I asked at a nearby hotel about buses, but the desk clerk looked at me like I was a crazy man. We were staying in distant Orange County. Once my son wanted to buy an electric guitar from a store on Sunset Strip. Points which look close on a map and linked by such evocative names as Golden State Freeway, Redondo Beach Freeway or Hollywood Freeway stretch out to become half-day trips when you climb the steps of the bus.īut catch a bus and you can be in for more than a ride. There's also a good argument for having a car, however. And by some curious inversion of logic and gyroscope, people in cars look down on those travelling above them in the bus. Yes, in this the city where the car is king and the songs celebrate Ventura Highway and Sunset Boulevard, if you ain't got a car, you simply ain't got. 'Man, why you wanna take the bus?' a Camaro-owning Angelino friend said recently. Some bulky guy with the disposition of a permanently peeved Ernest Borgnine is more likely.

Oh, and the likelihood of having Sandra Bullock - even here in movie-obsessed LA - driving you to Watts or the beach is pretty remote. Every day any number of good honest folk ride the MTA - but so, too, do veterans of the alcohol wars, strange men who mumble and pay their fare in refund money, the careworn guy in the grey suit who conducts an angry cellphone conference call-cum-argument with his ex-wife and her lawyer about access to the kids, that miniature Mexican woman with the huge suitcases. In the city of Los Angeles - which is 19th-century Spanish for 'the land where men walk on four wheels' - it sometimes seems that only the socially disenfranchised take the bus.

Car town ex