Culver City's Transit Was Doomed From The Start - A Harm Reduction Approach (Part 1)
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- Опубликовано: 29 июл 2023
- If you look at a city undergoing change the same way you look at a person undergoing change, you're more likely to be understanding of the underlying issues causing the problematic behavior in the first place. And the more understanding you have of the situation, the better prepared you will be in dealing with the eventual relapse.
This video introduces the idea of harm reduction. You may be partaking in a behavior that is problematic, but you may not be able to completely stop the behavior. So instead we create a plan that allows you to continue that behavior but in a safer manner, with the hope that you can reduce the problematic behavior or even stop it.
In part 2, I'll describe how I think driving to and through Culver City can be done in a safer more comfortable manner, and in a matter that doesn't affect businesses, acknowledging that there are outside factors that prevent us from completely abstaining from driving in LA for the time being.
Logan, Diane E, and G Alan Marlatt. "Harm Reduction Therapy: A Practice-Friendly Review of Research." Journal of Clinical Psychology. 2010 February. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
I really like that there are people like you out there who recognize the potential of LA and other Californian cities to get so much better in the future. There are so many doomers both within the city and outside of it who will forever sentence LA to be among the worst in terms of its current city design, which I think is really harmful and has the power to send us in the wrong direction.
thats one of the reasons why i love this channel, it gives me (a san diegan) hope that socal and the rest of the country can improve
LA is not the worst. Have you heard of a place they call Houston? Jacksonville? Oklahoma City? All objectively worse, right down to the urban design. It's not going to take much infill to get most of LA county (other than the mountains) to over 10,000/mi² and allow for better mass transit. OKC and Jacksonville are sitting just over 1,000/mi². They will never have good planning ever.
@@VulcanLogic For sure, LA is definitely not the worst and I know there are a lot of cities that are objectively less people-friendly than LA, but that doesn't stop many from ignoring that and hating it because it is the second largest metro areas in the country. Admittedly, yes, it has the some of the worst people-friendly infrastructure of its size, at least until you get down to the metro areas you listed.
@@VulcanLogic I think it's worth pointing out that the more parking lots a city has the more space is available for development without having to tear anything down.
I have lost count as to how many times I've heard the argument that U.S. cities can't become as good as European cities because U.S. streets are too wide etc.
Well it's really frickin' difficult to find space for anything in European cities not just lanes for buses and tram lines but even when we build new underground rail ways it's genuinely difficult to find space to build stations etc.
In cities Houston, Jacksonville, Oklahoma city, Tulsa etc. you're spoiled for choice, there's so much space you plunk down anything you want almost wherever you want and make things evenly spaced and spread.
Places like these may be bad starting points, but they're so easy to change in comparison.
Or rather they would be if it weren't for U.S. politics and culture.
@@williamhansen9456 Absolutely. You look at Detroit, which is still 4 times as dense as Jacksonville, despite having lost 2/3rd of its people, almost 30% of the downtown area is devoted to parking, and there are empty lots available all over. The city can absolutely rebuild itself in a more sustainable way, and more easily than nearly anyone else outside of Gary, Indiana, because of the available space.
In Irvine, CA, where I'm at now, the Irvine Company, the developer responsible for all this sprawl (but still at 4 times Jacksonville density), they've actually run out of vacant land, so they're doing infill at failing or aging retail centers, adding 4300 more units over the next few years. There's another 4500 units going in at Tustin Legacy which are also going to be higher density, but unfortunately not mixed use. But at least there are 1100 units going in at Warner Red Hill (technically Santa Ana, but right on the Tustin/Irvine border across from the legacy) that is mixed use. The density in my zip code is almost 8600/mi², but it will be closer to 11,000/mi² by the time this round of infill is done.
Jacksonville can do the same in their aging powercenters, but it's going to have to look a lot more like Vancouver than Detroit or SoCal. They don't have the space for missing middle without tearing down SFRs, which still have plenty of remaining economic life. So it would have to be high density high rise if they want good density any time soon, and politically, no, they don't want it. I honestly have no hope for Florida. Next Cat 3 to pass through may bankrupt the state, as 20% of homeowners are insured by the state (most other insureres have left).
At the end of the day I feel like it’s all about providing real and safe options. The truth of the matter is that the road in Culver City before the changes was only usable by cars and (kinda) pedestrians.
Then the road diet came along and made things like public transit, bikes, scooters, rollerblades, one wheels, and walking all safe options for getting to your destination. As you said, enough people started using these other options that traffic didn’t actually become worse.
