LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density.

The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.

Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a feedback loop.

Taller buildings are not required for density, far from it. Look at Somerville, MA, where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories, yet they fit almost 20,000 people into a square mile -- and they like it. What they don't fit is 20,000 parking spaces, and that makes all the difference.

The car did not directly kill density, it enabled people to choose less density.

A small number of people like Robert Moses wielded enormous power over how our civil infrastructure was built in the post war period. Moses was famously opposed to public transit, going so far as to deliberately build bridges with overhead clearance too low for buses on routes to one of his beach developments.

During this period the federal dept of transportation was offering to pay 90% of urban freeway projects. There are a few famous examples of people negotiating a different outcome, like the light rail vs mt hood highway in Portland, Oregon. But the bulk of local politicians simply took the free money and built massive freeway infrastructure without much consideration of the future.

So no, this was not some broadly democratic choice or invisible hand of the market. It was a small number of politically powerful people making unilateral decisions using vast government funds.

People wanted to live in the suburbs. It was definitely promoted by government and business leaders, but it was also desired organically by people. It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape. The suburbs were a boon to the economy, to standard of living, to incomes, etc. I found a great video from a filmmaker on this subject:

How The US Government Sold Us On The Suburbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmL6xIg-EJ0

> It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape.

A lot of people still do. The people that could afford to move to the suburbs were also people that could afford to move out of tenements in the city, too, generally.

OTOH, it allowed them to be farther from (and outside shared facilities like schools, etc., with) the tenements and the people stuck living in them. (Which, due to economics and outright, overt discrimination in both lending and things like restrictive real estate covenant, especially meant non-Whites.)

I'm aware, and spent a decade living in that sort of neighborhood where most of the buildings are still original to their 20's construction.

The point is that suburban sprawl was something that was ultimately lead by a small group of people, and was done without a lot of foresight, particularly about induced demand.

Of course many people chose the new suburbs. One of the problems with this style of building is that it is indeed very appealing when it's at it's initial lowest density state. The problem is that as people move into the suburbs and congestion begins to rise, suburban sprawl has no answer. Those wide open freeways that felt so fast and convenient initially become the bane of your commute or even doing simple errands.

Then people get frustrated, and believe the only answer is still that same default idea to return to that initial utopia: just expand the freeways even more! Except as we see today, that simply doesn't work, and the pattern just repeats.

The whole context could have been different, and that would have resulted in very different decision making from consumers, particularly today.

I'll use Portland as another example, as I'm both familiar with it and it's something of an outlier on these issues historically. All the cool neighborhoods that are desirable to live in now are where the old streetcar lines used to run. The entire shape of these neighborhoods is different, with high walkability, because of the remnants of that transit system.

The streetcar system here was deliberately deconstructed here, again, largely due to powerful special interests. The auto and tire industry worked quite hard on promoting buses as the new modern approach, a vision local politicians also helped promote.

Today Portland is reconstructing the street car system, as part of a larger overall transit plan. 100 years later we can see we wished we'd just kept and maintained the original track system, and designed our zoning around it.

That's really the core point I want to make: suburban sprawl is a mirage, that appeals initially. However it fundamentally cannot deal with congestion, which means sprawl only has three possible futures: Door one is continued cycles of expansion and induced demand where congestion just gets worse in the long term. Door two is a mode switch, to provide a meaningful transit option to relieve the pressure of congestion without freeway expansion. Door three is economic collapse, where the whole question is mooted because entire subdivisions become blighted places no one wants to live in.

A large portion of US suburbia is headed for door #3 atm over the next half century. Hopefully we can be smarter than we were half a century ago.

I love making the free choice between a car that costs hundreds each month vs unlimited public transit for $90

My time is money, and public transit costs a lot of time and frustration. And with a car, I have freedom to go anywhere.

There is absolutely nothing like a free market in housing. Many low-density suburbs would already have naturally densified if they were allowed to. The reason they have not is that it's illegal. People aren't choosing less density. They're banning density.

If that's what people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to regulate it with zoning laws.

That's a distinction without a difference.

It doesn't enable people to choose, it made a choice and forced it upon everyone.

Somerville, MA is in the middle of the Boston metro area. It's saturated with three and four story buildings and the downtown is 10+ story buildings. It's tall buildings.

LA County is full of detached single family homes and undeveloped land.

Downtown? What downtown? We don’t have one.

If your talking about Assembly Row, that’s a “town center” development. Used to be a movie theater and a sea of parking lots. It doesn’t factor into Somerville’s style of urbanism.

