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ChineseThe Journey To A Transit Oriented Life
It’s not uncommon to see expressions of bewilderment on the faces of others when you tell them you live a Transit Oriented Life, especially in Los Angeles. People will assume you have run into a major financial crisis, lost your vehicle to accident or crime, got caught driving under the influence, or that you’ve just gone batshit crazy. After reassuring them that everything’s okay and that you indeed came to the decision through personal choice and reasoned logic, not faulty wiring or Acts of God, your auto-addicted friend is likely to wonder what possible logical reasons there could be for you to make such a choice. Ben W. over at the Seattle Transit Blog faced this very question, and decided to put an end to the confusion by listing five benchmarks that set him on his way from car-dependent to car-free.
Here’s what did it for him:
- Using transit to get to work
- The ease that Google Transit provides when planning transit trips
- Taking part in Seattle’s One Less Car Challenge.
- Finding out about Flexcar (now Zipcar) and becoming a member.
- Taking transit to someplace new.
Those five experiences all came together in a positive way to make Ben realize that the car-centered life he had known all his life wasn’t really all that. Unfortunately, Los Angeles doesn’t have Google Transit, and the city is nowhere near as progressive as Seattle that it would offer an incentive program to encourage people to go car-free, and Zipcar has abandoned L.A. like a girlfriend who got too fat. But, like Ben, I grew up in the suburbs (in my case, the suburbs of Orlando, FL) and didn’t really think about public transit until I got to college (in Tallahassee, FL) and even then it was just a novel way to get around campus, nothing I would ever have considered as a lifestyle. I’ve been driven around in cars my whole life and started driving myself when I was 16, and nothing in the six years that followed would have given any indication that by the time I was 23 I would be a regular mass transit user and that by the time I was 24 I would be completely car-free. So what milestones drove this suburban boy who’s had four different cars since he was 16 to become a guy who for that last three years has had zero cars?
Here we go:
- I moved to Los Angeles and accidentally ended up living a few blocks from a subway station.
After living in suburban Florida for most of my life, I was excited for big city life. Typically, Los Angeles doesn’t provide a lifestyle that is particularly urban, but through random chance my first apartment was in unquestionably urban Eastern Hollywood. It was made all the more urban by the Red Line station at Hollywood and Western. The subway had spurred transit oriented development around it, including a Ralphs grocery store, so as I went to by my food I couldn’t help but notice that curious path leading underground. It wasn’t long before I was riding the rails whenever I could. - I got a job in Downtown LA.
One of my first jobs was in Downtown Los Angeles, a serendipitous event considering all the other places I could have ended up working. Hollywood to Downtown was a 12-minute ride on the Red Line, cost $2.50 round trip, and was a whole lot of fun for a suburban kid. - The transit strike of 2003 happened.
In the middle of my tenure at my job in Downtown, negotiations failed and transit in Los Angeles was out of commission for 35 days. I was forced to drive to work. My once easy, fun, and uniquely urban 12-minute commute became a stressful, boring, unreliable 20-minute to 1-hour commute (there was no way to know how long it would take). This was my first time REALLY driving in Los Angeles, and it was a nightmare. Traffic lights on freeways, stop-and-go traffic, one-way streets, potholes… this was the L.A. that people hate. I dreaded going to work every morning, and worse, I dreaded leaving work every evening. When I got home, after circling for street parking, I was lifeless. The day the strike ended was one of the happier days of my life. - My apartment provided no parking spaces.
Which meant I had to park on the street. Which meant parking was very very difficult. If I arrived home any time after 6:00pm, I could expect to drive up and down the nearby side streets for 30-minutes or more hoping for a parking space to magically appear. The idea of leaving the apartment at night was a joke, because it guaranteed the loss of a parking space that would not be redeemed until 9:00am the next morning. Twice a week street cleaning meant that twice a week there’d be half the available parking spaces. It also meant waking up very early and searching for a spot on the “right” side for up to 30-minutes or facing a $45 ticket. Oh the parking tickets! I racked up many in my first months of Los Angeles living. A fresh outta college Angeleno does not need to be throwing $45 away every few weeks just because he couldn’t tell if a curb had red paint on it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the parking situation is the #1 reason I finally dumped my car. - By 2005, my 2003 Honda Accord looked like it was 10 years old. And I hardly ever drove it.
My poor car, a new Honda Accord I got my senior year of college, a car so nice my friends and I referred to it as the “Secret Mercedes”, did not age well in the City of Angels. Like so many fresh-faced starlets who move to Hollywood, within a few years the Secret Mercedes looked haggard and aged. What made it worse was that, since I discovered the Los Angeles transit system, I rarely drove the car. It aged just by existing in Los Angeles. One day I looked at its silt covered exterior, its doors and fenders dinged and scratched by those with trouble parking, and I felt pity. It was time to set this car free, and it was time for me to go car-free. On a cool October day in 2005, two years after having moved to Los Angeles, I said goodbye to my car and goodbye to 24 years of car-centered living.I was free.
