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My commute from Hoboken to my office on the west side of Manhattan - about 1.5 miles (max) as the crow flies - takes me about 45 minutes door-to-door. It can be as short as 35 minutes if everything is perfect, or as long as an hour and 15 minutes if things go sideways. When commuting in NYC, "you ain't no crow".
Broader point on commute times though, potentially unfair comparison for the northeastern states to the western states as the northeast states are physically tiny and highly urban. Better compare would be city-to-city. While I have no doubt my commute will still be awful, I'll sleep better at night knowing Los Angeles isn't really six spots below me on the "worst commutes" list.
I'm replying to this mostly to get rid of the dangling quote brackets.
I agree with your point about northeastern states being tiny, and more importantly, a huge proportion of a lot of their populations for some of them are part of massive and dense metropolitan areas. California does this as well, but to an oh so slightly lesser degree compared to some of the others (after all, CA still got a solid 6th place finish).
I still can't understand why someone would prefer a dense auto-oriented suburb over one where you actually get a yard. Western suburbs are the worst of both worlds. You get a less dense core city than the NE and your suburbs sprawl with bad traffic 20 miles away from the core because they're also dense but still car-dependent.[/QUOTE]
Longest Average commute times by state:
1. New York
2. Maryland
3. New Jersey
4. District of Columbia
5. Massachutsetts
So one reason someone might prefer a dense California suburb is to escape the traffic congestion of the northeast for a shorter commute.
All I have is a 130 square foot patio but the existence of an ocean less than a mile away mitigates the hardship of not being able to "get a yard" a bit, also a great big community park two blocks away with great weather to use it about 365 days a year.
You aren’t escaping traffic when you move to an area with worse transit options. In fact, I’d say if you’re driving in a big city at all, you shouldn’t complain about traffic. Unfortunately, a ton of people don’t have any option but to drive in places like LA.
I still can't understand why someone would prefer a dense auto-oriented suburb over one where you actually get a yard. Western suburbs are the worst of both worlds. You get a less dense core city than the NE and your suburbs sprawl with bad traffic 20 miles away from the core because they're also dense but still car-dependent.
You're oversimplifying and are generally just way off-base here. It's not like every Western metro is Phoenix.
There are plenty of Western cities with dense, vibrant, walkable cores: San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and Denver for starters. LA is certainly its own beast in how its laid out (very spotty for sure) but cumulatively it has plenty of dense, walkable areas in its massive core as well. Aside from the Northeast, I'd take that collection of urban cores over any region in the country. The Midwest aside from Chicago and Minneapolis has more hollowed-out cores that don't come close in vibrancy or activity. The South and Texas certainly don't have very impressive cores.
And then with many of these Western cities with great cores, you get spectacular settings that the East can't come close to matching - the beaches of San Diego, the mountains and Sound in Seattle, the rolling hills of San Francisco.
There are also tons of suburbs with great, walkable downtowns in California and throughout the West, and smaller cities like Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Bellingham, Bend, etc. that are super walkable and interesting, and embedded in even more spectacular settings.
In terms of transit, this idea that people don't user transit out West is ridiculous. Aside from the Northeast, no other region comes close to the West Coast for transit usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...nsit_ridership
In terms of % transit share, of the top 36 cities with 100K plus residents (I choose 36 because this is the 10% cut-off), here is the breakdown by region:
Northeast - 20
West Coast - 11
Midwest - 4
South - 1
Again, the West Coast more than holds its own in terms of transit usage compared to any region aside from the NE.
How about walking and biking as a mode? I don't have the data in front of me but from what I recall there are several Western cities in the top 10 (with minimum threshold of 400K) including San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and Portland. West Coast cities tend to score highly in Walkscore as well.
So - in summary, the West is very far from the worst of both worlds. Yes, there are some dense suburbs, but you also get some of the best, most vibrant (and safer) urban cores in the country, cities with relatively good transit and walk mode share, paired with the type of spectacular outdoor settings and activities that you just can't get on the East Coast.
If I'm not mistaken, the way urban area is defined is via contiguous census tracts at a certain population density. This isn't a definition specific to California, but the entire US. As you can see from your images, it was undeveloped hillside, the remnants of the air force base, and Irvine Spectrum Center and adjacent *commercial* strips separating out the two so it's pretty apparent why they weren't part of the same urban area in the 2010 census. I think they are contiguous now for the 2020 census, or if they aren't, they just missed it for when the census taken as the development is and has been ongoing. There were a couple of paths there which is redevelopment of the base and development of the hillsides (both happening) or mixed-use redevelopment of the Irvine Spectrum Center and adjacent commercial and industrial strips.
