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I think it's safe to say San Francisco, Boston and Philly all have very extensive and impressive highly urban fabric, particularly for American cities.
I personally enjoy that all of them have their own flavor, and each of them demonstrates that urban form definitely can present itself in variety of distinct ways.
That makes no difference at all. I can evaluate cities without riding mass transit or walking all over the place. When I'm in Baltimore, I'm driving my car rather than boarding light rail or riding a bus. But yet I can still see the three-dimensional nature of the urbanity, observe the pedestrian intensity, etc. I also spent most of my time in Chicago riding around in a car, but I could still see signs of active pedestrian life, etc. In fact, the most walking I did in Chicago was along the Mag Mile. Riding transit is not going to impact my assessment of urbanity at all. I'm judging primarily on the built environment and the level of pedestrianism (even on quieter residential streets).
So that whole line of thinking seems misguided to me. Somehow I can judge Chicago and Baltimore without riding mass transit, but I can't do the same for Los Angeles? Unless you're Stevie Wonder, it's not hard to look around and either see pedestrian-oriented streets with people on them or auto-scaled streets with hardly anyone on them. It's not complicated. The big difference is that Chicago has areas where I would consider walking for long distances and LA does not. And I can see that from observing the streetscape from a car (or walking to a restaurant from a parking lot and not seeing many pedestrians other than the ones headed to their cars).
Besides, most people aren't going to visit a city and ride mass transit for the sake of it. People ride mass transit when they visit New York because it's not practical to have a car. And most of the people you'd visit in Manhattan won't have cars. If you brought your own car, you'd have difficulty parking it. Not so in Los Angeles. There's off-street parking and valet all over the place, which is extremely scarce on the East Coast. So why would we be taking mass transit when everyone I know has a car and parking is available at our destinations (I'm sure many Angelenos think the same thing)? The decision to ride transit comes down to practicality and nothing more.
Well, we've discussed this all before. I'll review some of it. You went to LA several years ago and stayed in the suburbs with people who lived in the suburbs. That already means you're going to drive in on the freeways and then drive back out. Yes, you're going to see a lot of auto-scaled streets if you basically spent the entire time in an automobile trying to get from point A to point B. You probably didn't hit up a lot of the parts of LA that are actually urban, though you probably did go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and maybe briefly downtown, is that right? If you went to Hollywood, then yea, you did see a bunch of people walking around. For downtown, it was likely alright when you went but probably much, much busier now as there's been a shift in how people view downtown and there's been a lot more people in the urban parts of LA letting go of their vehicles (which is why you get double digit year on year ridership growth). Now, your view of the city and what you saw is funny in that it's likely what the majority of people who live in LA see as well. It's how the majority of people live. I also agree that LA doesn't score too high on pedestrian-oriented urban design overall.
However, despite that, I'm telling you there are people who live and work in a different sort of LA. If you're harboring even the slightest doubt that perhaps I, munchitup, or others who have lived/live in urban East Coast large cities are not going full retard on you when talking about a walkable LA, then consider asking for an itinerary and basic map of sorts for walking, biking, transiting through LA for a visit in the future.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-23-2013 at 05:16 PM..
However, despite that, I'm telling you there are people who live and work in a different sort of LA. If you're harboring even the slightest doubt that perhaps I, munchitup, or others who have lived/live in urban East Coast large cities are not going full retard on you when talking about a walkable LA, then consider asking for an itinerary and basic map of sorts for walking, biking, transiting through LA for a visit in the future.
I have never lived in LA but visited a few times and I think people really play up the lack of walkability. Last visit a few of us decided to stay Downtown for a night at the Millennium Biltmore and were told we definitely will need to cab/drive to get anywhere decent and forget walking around. Turns out that wasn't the case at all and walked the entire night and hit some awesome spots. Dinner at Rivera then a bar hop from Library Bar to The Varnish to Hanks Bar then a Mexican food truck on our way back to the hotel. No cab just walking. The streets weren't packed or anything (other than Skid Row) but there were others seemingly doing the same. We did get messed with by some LAPD for Jaywalking though across a completely empty road though, but otherwise it was a pleasant walk around downtown for an entire night.
Well, we've discussed this all before. I'll review some of it. You went to LA several years ago and stayed in the suburbs with people who lived in the suburbs.
