![]() ![]() Los Angeles County is also set to tighten restrictions Wednesday with a new ban on outdoor dining, and may soon implement additional “safer-at-home” measures.Īll of that adds up to a predicted 13.5% drop in Thanksgiving trips across the region, according to the Auto Club of Southern California, the largest year-over-year drop since 2008.īut after decades of bemoaning that infernal traffic jam - of news outlets across the country pointing to it as an insane, hellish nightmare that further exemplifies why no one would ever want to live in L.A. This year, the freeway may look a little different: State officials are pleading with people to stay home and avoid holiday travel amid an alarming surge of cases of COVID-19. News helicopters hover overhead and photographers perch on overpasses to capture the familiar glow of city folks en route to Grandma’s house, or returning from whence they came. Headlights and taillights snake across the asphalt and disappear beyond the horizon. No, not the Christmas tree kind: the freeway kind.Įvery year, the 405 Freeway’s bumper-to-bumper traffic on Thanksgiving eve becomes a symbol of America’s holiday travel mayhem. But while you might think more road capacity means less traffic, that’s not actually the case, according to a report published by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California, Davis in 2015.In L.A., nothing signifies the start of the holiday season like those twinkling red and white lights. LA County has 6,500 centerline miles of streets, significantly more than some other US cities known for their congestion, such as Portland and Denver. According to a report, social media went crazy as dozens of people upload their own photos of the traffic jam, making the spectacular event a worldwide frenzy. Read: How do you solve a problem like Jakarta’s gridlock? We have developed, by choice, a car-dominated infrastructure. The high cost of parking, combined with the wide-reaching, 24-hour public transit system in New York limits car ownership there, McNally adds. In LA, development densities are high for the entire region – (it’s) essentially a flat surface where most of a very large area is equally dense, and thus equally congested.” “New York City has extreme population and employment density in the core, but it drops off rapidly as you move out radially. “We have developed, by choice, a car-dominated infrastructure (in LA) that will be no easier to change than trying to impose a road system in Venice, Italy,” McNally says. One of the reasons is car ownership: LA had an estimated 7.8 million vehicle registrations in 2016, whereas New York had just 2.6 million in 2015. By comparison, New York City had an estimated population of 8.5 million in 2016, squeezed into roughly 300 square miles of land.ĭespite having less space to house a similar population size to LA, New York still doesn’t have it as bad when it comes to congestion. Los Angeles County covers about 4,060 square miles and had an estimated population of 10 million in 2016, according to the US Census Bureau. Read: Downtown Los Angeles’ stunning comeback You can make all the improvements in public transport in the world, but if people can drive (from the suburbs) to their destination … the reality is (driving is) always going to be a more attractive way to get around.” “If you build all this transit, will it relieve congestion? The answer is no,” he says. The project aims to reduce time spent in traffic by 15% a day by 2057.īut Taylor doesn’t believe improving public transport facilities will work. In 2016, LA voters passed the $120 billion Measure M ballot to expand transit capacity and improve highways throughout the region. Their geographic areas, however, are much smaller than that of LA, meaning that drivers have a shorter commute, and hence spend less time in congestion during rush hour. ![]() Other US cities such as New York City and San Francisco suffer from similar levels of overall congestion as LA, according to Inrix. “It’s portrayed in media and movies as a city of sunshine and palm trees, and tracts of single-family houses stretching off into the horizon – when actually, as an urbanized area, it’s the densest in the country, more so than New York.”ĭrivers in LA spent, on average, over 102 hours in traffic at peak times in 2017, according to transportation analytics firm Inrix – that’s the most time drivers spent in rush-hour jams in any city in the world. ![]() “One of the things that has characterized Los Angeles over the past quarter century is that the metropolitan area has been continuing to grow,” says Brian D Taylor, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and the Institute of Transportation Studies at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. ![]()
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