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Good excuse to not rebuild it I think. Urban freeways are a terrible use of space. But it’s LA so that won’t happen. Few places with a deeper car addiction.
Got to rezone everywhere and tell millions of people with single family homes to fuck off. That is a hard thing to do when those people are voters. The entire LA basin is layer after layer after layer of suburbia expansion. Most of it is single family homes, while if it were something like Paris, planned roads and public transit could work. This level of urban sprawl is only possible with these freeways and it is still insufficient. It is a giant stack of problems.
Comparing LA with Paris and saying is easier in Paris is quite a statement!
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LA have large roads, grid configuration and a relative recent age: 250 years. And lot of people around.
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Paris have 2000+ years of history with layers of people coming around too, no grid configuration but roads created for pedestrian and horses, with some of them existing since thousand of years. And we have a big river in the middle (la Seine), unstable basement with many caves making the creation of any subway a living hell. And on top a lot of historical buildings are protected making demolition for new road impossible.
But despite that, we have good transportation alternatives on top of classic and totally full car roads: trains, subway, bus, cycle. Not perfect, lot of improvements still needed but things change, step by step… And people has been relocated multiple time to allow that. But it easier when the costs are payed by our global taxes and some LONG term plan. we have also the concept of public interest project to relocate people and businesses if they are in a place useful for a future transportation plan.
In LA, i don’t see the change really empowered at the political level, at town level. With large road like yours with no hard turn, you could put so many alternatives transportation:
- rail track for tram or automatic train
- dedicated bus line
- bike protected line with tree separation in the middle and free ticket to encourage the use of public transportation.
Does LA mayor / administrators promote this kind of alternatives? Because it’s what all big towns in France are pushing since decade’s already.
For various reasons, cities in America do not really invest in alternatives to automobile use. It’s not an LA exclusive problem but LA is a good example of why this can’t be the only way for your citizens to get around.
unstable basement with many caves making the creation of any subway a living hell.
That isn’t a problem in L.A., but there are areas where they had to build trains above ground rather than underground because parts of the city are floating on beds of tar (hence the La Brea Tar Pits). Believe it or not, there are oil wells in Los Angeles. They’re hidden inside building facades.
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…and tell millions of people with single family homes to fuck off.
No, we don’t have to do that. Upzoning their property only increases their options; it doesn’t force them to do anything. If they want to not sell at a lucrative price to a developer who wants to build the property out to its highest and best use, they’re welcome to be the last holdout like the guy from Up.
