I realize this won’t work in LA, but if you are traveling for fun/vacation, why not check out places with functional public transit so you don’t need a car?
San Francisco, Portland, New York, European Cities, etc.
Because you still need a car in those places if you want to experience them fully. Eg hiking in the East Bay is still pretty inaccessible by public transport from SF. So yes, you can enjoy the landmarks in the city, but if you want to visit adjacent cities and/or nature - you still need to spend a fortune on Uber or rent a car.
Two friends and myself went to New York for the HOPE conference in Manhattan. We drove there but we're midwesterners so we didn't want to drive in the city proper. Our plan was to drive to New Jersey, leave our car at a friend-of-a-friend's place, and then catch the train into the city.
All went well until we were on our way home. The friend-of-a-friend was supposed to pick us up from the train station and drive us 5 minutes to his house so we could get in our car and head west. But he wasn't answering his phone.
While we sat there wondering what to do, I saw a pizza place across the street that said "free delivery" on the sign. I joked that we should order a pizza, give the address where our car was at, and then ask if the driver would deliver us as well. Without laughing, my one friend said, "let's give it a try" and strode off towards the restaurant. We explained our situation and a few minutes later the pizza guy was delivering the pizza, and us, to our car.
You can visit Philadelphia by train from New York.
I'm actually planning a trip with a friend through the Northeast Regional. You can start at the White House / Smithsonian (seeing all of the history there), hop on a train to Philadelphia to see the liberty bell + the original capital of the country, then hop on a train and continue to NYC / Broadway and watch Hamilton.
No car (or airplane) needed. 100% trains / metros.
As a Philly resident... yep. For those visiting, honestly if you plan to stay anywhere near Center City having a car is more of a hassle than not. Our transit system isn't perfect but it's easily the best way to get around the core parts of the city.
And yeah whenever I visit NYC from here it's always by train.
This isn't really a sight-seeing thing, but grab a cheese steak! Pat's/Gino's are the famous spots where everyone takes photos, but IMO they're mostly tourist traps at this point. Worst cheese steaks I've had within 100 miles of Philly. Jim's is a good spot, plus it's on South Street which is a good area to walk around in.
The South Street area is also home to a bunch of mozaic murals by Isaiah Zagar, which are definitely worth checking out. There are official tours, but you can also just check out the neighborhood map here and explore some of them on your own: https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/mosaic-mural-map...
If you like walks, check out the Schuylkill River Trail - it got caught up in the recent flooding so I'm not sure what kind of shape it's in right now, but I assume it'll get cleaned up pretty quick if it hasn't been already. The view of 30th Street Station and a nearby USPS building is pretty cool at night. I've heard it can get a little sketchy if you're down on the trail at night, but as a 6ft tall white guy I never ran into any issues on the route walked home from work for ~8 months. Your mileage may vary, but the worst thing I ever encountered was kids my age smoking weed down by the river.
Go to Arch St & N Independence Mall E. See B. Frankie's grave, Christ Church. Walk south down Independence to Chestnut. See the Bell, Independence Hall. Walk east to S 3rd St, seeing the Second Bank, Carpenters Hall, First Bank. Walk south on 3rd to Walnut, see Merchant Exchange Building. Walk West on Walnut, see 18th Century Garden, Dolly Todd House. At Washington Square, walk diagonally down to Locust Street, keep walking west down Locust about 12 blocks to Rittenhouse Square, but stop along the way for lunch and a cocktail. Walk counter-clockwise around Rittenhouse and then go South on South 19th St, until South St. Head east on South St for 18 blocks, until 2nd St. Head North on 2nd St to Spruce St, and then head East for 2 blocks to Spruce Street Harbor. At this point it should be evening, and either you can go home or check out bars/restaurants in Old Town which is about where you are.
You can also take a detour at Broad St up to City Hall (take the Broad Street line subway up and back down if you're tired). See the hall, see the Masonic Temple, see the smallest "LOVE" sign ever at Love Park. Back towards Old City there's Thomas Jefferson's little place while he was writing it, Declaration House. There's the oldest continuously inhabited street in America, with a little art walk on Fridays around there. And of course there's the Art Museum and Waterworks behind it.
If you want to speed up your whole trip, make strategic use of Philly's Indego bikes. A bike is a great way to tour up the Schyulkill, to get to the Art Museum, and head north along the bike trail past boathouse row.
