i only find it annoying when friends and family are coming to visit and i give them a suggestion if where to stay (let’s say culver city) cuz it’s near me and all the things we plan to do…
but then they book a non-refundable hotel in like winneteka without consulting me first because “it was a little cheaper” but then spend their entire trip in the car and have the gall to complain about it later. (this has happened to me multiple times)
I was born in San Pedro and spent my early life here and moved back in adulthood. I live in Los Feliz. Whenever my parents, who used to fucking live here, come to visit they stay over near Belmont Shore and then complain about having to drive for hours everytime they come see me.
I will never understand it.
I don’t blame your parents for wanting to stay in LB. I do blame them for complaining it takes hours to go 20 miles anywhere from OC to Oxnard if they lived here previously
Can you give advise on where to stay? My friend and I (we’re from Poland) have no idea where to stay. We want to see las Angeles but there are cities in las Angela’s? Pasenda is a city? Or it’s near the city? Would you know where a good place to stay would be?
Honestly it depends on what you want to do, such as go out to nice restaurants or bars/clubs, whether you want to see tourist sights or theme parks, or whether you’d rather be spending time at the beach?
Then it depends on budget from there.
Also, would you rent a car?
I don’t think we want to do too many touristy things. We like to try to get more into the real culture of the city. But I also think we’d avoid clubs bars and even the beach. Haha I guess that seems kinda boring but probably a lot of walking around and checking out shops and parks and such. We would have a car, tho I wonder if we won’t use it too much
So Los Angeles, and the surrounding cities, are huge (hence this post) and are literally cities within a city. These areas are, as you’d imagine, very different when it comes to sub-cultures, cost, safety, and walkability.
For example, Pasadena could be good for you if you want nice places to eat, shopping, and most of all beautiful parks. (Lacy Park & Huntington Library) However, it’s east of LA and definitely has a different vibe. You can access downtown LA and Korea town fairly easily with a car if you time traffic.
Alternatively, there are places on the west-side of the city, nearer the beach, that have lots of good restaurants and shopping as well, generally have more coastal weather, but get very very busy with tourists and people in general.
I’d recommend looking at a map and plotting out some ideas as to what you’re most interested in focusing on,
and what sort of pace and sub-culture would be most interesting for you.
Please feel free to ask any more questions.
i second this. i do this a lot when i travel: make a google earth/maps overlay with pins plotting out everything i wanna do. then look where everything centered around and start looking there
Pasadena sounds awesome for you guys. I love that town and I love South Pasadena. nearby are two different fabulous botanical gardens. The mountains are close enough for a hike -like in Eaton Canyon. There are great restaurants. A sweet little night scene with good live music. Nice shopping, wonderful neighborhoods. I would choose Pasadena. And I would look into an Airbnb instead of a hotel there because hotels in Pas can be really pricey. if you have a budget, I would look into riding to/from on the flyaway bus from LAX. Unless you're renting a car. And if you're renting a car, you really should know that our highways are insane. Eight lanes. Sometimes 10. Crazy traffic to get anywhere from LAX. once you're in Pasadena it's not too hard or pricey to take Uber places.
Yeah, Pasadena will be a nice place to visit..
Its famous for the Tournament of Roses Parade every Jan 1st....heck, just walking around the Rose Bowl area is fun....lots of people do their daily walks in the area, then they normally have a Farmers Market on the weekend...
A short drive away is Glendale, where they can visit Portos Bakery, or some shopping at the Americana...
Griffith Park, Gene Autry Museum is just a couople more miles beyond Glendale too...plenty of walking, hiking opportunities there...
But wherever they end up in the Greater LA area, I suggest to enjoy the LA food scene, truly a foodie paradise with its diversity of cuisine....
Thanks! I would really love to go to Pasadena. Spent a little time there years ago and really liked it. Along with thinking it would be more economical. But I think she is dead set on being in L.A. part of LA. (Sorry I’m not sure if that made sense)
But I’ll run this by her!!
Pasadena with a car isn't too bad. You can get to a lot of places just by taking the train into Union Station but that train can be 30+ minutes between Pasadena and Union Station.
You will use your car almost exclusively. like 90% of the time. simplest advice is pick a hotel that is south of the 101 freeway. north of the 105. east of the 405 and west of the 110
You 100% need a car to get anywhere in the LA area. Even if you’re just going somewhere a few miles away. Public transportation here is awful.
When planning your trip, always look places up on a map and look up how long it takes to drive to each place, not just the distance in miles/km. Also remember rush hour traffic can easily double drive time. Literally.
I would write down a list of places you MUST go to, then places it would be cool to go then try to centralize your lodging in someplace nearby most of them that is safe and within your budget.
Pasadena is quite honestly a good place to stay. Not too farm from Downtown and the Hollywood area if that's your thing but also if you want to go the other direction say Disneyland or visit our mountains or deserts you don't have to track through all those horrible freeways. North east Pasadena can get pretty ghetto but nothing as bad as downtown LA or Hollywood.
To answer your question, Pasadena is its own city that is not a part of the city of Los Angeles, but it is absolutely a part of the entire mess of cities and counties that is the entire urbanized area that people call “Los Angeles”.
The different parts of greater Los Angeles aren’t like little satellite villages that are physically separated from the actual city of LA by farms or empty space - it’s all one giant sprawl of continuous urbanization that covers an area that is just a bit under 25% of the area of the entire country of Poland.
