I know LA can be pretty bike-unfriendly, if for no other reason than the fact that the drivers are pretty much uniformly douchebags, psychopaths, or both, but is there a reasonable bike route you could take? If not to work (10 miles isn't really that far, but could take awhile) then at least to the train station...

Alas, my problems with biking to the train station are entirely girly: 1) the sweating; 2) the difficulty posed by my usual daily outfit of skirts and high heels. It does make me miss the days I used to bike to school every day, though.

I'd also consider getting a scooter (I CAN HAZ VESPA?!?!?!), but my boyfriend has nixed the idea out of terror for my well-being (I have hemophilia plus a heart condition, so even a minor accident could turn unexpectedly nasty for me).

My absolute, number-one, OMGYAY! favorite thing about my imminent move is that I will never ever have to take the SF bus to work again.

I have used public transportation exclusively (as in, have not owned a car) for the past 14 years, and San Francisco finally broke me.

So I raise my glass to you in a "Fuck California public transit!" salute.

the difficulty posed by my usual daily outfit of skirts and high heels.

A bike like this one, though heavy, is skirt friendly. A change of shoes carried in a basket, and you're good to go. Not a performance bike by any stretch, but...

What about a vespa piaggio, a kind of cycle-scooter? It's like a bike with a motor. MUCH easier to handle - the negative is that your legs aren't cozily hidden behind the famous vespa-front (helps pressed pants stay pressed!)

(alternative, an old puch - they are very easy to drive as well, just like bikes, don't go fast, old ones are even cute)

scody I wear a skirt and HH frequently to work. Not to bike, but to work. Rolling things up in a towel in my messenger bag does the trick, even for fine silk items.

the shoes live in a bottom desk drawer.

also: damn. my bus pass costs me $144/month. Of course my bus commute is 25 miles one way but still.

Hehe, "euro-bike"? What the heck do bikes look like in the states? That's like my bike, and my mans.

Buses are bad in San Fran? I loved public transport there (hi all bus drivers on number 37 remember me? You were always so cheerful in the mornings!) - would move back in a heartbeat just for that.

just to clarify, when anyone says "scooter" I think either vespa or lambretta. Anything that has bigger than ten inch wheels is NOT.
A puch moped or a piaggio are more like little bikes with engines on them.

oh and, I am with you on the rant BTW. RTD Denver is becoming rapidly overwhelmed by the gas crunch, particularly the Denver-Boulder route. Since their bureaucrasy doesn't allow adding equipment/routes in anything shorter than glacial time units, this is going to be the case for the forseeable future. Result: I got hucked off the express bus last night FOR THE THIRD NIGHT IN A ROW because they had too many bikes on board. This is not to mention the dozen or so poor bastards who are now having to ride standing up the entire 45-minute freeway trip to Denver. Why is this a problem? Simple: our regional busses aren't in any way equipped for standing passengers (there aren't even any grab handles) and as it has become a non-trivial frequent occurrence, it has become a major safety issue.

Getting bumped is also non-trivial after 6PM, as it means waiting another 35 minutes for the next bus. I mean, seriously, fuck that noise, I just want to go home. If the idiots in the BroomMinsterVada yuppiedrone south of Boulder would ever get their shit together and stop NIMBY-ing around, we'd have a nice bike corridor thru their suburban wasteland hellhole. Like, it was scheduled to happen five years ago already.

and don't even get me started on how long it's taking for them to get a light rail corridor approved. holy revolving wombats, and we call ourselves a "green" metroplex.

I have that Amsterdam bike dersins linked and it is a total pleasure to ride in cute dresses and skirts. Yeah, it's not the lightest bike in the world, but I can lift it up and down the stairs to our porch every day, and frankly that's the most taxing thing I find about its not-super-lightness, and I ride it for 4-12 miles almost everyday.

Oh, and yeah, I totally feel you, occhiblu on SF public transit. It was okay for me because I never had to be anywhere timely, but the last 5 or 6 times my partner took the train home from work to Church, Castro, or Dog Shit Park (another SF landmark I don't miss!) the trains weren't running at all, were too packed to fit more people, or were stuck in a jam. A few times he had to take a train in the opposite direction to the embarcadero to get on a train going the right direction. Not long after, he got a job working from home.

Maybe bus 37 was blessed? I was never late to work but my collegues (bart and metro) often were.

"Amsterdam bikes" (hahaha, over here they're called Copenhagen bikes) are cruisers, you have to work a little to get a nice cruising speed, but then you don't work much at all, they just kind of roll for you. And forget trying to go FAST because that doesn't really enter the picture. You cruise at medium or upper-medium speed and that's that. :)

I am so adding "holy revolving wombats" to my vocabulary.

Scody, I've been seeing a lot more moped-type things on the road down here in equally-congested Orange County lately, and if you stuck to surface streets and took an MSA safety class, you might be OK as far as traffic risk is concerned. Honda makes some pretty inexpensive (starting around $2k)/dependable scooters - both my mom and my brother have been looking at getting.

Scody, is the stop in North Hollywood less crowded?

You should move to new york where you can quite easily enjoy smelly panhandlers, buttcheek-to-buttcheek crowds, garbled announcemnets and all the other joys of public transport.

