The Bus Stops Here

Sightseeing in Los Angeles by public transportation
takes a little money and a lot of time

By Stan Sesser | Contributor to The Wall Street Journal

from the September 26, 2009 edition

Los Angeles

(Please see corrections and amplification item below.)

The Getty Villa, perched on a bluff in the Pacific Palisades overlooking the ocean, has a cavernous parking garage for visitors to its Greek and Roman art collections. It also is easily accessible by bus from downtown Los Angeles—perfect for the daunting challenge I was about to undertake.

The Getty was my first stop on an unusual five-day odyssey. With the mantra these days to combat global warming by reducing our carbon footprint, I decided to tour what is probably the world's most car-dependent big city using only public transportation. Many car-addicted Angelenos don't realize that their city's public transit system is one of the nation's largest; it claims to be No. 3 in terms of passengers per day. My challenge would be to visit the city's wonderful but widely scattered tourist sites without ever getting into a vehicle that wasn't a bus or a train.

Looking up at the Villa de Leon from an L.A. bus stop.

My grand scheme hit its first speed bump after the first hour. I'd taken the bus from West Hollywood, where I was staying, to a bus stop near the Getty Villa, but as I approached the steep driveway leading up to the museum, two stern-looking security guards stopped me. Walking up the driveway would have taken no more than five minutes, but the guards said I had to wait while they radioed for a shuttle. The result was that in this wealthy, beachfront community of movie stars, I arrived unceremoniously at the Getty in the back seat of a four-door pickup truck.

A museum spokeswoman says the driveway isn't safe for pedestrians. Still, my experience was an omen of frustrations to come. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, known as the Metro, carries 1.5 million riders a day on buses, a subway and three light-rail lines, and it is in many ways a marvel. From a computer or smart phone, you can type your starting address and your final destination into the system's Web site, and it gives detailed instructions for using public transit to get there, including where to walk and precise schedules. The system's rapid buses have transponders that communicate with traffic signals to keep green lights on longer and change red lights to green faster. Fares are low; the regular one-way fare is $1.25, but with discounts and daily, weekly and monthly passes, the system takes in on average only 60 cents a passenger per trip.

Stan Sesser/The Wall Street Journal

A sign warns pedestrians not to walk on the bluff.

But in L.A., one tourist's fight against global warming wasn't going to be easy. The city of Los Angeles alone, not including adjacent cities in Los Angeles County like Pasadena and Malibu, occupies almost 500 square miles, and the rail lines serve only a portion of it, with buses covering the rest. Catching a bus can mean a long wait. Outside rush hours, buses often run only twice an hour, and trips often take what seems like an eternity, including all the time spent loading and unloading at bus stops. On a couple of my days, I spent more than four hours sitting on buses and trains, feeling I was doing a lot more newspaper reading than sightseeing.

An old adage says the only people who take the bus in L.A. are those too young, too old or too poor to drive. If my five days were any indication, there's a lot of truth in it. My fellow passengers clearly weren't on their way to Beverly Hills for some Rodeo Drive shopping. On one bus, a man whiled away the time by shouting to Jesus; on another, a woman came down the aisle with a paper cup asking, in Spanish and English, for a contribution on behalf of "the person who died on the Green Line last week." (That's a light-rail line, and a Metro spokesman said he had no idea what she was referring to.)

Except for on the subway, whose main function is to get office workers in and out of downtown during rush hours, I saw only one man in a tie and jacket. He was at a bus stop late one night when I was going to a restaurant, and he volunteered to show me how to use my BlackBerry to find out when the next bus would come. "So you prefer taking the bus to driving?" I asked. "Oh, no," he replied, clearly taken aback. "I'm saving up to buy a car."

Stan Sesser/The Wall Street Journal

Three light-rail lines in Los Angeles are faster than buses but cover little of the city's vast territory.

I did meet one Angeleno who prefers public transit to a car—a movie producer who lives in West Hollywood next door to my friend's house, where I was staying, and he agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity. "It's a preconceived idea that if you take the bus, you're a failure," he said. He ticked off things he likes about the bus. "I can read, I can get up to date on my iPhone, I can watch videos on my iPod. There's a lot that can be done with someone else driving." He warned me repeatedly not to reveal his name. "In the entertainment business, if they knew I took the bus they'd never talk to me," he said, explaining that he hires a car and driver when going to a studio.

