What You Can Learn Taking a Bus to the Super Bowl
Public transportation in car-dominated Los Angeles has held up relatively well during the pandemic but will face a reckoning when life returns to normal.
Free fares and team spirit.
Photographer: Justin Fox/Bloomberg
The Super Bowl is coming to the Los Angeles area Sunday for the first time in 29 years. I won’t be attending, but having just arrived in Southern California for an extended stay, I did feel compelled to mark the event somehow. So on Tuesday morning I walked about a mile to the 17th Street light-rail station in Santa Monica and got on an eastbound train on the E Line. At the La Brea Avenue station I got off and boarded a southbound 212 bus that, after a scenic drive through Baldwin Hills and Windsor Hills (There’s an oil well! There’s the ocean! There’s downtown! There’s … a parked alien spacecraft?), dropped me off at the corner of Prairie and Kelso in Inglewood.
According to Google Maps it’s an 11-minute walk from that corner to the new SoFi Stadium, which will be hosting the Super Bowl and also turns out to have been the alien spacecraft I thought I saw (it has a pretty crazy-looking roof). I could not verify the walk time because the stadium and its parking lots were locked up behind a chain-link fence, but it seemed about right, as did the prediction that the entire journey would take me an hour and 24 minutes.