation and increasing bike lanes will do, Public Transit and Bike infrastructure is great to increase mobility, but it won't reduce traffic.
I'm guessing you haven't been to Los Angeles. It's chock full of mixed use, the street network is VERY connected and almost all neighborhoods have general stores and/or supermarkets.
That's also not what induced demand is. Induced demand refers to the practice of building more roads expecting it to alleviate traffic but instead more people just use the roads.
Transitioning infrastructure away from roads and into mass transit and pedestrian friendly systems is a tried and true way to reduce traffic. And the thing about doing all of this work is that it does just that--TRANSITION the infrastructure. The bike lanes LA needs to build would replace parking, make lanes narrower and/or reduce lanes. It would disincentivize driving at the same time as it incentivized biking.
@@milkman82 Check out Strong Towns and Andres Duany's discussions on induced demand, it works both forwards and backwards, if you take lanes away, traffic will stay the same, if you increase lanes traffic will stay the same, if you get some people off the roads and onto transit, Traffic will still stay the same. A problem with alot of americans today is that we are so supply focused, both the roads people and the transit people, they both completely ignore demand, like how Traffic reduces demand for driving for people near the transit , and when you reduce it, people from farther out who stayed home, will now fill that new freeway capacity.
It also doesn't matter if LA is mixed use and walkable if none of the suburban towns are, traffic will always return.
It is a similar thing with housing prices, instead of worrying so much about the supply of housing in our big popular cities, why not cut demand by working on all of the other cities in the US, and improving many of the cities and towns across america that have largely been left behind or explicitly destroyed by government policy?
@milkman82 Removing parking space for cycling is not how you fix traffic congestion it is how you get the public to have a negative view on cycling as form of transportation instead exercise.
I lived in LA for a minute and absolutely agree with what you mention here. This place has the potential to be supremely bikable year-round due to the great weather and dense neighborhoods. I would ride e-bike to work in the morning 12 miles in each direction and it would take an hour or less. I figured if there were proper bike routes here it would be an extremely pleasant trip and more people would catch on.
The problems are as you say though. The infrastructure isn't even built out for it and the safest way to get around is through the residential neighborhoods where car traffic isn't as fast, but there are clearly no dedicated lanes for it. I see that individual neighborhoods are starting to catch on with transit options like Santa Monica and Culver City (which is now going backwards thanks to pushback from the locals...) but I think there's a general sentiment that needs to change. Part of the reason that biking isn't safe isn't even because the infrastructure is that bad. It's literally the drivers.
I can't tell you how many people ride around here, and equally I can't tell you how many times I've been brushed up, shouted at, or almost hit by drivers who are actually looking to knock you off the road. One particularly memorable one was riding in a neighborhood when some Karen decided to keep tilting her wheel to the right as I tried to get past, and once I got up to a light and caught up she just shouted out her window saying that the road was only for cars.
How do you get a population of car-dependent and transit-ignorant people to suddenly explore and embrace new ways of getting around? That's gonna be the biggest challenge.
Most of what you're talking about has been implemented in Toronto in the last few years. We now have really good (but not yet great) network of protected bike lanes and street patios.
The end result has been that a short trip by car now takes about twice as long.
On the plus side the bike lanes are quite busy even in winter. We may be close to Buffalo but we get much less snow.
Many of these new cyclists, myself included, are former car drivers fed up with the now longer trips by car. Overall the city folk are pretty pleased but the city-bound suburbanites not so much . Restaurants and shops along the main streets have seen a noticeable increase in business.
There was resistance every step of the way but it was certainly worth it.
Excellent video. I am so glad this appeared in my recommendations list.
I'm not even from the US but these videos are so good - thank you!!
Thank you!
I live in East Palo Alto, CA And do notice the impact bike lanes being seperated has been safer in towns like Cupertino Sunnyvale Mountain View Your video is very useful and informative and gets the minds of others thinking for better future thanks for posting!
Yes I seen the same in places like Downtown Sacramento and Davis in Northern California are in the process of being more bike friendly in some areas. Note some of these changes will take decades to find out. But they make the neighborhood more friendlier.
Yes I agree that the Bay Area has to be more advanced in making neighborhoods more Bike friendly like in San Francisco and Berkeley where I seen them as some of the more bike and pedestrian friendly place in the State.
Thomas, dutchie here. Nice try. However one has to start somewhere. It took Amsterdam more then 30 years to convert from car dependent city to where we are today. Including one of the most expensive Underground in the muddy soil on which Amsterdam had been built. So count with small steps forward for your dreams for LA bicycle lanes with inherent safety for cyclists and pedestrians. Please visit the you tube channel Not just bikes!
Keep up the good work! Happy 2023.
Great channel, thank you TH-cam Algo Gods.