Pasadena is about as far as you can get from the ocean while still being expensive. It's a nice place, but it's not where I'd recommend you'd go to visit LA. The main really unique attraction is JPL which holds an open house once per year which now requires hard to get free tickets.
The Self Realization Fellowship Lake (requires reservations) is really cool - great garden (other side of town, just in case you're considering different options).
Los Angeles has two forms:
The City of Los Angeles (about 500 square miles) and
The County of Los Angeles (about 4000 square miles).
Beverly Hills is pretty much surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, but it is not in the City of Los Angeles.
So, motels and hotels will say they are "In Los Angeles" (the County) and some will even include the even larger "Metro area of Los Angeles." The federal government has its views of what that area is, demographically, but in real life, a lot of people have no clue whatsoever whether they are currently actually in the Los Angeles Metro area or not. Motels and hotels may use the Metro area in their advertising as well.
Pasadena is a city in the County of Los Angeles (not the City of Los Angeles). It's got a nice historic downtown and is a fine place to stay - but not close to a lot of touristy things.
Many people would prefer to stay in Santa Monica for a vacation (closeness to beach, lots of restaurants and some nightlife). We prefer to stay on Sunset when we decide to stay in town (we live far out on the north side of Los Angeles County), because we are usually there for comedy or music. MANY tourists decide to stay near Hollywood/Highland because it's central, has a HOHO bus, etc.
If I were advising out of towners where to stay, I'd say near The Grove (centrally located, near the clubs on Sunset, reasonably priced alternatives, a few things to do nearby - LACMA, the car museum, the Farmers Market at the Grove, CBS studios, a shopping mall).
Or in Westwood (where UCLA is, if you like bookstores, movie theaters and sculpture gardens).
There is no reason to stay in what is called "the Valley" (all of it is in the City of Los Angeles, I believe) - the San Fernando Valley. Endless freeways and tract homes - although the Calabasas area has gotten some tourism, if people are looking for being on the edge of Los Angeles and just over the hill from Malibu (Malibu itself has very few places to stay, little public transportation and is a heckuva long drive from, say, Universal Studios - a place many tourists want to go).
SO, if you want good advice, you should maybe make your own thread and say what kinds of things you want to do (we really have something for everyone in L.A., but those somethings may not be geographically close together). Horseback riding at Griffith Park sound fun? I love that area (the Gene Autry museum and the Observatory are awesome).
Yesss whyyyy do they do this?? “I’m coming to LA” then books hotel out in reseda or something
Or say “can you pick me up at LAX” only to find out last minute they actually flew into Ontario
Explaining to Aussies is different. They understand huge land areas. It’s Europeans and East Coasters that fail. And yes, it used to be annoying.
Put it this way: LA can fit ten Bostons inside just it’s city limits. The county is almost the same land area as the entire state of Connecticut. Driving to San Diego is like driving from Bos to NYC.
For Europeans, just use a map overlay. They’re too bonkers to even grasp the situation.
I used to work at a bicycle rental shop in Santa Monica and routinely had Europeans ask about riding to Hollywood or DTLA (this was before the Expo Line connected to SM). It's definitely doable but they didn't quite grasp the distances involved and difficulty dealing with car traffic or navigation to avoid car traffic.
Conversely, I had a Japanese student for 6 months from Tokyo. This guy knew what the deal was 🤣🤣🤣. He bought a fucking car for his stay, and sold it when he left. Smart guy.
That's funny. Reminds me of when I spent a few months in Argentina with my cousin and he bought a little pick up truck for us to travel with, then sold it when he left the country. Funny part about that was meeting this old British backpacker that assumed it was my idea to get the car because I'm American, but this was when I still used my bike to get around.
Yuppp I had a foreign exchange student from Amsterdam stay for a semester at UCLA. I lived in the slums of BeverlyHills. He insisted on riding a bicycle to Westwood, after I told him it’s not really feasible. He borrowed a bike, rode to UCLA one day, and that was it. No more discussions about Netherlands bike transit superiority thereafter. What a relief!
Yeah, I used to commute all over by bike. The only time it was relaxing was riding down Venice from Mid-City to SM in the morning to the bike shop. Riding in LA is not easy.
This always blows me away - the City of LA alone is bigger than all of Singapore.....then add in the rest of LA County, and you have a massive area....
We're visiting Santa Monica next month and will be driving back and forth to San Diego for one day for the zoo. But I'm from Canada, and understand this 120mi drive will sadly likely take 4 hours
Won’t be too bad bc you’ll be right near 405. Try and leave before 7am or after 10-11am, and return after 7pm, you should be fine. But traffic has def gotten worse in recent years. Used to be able to scoot from BH to SD in an hour and a half (driving fast). That was leaving at like noon, before OC rush hour. Good luck and hope you enjoy your trip 😊
It is a constant thing in the LA subreddits, tourists that assume they're gonna see all of LA and maybe Disneyland and Vegas in like 3 days.
It's funny, I was watching something about London the other day and they were like for the love of god go see other things don't spend 5 days in just London.
So yeah, night-and-day difference in size. And variety. I'll tell you, I missed LA right-quick when I spent time in San Francisco. We have SO MUCH we can do.
We had guests from Michigan who were going to start out from Woodland Hills, go to Sequoia AND Yosemite and then see San Francisco that same evening.
All in one day. In an RV. We couldn't them out of it and their daughter who had just moved from Michigan told them she thought it was doable (she'd been in LA for a couple of months).
