If Los Angeles is understood only as the city of the personal vehicle, where the landscape is both dedicated to and seen from a personal vehicle, all other modes of transit appear as out of place anomalies.
Through a car-centric framing, buses, bikes and pedestrians function as interruptions. In Ed Ruscha’s photographs of Sunset Boulevard, buses quite literally block the frame, obscuring the built landscape beyond. For hurried drivers, buses block traffic as passengers enter and exit. Bus passengers become pedestrians, those rare people caught only in fleeting glimpses from Ruscha’s and other drivers’ moving vehicles. Then they too become interruptions as they stop traffic to cross the street. Even less visible are cyclists—dangerously hard to see from vehicles, and ephemeral at best in the archive—but they also slip into the landscape between cars and buildings along Sunset Boulevard.
Ruscha, intentionally or not, captures a more complicated landscape where the infrastructure of buses, cycling, and walking are very much in place, often outlasting buildings and other land uses along the boulevard. Though transit companies change and restructure routes, bus stops visible in 1966 are more than likely still occupying their same curb space in 2007. The stretch of Sunset captured here is adjoined by ample sidewalks—they infamously end at the edge of Beverly Hills—although pedestrians and cyclists vary by time of day and neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, the four-lane thoroughfare has limited cycle use, though the addition of a dedicated bike lane stretching from Silver Lake to Downtown by 2007 hints at a more bike-friendly future. Taken together, these glimpses of bus riders, cyclists, and pedestrians show a version of Los Angeles’s urban space constituted not just by and for the car. Instead, we find a city made through the collective life of the street, manifest through the multiple modes by which people travel along it.
Ruscha, intentionally or not, captures a more complicated landscape where the infrastructure of buses, cycling, and walking are very much in place, often outlasting buildings and other land uses along the boulevard.
Officially, Sunset Boulevard stretches 22 miles, roughly east to west across the city, connecting LA’s downtown with the Pacific Ocean and dozens of neighborhoods in between. Wilshire and Venice Boulevards, more than two miles to the south, are the only other surface streets to make similar journeys without interruption. As a point of comparison with New York—one sure to irk Angelenos tired of the apple and orange equivalences, but useful for grasping Sunset as a transit corridor—Broadway runs just about 21 miles from the lower tip of Manhattan to the upper Bronx. Rarely, in either city, would one have occasion to walk, cycle, or ride a bus end-to-end, but tens of thousands of people make use of both streets daily as public transit connections between the places they need to be. And they do so without ever setting foot in a car.
I Do My Best Thinking on the Bus
In Alex Cox’s Los Angeles cult classic, Repo Man (1984), the eccentric auto mechanic Miller delivers a monologue on the “lattice of coincidences”: a plate of shrimp, a cosmic unconsciousness, and his theory that flying saucers are time machines disappearing people from Latin America to populate the past with the first humans. The extended soliloquy culminates with Miller stating, “I think about this stuff a lot. I do my best thinking on the bus.” The absurd scene cuttingly satirizes LA’s affair with Scientology and superficial media, as well as the US government’s denial of supporting right-wing violence in Central and South America; but the linchpin of the scene, what marks Miller as a deviant in 1980s LA, is his refusal to drive a car. Miller’s concluding thought, “the more you drive, the less intelligent you are,” lands as a stinging blow to an autocentric culture while playing into a caricature that buses are for the abnormal.
In fact, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro) measures the daily users of public transit in the hundreds of thousands. Non-car mobility remains visibly segregated, however, along lines of race, class, age, and ability. In Ruscha’s photos across the decades, the vast majority of people waiting at bus stops present as people of color. Frequently people are dressed for service jobs. They tend to be older, or too young to drive. The images below of 5067, 4711, and 3535 Sunset Boulevard are just a few examples that make this clear. The camera does not reveal the complexities of people’s life stories or their motivations for taking a bus. People choose public transit for a plethora of reasons: some people are ecologically conscious, others want to avoid hunting for parking, and some are tourists out to see Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. But the vast majority of riders use buses out of necessity: to get to work, school, services, family, or friends across long distances without a car.1
Operation of the buses along Sunset Boulevard shifted from the Southern California Rapid Transit District (RTD) to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) after the state forced transit agencies to merge in 1993. Some routes were removed, especially after the opening of the station at 4661 Sunset Boulevard, where the subway crosses Sunset at Vermont. But throughout these changes, there remained a diverse group of people waiting for the next bus on the 2 or the 4 route.
Despite regular ridership, access to reliable bus service has remained a social and economic justice issue in Los Angeles. In 1992, transit riders began to organize into the Bus Riders Union, and by 1996 they had brought the Metro to court for violating the Civil Rights Act through its disproportionate spending of federal funds on wealthier, whiter train riders over bus riders. In March 2002, after years of litigation, the US Supreme Court refused to review the case and forced Metro to expand its bus fleet and provide better public transit service to communities of color across the region.2 Ruscha’s photos anecdotally illustrate the results. The number of people gathered at bus stops does not change dramatically across the years of photos, but the camera captures significantly more buses passing in front of the lens in 2007 than in 1985.
