Nathan Landau - Car-Free Los Angeles and Southern California

Traveling Car-free in Southern California

I FIRST EXPLORED LOS ANGELES AS A CAR-FREE TRAVELER. Somehow I hadnt gotten the memo that you could not visit Los Angeles on transit. It was 1984, and Los Angeles County voters had recently passed Proposition A, increasing funding for transit. No rail lines existed yet, but buses were plentiful and cheap. I stayed at a residential hotel in Beverly Hills and took the Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevard buses to the Mark Taper theater and to Santa Monica beach. I found a caf in Beverly Hills that would let me nurse a coffee for hours. I read Rodney Steiners Los Angeles: The Centrifugal City, which explained and mapped how Los Angeles had grown.

It was a great trip and I was smitten. I had gained an unshakable belief that LA is a great, fascinatingand transit-accessiblecity.

What This Book Is About

This book is designed to be a complete guide to a car-free vacation in Southern California, from the time you arrive here until the time you leave. Car-free Los Angeles and Southern California tells you how to get from the airportor the train or bus stationinto town. If you already live in Los Angeles or elsewhere in Southern California, this book tells you how to plug into the transit network and start traveling car-free to the fun places.

I also list good places to stay that are transit accessible and tell you about the terrific things to see in Southern California and how to get there. Whether your sightseeing tastes run to beaches or museums or shoppingor something else altogetherthis book will get you there. It guides you to good places to eat or places to buy groceries. Southern California neighborhoods have so many good restaurants and cafs that this book can only give you a sampling of them. And when its time to leave, you can look back at the directions to the airport.

The difference between this guidebook and other guidebooks is that it doesnt assume you need to have tons of personal steela carwith you to travel. This book assumes that youre curious enough and savvy enough, and maybe green enough, to travel by train, by bus, on foot, and by bike. Most of the time its not even that hard. (You may not wish to reveal this, so you can retain more street cred from your incredibly arduous Southern California transit trip.)

Ive made sure that the car-free trips in this book are possible by taking them myself. Since that first trip, Ive continued to travel car-free in Southern California, long before I planned to write a book about it. Ive gone car-free to every community in the book and traveled between them. Ive taken the buses and trains morning, noon, and night. I dont recommend that you take a trip unless Im willing to take it myself. You too can head out without a car in the world.

I Want Feedback from You

Feedback from you can make this a better book in the future. Tell me about your car-free trip in Southern Californiahow it worked, when it went well, and when it didnt. Tell me about other car-free places you discovered, or tell me if my description missed the mark. E-mail your comments and thoughts to landorf1@gmail.com.

Car-free Travel Can Be Done

The most important thing to know about car-free travel in Southern California is that, yes, it can be done. Many visitors travel car-free in SoCal every day, many of them saying that the transit they encounter in Los Angeles is as good as or better than elsewhere in the United States. (Visitors from American cities such as Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix are especially likely to notice LAs superior transit.) You can stroll the scented streets of Santa Barbara. You can take light rail through the beautiful Arroyo Seco to Pasadena. You can zip out to Santa Monica on an express bus. You can walk the streets of San Diegos buzzing downtown.

Public transportation networks cross Southern California. You can go to SoCals big destinationsLos Angeles, Santa Monica, Disneyland, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. You can travel between these cities on Amtraks Pacific Surflinerthe second-busiest intercity train route in the country. You can get around locally once you get to these places. To some peoples amazement, Los Angeles has a subwaya subway that happens to be very useful to visitors. Santa Barbara has electric shuttle buses. Ferries take you to Catalina. Buses are everywhere. You can go to beaches, theme parks, great streets, museums, theaters, concert halls, historic buildings, hundreds of hotels, and thousands of restaurants.