Thanks to a crazy driver on the 405 my car’s been in the body shop for a while, but today I returned to my regular work commute after a two week hiatus. When I first left my car at the shop I was dreading being without a car for so long since LA has a well-deserved reputation for being a difficult place to live without your own transport, but truth be told in a lot of ways I actually enjoyed the change.

The bus service that operates in Venice, Santa Monica and West LA (The Big Blue Bus) is cheap, frequent and as far as public transport goes pretty clean - very few games of “Guess the Liquid”. I live around five miles from work so it was a relatively short trip, perhaps 25 minutes, but still I’d forgotten what it was like to have a commute where you can read a book or magazine, or thanks to my MDA catchup on email, read news feeds and write blog posts.

When it came to socialising, shopping, laundry etc then I missed having a car more, though since I live in the heart of Santa Monica even this wasn’t too bad - more inconvenient than unmanageable. When you want to travel outside of Santa Monica though you need to switch to the LA Metro, which is quite a different experience to the Big Blue Bus.

I think I’ve caught the Metro three times; once into Hollywood and once to/from Union Station. Both outward trips were during rush hour and fine, if a little crowded and running late. Coming back was just horrific. Even from Union Station at 9pm on a Monday there were few buses to be seen, I think we had to wait almost 90 minutes to catch one. For the return journey from Hollywood I gave up after an hour and flagged down a cab instead

I like to believe that even though I have my car back I’ll still occasionally catch the bus to work, or perhaps even cycle from time to time. Of course, I know that I won’t. Until the next time my car is in the shop of course.