The Climate Challenge of Transportation in Los Angeles County

Despite billions spent on transit infrastructure, the region struggles to reduce the number of miles Angelenos spend traveling in gas-powered vehicles, the single-largest contributor to carbon emissions. How can LA stop traveling in the wrong direction?

Let’s get two myths out of the way. One, Los Angeles is not the country’s most car-dependent city. The region sees over one million daily transit riders, making LA’s the second-highest transit ridership in the U.S. after New York City. And two, despite our freeway-laced landscape, LA was not built around the car; our growth occurred largely along privately operated rail lines, which, by the 1920s, meant LA had the most extensive public transportation system in the world. But as cars crept onto LA streets in the early 1900s, those streetcars and trolleys relied upon by the local workforce were slowed down by the vehicles that Angelenos of means bought in their quest for freedom. Transportation investments and land-use decisions subsequently prioritized car-centric travel, often widening roads to add more lanes that just made the traffic worse. And even though great efforts have been undertaken in recent years to restore the type of infrastructure that once made transit the obvious choice for anyone to get around, the same essential problem plagues LA a century later: cars — a majority of which are fossil fuel-powered and occupied by just one person — are still stuck, generating the region’s number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions as well as a slew of other pollutants that poison our air, soil, and water.

LA says it wants to change, and in some ways, it has. Although its first interurban rail system was dismantled, LA never stopped operating transit; a nimble fleet of buses once delivered more daily boardings than LA County sees systemwide today. In 1993, a new agency was established to oversee its contemporary rail expansion: the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, now known as just “Metro.” LA County residents proceeded to vote four times to tax themselves for better transit, the most recent of which, Measure M, is a permanent half-cent sales tax increase funneling $120 billion over 40 years to Metro’s bank account.

Now LA is spending far more on ambitious public transportation projects than any other metropolitan area in the U.S. — and it’s not even close. Yet after decades of investment, a dramatic regional transformation has not yet occurred. Angelenos are actually driving more, leading to a regional increase in vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). The number of jobs that can be easily accessed by transit has also gone down, meaning that, for most Angelenos, a car is required to make money. Transit ridership has nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels but it’s still far below the peak in 2008. It is probably not a surprise then, that LA is going in the wrong direction by nearly every climate metric: buying more cars, traveling more miles, creating more congestion, and spewing more carbon pollution. 

Electric cars will only help so much. Vehicle regulations meant to curb tailpipe emissions are set at the state level, and California sounded the alarm decades ago. Using the Clean Air Act, the state created its own smog-reduction regulations and persuaded automakers to make cars engineered to “California emissions” standards, with 16 states now following our lead. Now the state is phasing out the sale of gas-powered cars completely by 2035. Currently, about 1 in 6 new cars sold in the state are electric, a far higher number than anywhere else in the country. LA has made significant investments to help more vehicle trips go electric — installing charging stations, modernizing the grid, electrifying city vehicle fleets, purchasing hundreds of electric buses. The DASH system, run by LA city’s Department of Transportation, is the largest all-electric fleet in the country. But even the California Air Resources Board (CARB), has warned that relying on the purchase of electric cars alone won’t achieve the state’s climate goals — Californians have to drive about 25 percent less than they did in 2019 to hit the 2030 targets. Californians also tend to hold onto their cars for about 12 years so even with the phase-out it would take until almost 2050 for the fleet to turn over. Requiring every Californian to swap their gas car for an electric one is hardly an equitable solution, when, at least for the moment, automakers are mostly making very large, very expensive EVs. And electric vehicles still carry grave environmental concerns: toxic tire particles, microplastic pollution, unethical mining practices, and the carbon footprint of manufacturing a giant machine out of steel. Most importantly, they’re still cars: electric vehicles do nothing to alleviate the corresponding high-VMT crises of traffic deaths, congestion, and sprawl. The only real solution for reducing emissions with the urgency that’s required is planning for a future with fewer cars — and where walking, biking, and riding transit is safer, faster, and more convenient than driving.