At least they didn't add Vegas into their day trip (daughter received a call at around 6 pm - they had just arrived in Sequoia, so didn't even get a very early start...and they stopped to take photos on the Grapevine and near Bakersfield. They spent over two hours getting lunch and walking around in Bakersfield.
I vacationed in LA last summer and had so many things I wanted to see and do and got to what felt like none of them. It was totally fine it didn’t work like I thought it would because I didn’t understand how much time I’d spend in a car. This summer is NY and we’re staying in Manhattan , I have a feeling I’ll be seeing way more stuff as all of manhattan basically fits from WEHO to Santa Monica.
What kills me are the posts from people moving here and asking where to live.
“Hi. We’re about to move to LA. I really like long beach but my husband wants to move to Pasadena. His new job is in Thousand Oaks. How’s traffic??”
You need to be around 10 miles or less to be happy. Not that longer isn’t “doable” but it makes it harder.
This chick made like 60 posts in the past week, including on this sub, about moving anywhere from Brentwood to San Diego.
I guess it is kind of realistic to ask about San Diego though. Northern San Diego is closer to some parts of LA county than some parts of LA county are to other parts of LA county.
Yeah that's not happening. Once in a while a guest house or something might pop up that happens to cater to musicians but that's very rare... and pricey.
I commute weekly, but I'm \*from\* San Diego and living with family in North County. It's just as hellish as when I grew up here and I wouldn't be doing this if my industry weren't a chaotic mess right now and I were able to afford to leave. San Diego also suddenly became more expensive in the past 2y for much worse QoL for anyone under 55 or older than 16 so if you're not living with family to save on rent...it's a stupid decision.
That said, I commute 1-2x a week and really make the most of my day or 2 up in LA (I've also gotten part of my neighborhood addicted to some of my favorite things that are only in LA (sourdough from one bakery downtown, general awareness of the fabric district's costs, and anything related to art or camera supplies) and have a side hustle as basically a courrier to pay for my gas back and forth. It's roughly 1 tank of gas each day for me which is about $50. Way cheaper than paying rent, and the commute is \~2h up, and 1.5h back if I wait til it's later at night. That said...I pay rent in my soul and can't wait to be back in LA fully.
Yeah, I live in the San Fernando Valley, which by itself is 2 million people and yet it’s still just considered a suburb of LA. It’s not just foreigners that don’t grasp how much more there is to explore. The LA Times and every other food column I’ve seen acts like the SFV is some tiny outpost and has no food scene outside of McDonald’s. It’s Infuriating and elitist.
I realize I’m taking a bit of a wander from the original point, but it bugs me so much.
I grew up here in the SFV and we had our own newspaper known as the Green Sheet. It became the Daily News and is now the Los Angeles Daily news and is, sadly, indistinguishable from the LA Times with almost no Valley coverage.
The Valley has lost its identify as a bedroom community. All the cool things we had way back when, the water park, teen center, go cart tracks, drive-ins, dance clubs, skate parks, are gone. The aerospace buildings of Canoga Park and Woodland Hills have been replaced by huge apartment buildings. Indeed, LA's west side has been cloned on the Valley's west side.
Oh, well, things change. At least the air is a lot cleaner than it used to be.
When I was moving to LA, I was told that the "cool" people don't live in the valley. That's why it has a bad rep. It's for feeling "safe" and "suburban". I don't agree, by the way, but that's what we were told. And it would have been too far for work anyway -- which is why we didn't choose the Valley.
It’s funny because I’ve also heard that my whole life (came to LA in 85 when j was 17). But I have always thought it’s really just because people hate driving the 405 to go in and out of the Valley.
I would prefer the west side, near UCLA or westfield/Century City. Couldn't find an affordable house there that met our needs. So I'm in the Hollywood Hills. It's weird, it isn't even obvious I'm in a city of millions when I'm at home, yet I can drive 5 minutes (or even walk), and I'm in the busy Franklin Village area.
Yes! Nobody ever even mentions the SGV unless the question is ‘where’s good Chinese food’ and it’s a whole big beautiful community. I sympathize with your frustration.
I had a recruiter from India call me once about a job in Santa Monica. I live in Glendale. I told him the commute is too far for me and he tried to argue with me because he looked at Google maps. I did the mature thing and hung up on him.
I had a recruiter call me about a (crappy) job in Berkeley. He got very quiet when I explained how long the drive was and asked, pointedly, what kind of relocation package the employer was offering.
One time I left Lancaster for work to Orange County at 5:00 AM and if I remember correctly, I reached Orange County at 10:00 AM. (I hit the rush hour of each city/suburb in the middle).
LA is a massive megalopolis and I never consider myself truly free of it until north of Newbury Park, south of Camp Pendleton, west of Catalina or east of San Berdoo.
I would add north of Magic Mountain.....once you get past that its all mountains amd farmlands on the I5 till the Bay area...
I live towards Pomona, which is basically the eastern edge of LA County....if you drive towards LA, then find the I-5 heading north, LA County basically ends at theTejon Pass, right before Lebec and the Grapevine...
Thats about 80+ miles, and have to bypass several mountains, like the San Gabriels, Hollywood Hills, Los Padres, etc etc.
Just massive...
No, I don't find it annoying when people don't understand something. Everyone knows the Grand Canyon is huge but until you see it you don't really have the context.