Everyone won with basically no downsides! And then the city council decided to completely ignore the mandate of the people and made half the options dangerous again so people will stop using them…
Move Culver City was definitely a net win. People just couldn't get over their perception of the worsened traffic; the corridor should have just been closed off to through traffic (but not necessarily TO traffic, as I'll get into in my next video) to begin with, but the details of how one would go about doing that are the topic of part 2. I hope an urban planner or engineer shows up in the comments of that video and lets me know if I should keep my day job.
@@nimeshinlosangeles yea, one of my biggest frustrations is when people hyper focus on one metric (like car travel time) and ignore all the other relevant metrics which indicate a healthy street like number of walkers, number of bikers, number of car vs car collisions, number of car vs other collisions, etc.
But pulling back this change definitely made a lot of people furious so I hope they become engaged in local politics in the future and make the next improvement to the street even better!
Except the reopened lane will just attract more traffic which will worsen the traffic until it gets still more congested, then they'll just open the bus/bike lanes to general purpose traffic and THAT will be choked with cars with no solution in sight except tear down the Culver City CBD and turn the arteries into freeways. Then it's "Just one more lane bro. Just one more lane. I swear bro, it's going to fix everything! Bro, just one more lane, bro."
After the next election cycle, when the conservative (and parking garage funded) council members are voted out, the city council needs to pedestrianize as many streets as they can.
yes and no… for some streets, where cars are totally out of place, yes. But for the majority you first need to reduce the need to drive: decentralize shopping, denser housing, a network (!) of separate bike path along every street unsafe to bike on and a transit network covering the whole LA area.
@@kailahmann1823 Yes, what's around the streets is more important than the streets themselves.
I believe parking is a close second.. Nobody needs bus lanes and bike lanes if there's no car traffic.
And goods transportation is still going to be necessary.
So if you get the mixed use medium/high density going and remove most parking and make the remaining parking time limited to like 1 hour, that's like 90% of the job done.
@@kailahmann1823 That's like saying we can't take the first step until the journey is complete!
@@kailahmann1823 No, you need to use the carrot _and_ the stick. If it's easy and convenient to drive, people will drive; this has been well-proven in places with an established walking/biking culture. You need to make it both hard to drive _and_ easy and convenient to walk, bike, or take public transit.
@@kailahmann1823almost all those things rely on the walkable infrastructure being in place. I would say low hanging fruit would be bus frequency increases and separated bus lane and separated bicycle lane. Next enhancement of the sidewalk with trees. See what happens after a few years and go from there.
As a med student, this is the kinda crossover I never knew I needed
Same, I know right!!
It really grinds my gears when motorists bring up the whole “bike/bus lanes cause congestion, congestion causes pollution” argument. They recognize that cars are awful and cause pollution, however their solution is just to dedicate more space to cars and make any other form of transport unsafe/slow. This will somehow improve pollution.
And cars cause plenty of congestion without bike lanes. Freeways are constantly congested. It’s almost like it’s an incredibly inefficient mode of transportation or something 🤔
I really appreciate the perspective you bring to the conversation by being:
* *A medical professional* : You're able to draw parallels from your medical practice, and bring a rigor emblematic of someone in the sciences.
* *A resident of Los Angeles talking about Los Angeles problems* : You're able to precise in what you talk about, because it's a problem space you live with and have a stake in. This would probably be a great video to put in front of decision makers, since it's well articulated perspective from someone in their constituency.
Irony of urbanized LA county is that all forms of transportation suck. Public transportation is slowly improving but still not where it should be. Owning a car is dumb expensive only for you to have no where to park and sit in traffic at almost any hour of the day. Walking and biking are only possible in a few places and very dangerous. There is no option here that is not a headache or risky. Thanks for highlighting all these things with your channel.
That's one of the interesting things about car-dependent places. The more car-centric a region is, the more degraded the driving experience gets along with everyone's travel options being diminished. Everyone loses including people who prefer to drive a car.
That's the legacy of Car-Oriented Development
As a Angeleno via New Yorker, glad you’re doing this. There’s a hunger for a better LA, and if the councils weren’t landlords maybe the expedition in housing and transit infrastructure could happen in this life time (one would think they wouldn’t want to be embarrassed with the impending Olympics how abysmal in city center housing is). Hopefully content like this can help get more people to start questioning the car dependency and the need to “preserve” pain points.