If you want to call 2009 "several" years ago, then okay. To my knowledge, South Central is in the city of Los Angeles. I don't see why you keep raising this point. The first time I visited Chicago I stayed with a friend's family that lived in a "suburban" neighborhood on the South Side. I could still assess the urbanity of the city notwithstanding the fact I wasn't in a swanky hotel in the urban core. I was staying with regular black folks with roots in Mississippi.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
That already means you're going to drive in on the freeways and then drive back out.
Actually, we spent a lot of time on surface streets to avoid traffic.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
Well, you're going to see a lot of auto-scaled streets if you basically spent the entire time in an automobile trying to get from point A to point B.
I can still recognize a pedestrian-scaled street in a car. Would anyone drive down Broadway and think the street is not pedestrian-scaled? Or Dekalb Avenue? Or Market Street? I spent the same amount of time in San Francisco in a car (never taken transit there) and came away with a completely different impression of its urbanity vis-a-vis Los Angeles. I can gauge the scale of a street whether I'm on a bike, on foot, or in a car.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
You probably didn't hit up a lot of the parts of LA that are actually urban, though you probably did go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and maybe briefly downtown, is that right? If you went to Hollywood, then yea, you did see a bunch of people walking around.
We went to the Walk of Fame and to Roscoe's in Hollywood. The big difference I saw was that the built environment and pedestrian intensity changed a lot just a short distance away from Hollywood Boulevard. This was very different from, say, Bedford-Stuyvesant where the built environment remains consistent and people are always seen walking down residential streets. The difference between the two is well articulated in this post.
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Gigantic seamless walkable areas with intense, 3-Dimensional centers of commerce and residential density. Its also where you'll find generous amounts of people walking through residential side streets as part of their commute.
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Geographically smaller areas of commercial intensity, sometimes resembling tier 2 (Downtown Portland, Miami Beach, French Quarter), or disjointed linear areas with noticeable commercial intensity (Los Angeles).
The first definition applies to San Francisco. The second definition definitely applies to LA.
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I'm telling you there are people who live and work in a different sort of LA. If you're harboring even the slightest doubt that perhaps I, munchitup, or others who have lived/live in urban East Coast large cities are not going full retard on you when talking about a walkable LA, then consider asking for an itinerary and basic map of sorts for walking, biking, transiting through LA for a visit in the future.
I honestly don't know what you're even arguing here. It's like you're trying to convince me that being in the urban core of Los Angeles is really no different from being in the urban core of San Francisco. And you won't let it rest until you've convinced everyone of that. And please don't reply with "You're just not giving L.A. it's due credit" because I don't care. If this thread is simply about which city is the most urban, then I would rank LA last, and I've already stated my reasons for that. If you think I'm biased, then I encourage you to go to the LA forum, start a thread, and ask the same question to LA posters that's being posed here. But make sure that we can see who's voting when you add the poll so that we don't have LA boosters skewing the vote. LA got smashed in the poll against Chicago in the LA forum and I'm sure the people who voted for LA were the regular posters in the City-vs-City forum.
If you want to call 2009 "several" years ago, then okay. To my knowledge, South Central is in the city of Los Angeles. I don't see why you keep raising this point. The first time I visited Chicago I stayed with a friend's family that lived in a "suburban" neighborhood on the South Side. I could still assess the urbanity of the city notwithstanding the fact I wasn't in a swanky hotel in the urban core. I was staying with regular black folks with roots in Mississippi.
Actually, we spent a lot of time on surface streets to avoid traffic.
I can still recognize a pedestrian-scaled street in a car. Would anyone drive down Broadway and think the street is not pedestrian-scaled? Or Dekalb Avenue? Or Market Street? I spent the same amount of time in San Francisco in a car (never taken transit there) and came away with a completely different impression of its urbanity vis-a-vis Los Angeles. I can gauge the scale of a street whether I'm on a bike, on foot, or in a car.
We went to the Walk of Fame and to Roscoe's in Hollywood. The big difference I saw was that the built environment and pedestrian intensity changed a lot just a short distance away from Hollywood Boulevard. This was very different from, say, Bedford-Stuyvesant where the built environment remains consistent and people are always seen walking down residential streets. The difference between the two is well articulated in this post.
The first definition applies to San Francisco. The second definition definitely applies to LA.