Angelenos must drive less. But the problem, both at the state and local level, is that as much as LA shells out for transit infrastructure, those figures are dwarfed by what is spent on car infrastructure that induces more driving. About 81 percent of annual funding from California’s state transportation agencies goes to freeway and roadway maintenance and expansion, while the rest goes to walking, biking and transit projects. And even though there are many programs set up at the state level that use highway money to fund projects like safer crosswalks, protected bike lanes, and dedicated bus routes, the applications are overwhelmed by demand and the selected projects still take years to implement. What Caltrans and other local agencies need to do is allocate more money for the modes that most closely align with the climate goals the state has set for itself, something that Colorado and Minnesota have legislated in recent years. In LA County, officials have succeeded in killing some planned freeway expansions and there are proposals to build parks over existing freeways to help mitigate their devastating public health effects. The region is also currently studying congestion pricing, soon to be implemented in New York City, which would charge drivers for accessing busy surface streets during high-demand periods, similar to the way LA’s successful ExpressLanes FasTrak program charges tolls on some freeways. These efforts can help manage the infrastructure we have today, but they won’t be as impactful without a moratorium on new lanes for cars, which are effectively fossil-fuel pipelines feeding directly into the centers of our cities.

In the meantime, all focus needs to be placed on helping as many Angelenos as possible make the switch from taking trips in cars to taking trips on transit. In addition to a reduction in emissions, an increase in transit ridership can mitigate congestion, improve air quality, and even reduce traffic deaths. And while LA’s higher-capacity fixed transit like subways and light-rail get a lot of the attention — and a lion’s share of the operating dollars — on any given day, the majority of Metro’s riders are only using buses. This was demonstrated to great effect during the pandemic when Metro’s ridership recovered more robustly compared to other U.S. transit systems, with bus ridership returning to pre-pandemic levels faster than rail. But instead of having a dedicated right-of-way like a train, LA’s buses are only as fast as the city’s gas-spewing cars, destroying their reliability for the mostly low-income people of color who use them. In recent years, LA has made great progress installing dedicated bus lanes which give buses priority to travel more quickly than cars. During the nearly two years during the pandemic that Metro buses were free, surveys with passengers noted that fare-free transit also induced more trips and removed other barriers to ridership. But free, fast, frequent bus service must be paired with train-like amenities; at the very least, dignified bus shelters with ample shade to combat extreme heat, comfortable seating, and lighting at night. 74 percent of bus stops in LA County don’t have any shelter at all.

Infrastructure for people who don’t use cars has never been an LA priority. Walking to a bus stop or anywhere else in LA isn’t easy due to shadeless streets, too-wide intersections, and broken sidewalks. In 2015, the largest class-action lawsuit in U.S. history under the Americans with Disabilities Act was settled with a $1.4 billion bond for LA city’s sidewalk repair. Progress has since plateaued with a backlog of thousands of requests and basic repairs to sidewalks can take months if not years. But just fixing what’s broken isn’t enough. The region needs not just smoother but wider sidewalks, with more shade and seating, and some streets need to be pedestrianized completely. Roads that look less like freeways and more like greenways can create paths for a wide variety of car-free modes that travel through the heart of LA County’s cities, connecting people to neighborhoods as well as to nature, planted with trees and stormwater gardens, and removing much of the pavement that causes LA’s deadly urban heat island effect.

One bright spot in LA has been the “bike boom” of recent years, particularly growing ownership of e-bikes, which are more likely to replace car trips, one half of which in LA are a very bikeable three miles or less. While California is close to approving an e-bike rebate program like other states, some rebates are being issued at the city level. Metro Bike, LA’s municipally managed bike share, offers low-cost access to electric bikes. LADOT even has a “universal basic mobility” pilot where residents have access to a wide range of free transit options plus bike rental, EV car share, and on-demand shuttle service.

LA County cities are also testing making more deliveries on e-bikes, electric scooters, or golf carts. Here’s where electric vehicles from big rigs to delivery vans can really help to move people and goods. Currently, trucking routes create a “diesel death zone” stretching from the Port of LA to the warehouses of the Inland Empire, subjecting local residents to some of the most toxic air in the country. It’s one reason that sprawl creates such a big carbon footprint; it’s not just the emissions of moving people around, but also moving around all those people’s stuff.

Which is why the most effective climate solution has less to do with transportation infrastructure and more to do with housing infrastructure. Locating people closer to where they work and play means shorter trips that can be more easily accomplished without needing to own a car. A dramatic decrease in car ownership means less space can be devoted to parking, which drives up the cost of housing (and presents its own environmental catastrophe by paving over a full 14 percent of LA County land). In an expensive place like LA, where cheaper rents draw people to the sprawling fringes of the region, efforts to build new apartments must prioritize people who can and will ride transit. LA’s wildly successful transit-oriented development programs do exactly this by giving developers incentives to add more housing units that are deed-restricted to low-income residents. The potential for this type of dense, affordable development remains to be fully unlocked in low-slung, mostly single-family zoned LA — but it’s the only way to guarantee that we’ll keep moving.

Keep reading to learn more about Metro and how to make an impact on transportation there.