Okay okay... the title exaggerates this notion quite a bit, but there is definitely truth in it.
When I moved here last September, I was thrilled to be in a neighborhood that's walkable. And within .5 to .75 mile from my apartment I have just about everything I could want - grocery shopping, restaurants, lots of retail, a movie theater, my gym, a train station, etc. etc. So, from the technical standpoint of walkability, I'm doing quite well for the average Angeleno.
That said, the other night my boyfriend and I were having dinner with some new friends, and a couple of us concurred that, despite opportunities to walk here and there (for some more than others), it's just not that fun to walk in LA. Why? Because Los Angeles is built for cars, not pedestrians. Many of the sidewalks are narrow and located close to fast-moving traffic, things are spread out so you gotta walk farther (than in your average city), and the majority of intersections require that you push a button to get a signal to cross the street (or else risk getting a ticket for jaywalking... or risk getting run over). On the flipside, the roads are wide; the standard speed limit on most thoroughfares is 35 mph (which is pretty high considering it's an urban environment); the grid pattern makes it easy to find alternatives if one road isn't moving well; and there's generally cheap or free parking almost anywhere you go (although often you gotta know the "tricks" to finding it).
The typical "progressive" response to a city built around the car like LA is to pooh-pooh it. Like it's the devil's spawn and not worth even considering as a viable place to live. Okay, I get it. I couldn't wait to move out of car-centric Detroit when I was growing up, and now I find myself in a place that epitomizes America's obsession with four wheels. But it is what it is. I'm not responsible today for the decisions urban planners made decades ago to tear up the light rail and replace it with tar and paint.
And there's lots of people who are trying to change this. LA's current metro subway system, being what it is, is just over 20 years old, with some of the newer lines just around a decade old. Efforts to add bike lines and "sharrows" around town are moving along, but slowly. Redevelopment of neighborhoods like mine to make them more walkable and pedestrian-friendly is slowly changing the face of a city defined by the automobile.
It all takes time though... Just because you lay down a train line that can whisk people downtown past miles of backed-up traffic doesn't mean people will flock to it. A, they may not know where it starts or ends; B, it's a cultural shift they need to make to get out of their cars; and C, until land use patterns change as well, trains aren't going to just become popular on their own.
Think about the great train cities... London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Chicago... perhaps the most important factor in all of those cities is the age of their train systems. For many of them, they built their train lines at the same time that their cities were growing out to where the trains went. Secondly, and almost as importantly, their trains go directly to major places where people want to be. In London there's dozens of places, but certainly Picadilly Circus, Westminster, and Heathrow Airport come to mind; in New York there's Times Square and Wall Street; in Chicago it's the Loop and O'Hare Airport. If a train system doesn't take people to a major hub of activity, it's gonna struggle.
And in LA, in a city that grew up around the very notion that people can drive from wherever to wherever on their own, in which there's little concentration of jobs or housing in any particular location (not even, really, in downtown), it's very near impossible to develop a train system that'll get people anywhere they want to be consistently and for multiple purposes. Sure, when my boyfriend and I want to go downtown for an evening event, we'll take the subway, but when I'm going to work, I have little choice but to drive. If my work was located downtown, then I'd take the train. But it isn't, and it's nowhere near a train station, which is true for most Angelenos' jobs and/or housing. The very fact that I live within a half-mile of an LA Metro station actually puts me in the minority of Angelenos.
Changing this takes time. In my neighborhood, the Hollywood/Vine subway station is located in a great spot, and there's some good new development that has sprung up around it - but it isn't enough to make that particular station very successful. Instead of several blocks around the station being filled with housing/retail/etc, there are a few blocks with some development and some blocks with surface parking lots. And I guarantee you that if someone can park relatively cheaply at a location rather than navigate the train system, they'll drive 99 times out of 100 rather than take the subway.
So can this ever change? Certainly. But unlike the kind of outcomes we see in New York, London, Paris, etc., Los Angeles has a tougher road to take, so to speak. The city is built out already, land is expensive, and ingrained cultural norms trend strongly toward driving over alternative transportation methods. If LA ever were to become the walkable/transit "nirvana" of places like the aforementioned cities, it would probably take ten times more effort to get it done here than it ever did in any of those other places. Not that it didn't take lots of effort elsewhere, but the barriers here are so overwhelming that it seems near impossible that it would ever change.
I wish LA was more walkable. What with gorgeous weather 95% of the time, fairly flat topography, and so many interesting neighborhoods and cultural institutions, it has all the ingredients to be more walkable right now. I'm just not sure that that's something I'm going to see in my lifetime, or if it's even possible to do.
What do you think?
