I finish the LA Times crossword in about the 20 minutes it takes to ride the Gold Line to downtown LA from my stop in Pasadena, that can't be done while driving? I just read Kurt Vonnegut's final book, and that was leisure time. That 20 minutes is slightly less time than driving the Pasadena Freeway, too.

The individual who equated the cost of driving only with fuel, apparently doesn't realize that the biggest auto operating cost is mileage based vehicle depreciation, and in California (where we have mandated distanced based insurance) insurance. Both of these mileage based costs dwarf even today's fuel cost. The Automobile Club estimates a per mile cost over 80 cents per mile, fully allocated, to operate a vehicle. If you park in an area with paid parking like downtown LA, Hollywood, downtown Pasadena, that may result in saving another of $100-200 per month.

"Free" (ususally suburban) parking is, in fact, estimated to be the biggest single "public" subsidy to the use of the automobile. It is, in most cases an indirect public "subsidy", because it is mandated to be involuntarily oversupplied as a condition of land use by local zoning regulation. In LA it is estimated that there are aproximately 26 parking spaces per vehicle. At today's cost a parking space is between $10,000 and $50,000 per space, depending on land costs and construction type (surface, structure, underground). That parking cost could represent an investment as much as twenty times the cost of buying the car. The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in parking dwarfs the investment in mass transit, and makes the subsidy to transit seem trivial by comparison.

The train certainly doesn't work for all trips in LA, but what we have has set records for the last 4 months straight, and is getting overcrowded, even on some weekend and evening services.

And, it sure beats LA traffic, if you can use it.