That area would have been better off being the new international airport for Orange County, but of course the Irvine Family/Company can do anything they want in California independent of any state/local government, so they were able to block all airport proposals. Now this area gets tin box townhomes they are trying to sell as "detached single family" (lol). To me converting the current OC airport area into dense housing would have made more sense.
Someone help me out on that I know we have some really smart people in here.
In Boston 73% of commuters drive.
In Philadelphia 79%.
A number not much lower than the 84% in Los Angeles.
Thats Los Angeles though, where smart people know you just sit half the day in traffic, as opposed to those people practically teleporting around in the amazing mass transit of the northeast...
There are highly walkable, family friendly neighborhoods in many cities (and even suburbs that are very close to cities) that are way more interesting than Seattle and where you’d get a lot more than that for your money……
I get it, you don't like Seattle, but your own sentence acknowledges that the free market disagrees with you.
The reality is there aren't many major cities where I can drive 50 min and be skiing on 6 ft of fresh snow even though it's 50-60F in the city or go sailing in January from the neighborhood marina. If one likes a diversity of outdoor amenities, Seattle is hard to beat. I lived in Chicago for over a decade and Chicago can't touch Seattle on that front. So while you might find Chicago neighborhoods more interesting (and Chicago is a great city), plenty of other people account for outdoor amenities and natural setting, as well as career opportunity etc in their overall equation.
Past weekend on one of the hundreds of miles of public ski trails groomed by WA state, about 50 min drive from downtown Seattle, own photo. It's 50F in the city. Some people might want to pay double to have that within an hour's drive. Having lived in Chicago, I know very well what an hour's drive from the Loop gets you. Not to mention the -15F windchill tonight in Chicago.
My commute from Hoboken to my office on the west side of Manhattan - about 1.5 miles (max) as the crow flies - takes me about 45 minutes door-to-door. It can be as short as 35 minutes if everything is perfect, or as long as an hour and 15 minutes if things go sideways. When commuting in NYC, "you ain't no crow".
Broader point on commute times though, potentially unfair comparison for the northeastern states to the western states as the northeast states are physically tiny and highly urban. Better compare would be city-to-city. While I have no doubt my commute will still be awful, I'll sleep better at night knowing Los Angeles isn't really six spots below me on the "worst commutes" list.
The metro areas in California are uniformly denser than in the northeast, which has MSA's spilling across multiple states.
Commute times are longer in New York than in Los Angeles because, no matter which mode of commuting one chooses, it takes longer to get from point A to point B in New York.
The metro areas in California are uniformly denser than in the northeast, which has MSA's spilling across multiple states.
Commute times are longer in New York than in Los Angeles because, no matter which mode of commuting one chooses, it takes longer to get from point A to point B in New York.
Which is way more rail transit in CA will be very beneficial, if done right. Even with how it is now, I'd say it's just as easy to live without a car in many areas of SoCal when compared to the NE. So many people do it already. There is an extensive bus network thanks to the dense suburban grid layout that connects to a vast commuter rail system that's still growing.
That area would have been better off being the new international airport for Orange County, but of course the Irvine Family/Company can do anything they want in California independent of any state/local government, so they were able to block all airport proposals. Now this area gets tin box townhomes they are trying to sell as "detached single family" (lol). To me converting the current OC airport area into dense housing would have made more sense.
I guess the idea would be to modify El Toro into a commercial airport and shut down John Wayne which has a fairly short runway and would need something like burying or removing some highways as well as demolishing some structures to expand. I can see either kind of working though it's not like they expanded John Wayne airport in lieu of El Toro becoming a commercial airport.
Which is way more rail transit in CA will be very beneficial, if done right. Even with how it is now, I'd say it's just as easy to live without a car in many areas of SoCal when compared to the NE. So many people do it already. There is an extensive bus network thanks to the dense suburban grid layout that connects to a vast commuter rail system that's still growing.
Yea, if they can get Metrolink to be electrified, through-running, and grade-separated so that it acts like a S-Bahn/S-Train type of system and with frequent local rail and/or bus service to the stations, then southern California can pretty quickly become a very urban and walkable metropolitan area as a whole. It also has some pretty fantastic weather for biking for the most part--just has a bit too much air pollution and streets that aren't designed to be all that conducive to biking for the most part.
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