Reply With QuoteYou do need a car. It's Los Angeles. It's understood. Also, Venice Beach is pretty seedy which is fine for some people but just so you know. I'd never not want to be 'on the beach' myself and that's a great base for operations.
So my husband and I, along with three of his friends are going to BlizzCon in Anaheim in October. His friends are English, and this is their first visit to the States... as such, we decided to make a two week vacation of it, and plan to spend a week in L.A. for the week before BlizzCon, and a week in Vegas for the week after.
So I've been to Vegas and know what to expect, and know we won't need a car there, at least as far as what our plans are for there. However, I've been to Los Angeles only once in my life, and it was about 25 years ago and I was a teenager then, so transportation was not really my concern.
I know that L.A. is huge.. and also that it has a subway system, but Googling up the L.A. subway maps hasn't really helped me, since I can't seem to find a map that I can overlay on top of an actual map of L.A. to see exactly where the stops are. I'm looking at some hotels right on Venice Beach, but we'd like to do the touristy stuff in Hollywood, visit Universal Studios, etc... and those certainly aren't walking distance from the beach.
So can anyone tell me whether we can easily get around L.A. without renting a car? Since there will be 5 of us in total, we'd pretty much have to rent a minivan or something (to hold all of us plus our luggage) and when I last checked, the rental rates were a bit outrageous. Waiting for buses (and having to deal with transfers and that sort of thing) can be a bit of a pain... I don't think any of us want to have to deal with an hour and a half total bus trip if driving it ourselves would only take a half hour. My hope was that a subway stop would be within reasonable walking distance from the beaches, but I can't seem to determine if that's the case based on looking at the maps.
Any help/advice would be appreciated!
You do need a car. It's Los Angeles. It's understood. Also, Venice Beach is pretty seedy which is fine for some people but just so you know. I'd never not want to be 'on the beach' myself and that's a great base for operations.
I think Missing Persons probably had the last word on this topic.
You need a car and a nav system. Try to drive everywhere you need to go at 3 in the morning because the rest of the time it is the worst goddamn place on the planet to drive a car.
I have to admit I LOL'd at the LA subway system. Think of it as a prototype and then you'll understand.
Yes, the nav system is very, very critical. You will get horribly lost without one.
You'll probably get lost with one, too. At least you will if you have the one we have.
Yes.Originally Posted by Hansey
Anaheim isn't even in LA county. It's about an hour drive away from Venice. Just going from Venice to Hollywood is a good 30-40 minutes. There isn't really a "subway". There's the metro (a fairly limited train system) and a bus system but neither are particularly good.
P.S. I'll be at BlizzCon as well. :-)
Try using Google Maps to get some directions to give you a sense of what you will be up against. By car it's a 34 minute drive from Venice Beach to Universal Studios, but can stretch to 1 hr 20 min in traffic according Google. Switch to the transit option and it provides an estimate of 1 hr 45 minute with two transfers and the last leg is a 16 minute walk from the transit stop to Universal.
When we visited LA a couple of years ago, we stayed in a Hotel near LAX airport. As I recall, driving to Universal Studios in the morning wasn't a big deal and didn't take 1 hr 20 minutes. That transit route is just nuts.
Yup, LA without a car is not fun. The subway system, best I understand it, still doesn't serve major chunks of the city. As for the buses, well, in certain areas (e.g. Santa Monica and Culver City) they are OK, but as a citywide public transportation system they are a long way from ideal. I relied exclusively on bus travel for my first year or two out of college in LA. No desire to go back to that...
Yes, rent the car. You're going to be spending a lot of time in it, so make sure it is very comfortable, and gives you a large field of view. There are gas stations everywhere, so don't worry about getting something economical, just make sure it can accelerate quickly and can stop on a dime.
It wouldn't hurt if it could take a few hits too. In fact, if it were up to me I'd just rent Mad Max's car, and I'd get the optional turret mount.
Lol, thanks for the replies everyone, I guess I'll have to suck it up for a rental then. It's probably better that way anyway. Also, thanks for the nav suggestion... I'd like to think that I'm the kind of person that can find my way based on looking at a Google map (we've managed just fine without one so far!), but if so many people are telling me I need one, I'd guess I'd better get one, hehe.
As far as the subway goes, I really had no idea whether L.A.'s was any good or not.. the only ones I'm familiar with are Boston's (as I'm a native), New York's and London's, and those all seem to do a fine job getting the job done. You'd expect a city as large as L.A. to be able to make it work, but I guess not.
Since I'm here, any other suggestions for places to stay on the beach that aren't too "seedy"... but also reasonably affordable?
Yeah, I knew that Anaheim was some distance away from L.A. We are actually staying at one of the hotels right outside the convention center (with Blizzard's special rate) for the few days we'll be at Blizzcon. Our plan right now is: Fly into L.A. on the 16th, stay there for 5 days; head to Anaheim for the Con, stay there for 3 days; then drive across the desert (just for the hell of it!) to Vegas and stay there for 6 days. We'll all be heading home directly from Vegas. Looking forward to it!
