Russell's Blog

For the first time, I just paid more than $4 a gallon for gasoline. It cost $40.34 to fill the tank on my tiny Toyota Yaris. My commute to UCLA is 37 miles each way, and I get about 38 MPG for that trip. I normally do a little better, but the Sepulveda Pass always seems to wreck my milage. At about $0.11 a mile, one trip costs me $7.77. If I drove in every day, it would cost me about $155 a month. That's almost as much as the payments on the car. If gas goes up another 84 cents, then I'd be paying more for the gasoline than the car just from driving to school.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, a Metro day pass costs $5, and a month pass is $62.00. If you commute in LA, chances are pretty good that your employer will buy your pass for you.

When I was little, we used to have Smog Alerts in Los Angeles fairly regularly, sometimes for a few consecutive days. My elementary school used to keep us inside on those days, and I used to stand on the second floor balcony that overlooked the foothills, staring at the crap in the air. Around noontime, it looked like an overcast sky, but without the ceiling effect. It diffused all the way to the ground. Then, in the afternoon, the sky would explode in a malignant display of colors. The horizon was capped by a black line hovering above the ground with a mantle of crimson and orange, like the lips of a steamed muscle. The sun would squat over the ocean in a rust-colored splotch smeared across a quarter of the sky. Shadows turned the color of tea, and the air turned pinkish and cloudy like you were peering through gasoline. It looked genuinely dangerous.

Astonishingly, those days were a measured improvement over what my parents experienced. The smog used to be thick enough to obscure the sun completely, turning the daylight into a diffuse glow. Sometimes, it blocked enough of the daylight to create a sort of murky twilight. Here is the first known photo of LA's smog, from 1943 :

Beijing is like that, except the mantle of smog is much, much wider than the one that covered Los Angeles in its worst years. For the Olympics, China has been working to improve the situation, but the progress so far is not very impressive. Days with good air quality, called "Blue Sky" days, would be emergency smog alerts in Los Angeles. The Beijing Air Blog has some interesting data on China's ongoing battle with air pollution, though there haven't been many posts in a while. Here is Tienanmen Square on April 27, 2008, which was officially a Blue Sky Day :

The smog extends pretty far from the city. This is the shot from a train window about a hundred miles north of Beijing. The factory (refinery? LNG plan? cement factory?) is only about a mile or two away, and it's almost completely invisible.

I'm not going to delve into why this is a bad thing. Global warming, cardiopulmonary disease, lead, mercury, yadda yadda. You already know the arguments, or you can make your own. Here's a reason that doesn't require any sort of scientific background to understand. The day after I took the photographs above, a heavy thunderstorm scrubbed the smog out of the sky. This is what China is supposed to look like :

China is a damn beautiful country, when you can see it.

On my way home from UCLA today, I decided to see how fast I ride my bike from Westwood and to the terminus of the Metro Purple Line on Wilshire and Western. Particularly, I was interested to see if I could get there quicker than the 720 bus. To make it fair, I waited until there was almost no traffic for the bus to get mired in. Rush hour now lasts well into the late evening, so traffic was heavy but not jammed at 9:00 PM.

I waited for a 720 bus to pull into the station, and then took off. It was pretty much a dead heat until the Starbucks at San Vincente, and I got a couple of lucky breaks from the walk signals. I beat the bus to Western by about four minutes, completing the trip in 43 minutes without breaking a sweat. Oh, and it's mostly an uphill ride with lots of pedestrians to which one must yield.

Since I am now commuting to UCLA from Pasadena, I've spent a lot of time wondering how to cut down of the time, expense and misery of commuting. Most of that pondering happened while trapped somewhere on the Ventura freeway, or the perhaps on driving aimlessly around Westwood looking for a parking spot.

To that end, I've started using the Metro as much as possible. The Metro Gold Line is fantastic, and gets me from Lake Street in Pasadena to Union Station downtown in about 20 minutes (less if I catch an express). The Purple Line gets me as far as Koreatown, and this is where things start to suck. From Wilshire and Western, it's about seven miles to UCLA. During business hours, the 720 bus takes about an hour and 45 minutes to traverse this miserable stretch of urban leprosy. The worst part is Beverley Hills, which I would gleefully bulldoze if given the chance.

