The Commute Race: Westwood and Beverly Hills to downtown
The Commute Race · No. 1
Westwood to downtown, three ways
Two apartments, one office, one 8:05 departure. Each apartment is a ten minute walk from a D Line station, one in Westwood and one in Beverly Hills, and each trip is modelled door to door: the walk at both ends, the wait on the platform, and the minutes the driver spends in a garage. Pick an origin and watch all three go.
Three ways to reach 4th and Flower
Departing an apartment in Westwood at 8:05 on a weekday morning.
How fast each one is moving, right now
Ordered by current speed. Arrival times do not change.
Where the time actually goes
Each bar fills as the clock runs. Widths are minutes.
The number you will want to argue with
Downtown garage time is the softest figure in this model and the one that sets the size of the gap, so it is yours to set. The default is four and a half minutes to enter a Bunker Hill garage and find a space at peak arrival, plus three and a half to get from the space to a desk. Move it and watch the margin, which is the honest thing it changes: .
The driver reaches the building first and the desk last
Both trips, side by side
Same office, same departure, same ten minute walk to the station.
How this is built, and what it is not
Nothing here is measured. All three trips are models, which is the point of the format. The rail leg is a projection for stations that have not opened; if the car leg were live traffic and the rail leg a projection, the comparison would be putting two different kinds of claim side by side and drawing them as though they were the same. They are all the same kind of claim, and they are all wrong in the way models are wrong.
The trip
Where the numbers come from
- Walking is 3.0 mph over network distance, not straight-line distance, with time added for signalised crossings. Straight-line walking is the most common way models like this quietly flatter transit, usually by twenty to thirty per cent.
- The train ride.
- Waiting is 3 minutes, half of a 6 minute peak headway, which is the right expected wait when service is frequent enough that riders arrive without consulting a timetable. Another 1.5 minutes gets from the street down to a deep platform, and 1.5 back up at the other end.
- Driving.
- Cycling.
- Parking is a loose average, not a sourced figure, and it is adjustable above for exactly that reason.
What would change the answer
The origin, mostly, which is why there are two of them and why neither is a stand-in for its neighborhood. Westwood is not a point and neither is Beverly Hills. These apartments are each a ten minute walk from a station; one on Beverly Glen or north of Sunset is closer to half an hour, or a bus ride first, and for those trips the train loses. The same is true at the downtown end. A single trip is a single trip, and the honest version of this format lets you enter your own address. That is the next one.
The Beverly Hills origin is given as a street location rather than a named building. There are few residential towers in the city and naming a specific one here would mean printing an address we have not confirmed, which is a factual error whatever else it is. Bedford at Gregory Way is a real block of real apartment buildings in the flats south of Wilshire, and the walk is measured from it.
The drawn routes are simplified polylines placed along the real alignments to roughly fifty meters. They are good enough to show a route and too coarse to measure anything from. Segment distances in the table are routing distances, which run slightly longer than the lines on the map because real streets bend more than these do.
Basemap
MapLibre GL is vendored and version-pinned. The basemap is not: its style, glyphs and vector tiles are fetched from CARTO at runtime, so this page has no map offline and sends each viewer's viewport to CARTO on every pan. The routes, the model and every figure on this page are local.