Since when is anti-transit contrarian? Wake up, streetsblog, we pro-transit folks are the contrarians.

The Middle East, Africa, and Caspian regions are suffering terribly and will suffer more because we cannot get any traction.

The ice caps are melting and the human race is still fighting for the privilege to sell and burn more fossil-fuels.

L.A. has only L.A. to blame for not building a high-speed, high-capacity urban rail and bus network. These problems had been manifest ever since the days the last streetcars ran.

The logic of “Since we can’t serve everyone everywhere, we must build nothing nowhere” is only self-defeating. We must bear the costs and burdens for the failures of our previous generations.

We have the money, time and knowledge not to have to throw the time bomb to our kids and grandkids the way our grandparents and parents did to us.

We have infinite demand but a very limited amount of supply. So, we build the projects that have the most ridership potential, then when those succeed, we fill in the rest once everything settles. We only need a few projects to develop a network effect for everything else to succeed. In fact, those have already been built.

Yep. And consequently the cost of constructing a mass transit system with the capacity and speed to connect the many economic centers and serve the population which is “sprawled densely” is enough to consume the FTA New Starts budget for the next 20 years.

I think you’d have a hard time showing that with data.

Suburbs are now in surplus, the way viable urban neighborhoods were 50 years ago. Viable urban neighborhoods are in shortage.

There’s a general housing surplus in both suburbs and dense urban areas. There are plenty of condos for sale in downtown high-rises, many of them purchased by speculators hoping to flip them for a quick profit and getting burned when the housing bubble burst. Demand may generally have fallen more in suburbs than in central cities over the past couple of years, but almost all areas are hurting. And those recent declines must be viewed in the context of the prior run up in prices to relate them to the long-term trend.

I believe that trend has started to go into reverse, aside from cities when institutional arrangements and social conditions as a result of that 50 year trend make urban living unviable.

Suburbs are now in surplus, the way viable urban neighborhoods were 50 years ago. Viable urban neighborhoods are in shortage.

Let’s see which of those 19 million vacant housing units in the U.S. stay vacant. I expect lots of suburban and exurban areas are going to experience something like what older cities did in the 1970s.

What are these benefits?

Lower housing costs; faster, more convenient and more flexible transportation; less crowding; greater privacy; more green space; etc. The benefits that have been drawing people away from inner cities and into the suburbs for 50 years.

@rhywun,

Only if you happen to live near your job. Not so much if your job is on the other side of the metropolis from you.

It’s true in general. Researchers have studied the relationship between congestion, travel times and population density. As population density decreases, so do congestion and travel times.

http://www.pay4rides.com/2009/01/transportation-headaches/

OK, even if LA is more dense as a total metropolitan area (I don’t really buy it by the argument by the way), will Lost Asses continue to be so after the next earthquake, flood, tornado, brush fire, drought? And should the rest of the US (or California for that matter) continue to subsidize disaster relief for Lost Asses?

But congestion and commute times will be lower.

Only if you happen to live near your job. Not so much if your job is on the other side of the metropolis from you. Congestion will be higher because (a) a larger percentage of people will need a car (because transit is less effective in sprawl) and (b) those extra cars will be driving more miles.

The urbanized area in and around Los Angeles has become the most densely populated place in the continental United States,

That’s a hilariously misleading statistic I’ve seen thrown around by the car crowd and other anti-urban types, achieved only by the fact that large amounts of the region are too mountainous to build on. The fact is there are scarcely any “centers” in the region and the freeway network can’t keep up with the all the cars that are required by everyone.

What are these benefits? Enabling the 50,000 fatalities caused by automobiles in the US every year? Its a form of population control right? It must be mobility then. Is mobility itself an actual benefit? Who benefits from mobility other than oil companies and car makers? Accessibility is what people really need and density is part of providing accessibility.

I guess that’s opposed to the 1 square foot ‘place’ where I am standing which has a density of roughly 25 million persons per square mile.

To wit:

The urbanized area in and around Los Angeles has become the most densely populated place in the continental United States, according to the Census Bureau. Its density is 25 percent higher than that of New York, twice that of Washington and four times that of Atlanta, as measured by residents per square mile of urban land.

More at WaPo.

LA and a great deal of suburban sprawl represent how not to achieve a desirable polycentric city: Too many roads, too little transit, and a hellish pedestrian experience.

An intelligent, hands-on approach could utilize plenty of existing infrastructure. For example, most transit lines are filled to capacity in the peak direction but virtually empty in the opposite direction.

But congestion and commute times will be lower. And that seems to be the tradeoff most people prefer. New York is clearly an anomaly. There is probably no other city in the world with such a dense concentration of jobs in such a small geographic area. Certainly, there’s no other big city in the U.S. like it.

The problem with this statement is that cities in the US are for the most part not that dense any more. So if you start dropping down workplaces into these semi dense cities, people are still going to be coming from the surrounding areas to work there.
The second problem with this statement is that when the cities were dense, they were quite small, so the idea of scattering workplaces throughout doesn’t really heighten convenience (St. louis 60 sq miles – Cleveland 80 sq miles – Pittsburgh 55 sq miles). That’s the magic of density. Lot’s of people able to go lot’s of places without having to go very far.
Now the typical inhabited density in US is so low that it would never be considered a city, and putting an office there is what happens now anyway and people drive there.

I think that choice is up to people who invest in commercial property and start businesses.

The city has already upzoned Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn for large-scale office development, and has extensive tax breaks as-of-right in those locations. Outright subsidies have been provided in places such as MetroTech and Jamaica.

Moreover, there has been a massive boom in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens over the past decade or so. Most of it is in self-employment. You can see it in the spreadsheet attached to this post.

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/it_s_even_worse_than_you_know.html

Much of it is the result of the capture by these boroughs of consumer spending by their residents that used to flow to the suburbs. The growing number of large national chain stores (give Atlantic Center some love) and the re-occupancy of local commerical streets each played a role. The expansion of the media industries outside Manhattan also helped.