In L.A., Where Car Is King, He Refuses to Be Ruled by One

David Nathan has never gotten a parking ticket.

That is one of the good things about not owning a car in Los Angeles. Among the bad is the man on the bus wearing surgical slippers and asking if anyone can spare a couple of bucks for new shoes.

“There is a certain grimness on the bus,” admits Nathan, who nevertheless eschews driving in favor of riding buses, taking cabs, relying on friends and walking.

Nathan is a transplanted Londoner and New Yorker who, having grown up in cities where mass transit is actually used by the masses, has no desire to maneuver the concrete spider webs of Los Angeles. He prides himself on getting to places on time without wheels, from business meetings to doctor’s appointments to grocery shopping. It is something he figures anyone could do if so inclined.

“It’s really a question of being inventive,” says Nathan, who works as a jack-of-all-trades in the music industry. “You find ways of dealing with it.”

And in the end, despite a $200 to $300 monthly cab bill, he figures he comes out a little richer and a little saner than the millions of others who spend their days isolated in millions of metal cocoons.

“Driving is very me -oriented,” he says, shaking his head.

*

On this day, Nathan’s first appointment is a 10 a.m. breakfast meeting at Le Montrose hotel in West Hollywood, a 10-minute cab ride from his Park La Brea apartment. Picking up the phone, he orders his first cab of the day. He has an account with a cab company, so he doesn’t have to carry wads of cash everywhere. He gets a bill every month.

Minutes later he is settling into the vinyl-covered front seat of a green and white cab, explaining to the driver where he wants to go.

“What better way take it for you?” asks the driver helpfully.

After a few puzzled looks, Nathan deciphers the question and gives directions. The taxi driver nods and slips onto 6th Street, heading west. Nathan flips through the papers on his lap.

“If I have a meeting I can prepare for it in the taxi,” he says. “There are a lot of different things I can do, which a driver cannot. I can read the paper or I can eat or I can take a nap.”

The cab delivers Nathan to the front door of the hotel and he walks briskly inside for a meeting with a woman planning a music festival.

*

There is an unabashed prejudice against riding the bus in Los Angeles. “People assume the only reason you ride the bus is because you are poor,” Nathan says.

(He confesses that when he moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, he could not afford a car. No matter, though--he did not know how to drive.)

His first attempt to drive was in a friend’s car in a Los Angeles parking lot. It was a manual transmission and Nathan’s right foot was a little heavy on the gas. “We almost went straight into a wall and that was that. I really didn’t enjoy driving.”

A few years later he was vacationing with a friend in Hawaii when he tried driving again. It was fun. So he enrolled in driving lessons when he returned to Los Angeles.

“I was appalled,” he says. “I was very obviously a learner and people would honk. No matter where we went to practice, people were inconsiderate.”

Even more appalling, his instructor was a jovial man who found humor in Nathan’s terror and tended to laugh a lot.

After four lessons, Nathan concluded that he would not become a driver just yet. There are days he considers it. On sunny days, he longs to buzz over to the beach, but then wonders how often he would actually do it.

“I can’t say I will never learn to drive,” he says. “But I can say that I won’t do it in Los Angeles.”

His first meeting finished, Nathan walks the couple of blocks to Santa Monica Boulevard to catch a westbound bus to Santa Monica for a doctor appointment.

A bus screeches to a stop and Nathan climbs aboard, paying $1.35 for a ride and a transfer ticket. He settles at the middle of the bus and soon the stately neighborhoods of Beverly Hills zip by, obscured by the graffiti on the bus windows.

It is midday and the bus is only half full. The passengers make up perhaps the most representative cross-section of a city that vaunts its diversity even as its residents try to hide behind walls of race and money.

“This gives me a better understanding of the variety of people in Los Angeles,” says Nathan as his bus slows to a stop. “There are many days when I’ll be the only Caucasian on the bus.”

It is almost liberating, not having a car. Nathan says he never worries about theft, does not have to pay insurance and has never been told to pull over to the right and produce his driver’s license and registration.

Crossing Wilshire Boulevard, he notices the telltale pink slip tucked under the windshield wiper of a Mercedes-Benz. He asks how much parking tickets cost and shakes his head when he finds out.

He smiles.

“You tell me who’s better off,” he says.