Transportation in Los Angeles

Los Angeles has a complex multimodal transportation infrastructure, which serves as a regional, national and international hub for passenger and freight traffic.

The transportation system of Greater Los Angeles includes the United States' largest port complex, seven commuter rail lines, and Amtrak service.

The Coast Starlight provides additional service on the route and beyond to the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and on to Seattle, Washington.

There is also daily service to Chicago, Illinois on the Southwest Chief, and three times a week to New Orleans, Louisiana on the Sunset Limited.

Amtrak Pacific Surfliner trains stop at several locations in Los Angeles County, including: Glendale, Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, Chatsworth, and Van Nuys.

Also called Los Angeles Harbor and WORLDPORT L.A., the port complex occupies 7,500 acres (30 km2) of land and water along 43 miles (69 km) of waterfront.

From Chavez Ravine north to Pasadena it can be quite dangerous because there is no shoulder, the lanes are narrow, the turns are sharp (not always properly banked), and the ramps are quite short and offer little room for acceleration to freeway speed.

Los Angeles' mean travel time for work commutes in 2006 was 29.2 minutes, similar to those of San Francisco and Washington, DC.

Some of the more common means of maintaining surface street traffic flow is the use of loop-sensors embedded in the pavement allowing for intersection traffic signal timing adjustments to favor the more heavily delayed roadways; the use of a traffic control system allows for the synchronization of traffic signals to improve traffic flow (as of October 2009 this system is currently installed at 85% of the city's signalized intersections, more than any other US city); restrictions on vehicle turns on roadways without designated turning lanes during rush-hours; and the extensive use of rush-hour parking restrictions, allowing for an extra lane of travel in each direction during peak hours (weekdays excluding holidays generally from 7-9am thru 4-7pm, although hours vary by location) by eliminating on street parking and standing of vehicles, with violators being ticketed, and in the case of priority routes known as "anti-gridlock zones", immediately towed by specialized enforcement teams dubbed "tiger teams" at steep cost to the violator.

Northeast of the river, block designations are divided east and west by Pasadena Avenue and North Figueroa Street.

Also, some districts of Los Angeles, such as Wilmington, San Pedro, Venice, and Playa Del Rey have their own numbered street grids.

Major east–west routes include: Roscoe, Victory, Ventura, Hollywood, Sunset, Santa Monica, Beverly, Wilshire, Olympic, Pico, Venice, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Exposition, Obama Boulevard, and Martin Luther King Jr (formerly Santa Barbara Avenue), and Century Boulevard.

[16] Many city streets, such as Wilshire Boulevard, were engineered when cars, trucks, and buses were much smaller, and desperately need to be torn up and rebuilt from scratch to handle the weight of today's larger vehicles.

[16] Furthermore, due to its severe budget problems, Los Angeles is one of the few California cities that does not use raised pavement markers on its streets.

[19][failed verification] Downtown Los Angeles has numerous public escalators and skyways, such as the Bunker Hill steps[20] to facilitate pedestrian traffic in the traffic-laden and hilly terrain.

As certain popular species of trees accelerated the damage caused by roots, the council failed to concurrently allocate funds for continuing city repairs of such sidewalks.

The biggest agreement of its kind in U.S. history would settle a lawsuit on behalf of people in wheelchairs or others with mobility impairments who argued that crumbling, impassable sidewalks and other barriers were a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act since they were prevented from accessing public pathways.

[23][24] In 2024, Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive directive designating a single committee tasked with coordinating the maintenance, delivery and development of street projects.

Made up of general managers from nine city divisions, it will coordinate the work of the different departments and bureaus that deal with the concrete, asphalt, street lighting, bike lanes, storm water drains and parks.

For the entirety of its 17.7-mile (28.5 km) length, the 60-foot (18 m) articulated buses, built by North American Bus Industries and dubbed Metro Liners, operate on bus-only lanes that follow an old railroad right-of-way.

The Los Angeles Metro Rail ranked by daily ridership as the ninth-busiest rapid transit system in the United States.

These projects include: Also serving Los Angeles and several surrounding counties is Metrolink, a regional commuter rail service.

Lights The Way under the supervision of Mayor Eric Garcetti, an open competition to design and fabricate a new, improved, and multi-use standard LED powered street light to be installed and supplant the 220,000 existing less efficient high pressure sodium street lamps and the current single-function, utilitarian, LED-operated CD953 model streetlight that has been standardized throughout Los Angeles since 2009.

Additionally, the timeliness of the design competition echoes the larger, city-wide efforts to refurbish and modernize the city’s public environment in preparation for the 2028 Olympic Games (though the L.A.

[41] On September 3, 2020, Hawthorne announced via Twitter[44] that of the over 100 anonymous global entries, the winner of the contest’s $70,000 prize was the Superbloom concept, coincidentally created by the L.A.-based design studio Project Room.

Yum describes the design focus of the Superbloom concept was, "to take the ever increasing number of things we demand from our streetlights — shade, traffic sensors, telecom, EV charging, wayfinding, banners, the list goes on — and translate that into a form that is uniquely LA.

The streetlight expresses its purposes as simply as possible and yet remains open to change and to the future.”[45] The proposed Superbloom system is designed to incorporate features that have the potential to mitigate the detrimental effects of the various environmentally racist modern urban design phenomena, such as increasing the amount shade to combat urban heat islands that are disproportionately found in low-income communities of color.

[14] Driving alone has increased at the expense of public transportation in recent years, with the most marked decline occurring between 2019 and 2021 due to commute pattern changes coincident with COVID-19.

According to the American Community Survey, only 70.6% of workers who commuted in the City of Los Angeles did so by driving alone in 2006, and 11.5% used public transportation.

The millions of vehicles in the area combined with the additional effects of the Los Angeles/Long Beach complex frequently contribute to further air pollution.