Posts about Los Angeles

I analyzed the 11 heavy rail systems in the United States. Some of these cities also have light rail, commuter rail, or other transit systems, but I didn't count those. That means in Boston, I looked at stations on the Red, Blue, and Orange lines, but not Green. (Why?)

I also combined heavy rail stations from multiple operators in the same region. For example, the Philadelphia score counts both SEPTA and PATCO heavy rail stations. New York's includes PATH and the Staten Island Railway (SIRT).

And the winner is... Los Angeles?

I was surprised by the results. Los Angeles scored the highest! I certainly did not expect that. Though in hindsight, it makes a good deal of sense.

Los Angeles has only 2 heavy rail lines, the Red and Purple lines. Those lines are confined to a relatively small area in the LA Basin, with the exception of 2 stations on the Red Line in the San Fernando Valley. And while Southern California has a reputation for being sprawling, the LA Basin is actually fairly dense, especially where the Metro has been built. As a result, its score isn't dragged down by suburban park and ride stations.

In the same respect, I was surprised that BART scored better than WMATA. Large portions of the DC system serve areas that are urban or urbanizing. In contrast, BART's system is much more suburban-oriented and has very little in the way of urban circulation.

Also surprising is that New York is not an outlier. It does come in a close second to Los Angeles, but I really expected it to be off the charts compared to everyone else. The New York City Subway alone scores 90.47 without PATH and SIRT, still just below LA; SIRT averages 71.45 while PATH is higher, 92.23, but its relatively small size (13 stations) means it doesn't change the New York average even a tenth of a point.

What is not very surprising is that the sunbelt cities (except LA) score more poorly than the more urban older cities (except for Cleveland). Cleveland is at a disadvantage because of the structure of its transit system. The system only has one stop in the central business district, and that station's score isn't that impressive anyway, which harms the average.

Distribution matters

The chart above shows how Walk Scores for stations in each system are distributed. The green bars give the average score. The rectangle shows the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the lines with dots at each end show the highest and lowest Walk Scores for any station in that system.

At the high end, several cities had at least one station (sometimes several) with perfect 100-point scores. The lowest score for any station nationwide was 28 points. Two stations in the Washington region—Arlington Cemetery and Morgan Boulevard—and one station in San Francisco—North Concord/Martinez—had that score.

The distribution is important in understanding how well distributed the well-scoring stations are in the system.

In Washington, the distribution is weighted more toward good-scoring stations, but there are still a lot of poor-scoring stations, too.

Compare that to San Francisco's BART, where there are fewer poor-scoring stations. Instead, there are a large quantity of stations in the middle of the distribution.

New York and Cleveland offer contrast to each other. While most New York stations score very well, Cleveland's don't rank above medium.

Limitations

The Walk Score algorithm is not perfect. It works by calculating the quantities and distances of various amenties. There are other factors which it does not measure that help to define the walkability of an area.

For example, a street grid makes an area much more walkable than a sprawling network of superblocks and culs-de-sac. The quality and proliferation of sidewalks also influences walkability. But these factors aren't currently part of Walk Score; there's no good data file for Walk Score to use that shows where there are and aren't good sidewalks, for example.

Regardless, Walk Score gives us a standard and fairly good measure to compare transit stations (and systems) to each other.

Tip: Veronica Davis. GOOD LA writes,

Kim thinks that creating better environments for transit riders is certainly a missed opportunity for the city. "People wait for a while at these stops, 15 to 20 minutes," she says. "This is an opportunity for the city to engage them." Included in her growing ideas of creating "surreal, out-of-place" situations, is the idea of building exercise equipment at stops, so people could squeeze a few pull-ups in.

Sadly, she's got her work cut out for her, since most corners in L.A. offer the same ugly, uncomfortable bus benches, and not much else. "Many neighborhoods in L.A. still lack built features that stimulate the senses and elicit interest at pedestrian scale," she says. "Perhaps the coffee table filled that role momentarily."

Overvecht station in Utrecht. Image via The Pop-Up City.

A Utrecht station installed a slide, which they call a "transfer accelerator," at a train station. Previously, Volkswagen had done the same, but more temporarily, in Berlin.

The MTA told Gothamist they're pretty sure New Yorkers won't be getting anything like this. Does any US city do more creative things with its public spaces beyond the rare creative bus stop? Can we ever surmount the risk of theft and fear of liability to make public spaces and transit facilities a little more engaging and enjoyable?

You put your BRT in HOV lanes or regular travel lanes instead of dedicated lanes, or you build "stops" rather than more luxurious "stations", or you leave out pre-pay, or you don't give buses signal priority, or you don't give your BRT unique branding, or whatever. There are a thousand corners like that you can cut that individually may or may not hurt too much, but collectively add up to the difference between BRT and a regular bus.

In the US, BRT creep is a big problem. Generally speaking the main reason American cities opt to build BRT instead of rail is to cut a corner and make it less expensive. Once you've adopted that view of your transit system—that cutting corners to save money is OK—it's too easy to keep going and cut a lot of other corners as well. Once you've made the decision to cheap out and go with BRT rather than rail, then your priorities are clear and the temptation to cheap out in other ways is too strong to pass up.

