I'm kind of an insider/outsider. Being from CA but living out of town currently affords me both perspectives.

I love trains and often plan trips around them. (This last one was mainly designed for me to take the Surfliner from L.A. to SAN. My next one is to take the Acela from BOS to NYC. The one after that is to take the Acela from DC to NYC. On those two trips, I'm not even planning to rent a car, because I can get around DC, NYC and BOS all on foot and by subway, which completely thrills me.

But there are some places that just doesn't work--both for locals and for tourists. L.A. is one of those places.

Kef's right when he says the Metro trains don't go anywhere you need to go. L.A. covers a HUGE area--I can't give a size comparison off the top of my head, but it wouldn't surprise me if the L.A./Orange County megalopolis is the size of a small East Coast state.

OK, wow. I just did some research, courtesy of the Wikipedia. What is considered the "Greater Los Angeles Area" is 1,000 km^2 larger than the state of Maine.

That's a heck of a lot of area to cover with only four Metro lines (the R/G/B lines and the new Gold line). And it's complicated by another problem: L.A.'s suburban spread is so vast that the traditional notion of "downtown"--the "CBD" ("central business district") where everyone goes to work--doesn't apply here. Yes, there is a "downtown" with some high-rises and business headquarters, but it's largely ignored: Most Angelenos could quite possibly spend their entire lives without setting foot in downtown L.A. Most of the city is made of a spread of single-family housing neighborhoods with commercial development spread along the main streets and centralized in numerous points throughout the cities. Combine that with the fact that most people can live and work on opposite sides of the city--you can live in Pasadena and work in Palos Verdes (between which there are no train connections)--and you have an area in which public transportation just will not work, at least not without a MAJOR, multi-trillion-dollar project of dozens of high-speed train lines, perhaps operating in a large ring-and-spoke system with feeder lines going everywhere.

So, in addition to the four Metro light-rail/subway lines, there are six Metrolink lines (full-sized "heavy" rail commuter trains). But even with these, most of the residents of the Los Angeles area are still anywhere from a 10 to 30 minute drive (much less walk)--if not more--from the nearest Metrolink station. The best the Metrolink can do is operate as a park-and-ride...and not a very efficient one at that.

And hotturnip's comment is somewhat on, but I digress on a few points. First, yes, it's possible to navigate to some of L.A.'s tourist sites by train, but it's inconvenient and slow. And many of the sites--from Griffith Observatory to Disneyland and thousands of others--are not immediately accessible by train (in the case of Disneyland, one might be able to find a hotel shuttle or bus that can pick you up from the Anaheim train station, but the station's not immediately next to the park). Entire areas of Los Angeles are missing from rail access (both Metro and Metrolink). And if the Metro lines are intended to be convenient for tourists to avoid renting cars, their first mistake is not hooking the Green Line directly to the airport terminals.

I'd love to see a functional public transit and train system in L.A. I just don't think it's feasible, due to the way L.A. is laid out. But if one ever appears and people use it, it'd be awesome for two reasons: a) it'd be fun to ride and b) the freeways would be clear so I could set my cruise control at 95 and not have to worry about traffic.

:-D

G'night,
Jackal