Photo by Stephen Perlstein

L.A. resident Bruce Reese investigates

Citing complicated language and multiple conflicting clauses, Los Angeles resident Bruce Reese failed to determine whether or not it was legal to park in the "primo" spot he found on Orange Drive just north of Wilshire Boulevard.

The spot in question had five signs above it, each one with various times, arrows and permit restrictions, making it tough to decipher for even the most expert parker. "It's like a beautiful oasis in a sea of occupied spots," Reese said. "It's even shaded! I just can't figure out those goddamned signs."

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Eva Recinos

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*Southern California's First 'Parklet' Asks the Question: What is a Park, Really?

If you felt like Downtown needed more nature to counteract its vast plains of concrete, consider your pleads heard -- somewhat.

Earlier this month, the City of Los Angeles and Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC) unveiled two parklets on Spring Street between 6th and 7th Streets -- in front of L.A. Cafe and Syrup Desserts -- to encourage residents to walk and bike more often. By definition, a parklet uses the space normally given to a parking spot and turns it into a mini-park.

Last year, a similar parklet sprung up in Long Beach as part of the project Park(ing) Day. The original inspiration for parklets came from San Francisco's "Pavement to Parks" program, and besides giving a different look to public space, the parklets serve as experiments in a larger project. For 14 months, the Spring Street Parklet Impact Study brings together USC's School of Architecture, the DLANC and the Lewis Center at UCLA to analyze the effects of the parklets in the city.

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Wendy Gilmartin

Coke drum rolls down PCH

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Last night, Chevron began moving two of six 500,000-pound coke drums -- that's oil industry lingo for processing units -- up from the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro to its refinery in El Segundo. Technically, Chevron's drums moved across the city in much the same way the Space Shuttle Endeavor and Michael Heiser's Levitated Mass boulder did last year, but like a D-list version of L.A.'s great street-closing spectacles of late, this cavalcade was met with virtually zero fanfare. And that's just the way Chevron likes it.

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PHOTO BY PAUL T. BRADLEY

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*I Was Sick of L.A. Traffic So I Took a Plane to Work

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.

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Photo by Joseph Lapin

It was raining in Los Angeles during the 2011 Christmas week, and the traffic on the 405 near the Getty Center was jammed. I had left Long Beach two hours earlier, and it would still be another hour before I arrived at work in Woodland Hills.

That morning the red brake lights were staring at me like blood-shot eyes. Angelenos have no idea how to drive in the rain, which causes both accidents and soul-sucking congestion. I wanted to kick out my windows; I wanted to lie on the horn; I wanted to turn around and forget about this city of freaking angels.

This wasn't matching the fantasy I'd created back in Massachusetts. Before I moved, I studied pictures of the Pacific Ocean and devoured Kerouac and Stegner, the stories of the beautiful people and the musicians, actors and writers who made their dreams come true. I had bought into the California dream, and I wanted my piece. So years later, at 25, I became one of the many who crossed the desert like ancient wanderers, driving until the Pacific Ocean, suddenly, was in view before me. I had never seen anything so vast, so stunning.

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Jon Haynes Photography

I'm just going to have one more beer and I'll still be good to drive, right?

Car culture was the last element I embraced in my new life as an Angeleno. The first few months I lived here, filling my gas tank made me physically ill. The cost! The fossil fuels! The hours spent in traffic! I may have cried about it once or twice, alone in my sad sublet behind one of Silver Lake's six thousand hair salons.

Three years later, I relish surface-street shortcut strategies just as much as I once relished plotting how best to escape my high school's Bronx campus to sneak down to IHOP during assemblies, and I crave Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne on my morning commute just as much as I once craved a novel or a newspaper.

And yet I still cannot stomach the casual ubiquity of drunk driving in this city. I see it every weekend among friends, acquaintances and strangers. The stammering insistence that you are cogent. The shrug showing you believe there is no alternative. The sloppy slip into the driver's seat.

Over a thousand Angelenos got DUIs the week of July 4th. Seriously, Los Angeles. We need to talk. Why must you weave a dangerous game of Russian roulette along the freeways and boulevards every weekend?

I have a few theories.

