Biking in the city is fun, actually
Los Angeles may be car hell, but it's got a better social bicycle culture than most cities in the US. I'll die on that hill.
There's a vibrant, active culture of group bike rides in LA--both the kind of lycra rides someone might do on a weekend for fitness reasons, and the kind of bike-punk rides where people will climb mountains in the middle of the night, unlock gates, climb over fences, and whip out firecrackers mid-ride.
We're also right near a bunch of fantastic mountain ranges, so we're home to some truly deranged, nearly villainous wilderness biking challenges. Stuff like the yearly Tourist race, which is hard enough that even skilled athletes often don't complete it, and Escape LA, a 2023 race which was 290 miles long and took many participants over 2 days of self-supported travel.
Most of this stuff is too tough for me. I have Type 1 diabetes, so any time I go out for an all-day ride, I'm juggling not only the (very demanding) challenges of fueling, hydrating, and pacing myself the way everyone else does... but also trying to keep my blood sugar in a safe enough range that I won't get left behind by the group. I need a lot more prep and planning than others do, and I hate getting dropped. Most of the times I've been dropped, it's been partially due to me hitting my limit not only on hydration but also on blood sugar. So I have to be careful about what rides I go on. I can't go too macho.
So to keep myself safe, I try to choose group rides that stay within the city. When I'm with a group or don't know the route, I don't go into the mountains. And I don't go too far away from an open gas station stocked with sugary drinks.
The mountains may be beautiful, but the city is beautiful, too, and it's really fucking weird. To me, weird is better. It doesn't fulfill the same, like, spiritual goals for most folks, but I do think most people could have as much fun biking around in an urban environment as a natural one, particularly if they made a game out of it or chose a fun destination.
I'm not going to tell you how I got down there, but I've been underground, in the drainage tunnels.
I've been in the ports.
On the 4th of July this year, I took my husband on a tour of the Great Sights of Inglewood and Westchester, two relentlessly normal cities in the LA area. We toured the gigantic cemetery, visited the Square Enix headquarters, checked out all three of the huge Inglewood sports/music stadiums, and finished up at the LAX overlook park where all the airplane photographers take photos. We hung around to catch some double-deckers. It was genuinely a fantastic day.
A lot of the social bike rides in the urban part of LA are about choosing weird routes--cutting through the street grid in ways you wouldn't expect. There are groups out there that play games with their ride routes, choosing roads based on strange themes... or even using a kind of basic choice tree that results in sorta-'procedural' route generation. There really is nothing better than grouping up to bike somewhere you're kinda-sorta not allowed to be... or not expected to be... or wouldn't choose to be, if you were by yourself. Almost every time I go out with a group or by myself, something weird happens. And I would be absolutely done for, emotionally and intellectually, if weird shit wasn't constantly happening in my life!!
I highly recommend searching for wherever your local social bike ride community is hiding. LA's is largely on Instagram, with some stuff that splashes over onto Facebook or Reddit for different audiences.
And if you don't have something like this locally, consider designing your own routes! I've gotten super into designing bizarre bike rides to take my husband on. The Tour De IngleChester was a good one... I've also been planning a route that connects eight separate Cheesecake Factories across 50 miles of the city. Think of a way to slice up your urban environment, then do it! I found this video of people visiting every diner in Boston particularly inspirational.
For the locals
If you live in LA and want to get involved in this stuff, here's a very comprehensive calendar of social biking events in the LA area. If you're a mutual I'd be glad to make more specific recommendations about which ones are exciting. I also recommend this instagram account's weekly roundups of bike events. (Their calendar is good, but I've never been on one of their rides, because they definitely seem too fast for me!)
Many of these rides are pretty intense. If you want something appropriate for beginners, my first suggestion would be LA Critical Mass. It's mostly slow and easy, and it has a bathroom break halfway through, at public parks. If you want to armor your mind against the possibility that any of these rides are too hard for you, I also recommend biking up into the Santa Monica mountains at least once on your own, or with a small group--the most challenging stuff the vast majority of these groups do involves the more city-accessible portions of that mountain range specifically. I personally did Mandeville Canyon to Canyonback Trail to get myself in the right headspace to do this kind of stuff. (That's also how I learned that it was safer for me to stay within the city!)