To my surprise, my California tax dollars are being used to pay for firefighting in this high-risk area. I naively assumed that people who live in these fire zones pay for their own extra fire protection services through local property taxes. But this is not the case. Climate change will increase both the size of these zones and the severity of risk that local residents face in them. Current state policy spreads the cost of this fire protection across all residents in the state. But consider a small change in state fire policy. If local governments in fire zones had to pay for the bulk of their own fire protection, they would change their zoning codes to allow less new development in these areas. This would immediately reduce the cost of climate change–induced forest fires.
Los Angeles Has a Subway?
Public transit is not used in Los Angeles. In the year 2000, only 6 percent of LA residents commuted using public transit. The Santa Monica Big Blue bus charges adults 75 cents and students 25 cents a ride, yet this isn’t enough of an incentive to lure mass ridership.
Although the car is cool, a more fundamental reason why people in Los Angeles do not walk, take the bus, or use the subway is that the city is so spread out. Urban researchers have documented that this city has at least sixteen different major employment centers, each with more than 100,000 jobs centered in it. Unlike nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities, which had a single downtown employment center, the modern city has multiple employment centers. When people work in the suburbs, they are highly likely to commute by private vehicle.
The paradox is that the average Los Angeles resident lives in a neighborhood with 13,100 people per square mile, but few live a “new urbanist” lifestyle of walking and biking to places of work, shopping, and cultural activities. In recent years, the city and federal governments have invested billions of dollars in a subway and light rail system geared to getting people downtown. The Red Line is LA’s subway. It was opened in early 1993, with extensions through Hollywood opened later in the 1990s. The total cost of building this system has been roughly $6 billion, or $300 million per mile. Today, 150,000 people per day ride this subway. In contrast, 5 million per day ride the New York City subway.
Today, Los Angeles is considering building a “Subway to the Sea.” This east/west subway could take people from Hollywood, west through Beverly Hills, Westwood, Brentwood, and then finally to Santa Monica and the beach. My UCLA students tell me that they will take this subway (which will cost roughly $1 billion per mile) the 5 miles to the beach once it opens. If this subway does cost $5 billion to build, and if it attracts 200,000 riders per year, then after twenty-five years it will have attracted 5 million riders. The average fixed cost of providing this service would be $5 billion divided by 5 million, or $1,000 per rider. Critics would argue that a taxi, even a Beverly Hills taxi, would charge much less than $1,000 per ride.
Of course I am partially kidding. There are environmental and congestion benefits from building such a subway, and the subway would live on for years. But transit advocates must admit that in the absence of huge federal subsidies of up to 80 percent, there would be a serious public policy debate over whether subways are a good investment of scarce tax dollars. The case for building such a costly subway would be stronger if the federal government taxed gasoline to reflect its contribution to climate change. One leading economics study concluded that the tax on gasoline should be $1 a gallon higher than it is today. If the average household consumes 700 gallons of gasoline a year, this extra $700-a-year tax on gasoline expenditure would push some of them to switch from using their cars to taking public transit.
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17 Comments
Add CommentI really wanted to like this piece, but it relies too much on intellectual shortcuts. The anecdote about the writer's mother-in-law on page 7 is a prime example. The water agency is trying to cut water use by incentivizing saving, but the writer believes this is silly because his MIL got a check for cutting her water usage, when in reality she was overseas and hence her water use fell. Are you really using a single anecdote that relies on an outlying phenomenon (i.e., not everyone can afford to spend a whole month traveling in Italy) to dispute the generally accepted notion that financial incentives can influence human behavior? The same goes for example of how Candy Spelling's giant estate pays less per gallon of water used than the writer does. Is one rich person's anomalous water bill enough to toss out the entire idea of tiered rates? Finally, your view of L.A. is way too westside-centric. You should hang out in some other neighborhoods a bit. The fact that a handful of UCLA students won't venture downtown proves nothing. Oh, and you misspelled the mayor's name.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.notenoughtowaste.org/notenoughtowaste/Headwaters.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of your facts are not totally correct, we do get 15 inches of rain not 11 and not everybody wastes water, check out more facts about Securing LA water future here. http://www.notenoughtowaste.org/notenoughtowaste
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurious. So Cal is heading towards the coolest summer on record. July 8 saw the lowest maximum high in 132 years of record keeping in San Diego. Lowest record highs breaking decades old records have occurred continuously this summer on the California coast. Didn't we have record snows this winter back east? And where exactly are the hurricanes the ;ast four years now? Certainly makes on wonder how this stuff is measured.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBTW, everyone talks about how bad LA/OC is but nobody seems to be leaving, apparently even you. That's why the song say's 'We love it!'. After an awesome day today around the pool it should be obvious to the most effete Eastern snob.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed, climate is an important factor for attracting people living in LA, but LA has many different characteristics from other region for its charm. It's really interesting that the author discusses the climate issue on an economic view.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs one lucky enough to take my family and escape the cesspool of SoCal, I can't imagine that anyone still believes the false claims that LA is some sort or nirvana or desirable in any way. The traffic alone is reason enough to hate the place. I live 65 miles from the nearest freeway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost of the article is about water. Typical LA attitude that the author thinks that water should be taken from farmers for the lawns of the city. What don't you understand about the fact that WE GROW YOUR FOOD!
