I'll be writing this from the perspective of a Los Angelino, and a couple of other So-Cal native can pitch in too, while we have some members from the Bay Area. I've been in San Francisco for the past week, and of course, I'm loving it. I've always loved this city, and aside from the lack of parking and adequate housing, oh and the San Francisco Giants, this city is a far nicer place than L.A. in my opinion.
But I noticed something about people in San Francisco and I wanted to see if others agree. Is it just me, or are people friendlier in San Francisco, in general, than in L.A.? I think most people in San Francisco are a lot more helpful and friendly to strangers than they are in L.A. Have you noticed this as well?
I'm also always amazed at the quality of public transportation in San Francisco, compared to L.A., or especially compared to where I live now. I never have to wait more than a few minutes to catch a bus, and there's always plenty of buses ready to take to you anywhere you need to go, and you can go from the Mission District, to Castro, to Pacific Heights, and to Fisherman's Wharf in less than two hours on the bus. And best of all, it only cost 50 cents for the whole day!!! That's incredible.
One thing I don't like about the city though is how they nickel and dime you for everything. Parking cost are out of this world, and everytime you cross a frickin' bridge they charge you 5 bucks! That's insane. If or when I move there, I'm planning on not owning a car. I would like to move there, but I would prefer living outside the city, somewhere like San Rafael or Sausilito, and just taking a ferry into town, and using the bus to get around town. Using the bus everyday would only cost $15 a month! That alone would save you almost a $1000 a month in car-related expenses.
fab
I've never been to San Francisco, but I always had a very positive image of it. On the other side I didn't liked LA. Los Angeles has a nice climate but it is to me just a endless addition of houses, highways and malls and seems very superficial.
Deborah
Re: San Francisco vs. Los Angeles
Porthos wrote:
One thing I don't like about the city though is how they nickel and dime you for everything. Parking cost are out of this world, and everytime you cross a frickin' bridge they charge you 5 bucks!
Yeah, the bridge tolls are getting way up there.
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If or when I move there, I'm planning on not owning a car. I would like to move there, but I would prefer living outside the city, somewhere like San Rafael or Sausilito, and just taking a ferry into town, and using the bus to get around town. Using the bus everyday would only cost $15 a month!
You mean $15 a week, right? A one-way bus fare is $1.50 x 2 = $3.00 a day, x 5 = $15 a week, or slightly over $60 a month. Or you could buy a FastPass and get unlimited use of public transportation within San Francisco for $45 a month.
Porthos
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You mean $15 a week, right? A one-way bus fare is $1.50 x 2 = $3.00 a day, x 5 = $15 a week, or slightly over $60 a month. Or you could buy a FastPass and get unlimited use of public transportation within San Francisco for $45 a month
I'm under 18, so it only costs me 50 cents. And I've been riding the bus about 4 times a day, and I only have to pay once every 24 hours. So, $.50 X 30 days = $15 per month.
Do you know how much BART costs?
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I've never been to San Francisco, but I always had a very positive image of it. On the other side I didn't liked LA. Los Angeles has a nice climate but it is to me just a endless addition of houses, highways and malls and seems very superficial.
Yeah, most people have an impression of L.A. that is very far from reality I'm afraid. But why would the "urban sprawl", which is what you described, be superficial?
Uriel
LA was just one huge monstrosity of urban blight to me the one time I visited it. You literally fly into it for about 10 minutes. 10 dirty, ugly, when-is-it-gonna-end? minutes. Whereas flying into SFO is spectacular -- sunlight glinting off the bay, the bridges spanning the water, sailboats down below, etc., etc.
That said, SF was ridiculously expensive even when I was in the Bay Area, in the late 80's and early 90's, and I don't expect it's gotten any cheaper since I left. But if I recall correctly, they only charge you a toll going in one direction on the Golden Gate. I don't remember what they do on the Bay Bridge.
Julian
San Francisco is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities I've ever visited and probably one of my favorite cities in the world. But there are also plenty of beautiful areas of Los Angeles and it's not always the places that visitors often go to.
The problem with comparing San Francisco with Los Angeles is that SF is crammed into 122 square kilometers of mostly hilly terrain while LA is spread out over 1,290 square kilometers of flatlands, hills, valleys, mountains, and deserts. That's ten times the size of San Francisco! You can touch down in the middle of SF and get a good feel for the city, while in LA you might have to travel several dozen miles of concrete and asphalt before you see anything worth writing home about. Unlike SF, LA has a decentralized urban layout. Sure there's a downtown where the city government buildings and financial district are located, but most Angelenos hardly ever venture out that way and have created "city centers" within their respective communities. So whenever somebody compares San Francisco with Los Angeles, I have to ask, "Which Los Angeles?" I guess a fairer comparison would be LA vs. the entire Bay Area, and let me tell ya, there are areas of Oakland that ain't pretty.
Map of Los Angeles' communities:
Click to see full size image
You can fit 10 San Franciscos within Los Angeles' city boundaries. The sheer size and terrain of LA has historically been a beast for city planners trying to come up with a comprehensive and cost-effective public transportation plan.
