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My LA Metro rides today

Posted by zac on Fri Nov 17 01:10:29 2023

In a word, yuck.

I'm in LA, piggybacking on my wife's conference, so she's working and I'm free all day, and staying in Marina del Rey. As I've always thought about LA it is a huge city, bigger than NY area wise, and nothing is ever close together. I thought I'd be close enough to Santa Monica to walk there.. WRONG! Well I could but then I'd be too tired to do the rest of the touring around. In any case I probably walked about 10 miles today.

I Uber'ed to the Santa Monica Metro station at the end of the E line and took it downtown. This line is mostly surface, off-street running light rail but with lots of intersections. It took an hour to get downtown, where I got off at the Arts station to go to the Broad museum and the Grand Central Market. But there are so many homeless people and drug addicts on the train it is unpleasant. Much more than in NYC.

After spending a fair amount of time downtown I decided to go to Hollywood and see if I can get in to see Jimmy Kimmel so I took the B line (orange bullet B line, now where does that sound familiar?) to the station directly across the street to wait in line but I didn't get in. The B is the old Red Line and uses 3rd rail. I walked around Hollywood Blvd for a little while and decided that if I want to see that I'll got to Times Square instead. I got back on the Metro at 4:17, changed trains downtown and went back to Santa Monica. It took an hour and a half even though the train going back seemed to avoid stopping at intersections.

I don't understand the payment system either. I had to prepay even to use my phone to tap. Why not just debit the account directly upon use like OMNY does? Not a big problem though. And you have to tap to transfer between some of the lines but not the others. If you are on a D line train it is same platform to the B line, but to go from the B line to the E line you are supposed to tap again even though you don't get charged.

Unlike NYC, London, Paris, Chicago, and just about every other place where there's a subway/Metro/Tube or whatever they call it locally, Angelenos don't ride it as a regular part of their lives. Given how big the city is, it just doesn't connect up enough to be worthwhile, even with a major freeway out of service. Everybody drives, even with all that traffic.

I have a few pics but those'll have to wait until tomorrow.

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