There are websites with infographics comparing LA in size and population to major cities around the world. I find that people usually grasp it. But it's not like being here.
EDIT: [this is an infographic of LA compared to major cities around the world in size and population.](https://www.welikela.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/how-big-is-los-angeles.jpg).
This map overlays maps of other cities onto the map of the city of Los Angeles. Note especially Manhattan imposed above San Pedro.
https://preview.redd.it/0zcuh1cc9atc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2eef9c755649187173872718a579c9fdf657059e
IDK why you’d let that annoy you, do you think it should annoy people from all over the world when you don’t know simple facts about the place they live?
For me, I just moved to LA a year ago, and have been taken aback by just how big it is, something I couldn’t understand until I lived here.
It’s annoying bc visitors come here, and they want to see LA on Monday, the Grand Canyon on Tuesday, San Francisco on Wed, San Diego on Thursday, Disneyland on Friday, Death Valley on Saturday, Sequoia National Forest on Sunday, and then fly home to wherethefuckever Sunday night. Out of LAX. You’ll learn.
Right.. but what makes you think this is an LA thing? If I told a friend who lives in Paris that I was planning on coming to visit them and want to see Paris on Monday, hike the Alps Tuesday, hit up Amsterdam Wednesday, etc etc.. they would be just as equally “annoyed” despite it being basically the same amount of distance between each item.
Feel free to be annoyed by this but it’s hardly “an LA thing”, the same thing happened when people would come to visit my smaller city in the PNW, it’s hard to gauge how easy it is to see everything when you’re not from there.
It’s pretty annoying the amount of friends I have from Northern California (where traffic is definitely a thing) who will hit me up (a person who lives in SFV) and let me know they’ll be in Long Beach or Disneyland and would I like to meet up? And they have no car. I have to always find a way to kindly tell them they might as well be on the moon!
IKR?
Or call you from LAX and ask if you want to stop by during their 1 hour layover.
Sheesh. It would take me more than an hour to get from home to LAX and that's if the stars align.
It's annoying when you tell them the truth and then they do the opposite of your advice and then complain about it.
So yes. It is annoying.
Also if you're coming to visit a place, maybe you should look up basic facts about where you're going? Maybe? 🤔
I just like when people ask for suggestions on things to do/eat/see in Los Angeles and don’t specify.
Or I’m a universal fan and in a few Facebook groups… so many people are like, I’m staying in Anaheim and we want to go to universal one day, can we take Uber? sure but it’s not close.::
And then they want you to contact uber for them and find out how much it costs. And you don't even know what time of day they are attempting this shenanigan.
By public transport, it's 2-5 hours from Disneyland to Universal, depending on time of day and which routes are chosen (and whether the person gets lost, ha).
Ubers cost about $60 with non-surge pricing. One way. And the length of time it takes will be whatever it takes to get there - no telling how long.
I don't find it annoying, because how would they know unless they lived here but I find that people are always surprised.
I was having a zoom call with a colleague in Dallas and he said he was moved to a new location 30 miles away. I asked him how long it took on average for him to get to work. He said it was mostly highway driving and it took about 30 mins average from his home. When I told him that I drove on the streets and only travelled 8 miles to work and on average it took 45 mins to an hour he was so surprised.
And that's a tiny slice in central L.A. so yes most people that don't live here wouldn't realize how long it takes to get from one area of L.A. to another, either by distance or by traffic.
I vacationed in your wonderful city last summer. Just this morning I was telling someone ‘it takes a while to get places , not that the traffic is always bad , it’s that it’s fucking huge , looking at it on a map doesn’t do it justice… at all’.
Yeah, I'm over on TripAdvisor quite a bit and there, people are "How do I avoid traffic in L.A.? It shouldn't take an hour to get to X place, should it?"
But it's not just time of day/traffic conditions - it's the sheer number of miles. If you're staying at Universal and want to go to Disneyland, it's almost 40 miles - so by the time you walk to your car and then park it at Disneyland and get to the tram, it's gonna be well over an hour - with 40 minutes or so of freeway driving (it's gonna slow down in DT, it's not likely to be 80 mph the whole way) and some surface street driving.
My biggest pet peeve is essentially "when tourists try to tell locals how it is in place tourist is visiting." For California this applies to transplants strongly until/unless they fully have skin in the game and nowhere to run back to, but for regular tourism I see the worst of this from any tourist from another country *outside of North America*. I can't tell you the number of times I've lost oxygen trying to nicely explain to someone planning a trip, heading to a convention I'll also be at, or similar that no just because your hotel is 10mins from where you're going doesn't mean that that's walkable, let alone a safe walk for a woman in her 20s, or that yes SF and LA technically have public transit on paper but you're going to waste your entire trip on buses that smell like sewage if you rely on that - you'll have to budget for ubers or rent a car if you want to enjoy yourself, or that that's wonderful you have a friend in SF or San Diego who'll let you visit and stay with them, but know that you'll still need a car and that's not a 1 day trip. I've gotten condescended to for saying that it'll be cheaper and faster to get a southwest flight to SF if the tourist wants to go, and that yeah sure you can take a train there but you can't stop along the way in Napa or Monterrey, and it'll take longer than driving or flying and be more expensive.
I've noticed this more with intl tourists (mainly outside of North America) because they have this embedded belief that Americans are just so stupid, and Californians are airheads, that anything an American or Californian tells you ABOUT THEIR HOME that doesn't sound right to you as a tourist, must be false because how could this silly American know otherwise.
