The Official New Yorker’s Guide To Los Angeles

Public Transportation: "Gag me with a spoon!"

A reasonable person might ask, “Why not just take public transportation?” You can’t. Planned, for the most part, during the dawn of the automobile age, Los Angeles is not actually a city, but, rather, a sprawling web of suburbs that fancies itself a city. It’s New Jersey, really, but with fairer weather, blonder reality stars, and a beach instead of a shore. But unlike New Jersey, whose efficient transit system will whisk you to a shining urban metropolis, the L.A. Metro’s reach extends to only a handful of forlorn stops on the city’s east side. It is a subway to nowhere, whose stations are guarded by a population of barefooted, wild-haired homeless people resembling extras from the set of the prescient, post-apocalyptic drama, Mad Max. [Meryl Streep via] To make matters worse, it is socially unacceptable to ride public transportation. Want to be treated like a pariah? Ride the bus to an event at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (True story, I was taken for a tardy valet.) According to the voiceover at the beginning of the Academy Award-winning film, Traffic, buses have large windows so that Sandra Bullock will never mistake her maid or another member of society’s outcasts for a normal person, who is expected to valet his or her BMW, Mercedes, Bentley, or Toyota Prius at the venue’s front entrance. Which brings me to…