All Dressed Up With No Way to Go

Getting to work is getting to be harder than the work.

For a number of weeks, commuters here have had to be afraid of automobiles that come equipped with snap-crackle-and-pop tires.

We once worried more about drive-by shootings. Now that bang we fear on our freeways is a flat on somebody’s explosive Explorer.

For most of last week, meanwhile, commuters without cars had considerable troubles of their own.

Namely, how to get to their jobs without sticking out a thumb.

A strike by our Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s work force left men and women of greater Los Angeles all dressed up with no way to go--no bus, a few trains, little choice except their old familiar friend and enemy, the car.

Many Monday-to-Friday laborers spent the week bumming rides or paying astronomical gas prices out of their own pockets, occasionally nullifying the very money they made at the jobs to which they drove.

Now there’s a Catch-22B for you--if you can’t get a ride to work, you can’t pay for the ride that gets you to work.

Catchier still, if the reason you couldn’t get to work is that the people who get you to work weren’t working, how were you supposed to get to work?

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Needless to say, L.A.’s commuters had themselves a bad, bad week.

The bumper-to-bumper traffic on our already ridiculous roads got to be bumper-to-bumperer than ever before. Entire freeways were as crammed with cars as Cal Worthington’s parking lot. We officially began living in the slow lane. About the only bus anybody could see on the highway was a yellow school one, or once in a while a charter bus carrying a country band from Bakersfield to Pomona.

Furthermore, at a time in our lives when the word “train” was just beginning to work its way into Southern Californians’ vocabularies, many of our commuter rails were no longer operating either. Subway to some was still nothing but the name of a submarine sandwich franchise.

Right up to the last day of summer, L.A.’s commuters were frozen.

Without a car, many people probably stayed home and watched Bob Barker and Rosie O’Donnell every day, because they became virtual shut-ins.

Now in most big towns, this would be a major crisis that the mayor would be on top of, 24/7, never leaving his office, maybe even sleeping in it.

He would lock the door, keep the leaders of both sides at a table around the clock, and threaten to break the legs of the first one who set foot toward the door.

Los Angeles being different from other big towns, alas, our transit predicament dragged on with our mayor, king of the road Richard Riordan, riding a bicycle around Europe.

Livin’ large on one of his clearly much-needed vacations, His Honor was obviously too busy touring France, partly on a bike doing his delightful Lance Armstrong impersonation, to be bothered with anything so trifling as a transportation strike affecting a city of 3 million people.

In a stirring example of government by phone--not the campaign slogan that originally got him elected, as we recall--Mayor Lance spent the week gallivanting through French grape groves, while occasionally dismounting to give City Hall a jingle and ask: “Bonjour, what’s new?”

One would think that a bus-rail strike would be a top priority to the mayor of Bordeaux, not to mention the gentleman who runs the second-largest town in America. But apparently this was not the case for Mayor Lance, who had other uphill fights to climb.

While L.A. skidded to a halt, Mayor Lance rode on, reaching for his water bottle.

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No wonder San Franciscans, New Yorkers and Chicagoans like to poke fun at L.A.’s lack of concern over public transportation, often perceived as if we had none at all. (No concern and no public transportation.) They still get a chuckle that there are certain expressions we just don’t use here--like, for example, “hailing a cab.”

We don’t hail; we phone.

A bus-rail strike in any of those cities would “paralyze” it, or at least that’s how it would be characterized by civic officials there. Two things paralyze big cities: blizzards and transit strikes.

The image of Los Angeles, though, is one of a city that’s never stopped cold, where everybody drives a car, except for motorcycle riders who drive between the cars.

It is a falsehood.

There are thousands of people here who have no cars, or who have no licenses to operate one, or who have insufficient funds to keep one running. They take a bus to work. Or they take a train--except that without a car, it’s still necessary to find a way to get to and from a train.

Had he been here last week, Mayor Lance probably could have offered a helpful suggestion--bicycles for everybody!

Well, at least with him gone, there was one fewer L.A. worker stuck in traffic.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com