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Metro

Sam Erenberg's artwork at the Roscoe station

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The Expo Line's opening last spring may have snagged all the headlines, but a few months later, the Valley debuted its own transit triumph: the Orange Line busway completed its 18-mile route connecting North Hollywood to Chatsworth. This light-rail-on-wheels has become an internationally recognized and locally beloved institution, and a new exhibition showcasing its public art program, explaining the process behind the artworks that are at 18 stations now dotting the San Fernando Valley.

Twenty artists are featured in the show, which is on view until Dec. 13 in a gallery tucked into Los Angeles Valley College's art building in Valley Glen. The roster includes lead artist Renée Petropoulos, whose vision was to create a "necklace" of artworks that string through the Valley, so each station is portrayed as a link in this chain, with uniform elements like elliptical mosaics and porcelain enamel steel panels. Even the Orange Line's landscaping is a work of art: we learn that landscape artist Jud Fine chose the distances between trees, for example, to create a sense of movement.

For the rest of the 18 artists, who are all working in California, the exhibition shows the explorations that led to their site-specific works as well as photos of their work in context at each of the stations. Seeing them together, themes emerge. Most artists, for example, chose to nod to one of the Valley's major exports like agriculture, entertainment and tectonic shifts (no porn industry references, however).

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Anna Jones

If Kobe can fly to work, why not me?

I am flying westward over the Angeles Crest Mountains, the morning sun shining down over the San Fernando Valley as it spreads out below me and we bank south. The Cessna 152, aptly named "the Commuter," cruises at just over 3,500 feet as we travel from the Agua Dulce Airpark toward Santa Monica Airport -- a 47-mile trip that will put me just two miles from my office in Culver City.

Exhilaration rushes through me as the plane reaches optimal speed, or "trues out," at about 95 knots, the propeller spinning in a blur. The pilot, Michael Gold, checks in with air traffic control, effortlessly communicating a long string of flight information consisting of letters and numbers. I may be on my way to work, but this is definitely not an ordinary workday.

I don't usually commute by small plane. Other than the Lakers' Kobe Bryant -- who famously helicopters from Newport Beach to Staples Center -- who does? Since I started my job a year ago, in fact, I've been commuting almost 70 miles round-trip each day on L.A.'s jam-packed streets, spending, on average, three hours (or more) stuck in traffic on the 405.

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Alissa Walker

The streets of Venice Beach whir with the crunchy hum of skateboards, the utterly '80s rhythm of Rollerblades, the impossible physics of a surfer pedaling a beach cruiser barefoot, one arm slung around a board. A new design exhibition on Abbot Kinney that focuses on human-powered movement is almost ridiculously place-specific, since many of the products hanging on the wall are just as likely to go whizzing by outside.

"Moving LA: People-Powered Design" is a collaboration between two Venice designers: furniture designer Ilan Dei, whose studio is a few blocks away, and product designer Stuart Karten, whose firm designs medical technology like hearing aids. When Dei tossed out the idea for Karten to curate a show in his new pop-up store on Abbot Kinney, the overriding theme was already obvious: Dei and Karten met 15 years ago at Dei's first store, passed each other on the Venice bike path a few days later, and have been riding together ever since.

In choosing the products, Karten focused in on three areas -- wellness, recreation and transportation -- but he quickly realized the lines between them were blurred. In essence, the products on display show how Southern Californians have made the best of moving through our exquisite climate and unique geography, says Karten. "It's how people rationalize their existence in the outdoors. It's not enough just to be hanging out outside -- I gotta be doing something."

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Tanja M. Laden

The Kansas

Los Angeles Union Station isn't just a mass-transport hub. It's also a semi-retirement home for a cluster of vintage railroad cars that occupy the station's annex, also known as "the garden." Most of the trains won't move. A few get lucky and land the occasional film permit, scoring a cameo in a scene that calls for an old-timey train. Others, like the garden's newest residents, get facelifts and hit the tracks.

The American Railway Explorer is a group of three train cars, each named after a U.S. state: Kansas, Utah and California. They were originally part of the Ski Train, a 14-car passenger railway shuttle that transported Denver residents (mostly kids) 56 miles to the Winter Park Resort. The Ski Train ran from the 1940s until 2009, when the Canadian National Railway bought most of its cars, except these. Now, each of the three vehicles is available for charter at a rate of $5000 a day, not including Amtrak charges, liquor and food by the American Railway Explorer's exclusive caterer, Wolfgang Puck. Still, it seems like a decent price to travel back in time to the golden age of travel, if you have the money.

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