Even if they aren’t landlords or homeowners themselves, city councils tend to represent special private interests, like landlords and wealthy homeowners. They vie for their own self-interest, at the expensive of overall economic health. They want free markets, on the global stage - that’s how their portfolios increase in value - but they don’t want it in their own private fiefdoms. They’d rather just manipulate the housing market in their favor, and keep the poor out of their local environments.
@@alexlwlondon agreed. In NYC and seeing their influence on their mayor here as they were majority of his campaign donors
@@DryWall-wd4ei tell me you think you know about LA without ever living there. Don’t believe what you see on tv. That’s just an aesthetic
I like the comparison to smoking cigarettes. I DO smoke (yeah, I know) and I hate being around smokers if it's not an environment designed around it (like the patio of a dive bar). I'm glad people aren't allowed to smoke in parks or transit stops. I'm *definitely* glad you can't smoke indoors. There are parallels there. I was living in New Orleans right after they banned smoking indoors entirely, and so many people were pissed off, but after a short while, almost everyone agreed how much better it is - even the smokers. Sure, you'll still find some old salty bastard that's still mad he can't chain smoke while sitting at the bar in his local watering hole, but 99% of people think the change was good, even if some of them resisted at first.
Hey man, I'm an engineer who moved to LA last year. About the same time you did and I was stoked to see you making videos on exactly what LA needs the most help in (in my opinion at least - homelessness and housing is a monster to tackle also).
I heard about the REMOVE Culver City about 4-6 months ago (flyers and other YTers) and was pretty upset especially since I saw your video and have visited Culver a good amount of times. I really appreciate your videos and your effort. I'm not sure if my energy should be dedicated to YT like you but I do think I want to start taking actions like you did. I'm thinking of going to city council meetings (as hellish as that sounds) or other types of meetings and gatherings where I can bring people together. Maybe there's a StrongTowns movement here.
Nevertheless, I like what you do and given you're a physician that's a big feat to split your time up between personal life, your job, and this hobby. Thank you.
I'm a business analyst who's been here for a while now and also want to get involved, but haven't taken the first step yet. These videos are doing a lot to inspire me to though
Your efforts will soon bear fruit, don’t worry
I think this is one of the best videos I have seen all year
Omg this was so good both for explaining cities’ poor design flaws and explaining harm reduction!!!
woah, this harm reduction analogy is actually really good. especially liked the smoking part.
your pedestrianizing thing is absolutely right. if we want to reduce people's use of cars we should make some of the places they go to not have any, so then they'll get the opportunity to walk/bike/take transit to their destination. once they see how great it is to do something without a car in a place with no cars they'll want more (which is like an addiction but this one's good) so they'll continue to go there without their car, and maybe find a car-light place to stop driving to. they'll keep seeing how nice doing stuff car free is and they'll realize that to really fulfill this experience they'll need more car free places, so they demand them and since so many people demand them the city will provide them, and it's just an upward spiral.
Another great video, Nimesh. I just moved from Koreatown to West LA, and both areas have so much potential to be more people friendly, healthy, and bike and pedestrian safe.
Excellent video, Nimesh. It’s sad what Culver City is doing right now, and a lot of the MOVE Culver City detractors need to see this video. I’m hoping they’ll eventually come around and convert the inner travel lane to a bus lane, and make the combined bus/bike lane into a nice and wide bike lane.
I'm so glad you started making videos. There really was a lack of good urbanist content from LA (which is kind of surprising) but you've set a great standard with these videos.
I also think it's great that you're from a completely different discipline than many urbanists, but are also able to link your professional knowledge and experience to urban planning lessons.
As for this specific video, I think you make a great point. The road diet they settled on was both too ambitious, but also not ambitious enough. It's a compromise that left everyone miserable, but since the car owners are the ones with power, they were able to convince the populace to give them back their space.
But the irony is, assuming I know where your next video is going, they may have set in motion their own demise, because just banning cars might be what happens next and may be the only "correct" solution.
Hey thanks for the kind words! "Too ambitious, but also not ambitious enough" is a very interesting way to put it; and yes, underlying all this is the fact that car owners are the ones with the power, so any solution has to keep that in mind.
I have my own thoughts on what the next small step should be that I'll explore in the next video, but it's not going to be banning cars. I think a lot of urban planning enthusiasts (as opposed to actual urban planners) want to see every space immediately pedestrianized, but the whole reason I made this video is to introduce that idea that getting to your goal may involve taking a lot of small baby steps on the way.