Transit justice in LA still has a long way to go, but the photographs reveal one small, incremental change: a growing number of covered bus shelters. Protection from the elements is something riders have been demanding for years. Unshaded sidewalk temperatures can easily surpass 120° F, and ubiquitous palm trees provide little shade on a hot day. There are still too few bus shelters, and riders can be seen doing their best to find respite from the sun—as at 3909 Sunset Boulevard below—or, we can imagine, from Southern California's torrential downpours in the winter. But shelters are far more common than they once were. At 8906 Sunset Boulevard, for example, replacement benches appeared between 1985 and 1995, and a shelter enclosed new benches entirely by 2007.
Danger: Pedestrian Crossing
One of Los Angeles’s great car-centric myths, frequently satirized in film and television, is that one needs a car to get anywhere. This myth erases the fact that many people, especially along Sunset, live in relatively self-contained neighborhoods that provide much of what people want and need: from groceries and services to entertainment and nightlife, to say nothing of neighbors and a sense of community. Some people even work near their homes, though most employment still tends to require venturing further afield. The photographs reveal many of the neighborhoods along Sunset changing dramatically as new communities move in and existing residents are, in turn, displaced. Throughout the changes, however, places with dense concentrations of commercial use remain sites of pedestrian mobility.
Ruscha’s morning photo sessions on the Sunset Strip did not always capture the vibrant street life that emerges at unexpected moments in LA. There are no crowds of rock fans outside the Whisky A Go Go, nor families milling outside the Hollywood Farmers’ Market. Still, his camera found people of all walks of life walking in LA. As with those waiting for buses, there is no way to know from the photographs why people may be walking: whether they are simply going from their car parked nearby to a shop, or to catch a bus, meet friends at a neighborhood restaurant, or attend religious services. Or perhaps they are just out to enjoy the pleasures of a stroll. Whatever the case may be, wide, flat sidewalks make much of Sunset Boulevard a surprisingly walkable street, despite its reputation as the heart of a car cruising culture. Pedestrians are never far from the flow of traffic; but, unlike many other major boulevards and car-centric-areas, Sunset Boulevard affords significant space for people to stand and gather or walk across the urban fabric.
Wide, flat sidewalks make much of Sunset Boulevard a surprisingly walkable street, despite its reputation as the heart of a car cruising culture.
Even when pedestrians are not present in the frame, signage marks their presence in the landscape. Most ubiquitous are signs—like the one in front of 8433 Sunset Boulevard—telling pedestrians that crossing the boulevard outside of official crosswalks is prohibited. In the car-loving city, moving one’s body across the street was an expensive crime for decades. High fines for jaywalking fell disproportionately on people of color, lower-income people, and unhoused people who were simply less likely to be in cars, but needed to get between places without walking excessive distances.3 Thanks to significant organizing, on January 1, 2023, a statewide “Freedom to Walk” bill went into effect, allowing pedestrians to cross wherever is convenient as long as they are not creating a dangerous situation. Police have discretion over what they perceive as hazardous, however, and the disproportionate targeting of racialized and classed pedestrians for penalties may continue.
Two Wheels Too Few
At the start of the 20th century, before Los Angeles became synonymous with car culture, local boosters hailed the city as one of the great bicycle capitals of the world. Free from regular rain and snow, the relatively flat, expansive plain of the Los Angeles basin was crosscut with long, straight roads. Even with the speculative expansion of surface rail lines across the region, plenty of space remained for cyclists to move around. Although the dream of a cycling city did not last long, bicycles remain a popular and often necessary mode of transportation for many in Los Angeles. At various times, city officials and organizers have worked to make the city more bike-friendly and to promote biking as an environmentally friendly alternative to cars.4 For most Angelenos, however, sharing a street like Sunset Boulevard with cars—and buses that need to cut in and out of traffic—is an extremely dangerous way to traverse the city. Bikers remain a relatively minor presence on Sunset, with the occasional bike rack and stretch of bike lane being exceptional rather than common forms.
“People on the streets, tryin' to find a plan”5
It will be hard to undo a century of investment in a landscape overwhelmingly oriented towards the personal vehicle. Such a transformation will be necessary, however, if Los Angeles is to persist amid climate change. The transportation alternatives captured in a half century of Ruscha’s photos provide one piece of a bigger picture of what is already possible without having to rebuild the entire city. At the same time, the photos also depict gentrification and the displacement of communities from denser parts of the city at the very moment when alternative modes of transit are being lauded and made more available by local government. Who will be walking, cycling, and waiting on a bus in the future—and where they will be able to go—remains an open question.
