Why I don’t drive in Los Angeles

It’s often been joked that a boat is defined as a “hole in the water in which to throw money.” What you rarely hear talked about is that minus the whole water thing, a car pretty much fits the same definition. Pick your poison: buy a new-ish car and make monthly payments on an investment that loses its value almost as quickly as you can pay it off, or buy an old car paid in full and then proceed to dump money into maintenance and repairs with such frequency that you might as well be making payments. And yet most people don’t stop to think much about that fact. Some people simply because they enjoy driving so much; most everyone else because they don’t have a choice. Nearly all smaller towns and even most big cities are laid out such that traveling to most any important location, including your place of work, requires driving. So you get yourself a car and that’s that.

But not me.

It’s been six months since I was last behind the wheel of a car, and more than a year since I’ve done any driving here in Los Angeles. But wait a minute, you say, isn’t that the town with no public transportation? So how do you get around to restaurants and stores? And how do you get to work? Let me see if I can explain…

First of all, I work from home. I know, it’s not something that most folks can do based on their occupation. But for me, sitting in front of a computer all day and working alone, it would be just plain silly for me to do my work in a different abode than the one I live in. Unless my home had too much commotion going on to make for a good workplace, which I know is the case with some self-employed folks with kids. But I live alone, so that takes care of that.

There are days in which my job takes me out into the field. So how exactly do I get around Los Angeles on those days? In all my years of living Florida, I always heard about how LA had no public transportation and just assumed it to be true. So when I first moved out here last year and I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard for the first time and saw an escalator that claimed to lead down to the “Hollywood and Vine” subway station under a construction site, I assumed it was just a prop for a movie they were filming (something they do all the time on the boulevard), set in some kind of alternate reality or future scenario in which Los Angeles actually had a subway. Except once I got down to the bottom of the escalator, hey look at this, a real-life subway station!

Sure enough, the subway runs all over town. Well, sort of. I should say that it runs to most of the major places you’d want it to. Since the LA subway is far from comprehensive (like, say, New York City), the key is to live near a station. So when I picked out my latest apartment, I made sure I did exactly that. Just by walking about five hundred yards down the street from my building, I can jump on a train and end up at destinations ranging from downtown Los Angeles, to the Staples Center, to Universal Studios. There are a couple of important places that the subway doesn’t go anywhere near, such as the ocean (I miss the beach) and the Sunset Strip.

Fortunately, the latter is within walking distance. Actually the Strip is just barely within that range, and might not be by most people’s standards, but I end up walking over to the Strip about once a month for various work-related reasons. While that’s kind of a long haul, most of the more mundane places I frequent (stores, restaurants, the bank, etc) are in fact within easy walking distance. It turns out that this particular neighborhood of Hollywood is sufficiently self-contained that I can walk to all of those local places without breaking a sweat. And of course the traffic and parking scenarios here in Hollywood are so ridiculous that it’s typically a lot quicker to just walk to where you’re going than to try to navigate through the crazy traffic and then try to find a non-existent parking spot once I get there. And the airport? Well, between the subway and a connecting shuttle bus, that’s easy going as well.

So I don’t need car. But why not own one anyway, just in case? Well I’ve thought about it, but really it comes down to taking on a monthly payment for a new-ish car I’ll rarely drive (making it an even worse investment than it would be for most other people), or buying something outright that will likely be old and aged enough that I’ll spend as much time maintaining it as I do actually driving it (which would be enough of a frustrating distraction that it wouldn’t be worth the hassle).

I’ve gone back and forth on it a few times. When I first got out here last year, I had a rental car for a month (during my “I don’t know where anything is but I’m going to drive around and see it all anyway” stage). Then I went a few months without a car and realized I didn’t need one. Then I changed my mind and decided I was going to try to compromise by buying an extremely inexpensive used car under the premise that I’d simply keep it until it died, which it proceeded to do not too long after I bought it; I donated it to charity.

When I was back in suburban Florida visiting my family, I certainly needed a car to get around, but the family has an extra set of wheels and that was that. When I came back out here and moved into this apartment with its location right next to the subway and everything else I need, I decided I’d start off without a car (who needed that hassle while I was already dealing with getting settled into a new residence) and figured I’d put the decision off until after New Media Expo was over – I just didn’t want the potential distraction prior to that. Come August I decided to go ahead and put the decision off further, until after I’ve returned home from my month-long December trek back to Florida and my trip to Macworld Expo in early January.

I still don’t know which way I’ll go. I made sure I picked an apartment building that had a parking garage, just in case. And I never did cancel my car insurance, although that has as much to do with retaining my ability to drive when I’m back in Florida, or when traveling to another town where I need to rent a car, as anything local.

The few times that I am out on the road (usually for the monthly carpooling trip down to the OC Podcasters meetings), I’ve noticed that the main highways seem significantly more empty than they used to. And I know where all those people have gone, as the subway trains are now packed with bodies, whereas they used to be so empty that I wondered if I might be one of about twelve people in Los Angeles who even knew there was a subway. I imagine the inflated gas prices and the depressed economy have more to do with that than people’s collective desire to conserve the environment, but whatever works. Gas prices are coming back down, but the economy will be a mess for awhile and I imagine a bunch of those new subway riders have sold their cars anyway, meaning that I don’t expect most of them to return to the road soon.

So will the increasingly-crowded subway, combined with the less-crowded roads lead me to end up buying a set of wheels? I don’t know. Even with a car, I would do so little driving that gas prices wouldn’t affect me much one way or the other. In the next six busy weeks before I head out of town, the last thing I want to stop and think about is the prospect of shopping for a car, getting it registered and inspected, and oh yeah – remembering how to drive the darned thing.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I could afford a car if I wanted one. I could go buy a car tomorrow if I woke up and suddenly changed my mind. I just see it as a bad investment in my case. And not just in a financial sense, as all the walking I do helps keep me from being in worse physical shape than I am. If I had a car sitting in the garage, I’d probably get lazy and too often use it for frequenting the places that are down the street (those that have parking lots, anyway).

What triggered me to write about this topic today is the literature I received in the mail about a ballot issue which would expand the Los Angeles subway significantly over the next however many years. I’m planning on voting for it because whether it’s a perfect proposal or not, I think it’s well past time this city got with the program and extended its subway to cover the entire landscape and not just the hotspots. I’m not trying to influence anyone’s vote; perhaps I’m overly biased in favor of it anyway due to my own particular situation. But it did get me thinking about a possible future version of Los Angeles in which a significantly larger percentage of the population is doing it my way. For most folks it’ll still largely come down to whether they live (and work) within reasonable distance of a subway station, as I don’t think LA will ever be able to pull of the virtual blanketing of subway lines that a place like Manhattan currently enjoys. But it’s interesting to think about nonetheless.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need some groceries so it’s time to walk down the street to the store.

Busy week next week, with three in-person interviews with musicians. One is in North Hollywood (two stops north of here on the subway), one is in downtown LA (eight subway stops southeast), and one is at the Capitol Records building, which is no further of a walk from here than the grocery store.