r/geography • u/villehhulkkonen • 1d ago

La is a wasted opportunity Discussion

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Imagine if Los Angeles was built like Barcelona. Dense 15 million people metropolis with great public transportation and walkability.

They wasted this perfect climate and perfect place for city by building a endless suburban sprawl.

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35

u/hanzoplsswitch 1d ago

Every time I’m in LA I have the same feeling. Imagine a city with this weather with good public transport and bike lanes. Dense neighbourhoods with a lot going on. Such a missed opportunity. 

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 1d ago

LA has all of those things... have you ever been? 

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u/Jeembo 1d ago

Haha I was gonna say.. he's literally describing a significant portion of LA. Hop on a train/bus/uber to any one of hundreds of fun neighborhoods, then walk or ride a public scooter or bike to wherever you want to go. Maybe I've been spoiled living in Redondo and Long Beach, but it's like these people are visiting Torrance or Cypress or something when they come out here and judge.

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 1d ago

Or commerce city, what happens is people fly in, get stuck in traffic, then go to visit their family in Reseda and never leave the house, then start complaining about it

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u/theamathamhour 1d ago

lol, I know people that do this, they save money on hotel in some random city near LA, drive to the family event then leave and say LA is horrible.

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u/Put-the-candle-back1 1d ago

significant portion

The point is too much of it lacks walkability, not that there are zero areas that do it well.

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u/OuchPotato64 1d ago

Parts of LA has those things. And it doesnt do them well compared to cities that do bike lanes and dense neighborhoods well. Small parts of LA feel like NYC, small parts feel like SF, and small parts of LA have European style zoning.

But the vast majority of LA is suburbs and parking lots. You also need to drive to the pockets of walkable neighborhoods. The shittiest part is that most walkable neighborhoods have high rent because of how coveted they are to live there. I grew up in LA, it does mixed used building better than the vast majority of American cities. But compared to cities like Montreal or Tokyo, LA has awful city design.

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 1d ago

These areas that are separated are the size of most other cities. Why not compare it to other american cities? Yeah no crap its different than tokyo lol

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u/LearnedZephyr 20h ago

Sure, let’s compare it to Chicago and NYC.

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u/mitojee 1d ago

L.A. is both. Sure the different "towns" can be nice but it's all glommed together into sprawl. Take South Pasadena, it's a very cozy small town with a Mayberry style sheriff's office, but it's only a few miles from hitting East L.A. urban hell. Same thing for K-town to mid-Wilshire, doesn't take long to transition from shabby strip malls stacked on strip malls to the fancy areas where the big money have mansions.

So they are making attempts for creating walkable urban spaces at the Metro stops in K-town with shops and apartments but it's still a bit hit or miss so time will tell if they take hold. Also, a lot of areas got gentrified or improved only in the past 20-30 years. Pasadena's Old Town was pretty shitty until it got cleaned up and same goes for Hollywood (though some would say its still pretty shitty as it only takes a short walk to hit some sketchy bits, especially Sunset and Vine area where you have homeless stabbing each other in broad daylight).

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u/deerskillet 17h ago

good public transport

Lol. Lmao even.

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 12h ago

You haven't been there in the last 15 years have you

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u/deerskillet 12h ago

The public transport in LA is laughably bad outside of few select areas. A car is a requirement to live in the city, unlike NYC, Boston, SF, etc.

Not to mention most major European cities

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 11h ago

Damn I must have died along with probably half the people I worked with everyday when I was living there without a car! I didn't even know that!   Lmao you can just say no, it's okay to be wrong

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u/deerskillet 11h ago

Alright I'll admit "requirement" is a bit of a hyperbole, but don't act like driving isnt quicker than public transportation 90% of the time when traveling in LA, often by a factor of 2x or 3x even.

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 11h ago

Dude it's literally the opposite. You have no idea what you're talking about. How about you drive from Pasadena to the Santa Monica Pier and I'll take a train and we'll see who gets there first 

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u/Limp-Adhesiveness453 11h ago

And you're going to have to pay for parking on both ends which is extremely hard to find even though you think apparently everywhere is a parking lot. You're going to spend five times as much and get there slower. Like I said you haven't been there in the last 15 years. I'm sure in the 70s and the eighties it was horrible but they've been building trains and still are building more

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u/caustictoast 1d ago

Other than good public transport, which they're actively working on and isn't that bad compared to a lot of places, the rest exists. Different parts of LA have different things. It's a huge place with 10 million people.

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u/LearnedZephyr 20h ago

The public transportation is trash. Credit where it’s due, it’s the most rabidly improving in the country, but it’s still trash at the moment.

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u/GenericAccount13579 1d ago

LA has fantastic public transport. Public transport doesn’t have to mean subways.

And there’s plenty of bike lanes, but since LA sprawls so much there’s also plenty of not safe bike roads. So it’s a mix and match.

But the thing about LA is that it is a collection of fairly independent areas. I hardly ever have to leave my neighborhood if I don’t want to. There are food deserts for sure that need fixing, but there’s basically dozens of 15-minute cities within LA.

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u/Then_Manager_7288 1d ago

They are investing on their metro system tho, but I agree 100% with what you wrote.

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u/mitojee 1d ago

There were plans for rational urban planning that but it was thrown out in favor of selling more developments and cars.

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u/LateTermAbortski 1d ago

I can imagine because there are lots of them up and down the coastline that are not la.

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u/ALickOfMyCornetto 1d ago

Lots of cities in LA have all of those things, especially on the beach