It’s a well-known fact, bordering on a cliché, that Los Angeles is a car city. Our overloaded freeways teem with traffic every morning and afternoon (as well as at random times in between, almost always when you’re late for something important); our Metro system is famously in total disrepair; and the oft-invoked Hollywood dream of a top-down convertible sailing down the Pacific Coast Highway against a blazing neon-pink sunset doesn’t account for the city’s clanking orange buses.
All the same, the time I’ve spent commuting by bus since I wrecked my car last month has shown me another side of LA. I was familiar enough with the city’s bus routes already: When I first made my move to Southern California after graduating from college in 2015, I was a humiliatingly typical New York City kid who’d never learned to drive. So, I bought a bike and started taking it on the 217 bus from my apartment in West Adams to my job as a TV assistant in Fairfax.
Yes, it was nice that the LA bus (unlike its New York counterparts) provided bike storage, and yes, I loved staring out the window at the mansions of Los Feliz, and the perennially Christmas-lit restaurants of Little Ethiopia, and the arguing couples that seemed to populate every outdoor cafe in Silver Lake. But relying largely on public transport meant I couldn’t spontaneously head to the beach, or get a pedicure, or do most of the things I’d associated with a carefree LA life.
Most of all, though, I was exhausted back then. I was in the grips of an undiagnosed eating disorder that constituted my primary relationship, and I spent far more mental time tallying up my daily calories and ruminating on my next mini-meal than I did commuting, to the point that biking eight miles home every night pushed my body to its absolute breaking point.
All this made me feel deeply worried when, after my crash, I found myself without a car again. But on the other hand, I’d never liked driving, nor been particularly good at it (see again: car crash), and I craved the peace I associated with simply reading a book while someone else did the hard work of actually…navigating the vehicle.
I told myself I’d try out taking the bus again, reasoning that my life looked extremely different than it did six or seven years ago. My eating disorder is well-managed with the help of therapy and medication; I live centrally and within easy walking distance of several major bus and Metro lines; and my roommate isn’t a fellow bike-commuting 20-something but my long-term partner, who has wheels of his own and doesn’t mind giving me a ride when I need one, so long as I don’t leave trash in his car.
And, honestly, I’m amazed by how much more a part of things I feel when I’m taking the bus—well, two buses, most of the time—to and from babysitting jobs, or the movies, or my friends’ houses. I hadn’t realized until I stopped driving just how insulated from the sights and sounds of regular life my car had made me, and there’s something really lovely about actually having to see and interact with other human beings when I need to pick up milk or get a COVID shot.
Part of what made me so bad at driving was my useless sense of direction; I basically relied on Google Maps to pilot me from one end of LA to another. But taking the bus is helping me to see how the city’s laid out in a way that I simply didn’t before. I keep thinking about Hacks’ Randi (Robby Hoffman) picking up a call from her boss while on the LA bus and telling him: “I like to mentally map a city before I drive in it.” Same, girl—although in my case, taking a break from driving is precisely what’s making me appreciate the city I’m lucky enough to call home.
