There’s an L.A. Visitors Office, if You Can Find It

Mark Swartjes was puffing as he pedaled his bicycle up a hill overlooking Malibu Beach and pulled to a stop.

“How far is L.A.?” he shouted over the Pacific Coast Highway traffic noise as Tobias Paglman pulled up behind him and fished out a wrinkled map.

The two Dutch college students were riding their bikes toward Los Angeles and the end of a 45-day excursion across America that had taken them from Boston to San Francisco.

Their trip so far had been delightful. They had no trouble getting from New England through the Midwest to the West Coast. Now they were bracing for the City of the Angels.

“We’ve heard a lot of people say that L.A.’s not too nice because it has no center,” said Swartjes, of Roermond, Holland. Added Paglman, of Soest: “I’ve read that it has the worst traffic jams and that it’s impossible to get around.”

Whether they come from Holland, Hokkaido or Hartford, tourists making their way to Los Angeles this summer are coming to the same conclusion: L.A. can be a tough city to negotiate.

There are too many cars. And there are too few street maps, parking places, freeway directional signs and locals able to accurately explain how to get there from here.

“I’d heard that public transportation is virtually non-existent here,” shrugged Des Tiernan, of Drogheda, Ireland, as he stood with friend Annie O’Shea of Cork at the corner of 7th and Flower streets in downtown Los Angeles. They were wearing 50-pound backpacks and puzzled expressions.

Ironically, they were standing atop a temporary wooden sidewalk above the partly completed Metro Rail subway tunnel as they spoke of traveling to Long Beach on the new Blue Line trolley. But there were no directional signs on the street. And passers-by at the busy corner were unable to direct them to the trolley station.

It figured. When Tiernan and O’Shea arrived, they paid $10 each for a shuttle bus ride from Los Angeles International Airport to the Los Angeles Visitor Information Office at the downtown Hilton. But the bus driver mistakenly dropped them off instead at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The pair ended up walking the last mile.

Most tourists who find their way to the city-supported information office aren’t there to inquire about Disneyland or Olvera Street or any of the Southland’s hundreds of other attractions.

“The No. 1 question is how to get around on the bus,” said Keiko Garrison, who helps run the Figueroa Street center. “We’re like RTD employees.”

Garrison and other workers have produced their own do-it-yourself bus guide that tells how to reach such sights as Venice Beach, the Getty Museum or the Hollywood sign.

Garrison was telling Australian tourists Margaret Frey and Emily Mulroy that bus lines 420 or 424 would take them from downtown to Universal Studios. That they had a choice surprised them.

“We’d heard that public transit doesn’t exist here,” said Frey, a nurse from Sydney. “We were worried. We can’t afford to hire a car.”

In Hollywood, car-hiring was no trouble for Gabriela Fischer, of Zurich, Switzerland, and Bettina Beck of Liechtenstein. They plunked down $25 each to ride in a stretch limousine for a 1 1/2-hour guided tour of movie stars’ neighborhoods.

The pair earlier had spent $800 to buy a battered used car to drive during their American visit. But Los Angeles’ sprawl and traffic congestion so unnerved them that they parked it.

Visitors using their own cars or renting them at the airport grumble that maps are often hard to find; the small ones that are handed out by car rental agencies are hard to use because they lack detail.

“People (in L.A.) drive so fast. You get shifted off the freeway if you’re in the wrong lane,” said Kathy Worthington of Riverside, Conn. “The freeways change names--the number 10 is called the Santa Monica Freeway in one place and the San Bernardino Freeway in another. It’s a scary place to drive.”