My man is fighting the good fight for the future socal transit utopia .
I really appreciate your different take on urbanism coming from a medical background. One of the main points of urbanism is having people of different backgrounds mix in a single area, and it's interesting hearing your take compared to engineers and city planners etc.
I never really go to Culver City but this was a huge bummer. Seeing you explain how different regions housing supply compared to the job supply, and the consolidation of certain sectors in the area make it a nightmare of traffic is a great nuanced take. I love LA and despite putting our foot in our mouth so often, and being the butt of a lot of criticism around the country, we're still decades ahead of a lot of cities that are only now expanded the way we did in the post WW2 boom, and it's good to see optimistic content with actual ideas coming from the inside.
Thanks for the video Nimesh. Your channel is quickly becoming one of my fave urban planning channels on RUclips.
Love the videos, dude. I live in Pico Robertson and Culver City is a mere 1.6 miles from my home, but you won’t find me scooting or riding my bike through the cluster that is I10 and Venice BLVD with all of the craziness that is that area north of a Culver City. I want so badly to never use my car, but that’s just such an unrealistic thing in LA due to the disjointed efforts like your highlight in this video.
The intersection of Pico and Robertson has so much potential to be its own town square that if the city of LA ever decided to give it a glow up, you wouldn't even need to go to Culver City!
@@nimeshinlosangeles Agreed. Im trying to do more in my direct neighborhood, but so much of it is still so pedestrian unfriendly. We will walk up to Beverly Hills from time to time but that’s all overpriced as heck so it’s not really a destination I want to reach. All of the places I want to go have major car thoroughfares in the middle of the route with no pedestrian/bike alternative routes. It’s mind blowing how little actual proper separate bike and pedestrian paths there are around here. “You’ll walk and bike next to the cars, and you’ll like it!” * wagging finger*
This vid will prob go viral.
Came here for a transpoetation fix video, stayed for the free medical/psychology info.
Love your utilization of your medical background to draw parallels between the city planning and treating an alcohol patient. I'm just confused how people can fork an even more drastic change of going from a 2-3 lane road to full on pedestrian road in LA thou. I thought your suppose to go gradually according to your harm reduction approach.
Yes! That gradual move will be the topic of part 2.
Your best one yet! I love how you equated public health and addiction issues with mass motoring. I’m wondering what we can equate car fetishisation with, aka, people who wrap their whole identity around what they drive (think men in needlessly giant pick ups, or anyone with a loud exhaust pipe).
Hippodamus, the godfather of planning, was also a physician. Not sure how aware he was of the circulation system, but he did plan the first radial street grids emanating from a central area (the heart of the city).
I'm an avid bicycle commuter who moved here for residency and was dumbfounded how a massive, year-round warm city could have such a broken transit situation. I think Americans/people in general don't realize how great bicycle commuting can be, even if a multi-mile commute. I do it every day. I really appreciate you bringing issues to these areas.
Those round-trips around DT Culver looked rough.. you suffered it for us all.
Working in the Arts District area I often walk from the expo stop and watch car traffic go from not moving an inch along Washington to free flowing 2 or 2.5 hours later. It looks very frustrating to be in at 8:45 AM but at the same time, Move Culver City allowed busses to shave like 10-20 minutes off transit rider's commutes. It's also been incredible to ride in on a bike or scooter, mainly near downtown.
I definitely have a optimistic feeling about the near future for Culver and LA once our political cycles reset.. glad you do too.
Amazing storyline, great ideas and I was so surprised how you managed to address different important topics in these 17 minutes, build a bridge between them and never make me doubt keeping watching until the end. From a film making and educational perspective a masterpiece of a film! Thanks a lot for that! :)
Great video, Doc. I like that you're showing us more of your sense of humor. I laughed at multiple points.
Culver city desperately needs a new local government.
I love your videos! LA desperately needs more content like yours
Interesting comparison, I never would have thought of something like that. Looking forward to the continuation!
I have to say, what strikes me the most about the „terrible“ driving clips in Culver City is…how normal they look to me.
My neighborhood has a similar problem to Culver, if on a somewhat smaller scale. It’s the only bridge over the river for 20km to the south and 5km to the north and the combination of two state roads for the segment through the core and onto the bridge. It’s basically the only road connection for the entire East and south East side of the region to go to downtown and the western side. About a decade ago they tore out one travel lane in each direction to build a tram and a somewhat narrow bike line, leaving one travel lane for cars. Unsurprisingly traffic routinely looks exactly like this.