Discussion
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Very cool. I’ll have to do a write up like this myself. Even though I’m not 100% car free, I do not utilize my car barely at all on public roads. It is primarily (10,000 miles in almost 2 years) a track car - with over 8500 miles of track, or private road driving.
The other 150k plus miles I travel a year are done by train, transit, and airline (not as many airline miles as you might think - maybe around 10-20k per year, most are on the railroad).
I love it, and wouldn’t give it up for a Ferrari.
I’m not car-free, but car-lite. I started taking Metro very often around October 2005. Prior to this, I’ve only taken mass transit like 5 times in my life, 2 - 3 RTD buses in the late 80s and 2 MTA buses in 1997. I too would stress at driving at the many places I worked. From my north San Fernando Valley pad, I’d dread the 30 minute drive to Sherman Oaks, 1 hour or more drive to Culver City, but didn’t mind the very far 1 hour drive to Whittier (that told me how much the Westside sucks with transportation when someplace closer takes longer to get to). What got me into Metro? My new job from November 2005. I knew about the Red Line as it was big news in the Valley in 2000, though I never really rode it. I used it, after searching high and low for parking at NoHo, for a job interview there. Then I hear that my new workplace were just tearing down a parking structure and would relagate new employees to remote parking with 15 minute shuttles. I thought “no way”! I could take the Red Line with its 10 minute frequency and it goes farther and faster than their van shuttles, across the Cahuenga Pass. Luckily, the Metro Orange Line just opened at the same time and Metro Rapid 761 (on the Valley’s busiest corridor and only one with 60BRTs out of the Orange Line) goes near my neighborhood. At first, I thought about parking at the Orange Line station and notice after timing both using the Rapid and driving just to the Van Nuys Orange Line station, I figured, I’d save the stress and leave my car and use Metro all the way. So for work, I never use my car; on occasions I want to stay late, I’ll take my car to the Orange Line lot. I never drive to Hollywood or downtown L.A. anymore. I’m glad I don’t work in West L.A.; and looking at the LRTP, I would reject job offers there because of the lack of good transit options.
Fred, an inspirational story, for sure. Makes me think there’s hope for Los Angeles yet!
I also live car-lite. I moved to Los Angeles in 1999. The place I found to live and work (I am self-employed) was within a few blocks of a (future) Red Line Station (Sunset/Vermont). I never owned a car in my life (having lived in cities all along, although I am a very good, sometimes professional driver. I had many jobs driving as a delivery person and a cab/limo driver).
Of course, this being LA (and because everyone is expected to drink the Kool-Aid upon arrival), I bought a cheap, small VW GTI hatchback that worked well for making the deliveries that my business required. But I found that I used Metro, or walked, for more than half the errands and trips I did regularly (shopping, gym, meeting friends for dinner and/or drinks).
After 5 years in Los Feliz I moved downtown, found a new workspace across the street from my (now) affordable apartment, and discovered that the car was even less necessary than before. I have free, underground parking. So I keep the car. For occasional supplies and deliveries (once or twice a month). To visit my sister on the West Side (and her cute little kid) once a week. To go to Palm Springs or the desert now and then. But the day-to-day life is car free. I have a bike, and my feet. Everything I need is a short walk or bike ride away. My friends are mostly within walking distance or somewhere along the Red Line or the 720 Rapid.
If and when someone crashes into the car, and totals it, I will probably be relieved. It’s come close twice. There are a lot of dents and scratches. It gets dirty just sitting in the garage. The insurance and gas are really cheap. Less than $100 per month. Hmmm, is that $100 too much to spend? I am beginning to think so. But I don’t think about it too much, as most of the time the car is out of sight and out of mind. I rarely use it.
Is a car-free life desirable in LA? Yes. Do others think it strange? Some do, but most are jealous. The community of people that I know downtown are all wise to it. Most of them are native SoCal folks who have rejected the car culture. Including those who still have cars and drive. The point is not to be a slave to it all. That freedom is 99% of the battle.
When the car becomes history, I will hardly notice.
when i first moved here i drove everywhere. it was a nightmare. it lasted just over a year when i finally got a steady job and mapped out some bus routes. everyone had warned me how “bad” buses were, but as we all know here at metroriderla, that’s as close minded as saying: all blacks are lazy, mexicans illegal, jews, cheap, whites, racist, etc. so as it turned out i was never driving and taking the 217 and BBB7 everyday to and from work. people i worked with actually pitied me or thought i was crazy. it was amazing. i wasn’t even a “metrorider” that i knew just chose the most logical and least stressful lifestyle offered me. now i’m car free and couldn’t be happier. those poor saps all have since got in as many car accidents, new cars, tickets, oil changes, empty gas tanks, as i’ve brushed my teeth… and i’m quite hygienic.