If you’ve found yourself feeling extra aggravated while sitting in yet another Downtown traffic delay of late, we have some good news: You’re not crazy. There really have been markedly more closures, detours and snarls than there used to be. (Oh, you didn’t think the news was that things would be getting better, did you?)
The thing is, those closures and delays are also kind of our own fault. It turns out that everything we love about Downtown LA—the great dining, flourishing arts and entertainment scenes, dense apartment living—is also a source of a lot of the new traffic issues.
As the LA Times reports, the renewed interest in DTLA has contributed to the traffic woes in two major ways. First, the patterns of when people move in and out of the city core have changed dramatically in recent years. In the past, a lot of people lived outside of Downtown, commuted into a few business districts for weekday 9-to-5s, and then left. Now, with more people opting to live Downtown and others from across the region coming and going at all hours of every day for not only office jobs, but also cultural attractions and evening and weekend entertainment, there are more people on downtown's streets than ever before.
All that activity and motion in the area has also led to the second big factor in traffic delays, tons of construction projects. From simple building retrofits that might close down a single lane of a street for a few days to massive street diversions for major projects like subway extensions or upgrading power and data line infrastructure, the Times found that number of permits issued for closures rose by 147 percent in the last two years alone.
On the bright side, all that construction is a good sign for a strong local economy—and, as current projects reach their conclusions, there will only be more opportunities to move around by train, live close to work and maybe, someday, even give up our cars entirely.