I honestly don't know what you're even arguing here. It's like you're trying to convince me that being in the urban core of Los Angeles is really no different from being in the urban core of San Francisco. And you won't let it rest until you've convinced everyone of that. And please don't reply with "You're just not giving L.A. it's due credit" because I don't care. If this thread is simply about which city is the most urban, then I would rank LA last, and I've already stated my reasons for that. If you think I'm biased, then I encourage you to go to the LA forum, start a thread, and ask the same question to LA posters that's being posed here. But make sure that we can see who's voting when you add the poll so that we don't have LA boosters skewing the vote. LA got smashed in the poll against Chicago in the LA forum and I'm sure the people who voted for LA were the regular posters in the City-vs-City forum.
Four years is several territory, isn't it? What's your range for several? I put it in 3-6 range.
The adaptive reuse ordinance hadn't been there for that long when you were there so it's since had time to actually prove to be a bonanza for downtown LA, there's been year on year double digit growth of mass transit usage, there's been a new transit line added and other ones have been extended, weekend rapid transit now runs until last call,
South Central overall is one of the least walkable parts of Los Angeles and one of the most suburban parts of the city and even less walkable than much of the suburbs that are actually outside the physical boundary of LA. It's an important point to make, because I don't think you had been aware of that previously.
You're not going to get the same exact form as SF, but what you will get is a similar function. It might be hard for you to figure out immediately because no one's introduced you to it and you haven't really tried. Yes, LA is auto-centric and it has some poor design overall, but there is still a large area of it that is walkable with people comfortably carrying on their day to day living without having to use their cars. I think I've also tried to explain the multiple ways LA ends up dealing with this sort of bad planning and trying to mitigate them by doing things like stacking retail and restaurants on top of each other with a lot of double or triple decker sort of strip malls, parking lots turned to food truck stops after normal business hours or placing parking lots on top of buildings while having the street level be retail.
If there are multiple linear corridors running closely in parallel and perpendicular to each other, doesn't that end up not being linear anymore?
Bed-Stuy, or pretty much all of Brooklyn, is a point of reference that puts pretty much the rest of all of these cities to shame.
I set up the poll before, but as I've said already, it doesn't make much difference--even a good chunk of people who live in LA or identify with LA, including the people you stayed with, can be mostly unaware of what's changed.
Again, I think you should actually give the urban parts of LA an actual try. It wouldn't really be a waste of a vacation as the urban parts of LA does offer a good deal to do.
Four years is several territory, isn't it? What's your range for several? I'd probably put it in 3-6 range.
Well, if one of my boys told me to come to a house party because there were "several dimes," and it turned out there were only four, I'd be kinda pissed. That's what I call a "few."
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
adaptive reuse ordinance hadn't been there for that long when you were there so it's since had time to actually prove to be a bonanza for downtown LA, there's been year on year double digit growth of mass transit usage, there's been a new transit line added and other ones have been extended, weekend rapid transit now runs until last call
I think the difference between people in the Northeast and the Sunbelt is that the latter are often not even thinking about walkability outside of the CBD. That's why I usually focus on fringe neighborhoods in West, G-Town, or Southwest Philly rather than Center City. It shows the scale of walkable development over 100+ square miles rather than mere "pockets" of walkability.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
South Central overall is one of the least walkable parts of Los Angeles and one of the most suburban parts of the city and even less walkable than much of the suburbs that are actually outside the physical boundary of LA. It's an important point to make, because I don't think you had been aware of that previously.
It's an irrelevant point because, as I mentioned, I stayed in a "suburban" part of Chicago too. You're just raising this because you're constantly searching for a way to discredit or dismiss my observations. The only observation that can be accurate or well-informed is obviously the one that you agree with. That also goes for posters in the LA forum that you immediately write off as being old, or from the Valley, etc, which is ironic considering that you admitted that you grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles yourself (though you later said that you also grew up in the "city limits" without specifying where).
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
You're not going to get the same exact form as SF, but what you will get is a similar function. It might be hard for you to figure out immediately because no one's introduced you to it and you haven't really tried. Yes, LA is auto-centric and it has some poor design overall, but there is still a large area of it that is walkable with people comfortably carrying on their day to day living without having to use their cars.