I am intrigued by this dress-friendly bike! I don't mind throwing my heels in a backpack and pedaling something as cute as that! I wonder how easy it would be to load/unload four times each way...? (It would certainly give me a good workout, in any case!)

if you stuck to surface streets and took an MSA safety class

He's even freaked out about surface streets (though perhaps the specter of a safety class would mollify him). I get to work via either the Cahuenga Pass or Laurel Canyon -- both of which are hilly, congested, and twisty-turny (esp. the canyon). He rode a motorcycle for years and so he's totally ZOMG GIRLFRIEND COULD BLEED TO DEATH MUST PROTECT, given the accidents he saw (and narrowly avoided himself!) while he was riding. But the more I think about it, the more I really want a scooter. I think I'll have to wear down his resistance. (But DAD, Mom said I could!!!)

Scody, is the stop in North Hollywood less crowded?

Parking permits are sold out there as well. Curses!

Guh, another potential problem with a bike: a coworker who frequently takes the bus that I would need to take from Hollywood to work says that the bike racks are almost always filled up by the time the bus arrives at the stop where I'd be catching it.

It's incredible. There are a million bilboards in this city exhorting me to take the train, and I can't because the train stations were built in non-residential areas without adequate parking.

Bigger than ten inch wheels = les "Holy shit!" when you hit a pebble. Newer 'scooters' with electric starts and all are easier to control, steer and all that. Easiest thing ever is that bike-with-a-motor moped though.

disclaimer: I drive ancient scooters with gears that hop like bunnies if you don't do it right. It can hurt at times.

I've thought about cutesy scooters, but I'm sure I would get my ass handed to me on my current commute (45mph one lane roads in the yeehas). It's less than 10 miles, so maybe, one of these days.

Public transit can be said to suck almost universally. The cities where it is a realistic alternative to automotive use are the exception.
Realistic, to me, is:
1. less than the cost of two tanks of gas
2. not disproportionately long compared to a car commute
2. reliable enough to make a missed bus a rare occurrence

For me Buffalo was a flop on all three... I live a block from a thurway, and work two blocks from it. My automotive commute is about 20 min. On a bus it took upwards of an hour each way. It also cost me about $75 a month... more than I spend on gas with a car that gets about 26 mpg. And, I often found myself taking cabs twice a month or more when the bus was early so I missed it, late so I missed a connection, or just plain didn't show. Which is less than I spend on insurance.

And, here, the subway stops at the city line. Every few years they try to expand it, and every few years the suburbs fight tooth and nail since they don't want anything that makes it easier for people from the city to spoil their tract housing wonderland.

since they don't want anything that makes it easier for people from the city to spoil their tract housing wonderland.

they'd better get used to the idea and damned fast because unless they offer ease of access to alternative transportation, they've a real potential to become ghost towns. according to some of the stats I've seen on foreclosures and fleeing residents, the sprawlier areas of our metropolitan centres are threatening to become the next ghettoes.

Anecdata: friend who lives in a particularly hellish tract sprawl-o-mat in Denver has noticed the neighbourhood taking a dive of late, and a lot of vacant homes and foreclosure notices. Plus crime and gang activity appears to be on the rise. Their neighbour's fence actually got tagged a little while back (graffiti) which was unheard of in that area several years ago.

Compare that with our 'hoody 'hood which does have the benefit of being a) ten blocks from downtown and b) right smack dab next to a light rail line. Now, there's no denying it's still a little rough around the edges here, but nowhere what it used to be. Four years ago our street was basically nothing but crackhouses, foreclosures and condemned building signs. These days we're surrounded by shiny rehabbed historical Victorians, some of which are selling for north of $400K. it's one of the few remaining communities in the entire major metropolitan area where housing values continue to rise.

The public transport authorities in the cities that I commute to/from have banned bikes on all peak period buses and trains.

I know they have had to do it because there simply isn't enough room for the people, never mind their bikes, but how fucked is that?

I must say, you can rent an enclosed (weatherproof) bike locker for a nominal monthly/yearly fee at all the train stations in the city where I live, which is a good start, though.

Lonefrontranger, your rant about Denver is fascinating to me! I think you know that I went to school there (Littleton, really) back in the '80s, and so remember the pre-boom days for the city. (I went away to college in '87, then my parents moved down to Santa Fe around '92, so it's been a long time since I've spent any substantial time there.) Back then, public transportation for me was pretty much covered by taking the "0" bus down Broadway to go to Wax Trax on Saturdays.

Tangent to a tangent: Dog Shit Park in SF has been recently rehabbed, and offleash dogs are now restricted to the one large lawn space, with new pathways and silly little garden fences to demarcate the area. It's an improvement, I suppose, but as with all San Francisco politics, it bears all the hallmarks of a long and hard negotiated compromise that nobody particularly likes.

"never mind their bikes, but how fucked is that?"

Not nearly as fucked as the little girl I saw on Atlanta's MARTA who got a 2" gash on her face when she fell into a bike when the train lurched. Someone may have given her a seat, but the train was so full, no one with a seat saw her.

Once, taking the Amtrak to LA, I wanted to take pub trans out to the beach to visit my mom. There was some LA transit nerd I found that told me the exact ins and outs. I am looking for the old email and whiffing on it but I will keep looking for this guy and post is info, if I find him.

The red cars should never have been ripped out...they ran all the way from Pasadena to Santa Monica.