For most people, the idea of transportation in New York evokes images of the subway. Transportation in LA is more likely to get people thinking of traffic gridlock on the freeway. A new study by the Brookings Institute suggests that those images may not be quite accurate.
The study found that a whopping 99.1 percent of no-car households in the Los Angeles area have access to public transit, compared to just 98.7 percent in the greater New York City area. It may just be by 0.4 percent, but Los Angeles has better public transportation than New York City. The only place in the country better than both is Honolulu, which evokes images of surfboards. The report says that 99.3 percent of carless residents there have access to public transportation.
But before Los Angeles starts to rest on its laurels, it is worth taking a closer look at the report. For example, in the entire, vast region considered metropolitan Los Angeles, only 355,457 households have no car at all, compared to approximately 2 million in Metropolitan New York. Some 10 percent of people in New York don’t have cars, while in LA it is only about 2.5 percent.
Furthermore, the report admits that over one-third of those carless commuters in LA—over 100,000 households—have a commute longer than 90 minutes. New York has its subway, but Los Angeles is largely dependent on buses, which are subject to the same traffic jams as cars. While this will certainly change with the expansion of the city’s rail lines, it will still take a few years to have a real impact.
Los Angeles may be well on its way to being top of the country in public transportation, but it still has a way to go, and gas prices are going down.