I’m sure there are also a couple of people who would like to convert the street back to how it was before and yes, if you sit in that traffic with a car it’s incredibly frustrating. The narrow stretch is about 1.8km (~1.2mil) and it has taken me 15 minutes at times to get through just a third of that, because it narrows from 3 to 1 lane. Believe me, it’s not fun. What is a lot of fun is sitting in the tram or riding a bike past all these people standing in traffic. The congestion makes riding a bike a lot better, because a standing car is much less dangerous then a moving one.
The city understands one crucial thing. There isn’t enough room to satisfy the demand for car trips across this corridor , ever. The only option is to get every possible person into a more space efficient mode, so the people who need to drive to the other side, can get there. Taking the bike or tram is straight up faster during rush hour and the parallel regional train is always faster, at least on route, you obviously still have to get to and from the train stations.
The surrounding area is car centric and I honestly doubt that’s going to change much in coming years. But the city has to do what’s right for the city and that’s using the given space to move as much people through this chokepoint, while allowing the neighborhood to have a core. And that can only mean getting people out of their cars. Because every single tram carries more people then it passes sitting in traffic, while taking up less space, not polluting and being much more quiet and pleasant to be around.
That "wrong way" scenario with "You have to stop drinking, everything!" reminds me of a standup comic who used to do one "I quit drinking 5 years ago. 3 years ago, I found out you're only supposed to stop drinking *alcohol*. Thank God! I was parched!"
Not Just Bikes just uploaded a couple minutes ago
Alan Fisher is also streaming live, it seems like today is my urbanist holiday
I'm watching this on my lunch break and when I get home I'll watch Not Just Bikes to cry about not having this in my city
This is some of the best urbanism content currently being made on RUclips. Great work.
man, i really really really really loved this video. i do a lot of local advocacy for safe streets in northern california, and seeing down south culver city relapsing was absolutely painful after seeing so much progress over the years across the state. this medical framing is very interesting, and i liked even more the suggestion wasn't like, "do less," but a more nuanced argument about induced demand.
Love how your filmmaking style is developing and improving, doc! It's the most unique thing since Alan Fisher.
I didn’t think I would agree at first, but, yes, entirely agree with the final conclusion. Shutting down car traffic along Culver from Venice to Watseka/LaFayette is the right answer. I lived along Motor and Clarington for a couple of years and loved Culver City. But I never drove through downtown. I didn’t understand anyone who wasn’t delivering to the businesses ever did. Yes, Venice Blvd is bad at rush hour, but it’s not any worse than Olympic, Wiltshire, or Washington at Rush Hour. The best way to see Culver City is a) Expo Line, or b) drive down Venice and park in the garage and then walk everywhere else. Main Street already shuts down every farmer’s market, so it’s not something anyone is unfamiliar with. And those days are just more pleasant.
Isn't it amazing how beautiful and inviting streets in Los Angeles are when there's space to walk, bike and eat al fresco? Instead we get car packed hellscapes while being told it's people choice to be in their cars.
Thanks Dr. Nimesh and guest star Dr. Kevin. Cheers from the SD days man, this is Brian, Raffys old pal. You made it baby!
Dang Nimesh! Love tour take in this video. I live just North of you in Ventura County and Ive seen my area chamge from being an agricultural town to sprawling towards the 101 freeway like its a natural source of life. Your videos give me plenty of insight on what folks are doing in the LA area.
Honestly you hit the nail on the head. Hate it or love it. You can't convince people by being smug and rude. Some RUclips channels, kind of edge the line there. Unfortunately to convince someone to join your side. You have to make a valid argument and hope you can a majourity of people to side with you. And I feel to get a majourity of people to side with you. We need to be informative instead of brash.
I really like how you set this video up. Comparing to health care really brought something new to the conversation. Sometimes all the transit youtubers start to sound the same, but this was really fresh.
Amazing video! I love your approach and skit analogies. You’re bringing accessibility to the topic; making it super digestible.
i remembered your first video and wow this channel has progressed a lot in terms of quality
Awesome video and very excited for part 2!
Great video, as always,Nimesh!!
I think some people when driving get upset when their car is impeded as well. It's like a fear or anxiety with not being able to be in control, losing control of the car or being at the whim of others around them. Makes it seem a minor negative experience, like driving slowly through an area, feel like there is too much hindrance on them.
