Nobody Walks In L.A.

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I used to live in San Francisco. San Francisco is a walking town. People are serious about walking. The favorite business shoe style for men is black Gucci’s with Vibram soles. Women wear high heels with actual mountain climbing cleats in them. In addition, many people carry walking sticks along with their briefcases. It helps with balance and is useful in poking tourists who stand in your way in small groups bent over maps looking for the Coit Tower.

LA is a driving town. If you live one block away from the store and you need a carton of milk, you don’t walk. You jump in your car and drive. Of course, you will have to park three blocks away on the other side of the store but at least you didn’t have to walk to the store.

Actually, San Francisco is more than a walking town. It is a public transportation town. San Francisco first put it a rail system in 1972 called BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). It is copied all over the world. They have a new light rail system in LA now, some of which is underground. Film producers shot part of Lethal Weapon Three there (Or was it Two?) In LA it is not as important that public transportation works, as long as it makes a good movie set.

In addition to BART, San Francisco has a network of buses. I love the double length accordion style with a flexible section in the middle. Not only does it help the bus go around the corner better but it also plays “Beer Barrel Polka.” There are also electric buses. These are connected at the top to a grid of electric power lines that run throughout the city. At one point the City did a test of double-decker buses as a tourist attraction. The first day a double-decker got sliced lengthwise when it ran in to the power lines of the electric buses. The lawsuits are still pending.

Riding the bus is just one morsel in the commuter buffet. Many people take the ferry. This isn’t some ferry attached to a cable slowly taking 8 cars across the Des Moines River. These are modern two deck ferries with a full bar in the evening. They run to Alameda and Tiburon and Larkspur. (Larkspur sounds like a town from Lonesome Dove. “Well”, Jeremiah answered the sheriff nervously,” They spent the night in Lonesome Dove and in the morning I reckon they hightailed it to Larkspur. Jesse’s brother is the blacksmith there”).

In New York, you can buy a parking space like you can a house. They have special agents to handle these transactions. “It’s a wonderful space” the agent enthuses. “It has two yellow lines!”

I lived in a section of San Francisco called the Marina. Parking there is a 1/2-hour endeavor. The Marina consists of three story flats with the garage on the first floor. So parking without blocking a driveway is impossible. Signs abound that say, “Don’t even THINK about parking here!” or “You WILL be towed” or my favorite “DON”T PARK HERE OR WE WILL RELEASE WILD KILLER DOBERMANS TO HUNT YOU DOWN AND TEAR YOU OPEN UNTIL YOU DIE!”

LA isn’t much better. I attract parking tickets here like a politician attracts PAC money. It is not my fault. You need a legal degree to understand the signs that Los Angeles posts. On one street lamp are five signs- No Parking Monday 10am-12noon: Street Cleaning”. Below that,”2 HOUR PARKING 8AM-6PM WEEKDAYS EXCEPT THOSE WITH M OR Z PERMITS OR FIFTH GENERATION ANGELENOS.” Below that-“NO PARKING AGAINST CURBS PAINTED YELLOW OR NOT PAINTED YELLOW.” And finally-“NO PARKING DURING SUNNY DAYS.”

In San Francisco it is better to have a small car. When I first went there, my uncle let me use his huge ’78 Caprice Classic. It looks like one of the cars Michael Douglas would have driven in the Streets of San Francisco. He would chase a bad guy down the hills at 120 miles an hour. Remarkably missing cross traffic, the cars would jump in to the air and then land with a WHOMP so hard the wheels disappeared under the chassis. You knew it was a really bad chase when a hubcap would spin off the front tire and shoot down the hill. Or sometimes the bad guy would lose control in Chinatown and crash in to a guy pushing a vegetable cart across the street. While the vegetable guy dove for cover, the vegetables would cascade over the bad guy’s car. Michael Douglas would run up to the car, clear the vegetables off the door and throw it open only to find the bad guy slumped over the wheel, dead.

In high school there was always some wacko who took up two spaces in the school parking lot. If you own a big black car with big tires, you shouldn’t be worrying about people dinging your doors. You should be worrying about the resale value of a car with a giant gold eagle painted on the hood.

Last week I went to the mall AND saw a different version of “My-Car-is-Too-Cool-to-Park-Normally”. Some dude had parked his Porsche 911 in the farthest reaches of the mall parking lot to protect it from clods like you and me opening our doors as hard as we can. When I returned from shopping, I noticed that the Porsche had been vandalized and all that was left was the charred shell of its body. But there were no dings in the doors.

Not all public transportation is motorized. In New York, you can hire a horse-drawn carriage. You can ride through the town in winter with your girlfriend; snuggling under a blanket and trying to forget you just laid out $500 to get pulled around by a horse. Even Columbus, Ohio has horse drawn carriages. This works better than their original idea: cow-drawn carriages. If it started to rain all the cows would stand tightly together and face the wind. They stood there for hours and blocked traffic.

San Francisco tried horse-drawn carriages one year. But the horses would do their business and the manure would roll all the way down the hill until it became a huge pile that blocked everyone’s view of the bay. When your rent is $700,000 a month, you don’t want your view blocked.