[www.sgvtribune.com]

Baby you can drive my car./ Yes I’m gonna be a star./ Baby you can drive my car./And maybe I love you./Beep beep’m beep beep yeah.

-- The Beatles

Caught a cool retrospective on the ‘80s in L.A. last week. Some of it was about driving your car and gazing at the strategically placed billboards featuring the anonymous bombshell, Angelyne.

The PR, talent-less, curvy blonde was always pictured behind a wheel. She would not have been possible outside of the dominant L.A. car culture.

Trying to be a star by driving in a car owned by John Lennon or Paul McCartney might have foreshadowed that connection between Hollywood glitterati and fancy steel cars with piston-pumping engines. The Beatles sung about it then but the shine may be off the rose.

Still, when someone tells me he’s joined the car-less culture in Los Angeles County, or that he or she is cool or trendy by not owning a car and riding trains and buses, I’m thinking they are like salmon, swimming upstream.

What’s cool about standing with your face pressed against the glass of the 7:42 a.m. southbound Metro Gold Line train to Union Station?

A lot, if you listen to Brad Colerick, a South Pasadena singer-songwriter who draws inspiration from bus and train rides around L.A.

“I’m inspired by the characters I’ve encountered,” said Colerick, who lives a half mile from the South Pasadena Gold Line Station. “It would take my mind to creatively different places than if I was sitting in my car on a freeway.”

He even wrote a song about girls going to a bachelorette party from a real-life plane ride to Vegas.

Edward Solis uses snapshots to convince you that his train ride from South Pasadena to Hollywood awakens a sense of adventure in him. He’s posted 100 separate photos of the ride at the South Pasadena Library on Saturday, where he and Colerick will be part of a “Car Free in a Car Culture” exhibit from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The snapshots take you behind the scenes of our Hollywood backdrop lives. You see architecture of different shapes. You view new people both on the train and on the platforms.

“They (mass transit riders) are also able to get a better view of what L.A. has to offer, including its architecture, geography, and diverse cultures,” he told the South Pasadena Review.

Though not a regular train rider, I can relate. The Gold Line crossing the Arroyo Seco makes me feel like I’m flying, like I’m one of those red-tailed hawks that encircle the riparian landscape. Going underground at the Red Line’s Hollywood station changed the way I see that part of L.A. I just take the train there and catch a movie and eat at one of the restaurants at Hollywood and Highland. So much easier.



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Like Solis says, your mind relaxes when you don’t have to find a gas station, a parking garage or navigate L.A. traffic. The stress level goes way down. “No endless wild goose chases looking for — or purchasing — parking. It’s just on and off, off and on,” he said in the article.

The freeways have divided us Angelenos into silos. Oppressive freeway traffic keep us locked in our quadrants like prisoners.

“We need to overcome this isolation our dependence on the automobile has fostered,” Solis told the Review.

What these two guys think about commuting is so opposite of most of us. They view cars and freeways as isolating and buses and trains freeing.

Colerick used to go completely car-less. Now he owns a Prius. But he still sometimes takes mass transit, like the 780 bus down Colorado Boulevard into Hollywood.

“The experience is great. You are interacting with people, not always the people you want to,” Colerick said, laughing. “But you observe life a little more closely.”