Category Archives: Green Saturdays

Posts about car-free life, sustainability, environmental issues, frugality, general tree-hugging stuff

Everybody Walks in L.A.

Walking in DTLA, Main Street

Don’t listen to Missing Persons. People do walk in L.A.! So says Mayor Eric Garcetti, among others, including the blogger.

Although I think the Salon headline “L.A. Ditches Traffic Jams: A Hollywood Renaissance for Walking and Biking” leans a lot on wishful thinking, there does seem to be a lot more of both around town.

It’s very much a ‘hood thing, as in, you walk around where you live. If it indeed is something more recent, it harkens back to what the Los Angeles area originally was: a bunch of small towns that grew together forming one huge megalopolis.

And since the megalopolis isn’t possible to walk through (well, not without a tent and provisions, anyway) people find that they walk and live in their walkable neighborhood, whether it be Los Feliz, DTLA, Koreatown, or Palms (which, oddly, has a very respectable Walkscore for L.A. – who’d think that a westside neighborhood would?).

And so it is totally possible. In my 30+ years of living in Los Angeles (mostly, there was a several year detour to SF and also time spent in Palm Springs) I have noticed there are more people walking. One reason could be that the city itself has grown by nearly a million people in the last 30 years (the county has grown by 2.5 million) so there’s just more people, period, whether driving or walking or on the bus or train or what have you.

And the city has made itself more amenable to walking. In those last 30 years, there’s been an explosion of outdoor seating at restaurants, something that oddly wasn’t the case before that. Other neighborhoods have taken Westwood’s lead and encouraged small business district walking. I think the Metro has a lot to do with it – not only the location of subway and train stops, but also the alignment and total system coordination of local and rapid buses with Metrorail and regional trains is something that’s relatively new.

So we’re truly Back to the Future — a lot of the new rail lines are being built where long before there were Pacific Railway routes — and we discovered the most important thing was that they had it right to begin with. It’s great that you can have a human scale to the place you actually find yourself living.

I think that the L.A. “lifestyle” as presented to me as a newcomer in 1981 and the subject of cliche — the surf in the morning, ski in the afternoon, have dinner by the beach, etc. which absolutely depended on fast automobile transportation is just a thing of the past – it’s just not possible anymore without a helicopter. That’s not a bad thing. Come to think of it, we’ve got to work on getting all the helicopters out of the sky as well.

The Six Things I Like Best About Being CarFree — A Six Month Update

The Blogger, with chariot at night.

I’ve now been car free for six months – that’s right, car free in L.A., living without owning a car in Los Angeles. Here’s a status report, and my favorite things about this major lifestyle change.

Saving money! Absolutely, my favorite. My last car, the 2005 Scion Xa, cost just about $400 a month to own and operate over the period of time I owned it (almost exactly 8 years). So that’s $2,400.00 right there. I did have transportation expenses, though, so I must subtract those. Metro fares: $280. Car rental: $200. Bicycle expense (a new seat): $25. So let’s adjust: $2,400 – 505 = $1,895 I’ve saved so far. And, that doesn’t even account for the sale of my used vehicle, which was $6,000 (thank you, CarMax!). So I’m really ahead $7,895.00.
Keeping fit! I lost about 15 lbs. doing WeightWatchers earlier this year and have been able to keep that off since going CarFree with very little effort, which I attribute to all the walking and biking I do now. My default modes of transportation in preferred order are: foot, bicycle, train or bus, taxi, rental car or ZipCar or other car share service. I live in Southern California, so it’s quite rare that any particular day is not a good bike day.
Not Having to Find Parking! There was a time, when I first lived in L.A., probably the early eighties, when it was fairly easy to find street parking in almost any neighborhood and there were very few restrictions on parking. That world is gone! Parking had become very difficult and most often expensive (if you just succumbed to the valet or a garage) but now I’ve never had to pay to park my bike against a pole.

