Matt Yglesias wrote an implausible-sounding story about “How Los Angeles—Yes, Los Angeles—Is Becoming America’s Next Great Mass-Transit City.” It sounds like L.A. is (slowly) becoming a more palatable place to live, and the city’s mass-transit strategy makes sense to me because driving pretty much anywhere in L.A. right now is a hellacious, grinding experience, and that experience is only getting worse over time. Which means L.A. and its residents only really have two choices: accept the hellacious driving experience and accept that it’s going to get continually worse, or attempt to build some kind of alternative system, presumably modeled on New York.

At the moment, we only really have two “models” of cities: the New York-style, walking and public transit version, or the L.A. style of car-based transport. Most cities over the last 75 years have followed the L.A. model, but L.A. is now demonstrating the limits of that very model.* When Southern California first began growing in earnest in the 1920s, cars were just getting started, and for each marginal driver getting behind the wheel made a lot of sense. But we’re now at the point where each marginal driver makes the situation that much worse, and the net effect of all that driving is an awful lot of misery. The only real alternative is allowing much denser construction patterns and building mass-transit around those very dense developments. I just didn’t expect that L.A.’s politicians and bureaucrats—and, by extension, its voters—would actually embrace, or at least tolerate, this solution.

* I’ve written a little bit about this topic before, most notably in Cars and generational shift.