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.
San Francisco, Portland, New York, European Cities, etc.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
So my decision is usually situational.
And yeah whenever I visit NYC from here it's always by train.
I was planning on mostly wandering around aimlessly (actually, I'll probably still do that :-) ). But I'm all ears for any "must see" locations.
Liberty Bell + museums are the main thing I know about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Signs for every single red zone is overkill (there are red zones on the edge of garages for example).
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.)
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)
Citation needed: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/02/20/transit-overl... "San Francisco’s example may be the worst in the United States"
But I can think of all of one trip in the past 10 years in the US where I felt like I was someplace where I could rely on public transportation.
It's just not viable for most trips in the US I think.