Why Living In LA Sucks

In these articles, we talk about two of the biggest issues in Los Angeles, and in the US broadly: Lack of good public transportation/bad roads and lack of good social and community places/centers. In this first article Public transportation will be the main topic, we hope that you find this article interesting and leads to some interesting conversations about issues in LA.

Have you ever noticed that there’s something a little wrong with LA? Something that just makes it absolutely depressing living here sometimes, especially as a teen. Doing fun things with your friends outside and being social outside of school is extremely hard. Ignoring violent crime–which is in part contributed to by the topic of these articles; One of the biggest issues that LA has is its infrastructure, and I don’t just mean how buildings look and how they’re arranged. We’re talking about cars, public transportation, and our collective lack of social infrastructure, which makes the ability to be mobile and enjoy this city extremely challenging.

I know that many of you probably like your cars and feel it gives you “the freedom to go anywhere you please” and “without a car how’d I go places?! I’m very car-pilled!”; but that’s exactly the issue. If you don’t have a car or don’t know how to drive, as I assume most students don’t, it’s too easy to just not go outside; by yourself or with friends. 

Luckily, for students with a bus pass, the transportation fee is free. However, because our public transportation is incredibly underfunded and restricted, routes are limited, wait times are unreliable, and oftentimes the bus is either crowded, dirty, or both. This makes wanting to take the bus  “uncomfortable” for most and, therefore, restricts their ability to move around if their other options are also limited. 

With the unreliability of the bus, many turn to other, self-powered modes of transportation. Despite the many benefits of bicycles, skateboards, and scooters, these are all more dangerous than the bus. As one can easily notice, Los Angeles bike lanes don’t do anything. They’re usually tiny and compact, often overtaken by parking spots, forcing most cyclists onto either the street or the sidewalk, having to choose whether they want to be the person who runs over pedestrians or be run over themselves. There are no safety guardrails or separation between cars and bike lanes––not even for people walking––making it difficult to avoid, at the very least, scraping cars or almost getting into an accident.

Over the past five years, 96 cyclists have been killed on Los Angeles roads, an average of 18 a year, according to LAPD data. Los Angeles streets can be incredibly dangerous for people both in and out of cars. In fact, out of the 108,000 average car accidents that happen in California, including injuries and fatalities, more than 27,000 of those accidents happen in Los Angeles - a fourth of all car accidents in the entire state of California; Five times more than the city with the second highest rate of car accidents, San Diego. The CDC has also reported that the leading cause of accidental death in children ages 15 to 19 is car accidents, and that is even when they are inside the car. More teens die from riding in a car than from drowning, dangerous falls, and suffocation.

Since most teenagers don’t have a car, which in itself is still not the safest option, they are forced to take either of the other two options (buses or bikes) or use the only other options left: Walking or taking the train. Now, obviously, walking is the least safe option out of all of them because not only does it make a person, especially children, and teens, susceptible to the dangers of walking right next to 6ft tall hunking metal death machines with little to no protection from the sidewalk (if there is one at all), it’s also the more dangerous option because of dilapidated sidewalks, holes, flooding during rain, etc. This leaves teens usually with using a car, which most can’t drive, or a bus. Students can also take the train, the safer and more efficient option out of all of them, if only they had them. 

The bad news for anyone wanting to take this last option is that there are only seven, in the whole city, of millions of people, with two of those lines being subways. If you want to take the train, a service that is even more underfunded than our buses, there are only seven that you can use, and the nearest one is two––almost three––miles away from this school, making the train basically useless for most students. Not only are these trains incredibly far away from each other and from high-density areas, which is where many schools and shops would be, but they’re also limited by the fact that their stops are also very far away from each other, having infrequent stops, making them a less effective bus.

Normally, trains (and buses in most cases) are supposed to be the most effective and efficient way of moving large masses of people across long and medium distances. For example, if you look at countries in Europe, i.e. Germany and Britain, their public transit has essentially none of the issues that the US has. Their public transport is mostly effective; they’re usually on time, accessible, cheap or even free, amenable to people who can’t drive, widely used, and even faster and preferable to cars in some areas like in Amsterdam where only about 1 in 5 people own a car. That may seem insane in our car-dependent society, but it is entirely possible if the proper resources are allocated and it’s properly planned out.

Let’s give some credit where credit is due: the city actually built an extension to other train lines in Crenshaw, called the K-line. The K-Line is a light rail line running between Jefferson Park and Westchester; passing through South Los Angeles and Inglewood. It's the seventh and newest train line in Los Angeles, opening last October 7th, and it's still being modified to this day. It attempts to connect Crenshaw and LAX and has been in development since 2014.

Hopefully, this newest line represents a positive change for Los Angeles in the future, making it slightly more livable for those who don’t have a car, especially for students. California has even been planning on introducing high-speed rail to the state, better connecting Southern California to Northern California. However, that plan has been delayed, misplanned, and at times disregarded time and time again, mainly because of the strong influence of a certain dubious billionaire. Also, this still does not address the second biggest glaring issue that is infestant within Los Angeles, which is the lack of places for students, and people broadly, to hang out and interact, safely, with each other; A lack of community; A lack of public and social infrastructure.

Look forward to the next issue where we tackle the lack of community centers and public spaces in Los Angeles as well as the third part of our story on homelessness in LA.