Los Angeles isn’t a particularly transit-oriented city, but it is a very large city and as a result the LA mass transit system is actually one of the most important in the country. You can look at this in a bunch of different ways, but Brad Plumer’s chart of millions of dollars worth of congestion avoided by transit operations makes the point:
Simply because of its size, the LA transit system is bigger and more influential than the systems in more walking-oriented but smaller cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, or Boston. This is one reason why it’s always worth paying attention to LA even though it’s not any urbanist’s favorite town.
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