Never Having to Deal with Angry Drivers/Road Rage! There are a lot of angry drivers out there, sometimes they’re armed, sometimes they’re just fracking crazy and dangerous. I’ve yet to meet a raging urban walker or a raging bicyclist (though hey, it’s a crazy world, perhaps they exist. Yet they don’t have 2-ton weapons at their disposal).
Not Having to Remember Where I Parked My Car, or Worry About that (Insert Expensive Thing Here) I Left Inside It! There was always this nagging feeling that the apocalypse was there, just out of focus, that total disaster could happen at any moment and this Thing I depended on (the car) would be utterly destroyed or taken from me on a whim. To not have this object to worry about at all is a great freedom all its own.
Finally: Exposing the Myth that “You Need a Car to Live in L.A.!” No, you don’t. You don’t need to own a car to live in L.A. What the people who say that really mean is that THEY need a car to live in L.A., i.e., they’re not giving advice, they’re talking about themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of people living in the city who don’t own cars. If you step out of yours for a few moments, you might meet the real city.

A great resource for me has been Chris Balish’s book, “How to Live Well Without Owning a Car.” It’s been my roadmap for much of this journey. Thank you, Chris!

Los Angeles Without A Car – Update

Rapid Bus 720 to the beach

Yesterday, I had to get to an appointment in Beverly Hills, which is over the hill and far away from where I live, and also not terribly convenient via public transport – meaning in my case, at least, that there is no direct line there, there’s a transfer or two involved.

But never mind – I do take the Rapid 720 bus down Wilshire, and generally I find that it is pretty rapid, at least, when I’ve needed it to be. After my appointment was over, I decided – on the spur of the moment – to take the bus west all the way to the end, which in this case is the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. (We were/are having Santa Anas, which means the weather is hot and windy and full of fire danger – but it’s also quite pleasant if you like hot, dry weather, which I do).

So I loved being able to go to the beach on what was really a whim, and not have to worry about driving myself in traffic or about (my most hated thing) trying to find a place to park and paying exorbitant parking lot rates at the beach. (I saw one sign, it was a $12 fee. . .)

I got there stress-free and read my book on the way. I didn’t go in the water; it was about 5 p.m. when I arrived so I just walked down the strand and watched the gymnasts and yogis for a while. (see photos – not mine, but this is where I was, you get the idea)

And yes, there was lots of eye candy there, though not as crowded as these pictures might suggest. I stayed down on the strand until it got dark, then had a small dinner in downtown Santa Monica before heading back home on the bus.

I can’t say that the return trip on the Rapid 720 was quick. There was a lot of Friday night traffic — I still have to remember to stay later than 8 p.m. to probably have the best chance of open streets.

To complete my journey I take the Red Line subway from Koreatown back to its end at the North Hollywood Station, where a crew was filming a scene for NCIS. Right – so we emerged from the subway to spotlights and extras. Just a very typical day in L.A., sunset at the beach and TV production — never a dull moment. Still grateful after all these years to all this place home, and can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever been bored for a single moment!

I also love that my total cost for this entire day of travel was $5. No gas, no parking, no driving. Love that!

(these photos are from Flickr: thank you Dani)

Update on Car-Free Living in Los Angeles

Pedestrians and bicyclists take over Wilshire Boulevard during a recent CicLAvia

So it’s been four months now in my car-free L.A. experiment. Other than three weeks in August when I was in NY (of course, I was also car free there!) I’ve been here the whole time, in L.A., in Valley Village, basically the core of the summer as we often describe it (or as the Beach Boys did, from “July to the end of September,” Beach Baby).

So how’s it working? I’m happy to report all the walking and biking has certainly kept my weight steady – I’d lost about 20 lbs. since March and have been able to maintain that. I do realize the biking portion of the program has really been assisted by a) warm/hot weather and b) the extended daylight of summer. Will my willingness to ride places be compromised when it gets dark at 5 p.m. in a month or so? I have good lights, I could use more reflectors and reflective clothing. I also like these things that light up your wheels.

Do I still worry about how my decision will be perceived? (Are you a loser? Are you too poor now to have a car???) Honestly, yes, still a little bit – but much less. I guess I’ve become the weird old guy on the bike.

