I Rode the Entire L.A. Metro in a Single Day
http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2013/01/metro_purple_expo_orange_line_subway.php
By Paul T. Bradley, January 24, 2013

I once dreamed of being a transportation planner: fast-roping into
jungles, skirting ancient booby traps to snag gilded idols, natives and
Nazi occultists in hot pursuit. Sadly, urban planners do none of those
things. The most daring thing most of them will ever do is Sharpie "Fuck
you, Robert Moses!" onto their Trapper Keepers. I'm not cut out for
that.
While I'll never get to write scintillating reports on Arterial
Levels of Service, I can still appreciate the bureaucratic ballet that
produces public transportation. I even like riding trains occasionally.
The thing is, I rarely ride them. I barely touch the Metro. Most of
the time it's too complicated to get from, say, Silver Lake to Santa
Monica, Red to Expo to bus, a buck fifty per line and nearly three hours
shot. Why bother when you have a perfectly decent car?
And yet there is that whole $5 day pass thing — you can ride any
train, and any bus, in the entire metropolitan system, with just one
pass. Which got me thinking: How far could you stretch it? You could
ride from one end of L.A. County to another in a single day. Other than
hustling chess at the library, it might be the cheapest way to kill a
day in Los Angeles — and potentially much more interesting.
I decided to give it a try.
At first, I had this silly notion that I might get up at 3:40 a.m.
and ride the thing from open to close. Roughly 23 hours or so. The
trouble is, I like sleep, and I don't want to do it on public
transportation.
So I'm up at 9 a.m. and on a bus by 9:30. I'm on a train at 10 a.m. Disco.
I start by taking the Blue Line from Metro Center to Long Beach. The
Blue Line, which spends most
of its length snaking through industrial
areas, smells like manky crotch. Cruising past the South L.A. yards full
of kind-of-managed clutter and unharvested citrus trees, I find myself
wondering why I never come to this part of town. It's verdant and — holy
shit, that lady just got hit by a car!
Just before it happened, we were all sitting peacefully. A guy was blasting Bobby Womack's newest album,
The Bravest Man in the Universe,
on portable speakers. Two women were chatting about romantic
transgressions. And ... smack. We all see it. "God damn!" one lady
yells. We crane our necks to watch.
There's a bizarre Disney-ride quality to the experience. The train
even slows through the crossing near 14th and Long Beach Avenue, as if
to give us all a better look. From behind train windows, we might as
well be watching the Pirates of the Caribbean check on an injured
comrade's vitals. "And to the left, Sandybeard Jack Treacle checks Lady
Look-one-way's pulse." There's no blood, thankfully, just a dazed woman.
The offending driver doesn't bolt. From the inconvenienced look on
his face, he looks like he wants to, but he does not. And there are
bystanders aplenty. So when the train moves on, so do I.
At least the Blue Line has some excitement. Two hours later, I'm on
the Green Line, riding east to Norwalk. Guess who's already sick of
riding the goddamn Metro? Heading either direction on the Green is
basically cruising the 105 freeway on rails. At Redondo Beach station, I
run into two L.A. County Sheriff's deputies, neither of them at all
interested in talking. They look at me like I'm wearing a glitter-laden
Rip Taylor costume. I am not.
About 1:30, I run into an old friend on the Green Line, musician and
Long Beach resident Chad "Emperor X" Matheny. He's dropping off a
long-distance love interest at the airport. Chad's the fiercest Metro
advocate I know. He's even got a song that Pitchfork liked once, "Right
to the Rails."
"Oh, make sure you do the Orange line," he says of the bus line that
runs from North Hollywood to Chatsworth. "You can't cheat BRT [Bus Rapid
Transit], it has dedicated rights of way ... and it was supposed to be
light rail."
"But not the Silver?" I ask.
"You can probably get away with avoiding the Silver," he says. "It's really just a bus."
I have a thought. "Hey, Chad, why does the Blue Line smell like dank filth?" I ask.
"Probably because it's the oldest line. People tend to forget that."
Good point. (Chad also notes the guy near us rolling a joint; he does
not offer to share.)
Chad takes off when we get downtown. Not even transit's fiercest champion can hang out on trains all night. That's my job.
Soon thereafter, though, the Expo Line, Metro Center to Culver,
reveals the nastiest thing I've seen all day: a used Q-tip. Sitting
right there on the seat. This is somehow grosser than the junkie who
soils himself on the Red Line an hour or so later. What kind of a
batshit lunatic drills out earwax on a train and leaves the cotton swab
behind? ::shudder::
Evening rush hour starts. As I ride through downtown to Wilshire on
the Purple and Red and back around, no one says a word for nearly two
hours. The clientele looks a little more business-slick but not by much;
it's still mostly worn-out workaday folks. Everyone stares at books,
Nooks, Kindles and newspapers. I stare at the in-train advertising.
"Protect Your Phone," demands one PSA, advocating concealing your phone
deep in your pockets or bag. Metro wants you to be completely bored,
apparently.
At roughly 8:40 p.m., I'm at the Red Line terminus in North Hollywood. A tiny man in an ill-fitting jacket is selling
The Spark, a Socialist newspaper. We chat. He quotes Marx (Karl, not Harpo). I get bored quickly.
On the Orange Line, which I take back from Chatsworth, I notice three
guys riding quietly in the back. They're bound for the Warner Center
mall when one of them up and asks his friend, "Where's your mustache?"
"Dude, I'm on probation," he responds. "I can't do shit."
By roughly 10:30 p.m., I've turned into a complete misanthrope.
Twelve hours ago, people fascinated me and scofflaws entertained me.
"Yeah, break those rules! Play that music on speakers! Smoke that
spliff! Eat that burger! Chew that gum!" Now, the slightly muted sound
of a handheld video game drives me utterly bonkers. My one curmudgeonly
comfort is that it sounds like the player is stuck on a difficult level.
Take that, jerk.
By the time I hit Metro Center, it's nearly midnight, and I'm
completely zonked. My ass is killing me. But, y'know, I did it. I rode
the whole motherloving thing. Every line (OK, not you, Silver, sorry)
and every station. In one day.
And I did learn something important. In 14 hours, not a single person
or machine asked me to prove that I paid to be here. Seriously, not one
legal entity checked my TAP Card. So. If you want to ride the Metro
from Woodland Hills to Long Beach, you may not need to spend $5 on an
all-day pass.
You just need to keep riding.
(Since I am a senior citizen and I now have my very own TAP card, I can do the above for a grand total of $1.80--pretty good deal!)