Amtrak is the best way to get between those cities imo. Puts you in the center of the city and avoids a cab onto the island through traffic. Did it for work a bunch
Agree that Amtrak is the best way if you can afford it. If you're on a budget you can also take SEPTA to Trenton and transfer to NJT into NYC. Puts you at the same place, just takes a bit longer.
If you're trying to save money, the bus system works. But... ugggh.
Train is more expensive for good reason! Its a much better experience. If we're talking about the price of Uber-rides / Rental Cars from NYC to Adirondacks... I bet you that the Train to Philly or even Washington DC will be cheaper than a rental car + all those miles you put on it!
So IMO, save your sanity and go with the train. But the busses exist if you really need to cut back on $$$ even more.
- Trains get to skip traffic, but rental car might be cheaper if you're splitting it with friends.
- Trains do break down or hit delays sometimes, but traffic is always a risk on I95.
- Buses are the cheapest but have random people (dice roll) and traffic.
- Parking a rental car might not be cheap in a city center but can be a wash depending on transit costs. Again, parking cost can be split with friends.
Oh no, I do mean by train! Both the SEPTA route and the NJT route I was referring to are trains - they just don't go the whole way from Philly->NYC, so you need a transfer.
Now, frequency on SEPTA's Regional Rail lines has tanked during the pandemic, so using it may not be as practical as it once was. Haven't checked recently. Hopefully they get service back to reasonable levels.
A car is usually pretty optional for most places in Europe. Some natural areas like the Alps have better public transit than most US city centers. Not everywhere is as allergic to public transit as most of the US.
SF is also one of the better US cities in this regard. I spent several months in SF without a car and rented a car exactly one weekend to get to some further out hiking. There are actually plenty of transit accessible natural areas.
Agreed, as a resident of Portland, when we have guests in town, we spend about half their time in the natural areas around Portland. Granted getting to wine country or beautiful waterfalls can be done with various public transit options, sorta, it isn't easy. And you certainly aren't going to get off the beaten path.
If you're doing a day hike, that's what car shares are for. There's plenty in the East Bay and SF. I only started owning a car when a friend gave us their old beater, but before that and through the earlier portions of the pandemic I used car shares any time I wanted to go hiking.
LA has more extensive public transit than either sf or portland. you can get around (to basically all of the tourist destinations) just fine by train, bus (gasp!), scooters and bikes, with the occasional lyft to fill the gaps.
Maybe it's gotten better? I did a summer at UCLA a bunch of years back and I remember it took me about 2 hours to get from LAX to UCLA via bus (and the bus dropped me on the far side of campus from where I wanted to be). At the end of the summer I knew someone with a car so I was able to get a ride from the dorm to LAX, door-to-door in something like 20 minutes. I was shocked, I had no idea the airport was that close by.
Over the summer I used the bus to get around and it worked well for some destinations (I spent a lot of time in Santa Monica because that was easy) but there were others that just seemed too much of a pain (I wanted to see what Malibu was about but never did).
Now as an adult who can afford a rental car I don't think I would consider going car-free for a trip to LA, unless the trip had a narrow focus (e.g. convention at convention center all week).
as @asdff noted, the point-to-point flyaway bus to ucla was a great, cheaper alternative, but limited service really hampers its utility. it's no consolation to you, but ucla will be connected to the purple (D) line in a couple years, which will make getting around LA from ucla much easier by public transit.
but even more frustrating was the decision not to extend the green (C) line train directly into LAX (due to lobbying by taxi interests and others). rather than even the flyaway, we should have a train line directly from LAX into downtown, a key regional business travel destination. there even was a historical train right-of-way for much (all?) of that route, but it's since been sold and parceled out.
The only useful way to get to the airport via transit in LA is to take the flyaway bus. They used to have a line servicing UCLA directly before the pandemic but they've since cut most of the routes after the pandemic.
The train is actually the one form of transit that usually beats driving, at least the trains that are grade separated (red and purple). There is no faster way to get between downtown LA and hollywood than the redline for most of the day. The expo line is pretty slow since a lot of it runs at grade, but even then it can beat a day with terrible traffic on the 10 going into santa monica.