You could argue Davis Square or Union Square I suppose. Bit, no, there's really no urban core the way Boston has one. I'd note that, in spite of that, Somerville is the 16th densest city in the US (with the caveat that comparing city densities involves somewhat arbitrary political boundaries). Cambridge is pretty much in the same boat and is at #26.

OP called out "skyscrapers". What counts as the precise cutoff for "tall buildings" is always going to be a matter of opinion.

But I live in Cambridge, MA and I can assure you Somerville would remain one of the densest cities in the union if every last building therein was lopped down to 3 stories by a giant lawnmower.

> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.

People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public transport, but the US doesn't, you need to look at what's different between the US and all other developed countries.

Canada might have certain urban areas with public transport, but huge swaths of the country depend on cars. That is the same situation as the U.S. except we've got 10x the population as Canada...so we've got more people in more places. As for Australia, a huge chunk of the country is desert, and most people are situated along the coasts.

The U.S. doesn't want urbanism. People by and large do not want to live in dense urban areas. Some people like it, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. With the remote work revolution, it's going to become even less appealing to live in a dense urban area.

There's a trope here that the US is some incredible outlier when it comes to per capita auto ownership. It's not. It's in the same ballpark as other wealthy developed countries. It's poorer countries (in Europe and elsewhere) that have lower rates of car ownership. According to a recent Pew survey [1], the US has slightly lower per capita car ownership than Italy and is in the ballpark of countries like France, Germany, South Korea, and Japan.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-sur...).

People who don't want density should be free to avoid it. What they should not be allowed to do is pass laws that prevent the rest of us from enjoying the benefits of density. The primary reason we don't have increased density in the United States is that it's illegal in most cities to build enough new housing to meaningfully densify neighborhoods.

From the internet:

Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. In Toronto, there are 4,457 people per square kilometre. In fact, Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541).

And crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594) and Boston (5,376).

>Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city.

The transit systems in both cities operate across the entire metro area not just the "city" proper.

Vancouver Metro Area: 2,463,431 / 2,878km² = 856 persons per km²

San Francisco Metro Area: 4,729,484 / 9,128km² = 518 persons per km²

(Numbers from Wikipedia)

>Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541)

Brooklyn is not a city. It's a densely populated subsection of one.

>crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594)

I'm not sure why you think Chicago and Philly are not comparable to Toronto despite being being only 1% and 3% more dense. They're effectively all the same density for the purpose of this discussion.

To put those density numbers in a bit more perspective: the entire country of the Netherlands has a population density of 521 persons per km². This is including the rural areas. While I wouldn't want to be without a car and happily own two, I can take public transit within walking distance from home, and I'm on the far outskirts of the country.

My (simplified) understanding is that it's more about the ideals. Back in the day, part of the American dream was to live in a semi-secluded suburban neighborhood and own 2+ cars per family. Only the poor and young people were expected to live in city centers. Therefore, the affluent citizens spread out, and cities evolved to cater to their needs, i.e., support private cars and the road system at the cost of not properly funding public transportation. In European cities the ideal was the opposite, and it was thought that only peasants would stay secluded and all the affluent people should live in the cities, which in turn should have great public transportation for practical reasons. I'd imagine that ideal extended to Canadian and Australian cities as well.

The difference is the treatment of poor & homeless. Public transit buildings/vehicles are some of the only inside spaces where they can spend time. Then people with enough money avoid public transit as much as possible. Then they vote against more funding for transit because it is not useful to them.

Toronto: not actually that dense.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+tor...

Well…OK, the core of Toronto is pretty dense, but the megasprawl that is amalgamated Toronto is not that dense.

But good luck getting by in any non-major metro area in Canada without a car. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver…maybe Ottawa…it's doable, but the second you get into the suburbs, or cottage country, it's Subaru time.

> very dense cities like Montreal

Remember it was founded in 1642. The older a city is, the more dense it is.

LA also happens to have a vast bus system that is heavily used.

We do not have subways partly because it would be very hard to build them in LA's geology. Seismic activity as well things like natural tar pits.

Historically I don't think its right to say cars killed the density. LA was several cities that grew into each other. Part of the reason LA is so wide is because of white flight to the outskirts. Do you build transit for something like that?

> almost 20,000 people into a square mile

That's less than 1/3 the density of Manhattan and about on par with SF.

Right...

>where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories

The point is that cars destroy density regardless of what your building height limits are.

You don't have to build skyscrapers to achieve high population density, you just have to build 3-6 story buildings close together. See Paris for an example. And you can have functional public transport at modest population density as long as the road network is a well connected grid and not a maze of cul-de-sacs. See Toronto for an example.

