Los Angeles has always been known for the automobile – and for good reason. Los Angeles is comprised of 88 cities and 140 unincorporated areas. Los Angeles County is huge, almost four times as large as the entire state of Rhode Island, and while the city is making great strides toward developing a wide variety of public transportation systems, the truth is that the car is still king in Los Angeles.

However, there are certain areas where public transportation is making viable headway. While Los Angeles has always had a somewhat problematic bus system, buses in Los Angeles are becoming increasingly frequent and bus routes are being constantly extended. All in all, LA County runs more than 1,500 busses daily.

In addition to busses, Los Angeles has also spent millions of dollars on the MetroRail, a series of commuter trains and subways that link Long Beach Airport and other areas to the downtown Los Angles area, the San Gabriel Valley, and parts of the San Fernando Valley. In fact, plans are in the works to further extend the MetroRail system.

Those planning to visit downtown Los Angeles and the Hollywood area can be very well served by the MetroRail system.

While taxis are common around the LA airport, the Long Beach airport and, to a lesser degree in Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, taxi use is simply not as common in LA as it is in, say, New York City. Many people who need a taxi phone and order one to pick them up at a specific location and at a specific time as opposed to standing on a street corner in the hopes one will drive by.

In the past, the reason that Los Angeles has not needed much in the way of public transportation is that it had such an excellent system of surface streets and freeways. Notably, the LA freeway system is still the model for the rest of the world, as well as, the most-used roadway system in the world.

In recent years, however, as the population of Los Angeles has continued to increase and the number of vehicles on the roads has also increased, it has become clear that it is simply not possible to continue increasing the amount of roadway space to accommodate the quantities of new vehicles. As a result, LA is hard at work on plans to keep the freeways and surface streets from becoming excessively bogged down with longer commute times and masses of congestion.

Stay tuned. Concerned about the welfare of its citizens, LA city officials are determined to keep the area streamlined and free of unnecessary traffic and aggravation.