It's maddening. The first 22 miles of the trip take about 30-45 minutes, depending on intervals between trains. The last six and a half take three times that.

While I was riding a 720 bus packed with more people than I attended high school with, it occurred to me that 6.5 miles in 105 minutes is a little slower than four miles per hour. I could probably beat that walking on my hands.

So, I bought some new tires for my bicycle, and gave it a try. Sure enough, I passed five or six 720 busses as they sat like flatulent beached whales in the morning rush hour traffic. With all the traffic lights, it's a slow ride, but it takes about 50-60 minutes, so I'm averaging between 6.5-7.8 miles per hour. In West Los Angeles, velocities this high are known to cause Cerenkov radiation. I could go a lot faster if drivers would actually look at the road instead of staring blankly into space while driving their Range Rovers in the bike lane, parking in the crosswalk or on driving on the sidewalk to get around busses (yes, really). It would be certain death for a cyclist if all of this mayhem weren't happening at the speed one can push a loaded dumpster up a hill.

There is just one problem, though. When you're not riding it, a bicycle is miserable thing to carry. You may as well be traveling with an Alexander Calder sculpture.

So, I bought a folding bicycle :

This is a Brompton M6R. It folds up really, really tiny, and has little wheels on the bottom to roll it like a suitcase when it's folded up.

Surprisingly, the small wheels don't seem to make much of a difference with stability. The only difference, really, is that it takes a lot less torque to turn the front wheel, even at speed. This makes it feel "twitchy" at first, but the sensation goes away after about twenty seconds of riding. The Bromptons also have really strong breaks. You have to be careful not to pitch yourself over the handlebars.

Compared to my road bike, the Brompton is almost alarmingly responsive. This makes it ideal for crowded situations -- it's easy to avoid unexpected obstacles, squeeze through narrow spaces, and stop suddenly. When it's folded up, it's nice to be able to walk down the train platform without goring people with the pedals or stabbing them with the quick release levers.

The Brompton has two main disadvantages. First, it's a little on the heavy side. I didn't shell out for the titanium version, so it weighs in at 23 pounds. This turns out not to matter very much, except when lugging it up long flights of stairs. The second disadvantage is that I must answer a never-ending stream of questions about it.

I will write a more detailed review of the bicycle itself in a few weeks.

While I was on jury duty last week, I rode the train from Pasadena to the courthouse in Downtown LA every morning. One of the best things about jury duty, I think, was riding the train. I took the Gold Line from the Lake Street station in Pasadena, switched to Red Line at Union Station, and then switched to the Blue Line at 7th Street, and hopped off at Grand, less than a block from the courthouse. The whole trip took took about 40 minutes when I caught a local train at Lake Street, or about 28 minutes if I was lucky enough to catch the Express. Driving from Pasadena during rush hour would have been... excruciating. At least an hour and twenty minutes.

I miss the train. It was quiet (except, inexplicably, for the tunnel leaving 7th Street), fast, and comfortable. I was always able to find a seat, even during peak hours. The stations are nice. I got a lot of reading done, and the scenery is interesting. If anything, my opinion of Angelenos has improved considerably from the random sample I encountered.

Now that I've been released from the jury, my trips to UCLA in West Los Angeles are by car. The train doesn't go here, and the buses from Downtown are slow, infrequent and astonishingly crowded. My most recent ride on the 720 bus featured a fifteen minute interval smashed face-to-face into the enormous pot belly of a 400-pound black man, who didn't seem to enjoy the experience any more than I did. No amount of shuffling and begging ones pardon were sufficient to disengage skin contact. The only solution was to stare out of opposite windows and wait for the rumbling glacier of sweat, flesh and steel to reach its destination. Riding the bus sucks.

West LA needs to get with the program, or it's going to become a slum. All the interesting new development in Los Angeles is happening Downtown, and the new zoning changes are only going to accelerate that. Running the Red Line down the Wilshire corridor to Ocean Boulevard is only a start. The proposal to turn Pico and Olympic into paired one-way streets is utterly idiotic, but understandable given that people in West LA would probably chew off their leg before allowing a even a single precious lane to be sacrificed for a light rail project.