Uniquely filled with homeless and skyrocketing rents because there's not enough housing? Uniquely stuck in traffic because there's not enough metro lines? Unique that there's few walkable areas like the lovely cities in Europe?
No LA currently is the worst of both worlds, an unwalkable, undrivable suburb as far as the eye can see. The best thing that could happen to it is to become a real city.
Second city I had visited in the US. Got a hotel room near Hollywood because that seemed like a decent idea as a tourist for a long weekend. On the first day I find that parking is $60/night. So I park a half mile away where it's closer to $10 and walk. That half mile turns into close to thirty minutes of walking because it involves crossing roads with three lanes in either direction. So I decide to try public transport: except for that there's no metro line near West Hollywood, buses take exact change only and I can't find one to begin with, and to get a TAP card I have to drive to the nearest vendor anyway which doesn't sell TAP cards past 5pm. Fine, so I'll drive. Except for that I have to take route 10 or 101 to get anywhere, both of which are almost always at a standstill. In the evening I decide to go drinking and realise I HAVE to get an uber.
So I can't drive, can't walk, can't use public transport...admittedly I booked a hotel in a bad location for sightseeing since it was very last minute, but I have NEVER had any issues with getting around European and Asian cities in similar situations.
Only typing this out because this is how I'm guessing a very large percent of tourists see LA: it's an absolutely beautiful city completely ruined by the fact that you can't see any of it easily.
The policy described in the article and those set in place in the past 5 years have created the worst traffic we've seen. Watch any movie filmed in LA before 2000 and look at the traffic compared to now. There were ten plus million residents then too. Essentially, we have terrible City managers now that favor ideology over flow algorithms and have made the city avg speed 9 mph
Do you live in LA, have you actually spent time here or is this a random post?
People think the traffic is terrible, but they also expect to get from the east side to Santa Monica at rush hour for some unknown reason.
There is a growing rail system, and the 2nd largest bus system in the US.
Given the population as it is now, I think "unwalkable, undrivable" is a bit of an overstatement or people simply wouldn't live here.
Doesn't the earthquake risk significantly curb LA's ability to build up as much as NYC? I think there are probably certain density limiting factors like this. Which just means that they need to adapt to what that means in terms of sprawl and moving people around.
Very tall buildings can actually be safer than shorter buildings, because they are all made of steel, and can have a lot of anti earthquake support built in.
Also as a short proof, Japan and Taiwan are also directly on top of a fault line. Taipei and Tokyo have some of the tallest buildings in the world. The tech is there.
Even if you know "how to spell" it is easy to not notice when you've misspelled something. Also, there isn't really such a thing as just "knowing how to spell", it's an open-ended skill. And some people just don't have the mind to remember the precise spelling of every single random word.
I also don't know what driverless cars have to do with this. For one thing, it is possible that you might not have the option in another 25 years in some locations. For another, this actually is an extremely Luddite attitude, given the objectively horrify safety of cars which we've managed to psychologically lock away in modern culture. Not to mention the massive secondary benefits: you get to recover massive amounts of time dedicated to staring at a road, and being sober.
>given the objectively horrify safety of cars which we've managed to psychologically lock away in modern culture.
Ab out the car safety, I see your point mentioned every time selfdriving cars are mentioned but we could remove the bad drivers from the road today without having to wait 20 years or more until all or most cars are self driven. My solution would be to have mandatory systems to check the driver for alcohol or drugs and a system to check for the driver attention plus the collision detections and other driver assisting technology. I know there is a privacy problem but I think is not larger then the selfdriving cars one or we can adopt this technologies in countries with less bad governments.
My point we can improve car safety today if we want and not wait for selfdriving cars.
>My solution would be to have mandatory systems to check the driver for alcohol or drugs
I mean, I don't even know where to begin.
First, good luck getting the 200 million drivers that don't ever have this problem to agree to dealing with this system every single time they start their car. Not gonna happen.
Second, have you actually stopped to think about how this would actually work? BAC is already a pretty vague and inconsistent check of impairment, but it is literally the best available from any category. There are no sobriety tests for other substances. And there definitely are not ones that could be compacted and used on-demand in vehicles.
> a system to check for the driver attention plus the collision detections and other driver assisting technology.
So instead of just letting software do everything, instead you think we should stop at a stage where the human is redundant and honestly a weakness in the system, just so that we can feel like we are doing something when driving? Why not just let the software do the last 10% of the work and free up 100% of your driving time? This just sounds like pure stubbornness, not an actually effective system.
And finally, it completely negates the enormous advantages of an automated driving network. Barring rare and extreme events like multi-lane closures, traffic exists entirely and exclusively because of fundamental issues in human habits and judgement. There would be no traffic if computers were automating freeways. Ever.
1 I am ok with good self driving cars that are better then the average human
2 I am suggesting that forcing this systems on people is as problematic as forcing them to buy an AI car, so say from tomorrow in your city you have 2 choices : buy and install the system I suggested or buy a new car with self driving AI, why is second option easier to force on people?
3 My point is that if you want that in 30 years to force all cars in some regions to be 100% AI driven so forbid people the right to drive there, then why not also force that device I suggested today, you get the benefits today and in 30 years you can force no humans driver at all.
4 My problem is that the problem with car crashes has more then 1 solution, so if we want to solve it today we need to look at something else not only at self driving cars,
I mean I see what you are saying but in the case of spell check and driverless cars you aren’t replacing the dumb version with the smart version you are augmenting it. If your spell checker fails you can still manually do it without any friction.
I think some people get wayyy to reliant on using spell check though (especially with the right click to replace etc, so they never have to actually learn to spell the word).
Imagine the combination of Orcas and/or other animals with artificial intelligence /cloud hookups, same as for humans. Certainly will be an interesting world...
It is a great idea to program a dashboard to one’s taste. Most dashboards these days are terrible and illustrative of somebody else’s UI dreams. Imagine something more useful than what Audi or Tesla provides and not the crap Apple/Google gives us on our phones
Tesla owners have been writing javascript websites to run in the web browser on the 17" touchscreen ever since the Model S was released. You can't do much of a car dashboard, alas, but you can do weather forecasts, TODO lists, geofenced content like work server status while I'm driving to work, and so on.