What an incredible video.
Love when you post!
This video was amazing from start to finish!
I forgot this video was about Culver City halfway through, but the segment on harm reduction was so engaging that I didn't mind 😂
Nimesh, incredible perspective from you here, loved the video.
Thank you for your content, Nimesh, this is quickly becoming one of my favorite RUclips channels! :)
Great work as always!! I love Culver City and its attempts to become a more modern multi transit friendly city and only hope they don’t pull too far back from the light. Keep it up!
Imagine a patient drinking during a history 😂
Great job.
I've been waiting for this follow up since the vote went the unfortunate way it did. Love it, thank you sir!
I really like how you've brought out harm reduction models here. Downtown Culver City's a cool place, and could be even cooler.
This was a good one, Nimesh
awesome video
The dry and varied comedy in this video keeps me attentive to the entire video itself
Great video, I have been following this situation closely from across the country in Virginia
Thanks for the video. Your initial one about Culver City got me to write the council members since I live here. It would be interesting to talk about the feasibility of owning a bike. I just got my ebike stolen no less than a month after owning it. It was locked up but I can’t keep it inside at home. I was talking to a friend and he said that after having two bikes stolen he came to the realization that it isn’t possible to own a bike in LA unless you can keep it inside most of the time. I agree but I’d love to hear your take. See you around cliffs!
The unfortunate truth is I agree with your friend (I also keep my bike inside my apartment). Los Angeles passed a law requiring new apartment buildings to include bike storage, but since there isn't much affordable housing going up, it doesn't really help most of us.
I hope not to imply by my videos that if we can get a comprehensive bike and public transit network then all our problems are solved. Those are just the first steps in a very long road to improving the health of our communities. I'm not aware of any community in the world that has solved all these problems.
People from Bogota hearing it takes 20 min to drive 1.5 Miles: “hey, that’s just like me!”
Bogota is much better though because it’s actually walkable and has better public transit than LA. LA needs to get their shit in order as well as Houston and Atlanta and Dallas and like 10 more US metro areas
Building off what you said at the end:
Harm reduction is often used as a crutch, as an excuse or a distraction from the real problems. Sometimes, you just need to quit entirely to realize you never had an addiction, just an unnecessary dependence in something you could quit whenever you tried
Jay Foreman had a good saying a-la harm reduction in his video on London's bike lanes: "Saying that a cycle scheme doesn't work because drivers are unhappy is a bit like saying that a diet doesn't work because it's making you hungry."
Love you videos. I hope people will look back on them 30 years from now when LA is the bike capital of the US.
I always enjoy your videos. One small feedback, I did find the cutaway to the doctor-patient conversation confusing. Had to check whether I had accidentally clicked on another video.
another nimesh banger vid
Were the traffic lights re-timed when the street was reduced to a single lane in each direction? If not, then the build up of heavy rush-hour traffic was guaranteed from the start. Re-timing the lights probably wouldn't have eliminated the bad traffic but would have helped reduce congestion noticeably.
I'm not sure if the traffic lights were re-timed, but the thing that my friend noticed while we were filming was Culver Blvd running through downtown is a tiny bottleneck. Washington Blvd and Culver Blvd are both two lanes in each direction, and as they enter downtown they merge into one lane in each direction. So you have 4 lanes merging into 1, and I'm not sure even the most optimized traffic light timing can fix that.
@@nimeshinlosangeles This is a great lesson in how any kind of planning has to be as holistic as possible. The Prius-driver guy that criticized you is right; eliminate all car traffic. It's the only REAL solution.
Thru-traffic cities are a major problem in California - all the large metros default to letting the cars cut through any street they like. They resist adding the modal filters necessary to make a huge sea change in bike/walk corridors. But I see the bulk of harm reduction in this decade coming from the alternatives getting much better, and then the urban design following the trend. Get the bikeshare docks everywhere, build trains and BRT, flood the streets with cheap, small, sleek robotaxis, and the will to pedestrianize LA will start to follow - because people will use cars, but they won't own them or identify with them.
Thank you so much Nimesh for creating these videos. I want to make a recommendation for you. Visit the city of Ventura. The city counsel there approved the downtown be shut down for East-west Car traffic. The residents love it. Moreover the businesses love it as well. the businesses had reported a 15-25% in sales ever since the street had been shut down. It has made the street so quiet you can have a conversation without shouting. Children can play in the street. The city even moved the weekly farmers market from a cramped parking lot to the street in front of the mission.