The reaction from a couple of my friends who I thought would be shocked that I sold my car was really rather mild — and while I wouldn’t say hugely supportive — was not unsupportive in the least. Others are extremely curious about how I get places and do things. Almost without exception, people here in L.A. understand why someone would want to get rid of the car — the source of so much frustration and irritation here, not to mention the money pit aspects.

Anecdotally, I pick up that more and more people are trying public transport here — of course, that’s a middle class person’s luxury problem. But the truth is that L.A. and the Southern California regional area have made great strides in the past decade-plus on its public transport infrastructure, and it’s working better and just a whole lot more pleasant than it used to be.

More of that, please!

Easy Things You Can Do On the Road – to Fight Climate Change

We’re not that far from these . . .again . . .

On my morning walk today, I saw that gas prices were again north of $4 per gallon here in Los Angeles. While happy that I’m now car-free and don’t have to pay anything to fill up my chariot (actually that’s not entirely true; since the bike runs on human muscle-powered energy, I could say that my grocery bill is also my energy bill), I do feel for everyone who does buy gas — here in SoCal, that’s practically everyone.

What to do when you just can’t not drive? You want to be part of the solution on climate change, but what can any one person do? (At times it really does seem ridiculous to me to be the lone bicyclist on a street of multi-ton vehicles, any one of which could easily pulverize yours truly.) Well, there are things you can do to mitigate greenhouse gases and help your filthy, dirty car to be more efficient.

This is an easy list. Probably most people know about these tips and try to follow them already. One that surprised me (or that I just didn’t think of): taking superfluous items out of your trunk, to decrease weight/increase fuel economy. And of course, when I had a car, I was remiss regarding tire pressure. I blame that on just being lazy. Of course, tire pressure is also crucial for bicycles, and it’s really easy to see the benefit of proper inflation when it relates directly to your poor ass!

So, you see, driving is no longer a thing . . .

Photo copyright Christopher Stumm

Since I’ve been ranting (well, not really ranting but complaining) about hipsters all day, I thought I’d post something more positive about them, at least here on the blog. (Not that every millennial is a hipster, of course not! – this photo above is from Flickr, and it’s titled “hipsters” there. So there.)

Seems driving is down. And we have millennials to thank for it, according to this story in Salon.

Interesting, I’d think that one of the reasons driving is down is because of the cost of cars, insurance and gas, not to mention the environmental impact of such things. However, the story makes a case for saying that mobile devices (smart phones, basically) have taken the place of “freedom” that the car had once represented. Not sure how you make out in the back seat of the mobile, but maybe that’s where apps like Grindr and all that sexting come in.

If I could just understand one gear bikes which have no brakes. . . I just don’t get it. Must be a boomer thing.

Car-Free in L.A.? The list of where to live.

Magnolia Boulevard in Valley Village

I was happy this piece in Metro’s The Source highlighted NoHo (specifically the NoHo Arts District) as one of the places in L.A. where it is most conducive living Car-Free or Car-Lite.

I live in Valley Village, which I guess I’d call NoHo-adjacent, and by this proximity, can also boast to be a good option for the Car-Free.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised over the (now two years, how time does fly) time I’ve lived here at how convenient the neighborhood is to my specific lifestyle – as the referenced Walkscore website puts it, “most daily errands do not require a car.” What they don’t tell you is what the criteria are for walkability distance, i.e., I know from personal experience that what I think is a reasonable walk another person might think of as a death march.

But truly, the usual places one needs: grocery, drugstore, movie theaters, restaurants, library, coffeehouse, yoga studio, park, gym, elementary, junior and senior high schools, public transit stops, farmers market, gay and other bars, etc. are all within easy walking or easy walking and biking distance.

The other neighborhoods The Source deems perfect for Car-Free living include Culver City, Koreatown, DTLA and Pasadena. I would also have included Los Feliz, my former neighborhood, which still has a huge place in my heart – and is very conveniently located to all amenities and is also a hub for Metro lines, bus and rail. And, it’s got Griffith Park. Hard to beat that.

