A few years ago, if you told me that I could get around Los Angeles with no car, I would have said, NO WAY. And yet here I was, a little over a week ago, faced with a tough decision of whether I wanted to shell out $160 for a car rental (this is not counting gas and parking) to get around Los Angeles for a weekend this summer while traveling by myself. I ended up deciding to chance it using public transportation and Lyft alone. [I unsubscribed from Uber a long time ago due to the company’s reputation, only willing to use it if all other methods are deemed unsafe]
Surprisingly I had a pretty busy weekend lined up. Doing the experiment has made me think that perhaps there is a reality one day where I’d live in Los Angeles (one day we will likely have to move there to be close to family) and share just one car in our family. I used a combination of Google Maps and the Transit app on Android to plan my trips.
Me, on an LA bus
Friday:
- Airport to DTLA for a photoshoot with Briana Moore – I patiently sat at the airport waiting for the Flyaway bus which was supposed to come every 30 minutes. I must have missed the last one and ended up waiting a nail biting 30 minutes for the next one. It took about 1 hr and $10 to go from the airport downtown. At Union Station, I bought a TAP card and loaded up $10 on the card, and took a train and then a 10 minute walk to meet Briana
- For our photoshoot we walked a mile into DTLA to shoot near some famous buildings downtown. After dinner, we took a $6 Lyft to avoid another 20 minute walk back to her hotel because at this point I’d been awake for 20 hours after getting 2 hrs of sleep so I was dying
- I then proceeded a bit of a risky trip – I found the 10 express bus that took me from DTLA to Santa Monica. I got off a few stops before Santa Monica at Pico and Bundy boulevards. There would be one more bus I could take to get to within 1 mile walking distance of grandmother’s. At this point I’m talking nearly 24 hrs of being awake, so I waved the white flag and got a Lyft for $10.
Saturday
- I found a way to go from Grandma’s back up to Santa Monica – via bus.
- From Santa Monica into LA I got a carpool from a friend
- From DTLA to Japantown for dinner – The Downtown Santa Monica light blue line got me to within a 20 minute walk at Expo / Sepulveda and then I walked the rest. It ended up being quite pleasant
- Going from Japantown to grandma’s would be a bus and a walk and I was still absolutely exhausted from the week. I took another $9 Lyft.
Sunday
- I was about to take a bus and then a walk from grandma’s to Venice to see a friend, but then an emergency situation happened and I had to depart much later than anticipated. I got a shared Lyft ride so I spent $7
- My meetup at Venice ran long, so not to miss my flight, I took a Lyft share to LAX. It was $15. But had I not gone over, there is an express bus that I could have taken directly to LAX so I could have avoided the $15. This was the day I wished I’d planned better because I could have saved $18
Total spent: $61
Could I do this full time? With some parameters, yes
Estimating that the average car costs about $459 per month (assuming I can buy a car cash only, and I increased the monthly gas to $250 to account for California high prices), and that a LA monthly pass is $100, I’m going to assume that for 5 days of a week I commute to work using public transportation only and that I live within 1 mile’s walk of a public transportation node, and similar, work is within 1 mile’s walk of a public depot. These probably limit me to living in a certain radius around LA that stretches from the San Fernando valley in the north, down to Long Beach / San Pedro in the south, but it’s not bad coverage.
I am going to assume that I use the family car to run errands on weekends only, and that I would use a combination of Lyft and public transportation for up to 2 social events a weekend (probably realistic for Los Angeles). Therefore, if I cut out the car, but add $100 a month for the pass, and then $30 each weekend for getting around using car shares, at 4.3 weekends a month, my monthly transportation would be $230. And given that I expect to share my weekends with my husband, it might not even require a car share. This implies at minimum savings of $229 a month, $2,748 a year, but even more importantly
- I’d get daily exercise
- I don’t think I’d miss out that much in “time lost”, as Californians appear to have fewer hangouts due to lower density of friends than in Manhattan
- I would actually get work done. I could easily read, edit, and write, while on public transportation. I would be 200x stressed having to drive LA’s freeways. I also would have a lifetime decreased chance of being injured in a car accident (actuaries use the time you spend driving as a main calculation in your disability insurance calculation)
