La is a wasted opportunity

[u/villehhulkkonen]

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.

[u/DBL_NDRSCR]

it's not hard to live carfree if you pick the right neighborhood, lots of people do

[u/contextual_somebody → u/DBL_NDRSCR]

Greater Los Angeles has the second highest population density of all US metros. This isn’t surprising to people who have actually lived there. It’s walkable. There’s a subway. Etc

[u/vivekadithya12 → u/contextual_somebody]

That's a ranking of metropolitan areas, not the cities themselves.

Most metropolitan areas mentioned on that list have dense urban cores (downtowns), suburbs, satellite cities that stretch over a very very big area.

Los Angeles is a very very very populous city that's distributed much more evenly across the entire metro region compared to the other cities. It's much more like a 1000 little towns collectively identifying as LA. So on the whole, it does feel a lot less dense except for a few pockets like Downtown, Hollywood, Culver City, Santa Monica etc.

Secondly, the subway barely covers a decent chunk. Walkability isn't just "the ability to walk around" - it's more about getting to everywhere, do everything by foot and public transport. You may walk to your local groceries and handful nearby places but you can't make it to the other end of the city or the airport without a car.

[u/Vin4251 → u/vivekadithya12]

(Not directed at you specifically, but at a common sentiment I see from east coast suburbanites): I really never understood and will never understand how people from say, the Philly suburbs or DC suburbs think that their metro areas "feel a lot more dense" than LA's just because they have a tiny city proper that's denser than DTLA. Those metro areas are basically like 95% of the USA: no sidewalks outside of the city proper, every road is either a cul de sac or a high speed arterial, and amenities are not just far from home but far away from each other and from workplaces. That makes them overall worse for car dependency, because they might have commuter rail, but on average 75% of vehicle miles traveled in the US are for non-commuting errands, and suburban areas of east coast cities tend to be way worse for those than LA's suburbs.