C’mon, Share, Kids, You Know You Want To.

photo thanks cleanairgardening

Or even if you don’t, you can’t afford to not share anymore.

I wanted to share this NYT piece about sharing – even though it’s a couple of months old, I agree that the new sharing paradigm is important, and wanted to acknowledge Tina Rosenberg’s opinionator.

Access, rather than ownership, is what drives the future of commerce, according to this theory.

**ANOTHER UPDATE: Los Angeles Times ran a story today on Airbnb issues in Silver Lake.

When I was a little kid, I never really understood why everyone on the block had to have their own lawnmower – mowing was such an odious task (I grew up before the explosion of the service economy, so dads and kids – and the occasional mom, to be sure – took care of the yard work). I hated cutting the grass. We tried to avoid it as long as possible. The truth was, though, the longer the grass got the harder it was to mow with those manual push mowers (see above), which is what we had. But I digress. The point I was trying to make is that the mower was used maybe once a week, once every two weeks if there wasn’t much rain. So the “block” we lived on probably could have shared one or two mowers if someone had figured out how to organize it. (I’m sure there were smarter localities that probably did. BTW, the photo isn’t of anyone I know.)

I previously posted on car-sharing your own car; in the end I opted to sell it instead and become car-free.

Rosenberg divides the new sharing economy into what are called full mesh schemes (like Zipcar) and own-to-mesh (like Airbnb, etc). Full mesh means a company owns something and rents it out (as in cars, for Zipcar) and own-to-mesh is a gazillion little owners renting out what they have, like Airbnb, or like the personal car sharing companies I talked about in my previous post.

I never understood why people didn’t share WiFi in small apartment buildings or areas that could be wired appropriately – like they already do in office buildings or hotels. Obviously, the telcos have much dinero to lose and that’s why they’ve “encouraged” everyone to lock up their WiFi. (For those of you who’ve been on it a long time, you know this was not always the case and most people didn’t password-protect their service when it was first rolled out.)

I’ve even heard of people who make their monthly rent by renting out a few nights on Airbnb and staying elsewhere – even, at times, in their cars (if they have them) – which seems a little extreme to me, but hard times can call for desperate measures. Maybe Airbnb is the 21st Century equivalent of the “rent party?”

But how does this all work in a system where the economy is dependent on consumerism and continued consumer spending, largely made possible by debt? Well, the answer is kind of simple. It doesn’t work for that kind of economy.

Perhaps we’re on the threshold of something new, both for the way we live our lives and for the health of our yearning to be sustainable, finite planet. (But expect a lot of wailing and gnashing along the way. It won’t be pretty.)

Living in L.A. Without a Car: Airport Connections — and Connecting

photo by Victor L Antunez

I love cities where the urban planners have had the foresight to make the airport fairly painless to get to (thinking of Heathrow in London, right away). Believe me, this is not usually the case, especially in the U.S., what with our still crazy dependence on the private automobile making us anything but independent (the very thing it was supposed to do, for all of us, was to make us our own sovereign masters of travel. But don’t get me started. . .)

I recently took a trip from LA to New York, and since it was relatively last minute, the best deals were from LAX (which I try to avoid) even though I live much closer to that easy Burbank Airport. So that was not an option this time.

This post would be more accurately described as the various ways to get to and from the airport, and certainly not specific to car-free folks – cause you’d have to be crazy to drive yourself to the airport for anything other than a weekend getaway. Right? Or am I just crazy, not realizing that people throw good money away on long-term parking fees that add up really fast?

Maybe they do. So OK, then perhaps this will be enlightening, or maybe it won’t.

I was gone for 20 days. So if I drove myself, I’d have that convenience, perhaps, and let’s just estimate the long term parking charge at $6/day, so that would cost $180, plus gas and whatever your time is worth.

I’m sure there are people who do this and don’t blink an eye. I’m not one of them.

