Culture

This App Hopes to Help You Outsmart L.A. Traffic Jams

GoLA links all your transit options together and tells you which one works best.
AP / Richard Vogel

Los Angeles’s streets are famously congested, home to some of the worst traffic in the world. In 2015, the average L.A. driver sat through 80 hours of traffic delays, according to a report by Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The city is also consistently home to some of the most miserable stretches of road in the country.

In a lot of ways, this isn’t unexpected—L.A. is a city built around freeways, and the car remains the dominant form of transportation for Angelenos. For decades, the city has struggled to wean its inhabitants off the automobile in a myriad of ways, planning improvements to the underutilized public transit system and starting a bike-share program. So far, those attempts have had little effect on car usage in the city; public transit usage is down and just one percent of L.A. residents ride their bikes to work.