Yesterday’s research on America’s vehicle dependecny further explains this transit issue, “The research defines world-class transit as being an accessible, frequent, reliable and convenient alternative to automotive travel”. And a lot of our local transit systems lack this, with long wait times, evident safety concerns, and overall inconvenience with multiple users having to take multiple modes of travel to reach their final destination. Another great quote from yesterday’s research about public transit where our author says, “Essentially, you are forced to live like a second-class citizen without a car,” said Watkins. “It will take you twice as long to get anywhere, and it probably won’t be a nice experience. You are almost always choosing that it will take longer than in a car.” This explains the hassle perfectly, not having a car in an area like this is so challenging and makes moving around your city twice as challenging. These issues show glaring holes in public transit. We need to invest more money and time into figuring out ways to optimize our transit system. Though I do understand the potential drastic cost of these improvements I think we should at least look into transit innovation. We throw billions on freeway widenings to end up with the same amount of congestion just a few years later. We have spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons and facilities that we might use just in case. I know I could be out of my depth here, but to me it makes more sense to spend at least some of our funding on transportation, specifically transit needs. Why not put this money into our own country’s development.
Another mind blowing stat is that LA county has 7.8 million registered vehicles. Let that sink in, almost 8 million vehicles in one county. To put that into perspective if LA county was a country it would rank 19th in the world for the amount of registered vehicles. But still, 8 million vehicles is extremely difficult to manage for any planner. With the county still growing in population, there simply will not be enough road space to continue widening. We have to find new solutions and one glaring one is our transit system. Though I do understand that getting more passengers on public transit in LA is tough with so many residents using their own vehicles, it is difficult to make people buy into this idea so late. But we just have to make it convenient enough that people will want to use it. This is what more funding can provide, we have to give more time and energy to creating new solutions to these traffic problems. If we don’t adapt cities will stay gridlocked and our traffic crisis will worsen and our tax dollars will continue to get wasted on unsustainable solutions.
Sources: LA Metro RIdership data https://www.metro.net/safety-support/by-the-numbers/
Car Centric America: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/06/american-cities-cars-public-transportation
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1h2uwub/today_i_learned_the_total_size_of_car_parks_in/
June 27, 2026
Andrewontraffic 
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