Agreed! I was born and now live in South Los Angeles. I didn't own a car for 15 years when living in New York City. There's a video called "How cars ruin cities" that makes similar points. I don't bike because of pollution and how people drive. Buses and rail also improve accessibiliity for people who can't drive also.
The south side definitely has the most underrated biking potential. I bike from Inglewood to Koreatown pretty often and I'm always surprised at how pleasant it is. Especially compared to Inglewood which I think is one of the worst places in LA for cyclists
@@HotDogLaws I work in Inglewood, you are sooo right
@@Liberperlo its a damn shame because the roads are plenty wide enough, but the city still uses 11 foot lanes. If they switched to 9 foot lanes every major street could have bike lanes with no reduction in car lanes :(
We have a bike lane on the orange line that starts in Woodland Hills but it ends in the valley. Wish it would go into the city
Agree! No snow in Los Angeles, flat roads so it can be the Premier to Biking and Public Transportation Capital of America. Imagine the air becoming freshest being least cars. Also, Businesses will flourish from the walkability foot prints. Let's make this City unique
I liked the more serious thumbnail for your type of content. Comparing it to Amsterdam made me interested and gave me more info than the circles arrows and question mark-y statements you used in previous videos!
I think you could also say Miami has a lot of potential as well. It has very good weather as well and more density plus Miami has lower car ownership than LA as around 19% of households in Miami have no car compared to 12% in LA. The only problem I see with Miami is that they aren't investing as much into public transit and bike lanes as LA.
Too hot to become a biking city. LA heat becomes more tolerable on a bike. Miami is intolerable to walk outside 300 days a year.
Though who knows how much longer Miami will last.
Yeah soon Miami's streets will be replaced by the world's largest saltwater canal network :D
@@gruweldaad Not stopping all the people who flock to the beaches there in summer
Miami is redesigning their bus network (taking a while to implement but the changes are already finalized) and they're planning a metrorail extension for 2024. I still say they have a lot of work to do but they seem to be going full speed ahead with it. I just wish they'd put a light rail on the beach strip...
Just in case you see this, I just wanted to suggest using a mic that you don't hold, like one attached to your shirt, I think that looks better. Àlso put more emotion into your tones and /smile more haha. Your videos are really cool and well produced, I love this channel! We definitely need to improve American cities to become more urbanist, transit oriented and walkable/bikeable
The reason why the bike lane improvement map shows little planned for bike infrastructure is because you showed a map of Los Angeles County and their improvements to bicycle routes, which they can only do outside of cities in unincorporated areas. That’s why none of the planned routes are in the areas with a color different from yellow.
you mentioned long form being a priority, and I hope that serves you. but short form content can fan out faster, and cover more topics - that interconnect if you so choose. the subject matter can also draw topics together that shouldn't normally be attributed except for the thread of your interest and effort. congrats on the name change!
It’s true what you said about the car infrastructure. If your car is the only way to get around your car is not your freedom but your slavor with a good sales pitch.
Cars are freedom from being trapped in auto-oriented infrastructure without a car. But if the infrastructure was just designed to support people better, that would not be needed.
You should become a city planner, you are good in your speaking and your opinions, thank you for the video
You don't even need Amsterdam level density for good cycling infrastructure. The entire Netherlands has it, from rural areas to small villages and cities. I agree that LA has potential in this area.
This is great work, keep it up sir !
I'm willing to bet many NYC businesses recovered a lot because they were allowed to set outdoor spaces where cars used to take up space. Open Streets has been a fantastic idea.
NYC small compared to LA
Great essay! Earned my lifetime support.
I think you have a really good balanced take on this. A lot of people will make out cars to be an evil that needs to be completely removed, but they will always serve specific functions other modes of transport can't substitute for. The best way is to reduce the need for cars and provide alternatives to driving.
And a fun fact: from everything I see so far, cities around the world with less car dependence and more alternatives, whether it's biking or transit, is more pleasant driving. From Amsterdam to Hong Kong, to maybe even Tokyo, you can see that it's a better experience driving when the majority of the population isn't doing so, and driving have to 'compete' almost with other modes of transportation as other modes are so convenient.
@@davidfreeman3083 I was in Tokyo and it was pretty amazing how little traffic there was down the middle of the main centres because essentially everyone catches the metro. The beauty of it is that if you really need to drive that option is still there and it's really cool for car enthusiasts and everything. I don't entirely believe in the 'cities are only noisy because of cars' thing tho because I found that it was quiet more so because of how quiet the Japanese are. I walked past an American tourist group and they stuck out like a sore thumb because of that
Removing parking in my city just made the small businesses shutter even faster. Nobody wanted to deal with not being able to park at their local stores, and everyone started just buying into either food delivery apps or Amazon. Biking will never be an option because of geography and weather so all in all nobody really won from this decision.
Worked amazing in Vancouver even though every business thought it would hurt them and now their all pro bikes. Toronto even thou our infrastructure is abysmal there are so many bike deliveries already.