As you know, LA is the center off all that is good and holy. It is also, coincidentally, fairly close to the center of all that is terrible and sinful. The number one reason for this high ranking is the fact that LA is, without exception, a car town. A massive, massive car town.
People who complain that there is no public-transit in LA are wrong. There’s a pretty well-developed bus system and even a slightly convenient metro that no one I’ve ever met has been on [TANGENT: the LA Metro gets a bad-rap from the NoCal San Francisco crowd because they have their very popular BART rail-system. Well the LA Metro may be pretty small, but the BART ain’t no picnic, either. The damn thing doesn’t even go all the way around the bay! But I digress…].
So we have the buses and the metro, but the problem isn’t the system’s themselves, it’s that LA is so damn big! Taking the bus to work would be, for me, close to 2 hours…where it takes me 35-40 minutes to drive and 55 to ride my bike. Nuts to that! And, now that gas is so expensive ($4.60 at my local station you mid-western bastards!), the $75 I pay to fill up my tank every other week is really starting to hurt.
And SO, to bring it full circle, to watch a guy walk slowly by while carrying a walker as I sat stuck in traffic…well that was just pretty lame.