The only thing the LA Subway is any good for is making bad movies.
Wow you all are going to Blizzcon? That sounds like so much fun. Someday I'd love to go to a big games event like that. I bet it's a blast.
Can I ask what's wrong with LA's subway? Is it scary and crime-ridden? Dirty? doesn't go anywhere useful?
Though only subway I used was in Washington DC... and just once. Back then it was overwhelming and scary, but so were buses since I always seemed to miss my stops.
They had a good one up until the ... 50s? 60s? At some point they ripped up all the rail lines (there used to be a ton of streetcars in LA) because cars were the new hotness.
Like I said, it's in prototype. It doesn't go anywhere useful. It's not particularly crime ridden. It's just kind of there. The people keep passing tax increases and bonds to try to do something with LA's rail/subway but Metro is probably not the best organization to keep tossing money to. They don't seem to be able to navigate the political hurdles necessary to get the rail system to actually work for many of the people living here.
For example, the Gold Line. Goes from Pasadena to downtown. Sounds like a good idea, except it actually takes longer to ride the Gold Line to get downtown than it does sitting in traffic on the parkway-turned-freeway-turning-back-to-parkway (whose idiotic idea was that anyway?) 110. This is stupid. But they wanted to stop everywhere along the way, so that's what you get. They would have been better served to provide Rapid Buses to parking places and halving the number of stops along the way. Then the rail would have been actually useful.
More accurately, because the city was in league with the car manufacturers, oil and rubber companies, and fast food chains in the large-scale effort to create the now-familiar freeway culture that dominates the Western US. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is actually not too far off on that plot point.
And yes, you need a car in LA, period. Also double check on rental prices if you intend to drive from LA and leave the rental in Vegas. Often rental companies charge a huge premium for one-way rentals.
The 110 was the first freeway in California; it opened in 1940. It wasn't really built for today's speed or volume of traffic.
Right, so why the hell would they turn it back into what it was in 1940?? I don't get that.
Heh, it never changed! Oh but with a fast car on a Sunday nite at 3am..it can be fun.
You might want to consider staying somewhere more central, like West Hollywood. You'll spend a lot less time driving to stuff that way.
Nostalgia. It was accumulating designations like National Scenic Byway, State Scenic Highway, and National Civil Engineering Landmark, so they went retro. Possibly because it doesn't really meet freeway standards anymore. There's always some moron who'll will go blasting down it at 3 AM in the morning and smack into a car merging in at 5 mph.
;-)
Pretty much every rental car place these days offers nav systems for rent, at not completely ridiculous rates.
I don't know that guy.
The last time we rented a car (Orlando), it was from Hertz and came equipped with a GPS. It wasn't a built-in unit. Hertz installed it in a permanent bracket and wired it in. No extra charge.
My suspicion is that they track where you've been, so if you go out of state under a rental agreement that said you had to to stay in the state, they can charge you extra. Therefore it would be in their interest to put a GPS in all of their cars.
Yeah, although if you're going to be renting a car for more than a couple of days, the rates are such that it may be cheaper to just buy your own (either in advance, or once you get to your destination).
Although I had been in LA for conventions and meetings for short stays previously, I've just returned from my first real vacation stay of 6 days living on a couch there. Before I had only been straight from the airport to my destination, this was the first time we got around from the beaches to bars to restaurants, and holy hell did we drive a lot. As a rule of thumb everywhere took 30min to an hour unless we deliberately stayed on our own town strip. If you look at a google map, zoom in and then zoom in again. Distances are deceiving. We were in West Hollywood which was great for exploring Beverly Hills, Larchmont, Santa Monica.
I did take the bus once, seeing as it was a straight shot down Santa Monica, a 7 mile transit for $1.50 which was pleasant enough and on time. It was a negligible little hop across the town, but up here 7 miles is the entire width of the San Francisco.
The one thing I noticed most about exploring LA is that doing the touristy things is disappointing. Vans with their rooves cut off shuttled people around checking out the various unimpressive hollywood trivia spots and the tourists seemed bored and pathetic to me. If you want my advice, spend your five days at a beach where people live (Redondo, Manhattan etc), go to cafes and hit interesting restaurants/bars in upscale neighborhoods. It's less a city to explore landmarks as to just hang out and look at people looking back at you.
Yeah, I think LA is a shitty tourist city in the sense of "big landmarks" etc. unless you really want to dive into old Hollywood lore and whatnot. Hollywood Boulevard, though not as grungy as it was a few years back, isn't a particularly pleasant place, and the Hollywood sign is... well... you look at it, there it is, move on. Beverly Hills/Rodeo Drive is a few blocks with palm trees (but there are palm trees lots of other places) and lots of stores you probably can't afford to shop at. But there are a billion great restaurants and bars and the beaches are nice and there are some great repertory/revival movie theaters if you have time (the Aero is fantastic; they have a Facebook page) so there's lots to explore. There are some good museums too, particularly LACMA. I hear the Getty's collection is much better than it was when it opened, though I haven't been there lately.
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