Agreed. Over the past decade I've commuted by some combination of all of LA's train lines, and the orange line, too.
Red and purple and the best. Although purple's lack of distance degrades the value. Green, yellow, and expo are decent, but Yellow running at-grade degrades the utility somewhat, as for the expo line, as you said. The Green line didn't freaking connect to LAX, completely negating it's potential utility.
Blue line and orange line are by far the worst, being entirely at street level and interrupted constantly with cross traffic.
Honestly, what really needs to happen is: 1) Purple line completes intended extension. 2) Submerge the blue line and install new station for connection w/ green. 3) The orange line needs to be submerged and absorbed by the red 4) New rail line from the I-5 that follows the 405 S. It would connect with the expo, LAX/green lines, and terminate with the blue line in LB. The red line would connect/intersect with it slightly north of the 101.
Already, those are pipe-dreams due to... well, everything about building public infrastructure. But LA does have the bones for some decent public transit, even if they'll never really invest in it.
God bless you public transport boosters but the idea of stringing together 3-4 different types of transportation to get around doesn’t seem like a very relaxing vacation to me. Renting a car is just so much easier…
But at the same time San Francisco is indeed a nightmare to park in. I had the worst rental car luck of my life in San Francisco - and no, I didn't really want to have a car in SF, but I was taking a road trip up from LA, then San Luis Obispo, through Big Sur, to SF and then onwards to wine country.
We stayed a couple of nights with a friend in SF, and on the first night I hunted for what felt like an hour to find a street parking space, and I FINALLY found an open spot that didn't have any signs for parking restrictions. The next day we went to get the car and it was gone. There was red paint and "NO PARKING" on the curb that I missed in the dark, so the car was towed to a city impound. In addition to a parking ticket, there was a nasty note on the windshield about how I was a bad person for parking in front of a physical therapy facility and infirm people rely on that spot to be dropped off, etc. Something like $500 later, I retrieved the rental car and got lucky this time with a legal spot right in front of my friend's house. Shortly thereafter, I heard a crash out front and thought "wouldn't it be funny if that was our car?". It was. An elderly gentleman plowed into it. But apparently not before parking enforcement had visited again - there was another ticket on the windshield, apparently this time I hadn't properly curbed my wheels on the gently sloped street.
So yeah, in San Francisco I might take the flawed public transit, or Uber/Lyft, or scooters, or walking, or crawling or anything else over bringing a car into the city.
Can't really help you with parking in the red. That's on you, and something to look for parking anywhere in the country.
Curbing your tires is definitely something an out of towner wouldn't know, so I feel you on that. It has a decent reasoning, at least.
The real problem with public transit is that there are a bunch of routes that need multiple transfers and take 3x as long as by car (with none of the reliability). Most places will have parking within 2-3 blocks or garages, but yeah it's tough.
What color would be better? Green seems like a poor choice when telling someone not to park there.. Yellow is already taken (loading zone). Blue is already taken (handicap). Orange is close to yellow, and is that even better in the dark?
Signs for every single red zone is overkill (there are red zones on the edge of garages for example).
SF seemed like a walkable city when I visited. I walked from my hotel to Fishermans Warf and back (back is a LOT of up hill). But I think at least parts of it are pretty walkable.
Just for example: When I visit my family over holidays, they live 10 miles from the nearest bus station, 35 miles from the nearest Amtrak station, and 100 miles from the nearest international airport, nearly two states away. There are no local taxis, busses, light rail, nothing. I'm not sure how public transportation would ever work for this kind of trip. This is the case for the vast majority of small towns in the USA.
Assuming your family have a car, wouldn't they meet you at the bus station/railway station/airport?
Mine almost always do, even though there are much better public transport options than you have. I don't generally have any use for a car while I'm visiting them, so there would be no point renting one.
(I can see this would be different if you are a family of five or similar.)
Public transportation works for that type of trip in some places. Not in the US though. If the dense cities can't even make it work where it is easy there is no point in trying those places that you point out where it is hard.
Good idea, but I'd definitely do a lot of reading before going that route. In some cities with a seemingly functional public transit...well, it's not one you'd want to use.
NoVa/DC and SF are both good examples though of generally safe, effective public transport.(not speaking of Portland or NY as I haven't used theirs)
San Francisco, Portland, New York, European Cities, etc.