Now that LA is just Tijuana Norte, I'm very happy that I don't live in Mexifornia anymore.
What is the reasonable/fair method of calculating the appropriate use of energy/resources by nation states on planet earth??? Should it be based on the resources used per person or per square mile???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow may we support you? Your invention is desperately needed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Climate change cant alter the blue skies or access to the beach and mountains, but it will pose four tangible threats: The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, is it just me or how bi-polar is this statement? sure, whatever we do here won't affect the fact that there are stars overhead either.... WTF? worry, but, don't worry? at some point, this "writer" needs to take a stand and quit taking the middle road. its not all about profit. at some point, you have to take a stand - that is, if you believe in something.
the author is talking like a fool, you should pay more attention at how to exist in the earth longer, if you are all gone with the bad climate economy is zero, all things are 000000000
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI take issue with a couple points. One is on the subway where you say it will have 200,000 riders a year. The current subway has 150,000 riders per day not per year, so basically you calculation is off by a factor of 365. That $1,000 taxi ride just went to $3.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, you claim that the skies will become smoggier. As you correctly stated, air pollution has dropped dramatically in the last 30-40 years and continues to drop. With the advent of electric cars and more technological improvements this will likely continue, but you suddenly give a more doomsday scenario because of warmer weather. Also, warm weather is not necessarily a producer of smog. Los Angeles suffers from an inversion layer of cooler air below warmer air. If the cool air does not come in from the coast this inversion does not happen so warmer days are not necessarily the most smoggy. This is often true today as the warmest days are generally not the smoggiest inland necessarily.
Hard to get past the first page of name-dropping and tourist advertising. Kahn and his wife must be up for the next Real Housewives of L.A. Who the hell would read his stupid bool?This guy is just putting lipstick on a pig and calling it beautiful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real issue is...where do these giant metro areas like L.A. and Vegas get their water? The reality is that they steal it from others. By doing so they desire to create a serfdom where the lowly rural inhabitants only exist to serve their city-dwelling masters. The most valuable commodity is fresh water.
The only way to stop the madness is to abandon the growth economy model and concentrate on a sustainable future. Mexifornia (nice one, notslic) is the present model for a failed state, with its $20 billion deficit and plan to again start handing out IOU's for the services it purchases. When it goes down the toilet, it will only end up where all the rest of its sewage does...3 miles out to sea.
"The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water", Matthew Kahn is talking Global Warming. The evidence for GW has evaporated. LA has bigger problems than climate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I arrived in SoCal 1972 from the NorthEast, I watched heat-infused sunsets, drank margueritas, ate chile rellenos, and thought I was in heaven (and picked up a BSEE). Having been to all 50 states and many countries, I still think SoCal is heaven. Please consider Shakespeare by the beach or opera at the Dorothy Chandler, cocktails at the Biltmore or dinner at the old train station. Take in the LA Marathon or volunteer at a soup kitchen. What's a little humidity? It's a very elastic and accepting social environment. And, very adaptable. Being rich is not how much you have but how little you need.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Almost everyone in Los Angeles was not born here."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHint...the vast majority of the Hispanic kids are NOT ousiders. They were born in greater LA. As were Vietnamese. Chinese, etc.
There are also outright twisted facts about precipitation, recent tremperatures, etc.
Are there no editors at Scientific American to weed out fluffy nonsense articles full of errors?
To me, it's clear that LA is not going to "adapt" so much as how the rest of the world is going to need to change. Different technologies and the use of completely clean power generation (say fusion in the future) could in fact make it very viable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe'll see
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