I rode the G line
I've never had a real reason to go deep into the San Fernando Valley, despite all the time I've lived in LA. I've been to events on the rim of the valley, let's say - in the mountains to the north of the valley, and in the foothills on the north side of the Santa Monica mountains. But I haven't had a reason to just go that far into the valley.
This is probably pretty stereotypical of me! I am a young person, I live in an apartment, and I commute by bike and train, mostly. I'm not eyeing the valley for a single-family home, and I'm not looking to commute down the 405 for work. I spend all my time on the west side, or in the stretch of city between Koreatown through Downtown to NELA, which is the region where most of my friends live. I'm sure there is some stereotype I embody which characterizes this constellation of behaviors. Oh well!
So last week I decided to go to North Hollywood on the B line train, then get on the G line busway and head deep into the valley, just out of pure curiosity. I wanted to go to Balboa Lake in the Sepulveda Basin area and take pictures of plants.
The route for me to get there from Culver is needlessly long. In like 15 years, I might be able to take the Sepulveda Corridor there much more directly. These days, it's a trip of about an hour and fifty minutes from Culver City station to Balboa Station, across the E, B and G lines:
I'd never previously been to North Hollywood station, the station which connects the B and G lines. It's monumental in the fun way that a lot of train stations are in every city on earth:
It's fun to climb like 3 stories of stairs and emerge squinting like a mole-person into a place you've never been before, even if that place is relentlessly mundane.
Across the street from the main North Hollywood Station plaza, the G line boards at a turnaround in front of the old Pacific Electric station building:
One of the most interesting local features of this line is that every station I visited had these hostile-architecture stools for passengers to wait on, too small and rounded to use as a sleeping surface. I didn't get a good picture of the smallest stools - a lot of them were designed for just one person to sit on. They have a very distinctive visual style, kind of a red terrazzo look on top of yellow metal strips. I've never seen them at any other Metro station in LA:
The ride along this line was pretty ordinary! You get on a large articulated bus and zoom around, sometimes on separated roads where only buses are allowed. I've been on busways before, and this is a very typical one. The sections in traffic were not particularly slow, but I was also riding this around 1 PM, so there wasn't a ton of traffic. The sections where we were on the bus-only part of the route were nice and fast.
I dunno! Busways!! Love 2 bus!! Here's a truly terrible photo!
I got out at Balboa Station and caught a glimpse of the bike path that parallels this part of the route, the G Line Bikeway. I've never biked here. I guess I've gotta come back and give it a shot.
Lake Balboa Park is right across the street from the busway station. I felt very grim and eerie walking around the park - for a couple different reasons. There had been recent grass-cutting here - maybe invasive plants? I'm not sure? - and there were dead stems everywhere. There was a lot of debris and junk in the river, and a lot of otherwise-nice spots that smelled like sewage. The only flowering plants were tree tobacco and sacred datura, which are both pretty cool-looking but also both pretty poisonous. Whenever I look at them, some voice in the back of my brain is just repeating: damn, that's poisonous. Maybe watching Snow White did this to me as a kid, but whenever I see a poisonous plant, it's pretty much the only thing I can think about...
I don't really mind any of this - we're about to hit wintertime, and LA nature gets a lot drabber in the winter, so it's to be expected, really. I think I'll come back in the spring. Most wet places in LA are really quite magical in the spring, even if they smell like sewage and have giant piles of trash in them. In the spring, all that shit gets covered up with green stuff and flowers!!
Another thing is that I came here deliberately on an overcast day in order to have an easier time taking pictures of plants. As El Nino continues, I've found that I have a much better time taking pictures (particularly pictures of bricks and walls and gas stations, to use in my level design project) on days with flat, overcast lighting. You don't have to worry as much about casting a shadow on something interesting when the lighting is so flat and even. As a result, however, the whole place probably felt an order of magnitude more gloomy.
I wandered around for about two miles and then got back on the bus. I'm now interested in going down there again and checking out other parts of the Sepulveda Basin area. The Wildlife Reserve on the eastern side of the area is the next thing I'm planning to check out.
Honestly, that other park seems like it might be more to my interest? I probably should have gone there instead... but I picked Balboa Station mostly because it gave me the longest headway along the line and allowed me to see more of the separated section of the busway! Transit Oriented Decisionmaking mostly works out for me...