The other ways I know of to get to the airport include 1) asking friends for a ride 2) taking a cab 3) taking one of the shuttle services 4) taking public transport.

This trip my plane was wheels up at 6:15 a.m., so I didn’t even consider asking a friend for a lift. I live in the close-in Valley, so I figured a cab would probably be somewhere in the $80-100 range, again, not really what I wanted to pay for this.

I generally dislike the shuttle services – because they pick you up so far ahead of time – this trip because of the early early hour there was no viable public transportation option (unless I wanted to go very late the night before, and stay overnight waiting for my plane – ummm, no thanks.)

So I did take Super Shuttle – they picked me up at 3:35 a.m. for that 6:15 flight. It cost about $38, which included a 10% tip and a 10% discount (I found a discount code on the internets that actually worked). Oddly, there was no traffic on the 405 at that hour so we got there in about half an hour – before even the TSA is open. I always assumed they were there 24 hours a day, but apparently not.

Coming back, I was able to make use of my preferred method – FlyAway Bus, Red Line Subway, Orange Line Bus. It cost $10. I took the FlyAway from LAX to Union Station, the Red Line subway all the way to North Hollywood, and the Orange Line Busline one stop to Laurel Canyon, which is about 2 + blocks from my house.

Prior to leaving NYC, my father asked me, if cost wasn’t an option, wouldn’t you rather just take a car? (As in, I think he meant, a taxi) I had to think, would I? I think no, not really. Because it’s not all about the cost. It’s about the ability to actually do this kind of a trip using public transportation options. Since I’m a writer, I really see the value in the “closeness” to my fellow passengers — because I don’t experience too much of anything new in a closed up car all by myself. The subway is a never-ending panorama of life in the Big Orange, including its ugliness and unconventionality. I’m constantly striving to fill up that depleting well inside. Being an integral part of the city (and immersed in it) is a way to make that happen.

Reinventing Los Angeles: Water and Transport

Los Angeles City Hall. Photo by Jimbolaya

Earlier today I saw a Facebook post warning about traffic jams on our freeways as a result of a messy oil tanker truck fire.

I then went to sigalert.com to verify this information and I realized I hadn’t gone to this site since I gave up my car in June. There was no need for it; bicyclists are not usually subject to traffic jams, and certainly not traffic jams on freeways.

In the attached article, writer Jeff Turrentine remarks on his culture shock moving from Brooklyn to L.A., and on the overwhelming insertion of automobile life into almost every aspect of how we go about our days here in Los Angeles. I recently spent a month in New Orleans, and upon returning, I also was surprised at how easily I became aware of the tremendous assault on the environment (and Southern California is truly a beautiful environment) the “car” has. From noise, to pollution, to vast amounts of space necessary for roads and parking lots, etc., it’s almost as if we exist to serve this status quo of machinery.

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In addition to the Southern California water situation (in a nutshell, we don’t have any, it comes from elsewhere) and plans to make that more sustainable, he talks about the resurgence of projects in public transportation, biking and walking infrastructure and what has had to happen politically to get there. A lot of the programs, such as the extension of the Purple Line Subway to UCLA, have a completion date of 2035, when I, gulp, if I live that long, will be 80. But heck, I see people much older than that riding the subway. So I’m looking forward to it.

Michael Woo, my former L.A. City Councilperson and current dean of the College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona said this about the reluctance of Inland Empire City Fathers and Mothers to the idea of public transit/density issues: “Many of them believed that low-density living, automobile dependence, a culture based on private backyards instead of public open spaces simply reflected the L.A. version of the American Dream. They were reluctant to embrace transit or density as part of the solution. To them it all just seemed like going backward.”

That says a lot about why things evolved the way they did. Still, as even car and backyard lovers don’t like sitting in gridlock much at all, everyone realizes some things must change, and we’ve finally found that there’s political will here to do it (and that will extends into Republican Orange County, as well as that Inland Empire). The end result will be a much more livable Southern California, perhaps more garden-like, as the earlier boosters liked to claim.

Now if they could just do something about that pesky seismic problem. . .