People who have never been to L.A. really have no idea how insanely huge it is. Driving to my apartment from the start of city (before you even get to L.A. county) and having the city just keep going and going and going for two hours and not because of traffic jams is something you have to experience to truly understand.
Hmm, it’s too soon to make the obvious fire joke…
It sure is a good thing that land elects presidents.
It’s also a good thing those shitty presidential candidates come from major population states too. Trump has never lived Nebraska and Harris didn’t grow up in northern Minnesota.They both come from states where the real power and money reside.
Don’t forget Senators too!
Land electing presidents is bad, but Senator’s have a purpose. The better solution for the legislative house is uncapping the House so places like California are properly represented
How else would the slave-owning states have the slavery powers they so needed?!?
is something you have to experience to truly understand.
I’m sorry I’m too European-public-transport to even want to understand, darling
I don’t blame you for that. I would also never go to L.A. as a tourist unless I knew someone to actually show me around the city and know where to take me.
Otherwise you think that it’s worth doing things like walking down Hollywood Boulevard and seeing the Chinese Theater and it really isn’t unless you actually plan to go watch a movie there. And even then, there’s better options.
(That said, the only time I went, I got invited to the Aliens vs. Predator premiere and we ate really potent cannabis brownies beforehand and I was so high I barely remember anything about that movie, so I could be wrong and it could be the best theater in the city. But I vaguely remember it as kind of unimpressive.)
But yeah, unless you are going to a specific place in a touristy part of town, just don’t ever go there. And find someone who can tell you where the places that are worth going to are, like the beaches that are not full of idiot tourists and the museums that would actually be worth your time (I miss the Museum of Jurassic Technology so much)…
The MJT looks like it is worth making a huge detour for
New York? That surprises me.
Ohio is the surprising one to me. Big state I guess.
It’s not true of Ohio based on a quick Google search. I think this map might be quite wrong
Most of Ohio cities exist solely for industry. Cincinnati for transit (river + trains + air), Dayton for WPAFB (formerly a major canal for the ohio river), and Toledo for the Goodyear plant and lake Erie access; thats all i remember off the top of my head.
New York is one of the few states not colored in?
The blue states are the ones with a lower population.
LA seems to have so much amazing culture but it is drowning in an addiction to cars perhaps worse than almost any other US city and it totally turns me off from going.
I have flown over the endless sprawl and traffic jams on approach to LAX and like vomits in trash can nope. It looks like 1000% the kind of city where it takes at least an hour to get somewhere no matter how close on paper it is.
It is a phenomena of a place, and easily creates and does more to make the world better than all of those rural conservative states combined I just wish it wasn’t a car hellscape so I actually desired to visit.
It seems like LA has been making serious progress on becoming more walkable, so I am excited to see where it goes.
as an expert on the topic of los angeles (i spent 3 days there, many years ago), i can confirm that it is exactly the kind of city where every drive takes 1 hour. if you have to get on the highway to go somewhere, you better cancel your plans for the evening because your new plan is to sit in traffic forever.
Holy hell the urban sprawl is insane
Just grid for hundreds of miles around
It’s nothing specific to LA, it’s what any city with that population and a car centered infrastructure turns into.
I know that’s probably what you meant, just wanted to add a bit o’ clarity.
but it is drowning in an addiction to cars
That’s like saying people are addicted to food and water. There is no significant effective public transportation in Los Angeles. You have a a car, or you suffer immensely. It’s not a desire, it’s a necessity.
that’s exactly why it’s addicted to cars, correct….
there is a decent light rail system connected all the cities in socal, but the buses suckBeing able to travel from one city to another doesn’t mean anything if you’re not able to get to where you need to go within that city. These are not small, walkable cities.
No one said they were and no one disagrees with this. What’s your point? He literally said the trains between cities are good and the buses suck.
The phrasing is what bothers me. Saying they have an addiction makes it sound like they’re abusing something they don’t need, when in fact you do need a car if you’re going to live in Los Angeles. It’s like comparing food to cocaine, they’re not equivalent.
Building your city so that you can’t survive without a car is what a city having a car addiction means.
I think the idea is that the larger society/city/culture is addicted, not the individual people
You’re being shat on for something SO FAR beyond your control and they’re just not understanding… well they understand, but they’re disingenuous in their arguments.
I understand that reaction but I didn’t mean to blame this on a mass addiction of the average person to cars nor did I intend a tone that was implying I wasn’t very much throwing stones in a glass house.
When I said “LA” is addicted to cars I literally meant the city in all its infrastructure, systems, and narratives allowed or not allowed to be repeated and canonized about the past, present and future by the rich who actually have a say on the trajectory of the city…
Believe me in my head I am chillin with Doc Sportello having a blast with how many amazing different kinds of humans LA contains. I didn’t mean shade at the average person who lives there only that LA exemplifies in many ways the tragedy of american car centric urban design because of the cities incredible vibrance and ability to imagine alternate futures.
Right on. Thanks for the response. Commuting is somewhat of a nightmare down there. It would be a much better place to live if they had effective public transportation. I used to live down there and I would spend 3 hours in my car commuting to and from work every day. It fucking sucked! Especially since my car was an old junker with no climate control, and no stereo. Eventually I got an old boom box and put it on my passenger seat to try to maintain some sanity.
It’s one of the 33 megacities in the world, so it makes sense.
Which population numbers are you using for this graph? Census data for 2020 has LA county at 10.01 million and NC and Georgia at 10.45 and 10.73 million respectively. (for the second link, click on the Table 1 PDF. I didn’t want to link to a PDF directly). 2023 numbers seem to have LA county trending down while those states are trending up.