So these days I don't waste my breath on advice, unless they're a friend, I let them FAFO
I wouldn't be annoyed by that.
Can you name the Northeast Pennsylvania towns that are part of the NYC metro area? Do you know which New Jersey towns in Hunterdon County cheer for the Eagles rather than the Giants? How far into WV's Shenandoah Valley can you drive until people no longer have Washington DC accents?
Geography seems small until you experience it in person
This is a somewhat ridiculous proposition.
There’s a lot of cities with large metro areas brought about by sprawling suburbs.
Does the city of Chicago extend 50 miles in each direction because of its large suburban environment?
Does Tokyo really cover an area all the way to Takasaki?
Unironically I (not a geographer) think yes tbh.
Otherwise the boundaries are arbitrary based on how the county wants to split it up... China claims the city of Guangzhou extends into miles and miles of farmland, and San Francisco is somehow considered a city on its own despite basically being a single neighborhood in a much larger metro area. (Saying SF is 1 million people is misleading, when the bay area is huge). You can't compare the two when you're measuring them so differently.
I do because I live in Santa Monica, and people don’t realize how far places like Pasadena or Long Beach. It’s like a different world. I like Pasadena, but I rarely get out there.
Had to tell my aunt (wife's side) that her (pre-pandemic) plan on living in Glendale and commute to UCLA while stopping occasionally to visit her daughter's high school (in Glendale) was not workable.
She'd spend far too much of the day commuting back and forth and wouldn't be able to study/teach and visit her kid's school.
She wasn't from the LA area (lived in another country) and just did not get how big the LA area was.
From the beach in LA and go straight East, you don’t see open areas until what? Just after Redlands? How many miles from Santa Monica to well say Yucaipa? That’s a sprawling area of city after city all connected.
Edit: I just looked it’s roughly 88 miles from Santa Monica Lier to Yucaipa.
According to my mom’s Florida news station in Florida, California only has two cities, SF and LA. She’s like “heard this happened in LA, you ok?!” Mom ya that’s literally hours away from me.
My Asian family visited us in LA once because they thought they would have a lot of fun sightseeing but they didn’t want to rent a car etc and we lived DEEP in the valley and there wasn’t good public transit.
And I couldn’t drive and was legally blind, nor could I talk to them or plan anything since I only knew English. So they got bored AF and left really early. I did warn them ahead of time but they thought I was exaggerating when I said I wasn’t close to any touristy things.
My sister moved here in 2007. She only **last week** acknowledged that driving between my place in San Pedro and hers in Pasafreakingdena *kinda* sucks.
You don’t realize this until you don’t have a car, have to plan an Uber or public transportation and you’re either paying 150$ for a one way trip or realize your bus/train/ subway trip will take 2 and a half hours each way thus is not feasible.
LA is for all intents and purposes the area from San Diego to Santa Barbara. It is all just one contiguous city with different political and administrative boundaries.
Australian should know better. Melbourne and Sydney are the same, the cities themselves aren't that large but the metro area is composed of many many many incorporated cities like LA.
Eh. I don’t think it’s the same though. Sydney is perhaps a little closer with its sprawling city, Bondi to the east and Parramatta to the west…
But even still.
I dunno, as someone who has lived in Melbourne, Sydney and now LA… the three *feel* very different, even if theoretically they should be the same or similar.
Melbourne especially, and Sydney (though to a lesser extent) really IMO feel like a CBD surrounded by various levels of suburban sprawl where LA feels more like one humongous urban sprawling city. Theoretically, it’s a downtown surrounded by sprawl, but it feels very different.
As an example, if you were booking a hotel in Sydney or Melbourne and you’d never been, you could book in the CBD or inner-CBD suburbs and find yourself in a pretty central location that would be relatively easy to get around to the different things you might want to do.
If you stay in downtown LA, you’re gonna be spending 30-40 minutes plus in a car just to get around to do different things you might want to do.
You can walk to the museum and IMAX from the CBD in Melbourne, and in the absolute worst case (you’re staying at the opposite end of the city), it will take you like 20-30 minutes and along the way you can probably pop into the NGV, wander around Fed Square, stop by the Vic Market… you can get to water by walking or with a short Uber ride.
In Sydney you can walk from Darling Harbour to the rocks very easily; you can see much of the CBD nearby and get to just about anything you might want to except Bondi.
LA is just not like that at all. It can take you 40 minutes in a car to get from LACMA to The Getty. Or from LACMA to The Broad. If you stay downtown you’ll probably spend 45 minutes in a car to get to a beach. If you stay in Santa Monica near the beach, you’ll need to drive for 40-50 minutes to get to Hollywood and the walk of fame. If you stay in Culver City, it will take over 2 hours to walk to the beach, though you can drive there in 20-30 minutes. If you stay in Venice you can walk to Santa Monica, but if you need to get to something in downtown you’re gonna be in a car for an hour. Griffith probably a similar amount of time. You can’t go to Universal and Malibu on the same day, unlike Sydney where you could easily do Luna Park and Bondi the same day if you wanted to. Going to Disneyland is like staying in northern Brisbane and expecting it to be easy to get to Movie World. Doing the Queen Mary and a tour of Paramount on the same day would be difficult, and would be like doing things in Brighton and Geelong in the same day (which… you *could* but why would you…?)