One of L.A.'s best-known public-transportation enthusiasts is Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and 1988 presidential candidate, who now teaches public policy three months a year at the University of California, Los Angeles. "When I tell people in L.A. that I take the bus to the airport, they have no idea what I'm talking about," Mr. Dukakis said in a telephone interview. "Freeways were a choice we made nationally," he added. "But people are starting to ask, 'What are we doing?'It's clear public opinion is changing, but once you have these urban development patterns based on highways, it's pretty tough."

Michael Brein, a Honolulu psychologist and writer, has written 14 guides on how to tour U.S. and European cities by public transit; his latest is about Los Angeles, where he visited more than 200 attractions (the guide is available by download at michaelbrein.com). "I did the whole shebang by public transit," he brags. His advice: "Visit L.A. a section at a time," spending the whole day in one area before moving to the next.

Alamy

Watts Towers are a must-see—but two hours and 37 minutes by bus from the Getty Villa.

I disregarded that advice on my first day and paid the price. I set out from West Hollywood for the Getty Villa, then on to Watts Towers in South Los Angeles before returning to West Hollywood. But I soon realized my itinerary was almost as challenging as seeing the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Empire State Building in New York in one day. My trip to Watts Towers—the 34-year effort of an Italian laborer to build a monument out of broken glass, tiles, bottle caps and other scavenged items—began with a 15-minute wait for the shuttle to take me back down the Getty Villa driveway, which caused me to miss my bus. Ahead of me, according to the four-page itinerary I'd printed out from Metro's online trip planner, was a one-hour bus ride, a transfer to a second bus ride a half-hour long, and then a transfer to the Blue Line light rail. Two hours and 37 minutes after leaving the Getty Villa, I arrived at Watts Towers.

The towers live up to their reputation as an L.A. "must-see," but the neighborhood was as forlorn as anything the city has to offer. When I was done, my transit itinerary sent me back to West Hollywood on the 305 bus. I was told to catch it on the southeast corner of Wilmington Avenue and Santa Ana Boulevard, but the neighborhood was so desolate that I couldn't find anyone to ask which corner was southeast. I guessed right, and remarkably the 305 took me almost to my door. But the ride was an agonizing hour and a half.

The next day I got smart. I decided to see the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the La Brea Tar Pits and the Petersen Automotive Museum, all on the "Miracle Mile" stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. From impressive paintings to bones of extinct mammals to historic cars, it was a satisfying day—and made even better because I could walk between museums. Even lunch in the Little Ethiopia district was just a 15-minute walk away—and I had the sidewalks almost all to myself.

My five-day L.A. adventure ended up costing less than $30 in public-transportation fares. My final stop was in Pasadena to see the Huntington Library and Gardens, a vast estate with a European painting collection housed in an old mansion and acres of botanical gardens. By this point, I expected to be used to taking public transit. But I hadn't dreamed of an itinerary like this: a bus to Hollywood to catch the subway, the subway to Union Station, the Yellow Line light rail line to Pasadena, a local Pasadena bus and then a mile-long walk to the Huntington. When I was ready to leave, the sun was baking hot, and the driver of a lone taxicab at the entrance offered to take me to the Gold Line station for the outrageous sum of $10. I hopped in without a second thought.

Corrections & Amplifications:

A privately owned residence known as the Villa de Leon was pictured in a photo that accompanied an article in Saturday's Weekend Travel article about sightseeing in Los Angeles using public transportation. The caption incorrectly said the building was the Getty Villa. In addition, the Gold Line light rail runs to Pasadena, Calif., from Union Station in Los Angeles. A previous version of this article incorrectly called it the Yellow Line.

Additionally, the Page Museum at Los Angeles's La Brea Tar Pits displays the bones of ancient, extinct mammals. This article previously said the pits were the site of dinosaur bones.

Write to Stan Sesser at stan.sesser@awsj.com

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— Stan Sesser, The Wall Street Journal; 2000–09–26 —