As for San Franciscans being friendlier than Angelenos, that's probably true.
Porthos
Julian wrote:
San Francisco is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities I've ever visited and probably one of my favorite cities in the world. But there are also plenty of beautiful areas of Los Angeles and it's not always the places that visitors often go to.
The problem with comparing San Francisco with Los Angeles is that SF is crammed into 122 square kilometers of mostly hilly terrain while LA is spread out over 1,290 square kilometers of flatlands, hills, valleys, mountains, and deserts. That's ten times the size of San Francisco! You can touch down in the middle of SF and get a good feel for the city, while in LA you might have to travel several dozen miles of concrete and asphalt before you see anything worth writing home about. Unlike SF, LA has a decentralized urban layout. Sure there's a downtown where the city government buildings and financial district are located, but most Angelenos hardly ever venture out that way and have created "city centers" within their respective communities. So whenever somebody compares San Francisco with Los Angeles, I have to ask, "Which Los Angeles?" I guess a fairer comparison would be LA vs. the entire Bay Area, and let me tell ya, there are areas of Oakland that ain't pretty.
Map of Los Angeles' communities:
Click to see full size image
You can fit 10 San Franciscos within Los Angeles' city boundaries. The sheer size and terrain of LA has historically been a beast for city planners trying to come up with a comprehensive and cost-effective public transportation plan.
As for San Franciscans being friendlier than Angelenos, that's probably true.
All that is very true Julian. SF is only 7X7 or 49 sq. miles. Everything is packed into a tiny little space, and built upward, and for someone like me from L.A., everywhere in S.F., I feel like I'm in Downtown. There are a total of 4 million people in the Bay Area, (700,000 in San Francisco) while there are 20 million people in the L.A. area. Not only is L.A. huge, but you must consider that all of it's so called "suburbs" (which have grown into large cities themselves) are all connected, so that you pass from one city to the next without every crossing open land. The result is an urban sprawl that seems endless. L.A., or at least downtown L.A. proper is sort of ugly, whereas there are nice parts in many of the Greater Los Angeles area. If one is talking about L.A., they must also include the OC and other areas which are all interconnected, because being that they're one continuous urban sprawl, they are essentially all one city, or one metropolitan area.
Deborah
Porthos wrote:
I'm under 18, so it only costs me 50 cents. And I've been riding the bus about 4 times a day, and I only have to pay once every 24 hours. So, $.50 X 30 days = $15 per month.
Oh, sorry. I pictured you living here after you were out of college. Well, you'd better hurry -- you only have a few months of $15 a month left.
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Do you know how much BART costs?
Within San Francisco, it's $1.45 one way, but you can use your FastPass instead. Once you leave the city, there's a jump in price. From Balboa Park, in SF, to Daly City, which is the very next stop, it's $2.30. The longest possible trip is from Millbrae, on the Peninsula, to Pittsburgh/Bay Point, in the (far) East Bay. That costs $6.30 one way.
Deborah
Porthos wrote:
Everything is packed into a tiny little space, and built upward, and for someone like me from L.A., everywhere in S.F., I feel like I'm in Downtown.
It's all relative. When I returned to SF after living for 8 years in Manhattan, where even the older residential buildings tend to be 5-6 stories high, everything looked very flat.
fab
concerning cities, this interesting document shows at the same scale Los Angeles and Paris urban entities.
the dark red shows the densily constructed continious areas, which consist in the case of LA of the "downtown" and in Paris of the "ville de Paris" department and some close "extra-muros" cities.
this part of LA has represent a negligeable population, while in Paris it represent about 3,5 million people.
the black line represents the administrative limit of the city.
in the case of LA, it represents about 4 million people, while in Paris it represent only a part of the densely constructed areas, with a population of 2,1 million people only.
the pink color represent the less densily constructed areas.
in the case of Paris these areas are all outside the city, while almost all of LA is consituted by it.
the whole urban area of LA consits of about 17 million people, while Paris urban area include about about 11 million people.
comparing the densities of population of the administrative cities
Los Angeles : 3 000 inhabitant/Kmē
Paris : 24 000 inhabitant/kmē
Deborah
I'm afraid I can't give a San Franciscan's opinion of Los Angeles, because I was there only once, in 1965, and I was staying with some friends of the family and didn't go anywhere except to ballet classes (on the bus, which took forever).
Julian
Porthos wrote:
L.A., or at least downtown L.A. proper is sort of ugly, whereas there are nice parts in many of the Greater Los Angeles area.
I don't really find downtown LA to be ugly. It's got a lot of beautiful architecture, old and new. What makes it ugly are scenes like this, which isn't going to disappear anytime soon:
Click to see full size image
That said, downtown LA is a hot market right now. The old abandoned buildings have been refurbished and converted into million dollar lofts and mixed-use establishments, high-rises have gone up in South Park, a huge sports and entertainment complex is going up across the street from the Staples Center, and trendy clubs and restaurants have moved back in to cater to the yuppie and guppie crowd, so in a few years that place is going to be rockin'! Although, I still can't imagine plunking down a little over a mil for an 800 sq. ft. condo when the whole place reeks of piss and homeless people mill about on the sidewalks below.