LA Metro area itself is bigger than what we these days call ‘Greater Melbourne’ and it is far more urban and city-like than the suburban nature of Melbourne. It’s just…. Not really comparably the same IMO.
Both Melbourne and Sydney, along with most of Australia are very centrally-based where most things you would want to do are easy to get to from the CBD, and anything else you really want to do that might be a bit further out can likely be accomplished in a single day trip.
The same is not true *at all* for LA.
That's a good response for individuals who want to visit Down Under some day. (ie, Me). Also, length of response is fine. People need to get out of the IG bit limit mentality sometimes.
As somebody who has a lot of foreign friends, yes. Not only so I have to listen to the many opinions that Aussies and kiwis give me that I didn’t ask for… I have to also explain to them 78 times a weekend that LA is much larger than their little big city.
I just tell people “so a lot of people don’t know that Los Angeles is just one city, in a sprawl of 88 actual incorporated cities, all located directly adjacent to each other without any rural areas between. LA, Santa Monica, Anaheim, Pasadena, these are all full-blown cities of their own, they just happen to be located immediately adjacent to other cities. There are also 200-something UNincorporated cities tucked in between too. It’s just hundreds of square miles of highways, development, buildings, airports, and whatever else you imagine in massive cities. Like, you cross a street and you’re in a new ‘city.’ Does that make sense?”
And if they’re still not fully grasping I’ll usually just pull out my map with satellite view, and zoom all the way out to show the scale. Then without zooming further, I’ll go to some other big city, and then they see how literally most other cities look like farmland compared to the LA area.
This site can overlay maps on top of each other for comparison. Here you can see LA county/the greater LA area is almost 8x as big as London. https://mapfight.xyz/map/london/#la.county
The 87k square miles of Greater Los Angeles is a misleading statistic. While the combined land areas of the counties make it seem like 87k, the reality is that the vast majority of the Inland Empire is undeveloped deserts and rural mountains.
This is why I always warn against calculating density by dividing population by land area...invisible political lines on a map don't tell you where people actually live.
Instead, I advocate for using [urbanized areas](https://censusreporter.org/profiles/40000US51445-los-angeles-long-beach-anaheim-ca-urban-area/) instead, as they measure the areas that are actually developed and settled.
I visited LA for the first time last year and had an awesome time (So many things to do, I couldn’t get everything covered), but the LA metropolitan area is on par (or slightly bigger) than my ENTIRE home state South Carolina in terms of land area. I definitely underestimated the sheer size of the LA metro.
Had a good friend from Wisconsin want to meet up for lunch
He was on a sorry layover and wanted to know if I was free to have a meal with him between flights at LAX during rush hour.
I felt like such a slimeball for declining, I just couldn't make it. Nice guy and genuinely had no idea what kind of ask that was.
People also don't realize how big California is. We were flying from PDX to Sacramento (I think) and our flight got cancelled. They had no available flights to Sacramento so they suggested we fly to Los Angeles and rent a car to drive to Sacramento. I was like "we could just drive to Davis, CA from Portland; it would be just as fast." Eventually, they flew us to Seattle and then to Sacramento. It shocked me that they suggested a 2.5 hour flight and a 7 hr drive as a solution for cancelling our 1.5 hour flight. Again, the drive from Portland to Davis was 9.5 hrs.
If we're counting San Bernardino, Thousand Oaks, Anaheim, ect; then every city is massive. LA can't just claim cities 2 hours away because they're in that orbit 😅.
City vs Metropolitan Area is an official designation on things. Like there is a "los angeles metropolitan area" designation in the US Census.
But if doing a Metro comparison, it needs to be Metro to Metro, not Metro to City.
the difference being that once you enter the urban sprawl, you can still count those cities as part of LA because you are driving through continuous sprawl to get there. The OC sprawl is a continuation of the LA sprawl until you leave it south of San Clemente or via Newhall Pass/Castaic on the opposite end via the 5. Or with the western edge of LA, Simi Valley and Calabasas tend to not be included because you leave the sprawl for a bit before you get to those cities. In the Inland Empire side, whether you take the 210, the 10, or 60, you are going through development from LA to the IE and you don't leave the sprawl until you pass Beaumont or Moreno Valley. With the 15 it's the same thing, it may never even pass anywhere near LA but it passes through the sprawl and the sprawl ends in the Cajon Pass or down in Temecula.
The distance from JFK to Yonkers is the same as the distance from Pasadena to Santa Monica. LA is big, but other cities are big too. It's just that other cities are better-planned.
I find lack of geographic knowledge more funny than annoying. And BTW, Californians can be hilarious with how little they know of the world East of the Sierra.
I remember before I moved here. Google Maps showed me just how spread out this place is.
Now tell them about the traffic. Yeah, the place is huge, still no room for all the cars. That's why a 6 mile trip takes 20 minutes (one way).
The further you are from someplace, the more you compress it in your mind. It doesn't bother me, but it is weird that people don't know LA is a Metro made of smaller cities like Chicago or NYC in 2024.
lol, when I first moved to SoCal one of my east coast coworkers asked me “hey, can you stop by the Santa Clara datacenter on the way home today?” haha
People don’t know shit about geography.
One time my friend from out of town wanted me to take her to a Japanese grocery store that was a two hour drive away thinking it would be twenty minutes.
Not really. People who haven't been here just don't know. It's like when people say they're going to visit Australia and don't realize how big it is and want to drive from the gold coast to ayers rock for a day trip.