You should make a video about it!
I wonder if there’s a way to align incentives to get people excited about a car free/car lite LA. The parts of LA that are walkable command a huge premium to live there so most people don’t even get to taste a little bit of walkability. They need to drive no matter what, any improvements in walkability are either happening some place far away or if it is in their neighborhood runs the risk of gentrifying and changing their neighborhood.
To me the ultimate solution would be an aggressive TOD campaign to make walkability more universal throughout LA county so people can get exposed and excited about walkability.
Great video! Just commenting to give you more engagement ❤
Culver City .... Along the concret gutter Balona Creek is a bike path, but many dead end residential streets to the path have a fence, so you can't hop on the path ...🤔😳
Great analysis. Please run for mayor
Great video! Time will tell if the conservative block in the city has enough money to stay in power and prevent meaningful change. However much they need they've certainly got a lot of it.
bro. The government needs to listen to this videos!!!
Ok, clearly we need to invest in cloning technology so this guy can solve our transit and healthcare issues and give us quality youtube videos
Hey Nimesh I know it's not legally required but just to keep the citizens of Culver City & LA safe, I would recommend blocking out or blurring license plate numbers.
It’s unfortunate but downtown tried to do entirely too much at once with a dedicated bus lane, bike lane (and lights), and cars. Classic case of you can have one or two but never three.
Side note: I also can’t help but feel the dedicated bus lane through downtown is duplicating the effort of the Venice dedicated bus lane. Why not maximize the utilization of the Venice bus lane and thereby simplify some of the traffic management through downtown? To be clear, I’m all for no cars but two bus lanes one block from each other feels redundant.
Great work. Love to see local content.
I was in Culver City a while ago and I noticed a problem at the intersections. Can’t remember the streets but one side of the intersection would over fill and not allow the traffic from the other side to move. Then the light would be red by the time the traffic moved but by then the same side of the intersection would overfill it again. The obvious answer would be to be considerate and not block the intersections but who am I kidding? Between the hours of 3pm-7pm everyone is desperate to go home.
Good video. Subbed.
Engaging to boost :)
The whole LA area needs some good mass transit that isn't stuck in car traffic
What efforts are there to develop job centers (hospitals, commerce, etc) in East LA? It seems like the West side is more bike and transit friendly but things can’t really shift without blocking people from driving to and from their jobs. We definitely under estimate how many people would take electric bikes or buses if those were available ways to get to the job centers. I’d suggest that the highway commissions need reform as well. The highways would be very convenient for rapid transit and even trains in the future. But these departments’ are separated by too great of institutional space.
That's why the valley is the best part of Los Angeles. I live in a 15 minutes city near the train and my rent is about 30-40% less expensive than Culver.
It's just an incredibly moronic situation--cave men banging rocks together have more insight than the Culver City Council members who voted to add back two mixed travel lanes. Even leaving the data aside, ignoring the fact that we know travel times barely increased by two minutes, there is no sense to the logic in this decision at all.
The map at 11:52 really tells the story. What's that strange gray line just north of the portion of Culver and Washington boulevards that you highlighted? Is it the 10, which is four or five highway lanes in *each direction* a stone's throw away from all the drivers clamoring to get through Culver City rush hour?
If ten lanes of highway capacity isn't enough, who in their right mind thinks that adding back two more lanes of mixed city traffic is going to somehow unthaw rush hour traffic? I am left to conclude that nobody in their right mind could, and the people who made this decision are either suffering from undiagnosed neurologic disease or have some ulterior motive.
**Edit: typo
I sometimes don't get why cars are willing to stuck on this street. There're plenty of parallel streets that are almost empty.
Idk who this is and why it took this long for Google overlord to put him in front of me but I'll take more of this handsome man pls and ty.
❤
Yay you posted again! :D Ok I've always wanted to say this, love your vids and I agree with you. But I'm a cyclist and I love to bike everywhere I can. Walking is great too, and if I have to I gotta take the bus. I hate hate hate driving. Just like, it's so stressful, the parking, tickets, you might get into an accident, the insurance, gas, etc.....
But not everyone is able to ride a bike/walk/bus. As a doctor you should know, some are disabled, elderly, or need help 24/7. They need cars. Most of life is lived in decline. And a lot of people maybe can't even afford a bike, they keep having it stolen, never learned how to ride, etc. So it would be nice for cyclists like me to make everything less car-centric, but what about people with disabilities? We are in turn reducing access for them.