Click to see full size image
Click to see full size image
Julian
Let's revisit these links that I previously posted on the old defunct site, shall we?
I got all ya'll beat, fab -- I used to live in the greater Tokyo area:
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Population in Tokyo metropolis 12million 369,000 persons in Tokyo
Approximately 10 % of the Japan's total population, the largest population of any of the 47 prefectures.
Population density :5,655 persons/km2 in total of Tokyo (Oct.2003)
the 23 words - 13,500 persons/km2 (Sep.2004)
Tokyo is the most densely populated prefecture in Japan.
Foreign residents : 342,437 persons (2003)
17.9% of the total population of Tokyo (Ministry of Justice, 2003)
(Statistics Bureau)
I actually lived about 35 miles or so from Tokyo itself, not there there is any intervening countryside. Complete megalopolis. I remember that between the air pollution and the reflected city lights, I didn't see stars for about three years (except for when I was visiting my mother in California). The night sky was always a sort of hazy, roiling brown -- a weird color to look up at.
As far as city planning or what we would call "zoning" in the US, there wasn't much of it -- the neighbors' roosters were always flying over the fence to make their godawful noise right on my roof or in the back yard (and no, they don't wait for sunrise!).
The Japanese also apparently thought the right angle was a terrible constraint to apply to urban planning -- streets zigzagged all over the place and often met at such acute angles that they had to post enormous convex mirrors at intersections so you could see what might be coming at you. And the occasional gap of an empty lot between houses was invariably planted with rice or something like that -- they didn't believe in letting any square foot go to waste!
Gas stations had such tiny areas that the pumps were often overhead, so as not to take up valuable space.
fab
I've been to Tokyo a few years ago, this city is incredibly big. From a European point of view it is very difficult to find yourself because there is not an identified city center, which is usually the oldest part of the city in Europe. All seems to be mixed. A completly different urban world... and coming from Paris you have the impression to come directly from the 19th century to the 22th one. modernity everywhere, but surprisingly ultra traditions hide between it... I loved been discovering Japan...
I would like to see Mexico, which is one of the few cities in the world to reach about similar number of inhabitants.
Uriel
Tokyo was the first city I ever saw to have well-defined districts, like Shinjuku and Harajuku and Ginza and Roppongi. I guess New Yorkers have something similar with all their various boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, etc.). Of course, many of those were originally separate cities that just got annexed into NYC as it grew. LA is kind of like that, too -- although I just think of it all as one monstrous city, it really isn't, as I was surprised to find when I tried to look up a phone number of a friend -- silly me, I thought West LA was just the western part of LA. Nope, it's a separate city, with completely separate phone listings.
Since few American cities have city centers in the manner of European ones, I never missed that. I never really got my geographical bearings when I was in Japan anyway, because I was too young to drive (they make you wait until 18 there). Also, the driving times threw me off because of the horrendous traffic. Here, I'm used to gauging distance in terms of how long it takes to get somewhere -- if I say it's three hours to Albuquerque, that translates into a couple hundred mines. If I say El Paso is forty minutes away, it's also about forty miles away. But in Japan you could spend hours in traffic and only go say, 20 miles. And if you took the trains instead, forget it; you were whisked through tunnels and whatnot until you got where you were going, and I was never able to correlate stations to locations. I just knew to get off at Sobudai-mae; that was home.
Why were you in Tokyo, fab?
Julian
Uriel wrote:
LA is kind of like that, too -- although I just think of it all as one monstrous city, it really isn't, as I was surprised to find when I tried to look up a phone number of a friend -- silly me, I thought West LA was just the western part of LA. Nope, it's a separate city, with completely separate phone listings.
No, no, no. West LA is a district/neighborhood within the city of Los Angeles that lies east of the city of Santa Monica and south of the LA districts of Brentwood and Westwood.
Click to see full size image
However, locals often use the term "West Los Angeles" to mean The Westside, an imprecise geographical region that includes the western portion of Los Angeles and the independent cities of Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, and Marina del Rey. Perhaps this is where you got the notion that West LA is a separate city.
Click to see full size image
Because LA is so vast, phone directories are issued in multiple volumes based on regions and sub-regions (The circled numbers on the map represent the separate book volumes of the Yellow Pages):
Click to see full size image
Deborah
Uriel wrote:
Tokyo was the first city I ever saw to have well-defined districts, like Shinjuku and Harajuku and Ginza and Roppongi. I guess New Yorkers have something similar with all their various boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, etc.). Of course, many of those were originally separate cities that just got annexed into NYC as it grew.
How are you defining "districts" and "well-defined"? You seem to be equating districts with boroughs. In NY terms, I think of districts as, for example, Little Italy, Soho, Upper East Side, etc. In San Francisco terms, I think of districts as being areas such as the Mission District, the Richmond District, Chinatown, North Beach, etc., all of which seem pretty well defined. Or by well-defined, do you mean something like zoning, where there are clear dividing lines? (Or is it just that Tokyo was the first big city you lived in?)