It happens all the time. The four leading examples of recently-built BRT in the United States are in Boston, Cleveland, Eugene, and Los Angeles. Boston's Silver Line BRT was built with curbside bus lanes like the one on 7th Street in DC, and is perpetually stuck behind car traffic using the lane illegally. Cleveland's Euclid Avenue BRT spends half its time stopped at red lights because it doesn't include signal preemption.

Eugene's EmX BRT doesn't even have its own lane for much of its route. LA's San Fernando Valley Orange Line BRT is probably this country's most successful "rail like" bus line, but even it was forced to repave its running way after barely a year of operation because the originally-constructed running way was substandard. So far, every example of BRT built in the United States has cut at least one extremely damaging corner.

And then there's Northern Virginia, where the HOV lanes on I-395 and I-95 that the state wants to convert to HOT lanes were originally built as a bus-only facility. Here, we built a pretty good busway and have spent the years since opening it up to more and more use by cars.

And why not? After all, if your goal is to substitute a less expensive but less effective alternate mode, why should anyone be surprised when you make the same sort of substitution when it comes to details of running way engineering or signalization?

If BRT is just a way to avoid spending a lot on transit so more can go to highways, why be surprised when BRT lanes are converted to car lanes? If decision makers were actually interested in spending the money to produce a transit line as good as rail, well, why not build rail?

I don't mean to suggest that BRT alone suffers from these problems, or that it's useless. Certainly rail projects can suffer from creeping cost reductions as well, and certainly good buses—including rapid ones—should be a part of every major transit system.

Still, as long as US planners think of BRT as a cheap replacement for rail, then the US will be very unlikely to ever produce BRT that is actually rail-like (as much as it can be anyway), because that mindset inherently undervalues many of the specific features that are needed to produce a high-quality transit line, regardless of mode.

Arlington found that Los Angeles and San Francisco are using installed occupancy sensors to improve parking meter enforcement and adjust parking prices according to demand respectively.

In Los Angeles, better enforcement and credit card acceptance means that parking revenues are dramatically up. There, drivers can use an iPhone app to see where parking spaces are available, and a webpage shows real-time occupancy. These data guide parking managers on enforcement targets as well as pricing guidance.

San Francisco's Smart Park program has support from a US DOT grant. SFPark will collect parking occupancy data and adjust meter prices automatically to balance parking demand, ensuring parking availability even on blocks that are in high demand.

Arlington staff is currently looking at procedures to manually measure occupancy, a labor-intensive process that former DDOT director Gabe Klein pointed to as one of the biggest reasons performance parking hasn't worked so far in DC. The time-consuming data collection process cannot be performed often enough to provide relevant information.

Arlington is also looking into a system similar to what DDOT has paid the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments to use. License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology uses cameras and a database to record where and when cars are observed. According to Arlington County, the treasurer's office and the police already own LPR equipment which can be used for occupancy counts.

Although this is cheaper than installing sensors at each parking meter, it has many downsides:

1. Data collection has to be planned in advance, essentially deciding what data to gather and then designing routes for people to drive with the camera in order to ensure coverage.
2. Data will most likely only be gathered when the meters are running and need enforcement, leading to the same information hole we have today where meters that aren't running can't tell you anything about how many people park outside of normal operating hours.
3. Monitor coverage won't be as complete as with continuously operating sensors. Essentially, with sensors, any possible view of the data could be supported, from information about late evening parking on weekends, to mid-day turnover rates and even special views like occupancy during street festivals.

Despite these drawbacks, collecting some data will help improve understanding of the usage of Arlington's metered parking spaces. Within six months, Arlington plans to test different occupancy measurement technologies within six months, and expects by next spring to identify high density blocks for studying occupancy as a proof of concept.

Update: Arlington County parking manager Sarah Stott's has responded with the following comments:

Thanks to Michael Perkins and GGW for helping to explain the importance of managing the curb space so that on-street parking spaces are available and utilized to their full potential to support local businesses. Unfortunately the article's headline is inaccurate.

Yes, Arlington County is currently investigating a number of techniques and technologies for measuring parking occupancy. We have not, however, decided to use cameras for this purpose.

Second, the County's goal in measuring occupancy is to collect data for the effective management of curb space and to devise parking solutions that are tailored to the community's needs. Revenue generation is not the goal. This is evidenced by the County's practice of measuring occupancy on non-metered streets where revenue doesn't exist.

Lastly, Arlington County has no current plan to extend meter hours past 6:00 pm in commercial neighborhoods. This decision would be made with the community's input and the support of data. We strive to make parking available and convenient for all. Doing so, will help to ensure that Arlingon continues to be a friendly place to live, work, shop and do business.

Can you identify each of the 6 locations (each row plus 2 for the middle row)? Responses will be hidden until the answers are revealed in a few days. Answer: Los Angeles. The locations are the Million Dollar Theater (top row), the Angels Flight funicular railway, the view from Angels Knoll park prominently featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer (middle row, left), the Grand Central Market (middle row, right), the Bradbury Building, and Caltrans Headquarters (bottom).

Planning hasn't always gotten everything right, but it has built and continues to build a foundation for great spaces and a great region.