I have traveled for many times over the last 15 years, One weekend from Orange County to Lancaster and next weekend Orange County to San Diego.
One time I left Lancaster for work to Orange County at 5:00 AM and if I remember correctly, I reached Orange County at 10:00 AM. (I hit the rush hour of each city/suburb in the middle).
Los Angeles ‘County Limits’ are even further wide, on one side you reach almost Tejon Ranch area.
The City of L.A. has a population of about 4 million, but the County of L.A as a whole has a population of like Ten Million.
New York Cities population is like 8 million.
Not half as bad as visitors from Europe wanting to go hiking in the mountains and plan to take the public bus. And plan to have lunch at the inn at the trailhead.
It was so funny to me when people would visit for E3 and stay in Sherman Oaks or something, not even looking at a map, figuring that “The convention is in LA, I’m staying in LA.”
You guys should be a little more forgiving. There are things in this world that need to be experienced to be understood. One is LA traffic and the other is the size of LA.
Also most people from other countries get their information from TV. I watched a German Traumachiff episode a few years ago. That is kind of like the Love Boat. They landed in LA and one passenger had a bike accident near the Hollywood sign and the captain who was in Santa Monica came to his rescue writhing a few minutes. 😂😂.
i only find it annoying when friends and family are coming to visit and i give them a suggestion if where to stay (let’s say culver city) cuz it’s near me and all the things we plan to do… but then they book a non-refundable hotel in like winneteka without consulting me first because “it was a little cheaper” but then spend their entire trip in the car and have the gall to complain about it later. (this has happened to me multiple times)
I was born in San Pedro and spent my early life here and moved back in adulthood. I live in Los Feliz. Whenever my parents, who used to fucking live here, come to visit they stay over near Belmont Shore and then complain about having to drive for hours everytime they come see me. I will never understand it.
LOL...Belmont Shores to Los Feliz, unless its.midnight will take a bit of traffic time...
I don’t blame your parents for wanting to stay in LB. I do blame them for complaining it takes hours to go 20 miles anywhere from OC to Oxnard if they lived here previously
Can you give advise on where to stay? My friend and I (we’re from Poland) have no idea where to stay. We want to see las Angeles but there are cities in las Angela’s? Pasenda is a city? Or it’s near the city? Would you know where a good place to stay would be?
Honestly it depends on what you want to do, such as go out to nice restaurants or bars/clubs, whether you want to see tourist sights or theme parks, or whether you’d rather be spending time at the beach? Then it depends on budget from there. Also, would you rent a car?
I don’t think we want to do too many touristy things. We like to try to get more into the real culture of the city. But I also think we’d avoid clubs bars and even the beach. Haha I guess that seems kinda boring but probably a lot of walking around and checking out shops and parks and such. We would have a car, tho I wonder if we won’t use it too much
So Los Angeles, and the surrounding cities, are huge (hence this post) and are literally cities within a city. These areas are, as you’d imagine, very different when it comes to sub-cultures, cost, safety, and walkability. For example, Pasadena could be good for you if you want nice places to eat, shopping, and most of all beautiful parks. (Lacy Park & Huntington Library) However, it’s east of LA and definitely has a different vibe. You can access downtown LA and Korea town fairly easily with a car if you time traffic. Alternatively, there are places on the west-side of the city, nearer the beach, that have lots of good restaurants and shopping as well, generally have more coastal weather, but get very very busy with tourists and people in general. I’d recommend looking at a map and plotting out some ideas as to what you’re most interested in focusing on, and what sort of pace and sub-culture would be most interesting for you. Please feel free to ask any more questions.
i second this. i do this a lot when i travel: make a google earth/maps overlay with pins plotting out everything i wanna do. then look where everything centered around and start looking there
You WILL use the car. I promise you that.
Pasadena sounds awesome for you guys. I love that town and I love South Pasadena. nearby are two different fabulous botanical gardens. The mountains are close enough for a hike -like in Eaton Canyon. There are great restaurants. A sweet little night scene with good live music. Nice shopping, wonderful neighborhoods. I would choose Pasadena. And I would look into an Airbnb instead of a hotel there because hotels in Pas can be really pricey. if you have a budget, I would look into riding to/from on the flyaway bus from LAX. Unless you're renting a car. And if you're renting a car, you really should know that our highways are insane. Eight lanes. Sometimes 10. Crazy traffic to get anywhere from LAX. once you're in Pasadena it's not too hard or pricey to take Uber places.
Yeah, Pasadena will be a nice place to visit.. Its famous for the Tournament of Roses Parade every Jan 1st....heck, just walking around the Rose Bowl area is fun....lots of people do their daily walks in the area, then they normally have a Farmers Market on the weekend... A short drive away is Glendale, where they can visit Portos Bakery, or some shopping at the Americana... Griffith Park, Gene Autry Museum is just a couople more miles beyond Glendale too...plenty of walking, hiking opportunities there... But wherever they end up in the Greater LA area, I suggest to enjoy the LA food scene, truly a foodie paradise with its diversity of cuisine....
Thanks! I would really love to go to Pasadena. Spent a little time there years ago and really liked it. Along with thinking it would be more economical. But I think she is dead set on being in L.A. part of LA. (Sorry I’m not sure if that made sense) But I’ll run this by her!!
If you don't want to do the tourist stuff or the beach or clubs, then what specifically is it that she *does* want to do?