And some areas have 10 billion no smoking laws that honestly at this point other than smoking areas you can't really smoke anywhere! Thank goodness! :D But like no smoking indoors, no smoking in outdoor eating areas, no smoking in outdoor malls, no smoking within 40 ft of entrances/windows, no smoking in your own residence if you rent from a smoke free property. Where can you even smoke anymore? I mean 40 ft is a lot, so technically if you are driving a car past an outdoor eating area you should not be smoking. But sadly these laws are often ignored and not enforced. I think how they do 'do not back up severe tire damage' the need to develop a chemical to spray in non smoking areas that will irritate/discourage when some idiot lights up where they shouldn't!
Bus is more important for disabled people by far.
A common theme in my channel is that cars, buses, bikes, and even your own two feet are all tools. Different tools are good for different purposes, but right now, our built environment is designed so that we can only use one of those tools - cars. So regarding disabled people, how are blind people supposed to drive? Or people with a seizure disorder? Should someone with an alcohol use disorder be forced to drive? I think we should have the freedom to choose our mode of transit. Our built environment needs to allow us to use the right tool for the situation, not force us to use one tool - the car - for every situation.
I'm not anti-car. I'm anti-only-cars.
@@nimeshinlosangeles 100% agree with you. The people I was referring to are people that require 100% supervision and specialty equipment. Like special needs adults that can't be really independent, older/infirm that need to be driven up right to the entrance of buildings. They require assistance. And it would be difficult if cars were 100% banned. Even tho it would be awesome for us cyclists. I would feel bad for these people whose life is already so difficult to access anything.
Yes the USA us very hostile to anything non car. There are shopping centers that have no pedestrian entrance at all. You have to battle it out with cars and risk getting hit. And these centers are IN residential areas! It's like do you expect people to get in car to drive across the street!? It's crazy I know. Just concerned for those with disabilities that's all. We need to think about the future, we are not going to be young and healthy forever sadly.
Its not an addiction. Its government mandated. If you simply convert all commercial zones into mix use, and remove parking requirements. Over time, you'll see a massive increase in housing in those areas. I think any area within 1 miles of a large job center should be up zoned - such hospitals, colleges, downtowns, military bases, shopping malls, etc and no parking requirements. Then you'll have more people switch to a car free or car lite lifestyle.
California gas taxes, and demand for more housing (an affordable one) should become a deterrent for such low density architectures buys out and a waking up call for LA neighborhoods into transform the city landscape into more of ‘Europeanish’ style city, a typical Medium density housing architecture with walking distance shopping and working place, with a bikes/bicycle focused transportation.
I will never commute on a bike to anything other than going to class after getting my bike stolen a few days ago. Some dude drilled the bike rack from the ground and took my ride 😭😭😭. Can't have shit in LA 💀💀💀
Motivational interviewing 101
I love your channel! Keep spreading the good word!
So Ive heard LA has a subway but you mentioned this area isn't served well by transit and thus many drive.
So why don't more people use the LA subway? Does it not go enough places, are destinations too spread out from stops? It seems like the LA subway has become one of the more extensive metro systems among American cities (which isnt saying much) but it doesn't seem to have been a game changer.
That's a great question that I'm going to do a full video on in the future. At 14:12 I briefly show what a typical transit stop looks like on the line that serves Culver City. There's a Jack in the Box, a Popeye's, a 76 gas station, and a dental office on one corner, and there's a huge public storage building on the other side. No one lives by these stops, and no one goes to these stops.
And even if you wanted to take the train here, many of these stops cross the road at grade, and instead of giving signal priority to the trains, the signals give priority to the crossing car traffic, which defeats the purpose of taking the train. @lej_explains has a great short on his channel showing an example of this called "Why LA Loves/Hates the Expo Line."
@nimeshinlosangeles thanks
Sounds like a textbook example of the Not Just Bikes video "America always gets this wrong (when building transit)
FREAKIN LOVE BALDWIN HILLS! I wish Inglewood has something that amazing :(
Hey, just throwing this idea out there, but I think a signal engineer needs to re-evaluate the traffic light cycles. Might help flow.
In part 2 I'll show more of what's contributing to the congestion here; namely the bottlenecks. I don't know if even the most optimally-time signals would help here.
@@nimeshinlosangeles Yeah, looking back at the video now, I definitely see your point, Not to mention my comment was kind of off topic for whats actually being discussed.