The Silver Lining

I grew up in a fairly small town, and as a child I never really thought much about buses or mass transit. A few kids rode the school bus, and I was always a bit jealous. You know, in the way you were jealous of the kid who was fortunate enough to break his arm on the playground. Seems like such a designation of specialness…although I’m sure the school bus riding kid and the broken arm kid both felt is was more of a burden of specialness.

My first experience on a public bus involved my great grandmother. She was this beautiful southern women who always carried a real cloth handkerchief. On very rare days, she would put on her white kit gloves and her pill box hat and take me on the #9 bus up Cervantes Ave. to the University Mall to buy orange sherbet cones. Since Great-grandma didn’t drive, ever, she would give me 35 cents, and I would climb onto the bus in my flip-flops and Destin Beach t-shirt.

It all seemed quite cosmopolitan at the time. Amazing how we glorify stuff in our childhood.

So now I spend a good part of my life in that black hole of Mass Transit called Los Angeles, and at this instant I am wondering if my grand experiment of traveling from Pasadena in the east to Santa Monica in the west will even get started.

My bus is late.

Mass Transit is this strange combination of having the time to take a journey that is bound to be unduly long, and watching the clock every minute wondering when your transit will come. After a short two minute walk, I have found myself sitting (thankfully) on a shady bench, waiting on a bus that is exactly 19 minutes late.

There is a sense that everyone driving by is perhaps laughing at me. “Look at that silly girl thinking that the famous public art piece “PASADENA BUS STOP” (complete with green peeling paint bench and Metro 256 sign) actually has anything to do with a real bus.

Hmm, 23 minutes late, no bus.

Good news, just saw a bus…bad news, headed in the wrong direction! At least I am not sitting at a public art installation.

Bus now 35 minutes late. I can verify this with my iphone’s wireless connection to the Metro’s mobile site. Kinda makes it worse.

39 minutes late. I wonder what my bus waiting threshold for pain is???

I see the bus!!!

I am on the bus having forked over my $1.25. It is not nearly as exciting as I had hoped, not surprisingly it’s mostly hardworking low-income folks. This bus is also more like those buses you catch at the airport and not the gritty urban canvas of humanity I was hoping for.

I have also realized that writing on the bus in making me motion sick. Throwing up on the bus would be bad.

Important element of mass transit, running to catch a train.
Just made the Gold Line train which will take me into downtown LA. In the spirt of full disclosure I should tell you that I didn’t have time to buy a ticket. I feel a bit bad about it. I don’t often get to purchase a train ticket, and I was looking forward to the automated exchange.

So I learned a few things on the bus.
#1 Fellow bus riders with whom I share a common language are actually quite nice and helpful
#2 The bus is hot and stuffy, like the waiting area of the DMV
#3 When taking the bus make sure the nearly hour wait is relative to the mile journey…I could have easily walked to the station.

Trains are a fairly new thing in LA, well actually that is not exactly true. LA used to have some great train routes, and trolley routes and all sorts of transit similar to San Francisco, but like all good transit ideas, the auto capitalist of the early 1900’s made sure LA was a city of cars.

Next stop Union Station…I have been to the Art Deco gem that is Union Station a few times before. It reminds me that public works projects which value good design and architecture can transcend.

Union Station is big and reminds me a bit of the train scenes in the Harry Potter movies. I spend a good 20 minutes just aimlessly wandering around looking for Metro bus information.

While asking the security officer, who was the only person near the Information Kiosk, where I could catch the Big Blue Bus to Santa Monica, I saw the Big Blue Bus driving by an obvious bus stop about 100 yards away. It was easy to see because it is literally a big blue bus.

According the the timetable, I have about 30 minutes to kill, and since I am now in downtown LA and have already been called “white girl”, I will put away my computer and ignore humanity with my ipod.

So the Big Blue Bus was fairly uneventful, but once again hot and stuffy. I have now arrived at my destination on the west side and the proximity of the ocean can be felt in the air. Cool breezes which I like to think have traveled from the south Pacific.

So here are the final statistics:

Travel distance: 19.6 miles
Cost: $3.00 (of course I did steal the train ride)
Time: 2 hours and 35 minutes

Not a horrible way to spend a sunny Thursday, but I am glad I have a car…and I wouldn’t mind a orange sherbet cone.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Bus, LA, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.