>Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?
Yes, because there is such a massive leap in population density when you hit the LA County border. That must explain it!
Orange County is part of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, so it serves as a good natural experiment demonstrating the effects the different policies have had since the 1970s.
Orange County has bad traffic. Los Angeles has indescribably shitty traffic.
>Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion.
Yeah, see that's the nice thing about empirical evidence. It shows you're completely full of it. Orange County was able to scale its freeways and has maintained a consistently busy but usable road network. LA is still using the same roads from 40 years ago, a fact that is lost on idiots like you that think it is "proof" that roads do not scale.
Of course, you might be right insofar as they've gone so far down the rabbit hole, they have no chance to dig themselves out now. It'd probably be a billion dollars (that they don't have) just to fix the I-5/I-10 interchange.