Quote:
Originally Posted by jmecklenborg
The weird thing about walking anywhere in LA is that you get this weird sense for the relative slowness of walking that doesn't seem to exist anywhere in the east. I get this sense even around Fairfax, UCLA, etc., where the prevailing densities are quite high.
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I think I know what you mean here, and it has nothing to do with the walking speed of people in LA. It's simply a nature of the sheer size of LA and how spread out the city is. Walking for two hours in a city like San Francisco can get you almost from one side of the city to the other. I recently had a lovely walk from Pac Heights down to the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero. Took a couple hours, and I passed through many distinct neighborhoods, points of interest, parks, etc. Never passed a freeway, and only had to cross one or two wide, busy streets, but traffic around me was never moving too fast.
Contrast that to LA where you can walk for a couple hours and more or less stay in the same area. The vehicular traffic is much more intense, and you're much more likely to encounter freeways. I could walk west from my place in Los Feliz, and after a couple hours still just be in the Hollywood area. Even if you're covering the same mileage, the city is so vast that it makes it feel like you're not really covering much ground.
This image helps show how huge LA is, and how walking there can feel somewhat futile compared to smaller, more compact cities. Looking at this, it's easy to see why this is. The entire city of Boston fits into the greater Downtown LA area!
