While it is indeed both commendable and technologically impressive that LA has synchronized all 4,500 of the cities’ traffic lights… it still means one thing: internal combustion driven commuting (e.g., cars) are the primary means of transportation.
Nevertheless, as the world’s first city to do so, it is a model that’ll hopefully be adopted globally to help to mitigate some of the network effects of being car-dependent (pollution / lost productivity / reduced quality of life issues, etc.)
(Source) NY Times: http://goo.gl/QORy6