It has now been well over thirty days since I decided to challenge myself to living in Los Angeles for a full month without a vehicle of my own. It has been interesting and edifying, and oddly enjoyable.
I always make it a practice to walk and cycle as much as possible when I am on location. It is the only way to truly take in a new environment. I am not sure why it never occurred to me to take the same approach to experiencing my surroundings at home.
The first ten days of the challenge were … well, frankly--a bit annoying. I have been so used to jumping in the car at a moment’s notice that I found it weird to have to think through how to get to where I wanted to go. It was a titch irritating—I’ll admit—but once I found a groove, it actually became fun.
LA has a ton of transit available. Who knew?! We have the largest fleet of clean-energy buses in the country, and nobody is riding them. Well, not nobody, but not enough of us. The system is pretty impressive and quite modern now. You can download a TAP card onto your phone and load it with a credit card. The LA Tap app also tells you what transit is available to you based on your location. It knows where you are. It will find a metro bus or train, as well as the Dash jitney and City bikes. Come on now, that’s decently cool beans.
My sister Sarah told me about another app that she uses for travel called Citymapper. That thing is quite impressive. You enter a destination, and it offers you a variety of ways to get there. Distances for walking or bike rides are given, along with projected time spent and calories burned. It guesstimates arrival times for scooters, taxis, buses, and, if you are near one, the subway. Even cooler beans.
I have had a lot more time in some ways. It is easier to think; to let the mind wander over various topics, when one does not have to concentrate on the task of driving. I kept asking myself why some cities embrace transit and others do not, and seemingly will never. So many cities on the East Coast were built around transit. It is second nature to use it in New York, Boston, or Washington, DC. It is entirely possible and even preferable to live without having a car. The West Coast has a few gems in terms of public access, as both San Francisco and Portland offer state-of-the art systems, but for the most part we suck transit eggs!
You know what the difference is between riding the bus in New York City or riding the bus in Los Angeles? Zip. There is no difference. It is all very standard stuff. The only difference is perception. Lots of people told me that they would never use transit in LA because it is full of homeless people and wackos. I have taken it a few times, and most riders were polite and exceedingly normal-looking and, as is the case with all humans one encounters these days, glued to their phones.
One bus that I took had a weird guy drinking something out of a can, wrapped in a paper bag. He kept going “He He He” quite loudly, in a style reminiscent of the ‘Uncola’ man. He mouthed “I love you” to me when he exited. It’s nice to be loved, but I was glad to see him go. Another bus had a young girl who was either high, crazy, or maybe both. She talked non-stop … to herself? Who knows? She also shouted the occasional obscenity with gusto. (This happens all the time in major cities. The human condition is messy.) The two elderly ladies, who had boarded with walkers and sat quite near her, seemed entirely nonplussed.
The other reason folks do not use transit in LA is class consciousness. There is a culture here that supports conspicuous consumption. It is a place to see and be seen, and I guess that has to mean in a fancy car. Most folks would not like to be observed getting on or off a bus, but we are also said to be health-conscious and eco-friendly, so at some point we are going to have to address that. Our history has not helped with the upside down-ness of it all. Great swaths of California were once owned by Standard Oil Company, and they naturally did not encourage the use of mass transit. They collaborated with Goodyear, Firestone, and Phillips Electric to get rid of the red streetcar lines that crisscrossed LA. They influenced the government to begin using all transportation dollars to build more roads and highways. So there were bad guys for sure, but also the people wanted cars, and we are nothing if not a society that lives for consumption. Our entire economy depends on us getting whatever we want, whenever we want it. The LA Times said of the streetcars:
“By 1933, ridership was off by 50%, and the next year, it dropped another 50%. People stopped riding them because they’d gotten shabby; they got shabby because people stopped riding them”
It’s time to uncool the car.
Going all-electric might help with some aspects of air quality, but it will not improve the lives of people snarled in an endless sea of traffic. Thank goodness a lot of young people are opting out of car ownership. They don’t want a house on a hill. They want to be able to walk to the store, the movies, and a decent restaurant. Yay! Good. Me too! I am ever grateful to be in a neighborhood that sustains a good amount of foot traffic. We have the other kind, too, but it’s nice to have options.
My transit costs for the entire month of May were $388.94. That includes a trip to a political meet-and-greet in Brentwood, as well as two lunches in the Valley. I went absolutely everywhere that I wanted to go. Most of the money went to LYFT and UBER, but I got myself a TAP card and loaded it up. There is a bus a half-block away that drops me off in Beverly Hills near my (yes, fancy because I am worth it) gym. The apps can give me an exact time when the bus will arrive. Easy-peasy.
My grocery/sundries expenses dropped by a full two hundred dollars because I was only picking up what I needed and not stuffing the cupboards and freezer with a jillion items. It’s just too darned easy to load up the trunk of a car with a bunch of bags full of a bunch of stuff. I LOVE to shop. The hardware store is my favorite, but I love a grocery market, and adore a pet shop or bookstore. I had to tone all of that down a tad, and that I think was a good thing.
So, all in all, not having a car in LA is doable and definitely less expensive than having one. Of course, this is not an option if you live in the Hills or in a remote area, but car-pooling is, and the move many cities are making toward a dense urban core is encouraging. We can all make an effort. It takes some thought and a willing spirit, but what the hell? Give it a whirl! Jump on a DASH, download a TAP card, dust off that bicycle in the garage. If we all stayed out of the car for one or two days of the week, it could have a great impact.
I was walking up Robertson last week when I noticed a man dismounting a very tricked-out bicycle. It had thick tires and a serious-looking set of gears. There was a brown leather satchel draped over a rack in the back. He wore a backpack of the same material. He was dressed in muted earth tones, and he looked cool as hell, and boy-howdy was he fit! He had a tan cap worn backward on his head with lettering that read: “One Less Car.”
Amen sir.
On we go …
Good to know! I'm in the middle of nowhere in Texas and have been receiving air quality alerts! Need to move to Seattle maybe
if I could walk this is very enticing to consider