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Originally Posted by iheartthed
Honestly, that sounds like terrible connectivity for major centers within a single metro area. NYC and Philadelphia probably have 2-3x as many trains per day between the two cities.
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It’s not surprising that rail connectivity between the Antelope Valley and the LA Basin falls short of that in the Northeast Corridor. After all, the NE Corridor is as good as it gets in the US. But it’s the Antelope Valley Freeway, of course, that most AV commuters use to get to LA.
When I worked in El Segundo (near LAX) in the late ‘80s, I had colleagues who commuted in from the AV. One winter we had one of those unusual cold winter storms that resulted in snow in the mountain pass between the AV and Santa Clarita. One co-worker loaded up his station wagon with sacks of flour and rice to provide more traction on the icy roadway. I thought it was wild that here in balmy SoCal I had colleagues who were battling snow and ice to get to work.
The Antelope Valley boomed in the ‘80s and ‘90s because it provided a relatively inexpensive supply of single family housing. It got hit hard by the foreclosure crisis after 2008, however, and home building there never fully recovered. Job opportunities there never took off either. The aerospace industry was the major source of local decent paying jobs in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but many of those jobs went away in the ‘90s. So for the foreseeable future, many AV residents will have to continue the commute to LA for better paying jobs.