Unlike Chicago’s Loop Link corridor, the Orange Line is true BRT, with pre-paid, all-door boarding and a car-free right of way, so it basically travels as fast as a train. The next day I took LA Metro to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete masterpiece Hollyhock House in East Hollywood, catching the Orange Line bus rapid transit route at Balboa station, transferring to the Red Line subway at North Hollywood, and exiting at Vermont/Sunset, a couple blocks from the landmark.

The FlyAway also goes to downtown Union Station, the Amtrak terminal. So I caught one of the fairly frequent, $9.75 LAX FlyAway shuttle buses to the Van Nuys bus terminal near Encino, and the bus took me from the airport to the station in less than an hour via the 405 freeway. I was staying with an old friend in Encino, a suburban neighborhood in the city’s San Fernando Valley, northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. The LA Metro Rail and Busway Map including trains (circle stations) and bus rapid transit lines (square stations.) Not shown: The endpoints of the Silver Line and San Pedro and the Blue Line in Long Beach. As such, depending on where you’re staying and where you’ll be traveling, it can be relatively convenient, easy, and fun to visit LA without renting a car. And, unlike Chicago, LA’s rapid transit network has been expanding fairly quickly in recent years, largely thanks to several Los Angeles County referenda in which voters approved sales tax increases to fund transportation projects including rail expansion. While many sustainable transportation advocates view Los Angeles as a worst-case scenario for car-centric urban planning, my impression is that transit in Los Angeles is a lot better than one might think. Here’s a show-and-tell of my impressions of the transportation stuff I experienced along the way, including a few things I’d be glad to see implemented in Chicago. Then I returned to the Bay Area for the following weekend, and flew home from San Francisco. After that I rented a car to visit my aunt in the Clear Lake area (yes, I do drive once in a while), about 2.5 hours north. I flew into Los Angeles and spent a weekend there, then rode Amtrak’s scenic Coast Starlight train to Oakland. Being a sustainable transportation reporter and geek, I naturally took lots of photos of the walk/bike/transit infrastructure along the way. In late February I took a trip to California to visit family and friends. Thanks to the editors of Streetsblog California, Streetsblog LA, and Streetsblog San Francisco for input on this piece.

Bart station trip planner