I agree that most of the US has been designed explicitly around the car, but there is no need to be fatalistic about it. Most US cities (including LA) had good public transportation before WW2, and they could have it again if they wanted.

Yeah, there's a cool project [1] that maps out all the historic streetcar routes in SF. There used to be a LOT of them, they all got ripped out to make more room for cars. There were rail tracks on the bay bridge! Those got ripped out in 1956 apparently. Everything was converted to buses so yeah, there's still public transit but I definitely feel like something valuable was lost there. I'd also argue that much of the bay area was built for street cars (they existed after all!) and we could always put them back if there was a compelling cost/benefit to doing so.

[1] https://sfstreetcars.co

LA has good public transportation but car-induced sprawl makes it less useful than it could be, and car culture here makes public transportation less appealing and less used than it could be. but if you live & work near one of the train lines, it’s awesome.

The rest of the world is rife with small, rural towns that nevertheless have great public transit systems, or at least ones that are more effective than what we see in the US. The major difference is that these places are willing to invest in the public sphere, and they're by and large willing to permit construction that is not car-centric (i.e., no parking minima to subsidize drivers).

Could you give a few examples of small rural towns where people can afford cars but instead the town has great public transit? Genuinely curious!

Iowa City, Iowa

Am I missing something? Iowa City seems to have only busses, and they run hourly. Perhaps I'm wrong?

If I'm not wrong, then we have vastly different definitions of "great public transit" -- I would not be happy there without a car.

Redmond, Oregon

Am I missing something here too? Redmond seems to have only inter-city busses.

Whistler, BC

  > The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

This just doesn't seem to be true. It probably needs some density (think "town", not "farmland") but the fundamental prerequisite is a commitment to planning and building public transit infrastructure, rather than automobile focused infrastructure.

Lot's of relatively low density places in Europe, Japan, etc. have very functional public mass transit. It's not universal, but there are good examples.

If you start with the assumption that approximately everyone has a car, you can choose build cities in ways that only support that...

Precisely. And the second fundamental prerequisite is frequency. Make public transport frequent enough, and with privileged access (eg bus lanes) and it will be more convenient than private cars.

> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

What does "high" mean? I think this should be quantified, preferably by someone qualified.

Unqualified opinion: It seems to me that if we took all of the money spent on personal vehicles, time spent driving, fuel and emission costs, infrastructure maintenance, and costs to human happiness + safety, we would be able to provide a better transportation system.

That's not exactly true. Bus systems are viable for low-density urban areas. Indeed, prior to the mass adoption of the automobile, buses and streetcars were fairly ubiquitous, even in such heavily urbanized areas as Peoria (population at the time: 70k).

Running a bus isn't that expensive. Running one every 15 minutes around a small town in a loop isn't that expensive.

I don't think there's anything fundamental about density. Its about ridership and funding. Even LA could have functional mass transit if it had the will to fund 15-minute busses on a grid all day. A 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?

Listen you’re totally right.

But even if car people lived somewhere with the best public transport in the world, they would drive.

It’s not about technology or even reality. This conversation is a lot like trying to tell private health insurance users about single payer systems. Or private school users about federalized education. Or telling people with 4 children or 0 children how to live in a world where a thing like the sedan is designed for people with 2 children.

It is telling rich people you know better and also they are wrong, which is not an emotion you’re permitted to send.

Many people are stretching the budget to have a car. With an adequate bus system that gets you anywhere in town taxi distance with a maximum single transfer of 15 minutes, there are perhaps many who's lives would be greatly improved by ditching the car. Or even just keeping the job if the car breaks down. Or using the car just for weekend jaunts.

> 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?

Busses accelerate, decelerate, and turn differently than cars, so even if in terms of steady-state flow the two-riders = break-even argument is correct, it's not in city traffic.

Moreover, I'd like to see your work on operating and capital costs, especially accounting for road wear for which the usual approximate rule of thumb is that it varies with the fourth power of vehicle weight.

Well, I'm repeating something my old boss Eric Carlson at Unisys said, in his Master's thesis on City Planning.

And remember, the City busses are running only every 15 minutes. So whatever effect they have on localized traffic, it's very intermittent.

The city I live in has around 65 thousand people and has perfectly functional public transportation. This doesn't ring true for me.

Los Angeles is spread out because it had functional mass transit at the turn of the last century. The Red Car interurban line sprawled out from downtown into the county and housing popped up six blocks on the side from every stop. Later mass car ownership filled in the blocks further out and the space in-between stops.

In that same period, just about every large town and small city had a trolley line.

You don't need skyscrapers for mass transit. Just enough political will to keep it funded.

> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

The Chinese and Japanese rail networks would like a word.