Getting to and from LAX meant getting in a car until last June, when the city opened the LAX Metro Transit Center. The station connects LAX with two rail lines (C and K), buses, and bikes. I say “connect” loosely, because accessing it from LAX is, for now, a mess.
Here’s how the metro currently works:
- Leave terminal
- Take the M bus from the terminal to the LAX Metro Transit Center
- Wait for your train or bus
If you book a ride or taxi, you get on a different bus to LAX-It, the giant parking lot where most of those rides originate.1
On a trip last week, I counted six LAX-It buses during the 15 minutes that it took one M bus to arrive. You can scan a QR code painted onto a column outside the terminal to see when your bus is arriving, but good luck making any sense of the website, which was also inaccurate. When the bus showed up, it was crowded and had no room for luggage. It took a long time to get passengers onboard, and some missed out.
Once I made it to the transit center, I saw a bright future for public transit in Los Angeles.
The center is beautiful and easy to navigate. The trains were clean, safe, and ran on time. The stations I transferred through in the city were pleasant (in my case, Expo/Crenshaw and Culver City). And the lines already take travelers to some notable places, including:
- Santa Monica
- Hollywood & Vine
- Universal/Studio City
- Downtown
- Inglewood
Once a monorail opens between LAX and the transit center,2 the airport is promising a train every two minutes in peak times and a total trip time of 10 minutes or less to get to the Metro. The monorail will also stop at LAX-It, so getting to public transit or a ride will take about the same time.
That will make the time and money math compelling for some trips. Consider a trip to W Hollywood in traffic:
- Uber: $90, 45 minutes
- Train from LAX Metro: $1.75, 1 hour 15 minutes
- Uber: $65, 40 minutes
- Train from LAX Metro: $1.75, 1 hour
USC:
- Uber: $55, 30 minutes
- Train from LAX Metro: $1.75, 45 minutes
There’s still a lot of places these trains don’t go, and for business trips, Uber is going to be the better option for a long time. But for at least some trips, it will soon be worth checking the transit tab before booking a car. That’s a leap forward for a city that has suffered from poor transit infrastructure for so long.
- You get picked up curbside at the terminal if you’re taking Uber Black or one of its equivalents. ↩︎
- Currently scheduled for mid-year, after multiple delays. ↩︎
