I am not a LA resident. I have, however, used LA area transit (mainly Metrolink, Red Line, some local shuttles). The rail lines are surprisingly useful considering how spread-out everything is in LA. The shuttles are a mixed bag; Uber is often better. Really, that's not much different from other cities that didn't grow up with the present transit lines from nearly the beginning (e.g. major East Coast cities, parts of the Bay Area). In all cases, the buses need work. I do find it amusing that LA has so many de facto principalities in the transit business - I'd almost say they were trying to emulate the Balkan kingdoms of the Bay Area.

"Almost" only works in horseshoes and atom bombs ...

How do you fix it? By cutting off all the funding? That fixes it for nobody; as what's there deteriorates, the congestion will become terminal. Does transit (especially rail) reduce congestion? Heavens no! Never has, and never will. It does reduce how fast congestion grows if it's convenient, by skimming off some trips and (I suspect this is happening on the Gold Line) grabbing a chunk of the induced trips keeping THEM off the freeways. Look at what happens when there's a BART strike - total rearrangement of the employment system, and traffic jams that expand from 8 hours to 24 - and tell me transit has no effect on congestion.

Frankly, "induced travel" is exactly what transportation systems are for. The travel is induced by providing the service, and without the demand (unmet or new) there's no reason to build anything. Sometimes, that's truly induced, as in providing service to raw land allowing it to be developed (streetcar suburbs?). Other times, it's demand that couldn't be met from development that's already there and stayed relatively hidden until something came along to meet it. Shazaam, people ride the train because there was no convenient way to get there before! Or people fill up the new freeway lane as soon as it's opened ditto. Either way, there's no real change to the background congestion; the new project mostly handles otherwise unmeetable demand.

I guess we *could* close everything and let people go back to bushwhacking with their burros. That would result in lower taxes for road construction, transit, and maintenance of such. Might be hard to get downtown for work or to the mall for shopping, or for Amazon to deliver your latest tchotchke, though. LA can afford it. For that matter, so can the Bay Area (BART does need the money, and it's not (entirely) due to mismanagement) and Sacramento, both of which also have transportation taxes on the ballot.