Los Angeles Congestion Capital of the US

LOS ANGELES

Congestion Capital of the US

By most measures Los Angeles is the congestion capital of the US. According to the most comprehensive statistics compiled by the Texas Transp Institute from Federal highways data it is easily tops for dail-person hours of delay, annual fuel wasted and total congestion costs ($8.6b for 1994.) Much of that of course is due to LA being the second largest urban area of the US — New York has a better highway system and better transit. But LA comes out top too in the TTI’s Roadway congestion index which weights conditions on arterials as well as motorways (mwys). In average peakhour mwy speeds San Francisco just gets the wooden spoon (60km/hr) but LA is not significantly better (61km/hr ) and both are significantly worse than other cities. The Washington DC area has the highest percapita delays and percapita fuel waste from congestion . But whichever way you slice it LA has a big big traffic problem, and its planning problem is more striking because it has more growth to cope with than many other places in the US.

LA lacks freeways, seriously

Here’s a contrarian proposition if ever you saw one — Los Angeles’ traffic problem is that it has too few freeways and not enough sprawl. Los Angeles has nearly the fewest lane-km of motorway-standard highway lanes in the US and the LA area is just too densely settled. Sounds crazy. Most people think of LA as having the country’s, maybe the world’s, biggest freeway network in a low density urban area. Journalists, planners, politicians and other chatterers are always saying that stuff, but it just isn’t true.

LA has the worst traffic congestion in the US because it has dense development and too thin a motorway network.

LA certainly has some of the widest freeways — many are 8 and 10 lanes. And there are a lot of them. But they have to provide for a huge lot of people (12m) and vehicles (9.4m), and they cover a very large urban area (5,800 sq km).

Relative to the things that matter — population, built-up area, and traffic — LA is short of fwy lanes compared to the rest of America. LA is 50th out of 50 metro areas in the ranking of freeway lanes per unit of traffic (fwy lane-km/vehicle-km traveled), 49th among 50 metro areas in the US in the number of lane-km of fwy/thousand population and 42nd out of 50 in lane-km of fwy/sq-km of area.

LA needs Minneapolis style road net: If Los Angeles is ever to get a handle on its traffic then it needs to work toward getting the level of freeway infrastructure of cities like Minneapolis-St Paul, Portland OR, Seattle WA and Boston MA. It is way behind them. Look at the numbers from the Texas Transp Inst’s latest report (“Urban Roadway Congestion — 1982 to 1994, Vol 2, p19, p95)

The map nearby shows the lousy LA area freeway network compared to that of Minneapolis-St Paul — same scale. LA typically has freeways spaced out 8km apart, sometimes as far as 12km from one another, whereas the Twin Cities have their fwys typically 2km to 3km apart and 5km at most. LA fwys are very sparse, so each fwy interchange has vast catchment areas for traffic. The New York metro area doesn’t have anything like the Twin Cities dense network of mwys but the expwys and pkwys of the Big Apple are 4km to 6km apart typically, about double the density of LA. New York also has more fwy lane-km in total than LA (10,160 vs 8,850).

The other contrarian thing to point out is that LA is densely populated compared to most other US cities. Indeed it is THE most densely populated US metro area. LA’s density of population is actually a tad higher than the New York area (2070 vs 1930 p/sq km). Portland OR is often touted as a center of “smart growth” which has chosen to “densify” its development by limiting outward growth. It’s density is 960 people/sq km compared to LA’s 2,070. The Twin Cities are 700 p/sq km. (Note: how we are comparing LA with those cities that tend to be run by progressivist liberal pro-planning types.)

“LA sprawl” is no myth if by sprawl you mean development that spreads widely but if by LA sprawl you mean low density, then it is doesn’t exist. I spent a week in LA recently, drove over 1,000 miles there. Looked around a lot. Not many people live in high rises to be sure but a lot of LA people live on tiny lots and in very compact lowrise apartments. And I have never seen so many middle class trailer parks. High land prices probably drive LA’s high density.

It is frequently said that the older northeastern and midwest cities are densely populated. Wrong again. Used to be, but a lot of the people have gone and the rest of the people have spread out. With land prices much lower than the west coast the sprawl of the older cities has actually been greater than the west coast. Remember LA’s density of 2070. Compare: Baltimore 1130, Boston 1030, Chicago 1190, Cincinnati 750, Cleveland 940, Detroit 1190, Philadelphia 1360, Pittsburgh 800, Washington DC 1340. The only metro area apart from New York that comes near to LA in population density is the San Francisco area 1570. Also high land prices. (Contact Tim Lomax, Texas Transp Inst 409 845 9960 t-lomax@tamu.edu)

{NOTE: These are TTI/FHWA data which cover the continuous urbanized area of LA which is different from the local government SCAG data which cover jurisdictional boundaries and includes a certain amount of rural area data. SCAG goes right to the NV and AZ borders. The TTI/FHWA define the LA area to end at the Santa Ana mountain chain whereas SCAG include several million people in San Bernardino-Riverview cos to the east. The other articles here on SCAG plans report the LA area as coincidental with the larger SCAG boundaries, which produces some inconsistent numbers. Noone seems to use the US Census Bureau’s Consolidated Mteropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) definitions for their data.]