Have you ever seen the demographics of LA's transit ridership? I would not describe poor immigrants who have no choice but to use public transit as "comfortably carrying on their day to day living." That's why studies show that they purchase cars as soon as their standard of living rises.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
If there are multiple linear corridors running closely in parallel and perpendicular to each other, doesn't that end up not being linear anymore?
No.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
Bed-Stuy, or pretty much all of Brooklyn, is a point of reference that puts pretty much the rest of all of these cities to shame.
No, it doesn't. From a built environment standpoint, Brooklyn is similar to much of DC. DC just lacks Brooklyn's fun.
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Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
I set up the poll before, but as I've said already, it doesn't make much difference--even a good chunk of people who live in LA or identify with LA, including the people you stayed with, can be mostly unaware of what's changed.
So what you're saying is that they're likely more ignorant about what's going on in LA than you despite the fact they live there and you don't?
Well, if one of my boys told me to come to a house party because there were "several dimes," and it turned out there were only four, I'd be kinda pissed. That's what I call a "few."
I think the difference between people in the Northeast and the Sunbelt is that the latter are often not even thinking about walkability outside of the CBD. That's why I usually focus on fringe neighborhoods in West, G-Town, or Southwest Philly rather than Center City. It shows the scale of walkable development over 100+ square miles rather than mere "pockets" of walkability.
It's an irrelevant point because, as I mentioned, I stayed in a "suburban" part of Chicago too. You're just raising this because you're constantly searching for a way to discredit or dismiss my observations. The only observation that can be accurate or well-informed is obviously the one that you agree with. That also goes for posters in the LA forum that you immediately write off as being old, or from the Valley, etc, which is ironic considering that you admitted that you grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles yourself (though you later said that you also grew up in the "city limits" without specifying where).
Have you ever seen the demographics of LA's transit ridership? I would not describe poor immigrants who have no choice but to use public transit as "comfortably carrying on their day to day living." That's why studies show that they purchase cars as soon as their standard of living rises.
No.
No, it doesn't. From a built environment standpoint, Brooklyn is similar to much of DC. DC just lacks Brooklyn's fun.
So what you're saying is that they're likely more ignorant about what's going on in LA than you despite the fact they live there and you don't?
I actually looked it up--dictionary-wise, my use of several was correct. Connotation-wise, turns out it varies from person to person. For a large number of people, the definition was 3-5. The other more common ones was 4-10 and 5-10. Regardless, it's still been 4 years.
Aside from the adapative reuse ordinance, the other parts apply to other parts of the city. West Hollywood/Hollywood isn't downtown, neither are Palms, Culver City, Koreatown, Westlake, Santa Monica/Venice, Chinatown, etc. Keep in mind that downtown LA is 5 square miles to Center City's 2. The big issue with LA though is that some of its blobs of walkability aren't as tightly connected, even though they run a larger area overall. LA differs from other sunbelt cities because it had started with a larger core and the pressures of high demand meant a lot more infill and a lot higher density. That higher density meant that LA was more quickly able to take advantage of these shifting trends.
I said your viewpoint is valid, because it's one that many people are familiar with--the only thing is you're not also familiar with what urban LA looks like. To most people, all LA is basically the suburbs. It's not as simple as me simply writing them off completely--their views of LA are still valid. The suburban parts of LA are still LA and it's still the experience of LA for a lot of people. Those views are valid, as are the views of many people who live in the more urban parts of LA. Guess which most ethnically appropriate part of LA I could have possibly come from, so it's that plus some stints in Burbank, Culver City and Westwood.
That flat no is silly because pretty much all the cities mentioned employ the same thing. There are residential streets, there are commercial corridors. Use your own reference point of Bed-Stuy. I thought that was supposed to be a facetious question.
Bed-Stuy is continuous high 50s density over about 3 square miles, well out from the CBD surrounded on most sides with similarly dense neighborhoods. That's a tough one.
Yes, a lot of LA's transit ridership are of poor working class. Part of that shift in attitude that's been occurring has been mass transit losing its stigma for more people and a greater acceptance by more people using it--that's partly why its ridership has experienced high growth.
Yes? Like, there's probably stuff I don't know that's going in NYC. Ask me about Staten Island or the Bronx--I pretty much have no clue. How familiar are you with Flushing? Probably not very.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-24-2013 at 07:55 AM..
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