On 10/10/10, Los Angeles banned cars from 7.5 miles of roadway through the center of Los Angeles for CicLAvia. The LA Times piece covers the details of the day. This post is a slice of LA's alternative transportation experience that I sampled before and during the event. It profiles the inspiring new impressions of this city I now have and the surprising effect some had on me.
What's it to me?
When I first learned about LA's CicLAvia, it struck me in a very deep way. I felt like I had to be there. "Why?", I thought. Oakland, my home town, had just had "Oaklavia". Why did I care so much about this one? Perhaps it was because, 25 years earlier, I tried and failed to use only a bike in LA while attending school. Black soot in my lungs and overt contempt from motorists quickly ended that. For this and other reasons, I transferred to UC Berkeley soon after and left town. So the prospect of cycling into the open arms of a city that had sent me and my bike packing 25 years earlier was definitely compelling.
But this felt bigger than that. The city has had a pervasive subway system for many years now. Locals still told me nobody rode it but how could that be true? All the supporters of CicLAvia are likely to be earnest supporters/patrons of public transportation. Also, the web revealed lots of new cycling activity happening all over the region. All this hinted at a dramatic shift in the city's transportation culture.
Personal redemption or historic sea change, I had to see this for myself. I signed up to volunteer at the event and padded the trip with a few extra days to try out some of the other new alternative transportation infrastructure and events.
Getting There
Train route from Burbank to Union Station I started planning the trip down there with myopic purity. I would take my bike on the Amtrak train from the San Francisco Bay Area: maximizing fuel- and space-efficiency. Unfortunately, the need for time-efficiency inevitably altered this plan. The train from the Bay Area to LA takes all day, literally. Doing this would require taking 2 extra days off work. On top of that, a terrorist alert had heightened train security which meant increased delays. Given all this, I decided to fly down with the bike. I'd congest the airways getting down there but not the freeways getting around town. This seemed right to me. It's all about right-sizing your ride for the journey, not using bike or train at all costs. I'm not a bike ascetic.
Since I would be toting a huge bicycle box from the plane ride, I wanted to avoid clogging the narrow aisle on most buses when riding from the airport. This was a job for a train. LAX only has bus service so I landed at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank which has a train station right across the street. Google maps will tell you it's a half mile away but it is actually much closer depending on how you walk. Regardless, there's a free shuttle to it if need be.
Metrolink
The train you catch at Burbank airport is part of Metrolink. This is full sized rail used for commuting: like the San Francisco Bay Area's CalTrain. This Ventura County line is one of several outer legs of LAs surprisingly comprehensive rail system that stretches to every major suburb. This line had an asymmetrical schedule with departure times that seemed to vary. Generally though, it left the airport for downtown every hour during commute hours. As I found out later, weekends are a different story: there's no service on the Burbank line, and other lines are severely scaled back. Nevertheless, on this particular Friday I was on a train heading to downtown in less than 10 minutes.
The train was astoundingly nice and fast. It had a clean bathroom, clean seats, and elegantly designed bike racks. It even had a few power sockets for laptops. This was much better than CalTrain. I thought I was in Germany or Switzerland. It was that good. The only unfortunate part of the ride was realizing that this clean, nice, fast train to downtown was virtually empty at 8:45am on a Friday. I suddenly worried that perhaps this great train service would wilt before Angelenos adopted it. But it was early yet. Regardless, I got from Burbank Airport to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles in 40 minutes. That isn't faster than a car in good traffic but it is in bad traffic. In any case, it is much, much, cheaper and cleaner.
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