It’s still a staggering visual to compare population densities. I just thought the claim was a bit suspect regarding my state.
Map is missing a few based on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
Maybe it was based off the 2020 census where it had a higher population, but even then it had less than Michigan, so idk where this is coming from.
2 senators each.
I mean that’s why we also have representatives that match the population.
Even that is capped though, so the smaller states are still vastly overrepresented. Living in LA means your vote is only represented at ~1/100th as much as the least populated areas. Because even the least populated areas still get a representative, but the populated areas are capped on how many they can have.
But the power differential between large population states and small population states matters a lot. Ain’t much national news coverage of Vermont’s or North Dakota’s senators or representatives. But a California, Texas, New York, politician can get major news reporter’s ears in a heartbeat. Low population density state politicians either need some unique point to make or be batshit crazy to garner attention. And when was the last time a viable presidential candidate came from one of those low population states? Let alone actually achieved office? On the national stage, no one cares much about what happens in Montana or Minnesota.
While I agree that California needs more members in the House, there is also a limit to just how much the House can expand before the whole thing becomes so unwieldy that it stops to function at all. Perhaps those large population states should be broken up into smaller population states to make a more manageable system of representation. But, I suspect California’s lack of representation per person will be be solved by the untenable living conditions they have created for themselves soon enough.
Not much coverage of Vermont’s senators? Did you miss all the Bernie Sanders coverage even when he’s not running for president?
Every state still gets at least one. Even if the population is 584,000
Unfortunately no because in 1929 the House of Representatives got capped at 435. For example, a Congressman from California represented 494,709 people while one from New Hampshire represented 3,448 people in the year 2020.
NH only has 2 congresspeople, so one per 700,000
Maybe time for a Port of Oakland tea party but with… Oh wait… we don’t need imports from the rest of the country and should just stop paying taxes without representation or something
I’m not an advocate of secession under normal circuimstances, what with the looming threat of WWIII if ever the power scale tipped against the USA, but it’s especially a bad idea when California is covered in fire.
Yeah. I just hate taxes and believe my state is an economic powerhouse. Not in favor of civil war
Even worse is the electoral college distribution among those populations. And the winner-take-all nature of our presidential elections
Why is NY blue? NYC is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with a population more than double L.A.
New York is grey… Are you looking at the wrong state?
NC has a higher pop than LA county.
Wake county (NC) has a higher pop than MT.I lived near Orange for a while. The way the cities and towns have 0 gaps between them was nuts to me. It’s just… you cross the street.
In MT you have 2 lane roads with several miles in between. The county I’m in now doesn’t touch the interstate. Wild.
Also means the fires out here, as terrifying as they are to my hurricane-seasoned ass, are more likely to take out stuff in the middle of nowhere and a handful of houses, not entire swaths of suburbia.
That’s why it’s a miserable dump.
You’re right by most accounts, but there the whole fire thing that makes this insensitive.
There are a lot of reasons to complain about L.A., but acting like Hollywood and L.A. are equivalents and Hollywood isn’t just a really shitty part of L.A. with a lot of tourists (so of course a lot of panhandlers will be there) is like acting like all of Las Vegas is just The Strip.
Most of L.A. is not Hollywood. I lived in the Valley and you didn’t see what you’re seeing in that photo. The places you will see a huge number of homeless in L.A. are Hollywood, for the reason I already stated, Downtown because Skid Row is long-established and hospitals actually dump people there when they discharge them (when I lived in L.A., they dumped someone’s grandmother with advanced dementia there in a hospital gown) and Santa Monica and Venice on the beach because of both the tourists and the fact that sleeping on sand is a hell of a lot more comfortable than sleeping on concrete.
Like I said, L.A. has a lot of problems, but calling L.A. a miserable dump based just on Hollywood is silly. Don’t base your opinion on a city on where the tourists go, it’s always going to be one of the worst parts of town.
I lived most of my time in L.A. in North Hollywood. It has nothing to do with Hollywood proper. It’s in the Valley and there’s a mountain range between it and Hollywood. It was never like that when I lived there as it was gentrifying, and now it’s a hip arts district that you would have no real reason to see if you were a tourist.
Homeless: serious problem, been a problem. Heartless evil the way they’re treated now.
Water supply: serious problem, been a problem. Los Angeles is the highest consumer of electricity in California, mainly because the energy is spent on treating and transporting water. Highly inefficient.
Air pollution: serious problem, been a problem. Closely tied to…
Traffic congestion: serious problem, been a problem.
There has been major improvement in drug deaths. Actually quite good numbers there.
Okay, but your characterization as L.A. being full of panhandlers because of a photo of a bunch of people panhandling in a tourist area was not exactly an honest view of the city.
Really REALLY exemplifies how ridiculous our “representative” system is.
LA does not have a bigger population than Georgia, and probably not Michigan and a few others. Map is bs.
Still, a shitload of people in trouble rn
California, Texas, Florida , New York , Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio , Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan are the ten states that aren’t less populated than LA county, to save anyone else who’s curious from needing to look it up.
Yeah it looks like NJ makes it in by the skin of its teeth and over that the top 10 most populous states all have more people in them than LA County — of which Michigan is one.
Los Angeles County has a population of approximately 9.66 million residents, making it the most populous county in the United States.
yawn No one cares. Especially Europe no longer cares about news from the divided states of southern northern america.
Here here! Fuck knows I don’t give two shits about Europe’s problems, yet for some reason, on an international forum, I keep hearing about it.
Personally, I don’t care anymore because the DSA has turned full fascist, The only thing I care about is them not starting any more wars and for the decent people over there to somehow hopefully eventually win their country back from the MAGA maggots.
Sure looks like you care enough to make a comment complaining about it