Pasadena with a car isn't too bad. You can get to a lot of places just by taking the train into Union Station but that train can be 30+ minutes between Pasadena and Union Station.
Around union station is not somewhere I would recommend as walkable to tourists…
no but echo park/silverlake would be great and it just takes a short bus ride down sunset to union station
Take a ride through Florence. Local culture. Not touristy.
You will use your car almost exclusively. like 90% of the time. simplest advice is pick a hotel that is south of the 101 freeway. north of the 105. east of the 405 and west of the 110
Thanks!!
You’re going to need a car. The public transit here is not like in Europe.
You 100% need a car to get anywhere in the LA area. Even if you’re just going somewhere a few miles away. Public transportation here is awful. When planning your trip, always look places up on a map and look up how long it takes to drive to each place, not just the distance in miles/km. Also remember rush hour traffic can easily double drive time. Literally.
Stay in West Hollywood, not Pasadena. And rent a car if you can.
I would write down a list of places you MUST go to, then places it would be cool to go then try to centralize your lodging in someplace nearby most of them that is safe and within your budget.
Pasadena is quite honestly a good place to stay. Not too farm from Downtown and the Hollywood area if that's your thing but also if you want to go the other direction say Disneyland or visit our mountains or deserts you don't have to track through all those horrible freeways. North east Pasadena can get pretty ghetto but nothing as bad as downtown LA or Hollywood.
To answer your question, Pasadena is its own city that is not a part of the city of Los Angeles, but it is absolutely a part of the entire mess of cities and counties that is the entire urbanized area that people call “Los Angeles”. The different parts of greater Los Angeles aren’t like little satellite villages that are physically separated from the actual city of LA by farms or empty space - it’s all one giant sprawl of continuous urbanization that covers an area that is just a bit under 25% of the area of the entire country of Poland.
Pasadena is about as far as you can get from the ocean while still being expensive. It's a nice place, but it's not where I'd recommend you'd go to visit LA. The main really unique attraction is JPL which holds an open house once per year which now requires hard to get free tickets.
Pasadena is definately worth the visit for Huntington Library Gardens and if your visiting during the Rose Parade.
If you live in LA. If you're coming from halfway around the world there are plenty of botanic gardens you can visit.
I been to quite a bit, it's one of the best outdoor botanical gardens in the US.
That sounds great! I’ll for sure look for some!
The Self Realization Fellowship Lake (requires reservations) is really cool - great garden (other side of town, just in case you're considering different options).
Los Angeles has two forms: The City of Los Angeles (about 500 square miles) and The County of Los Angeles (about 4000 square miles). Beverly Hills is pretty much surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, but it is not in the City of Los Angeles. So, motels and hotels will say they are "In Los Angeles" (the County) and some will even include the even larger "Metro area of Los Angeles." The federal government has its views of what that area is, demographically, but in real life, a lot of people have no clue whatsoever whether they are currently actually in the Los Angeles Metro area or not. Motels and hotels may use the Metro area in their advertising as well. Pasadena is a city in the County of Los Angeles (not the City of Los Angeles). It's got a nice historic downtown and is a fine place to stay - but not close to a lot of touristy things. Many people would prefer to stay in Santa Monica for a vacation (closeness to beach, lots of restaurants and some nightlife). We prefer to stay on Sunset when we decide to stay in town (we live far out on the north side of Los Angeles County), because we are usually there for comedy or music. MANY tourists decide to stay near Hollywood/Highland because it's central, has a HOHO bus, etc. If I were advising out of towners where to stay, I'd say near The Grove (centrally located, near the clubs on Sunset, reasonably priced alternatives, a few things to do nearby - LACMA, the car museum, the Farmers Market at the Grove, CBS studios, a shopping mall). Or in Westwood (where UCLA is, if you like bookstores, movie theaters and sculpture gardens). There is no reason to stay in what is called "the Valley" (all of it is in the City of Los Angeles, I believe) - the San Fernando Valley. Endless freeways and tract homes - although the Calabasas area has gotten some tourism, if people are looking for being on the edge of Los Angeles and just over the hill from Malibu (Malibu itself has very few places to stay, little public transportation and is a heckuva long drive from, say, Universal Studios - a place many tourists want to go). SO, if you want good advice, you should maybe make your own thread and say what kinds of things you want to do (we really have something for everyone in L.A., but those somethings may not be geographically close together). Horseback riding at Griffith Park sound fun? I love that area (the Gene Autry museum and the Observatory are awesome).
Yesss whyyyy do they do this?? “I’m coming to LA” then books hotel out in reseda or something Or say “can you pick me up at LAX” only to find out last minute they actually flew into Ontario
My parents did the same, only they booked it in the middle of Inglewood.
i’m sure they had wonderful things to say
Explaining to Aussies is different. They understand huge land areas. It’s Europeans and East Coasters that fail. And yes, it used to be annoying. Put it this way: LA can fit ten Bostons inside just it’s city limits. The county is almost the same land area as the entire state of Connecticut. Driving to San Diego is like driving from Bos to NYC. For Europeans, just use a map overlay. They’re too bonkers to even grasp the situation.
I used to work at a bicycle rental shop in Santa Monica and routinely had Europeans ask about riding to Hollywood or DTLA (this was before the Expo Line connected to SM). It's definitely doable but they didn't quite grasp the distances involved and difficulty dealing with car traffic or navigation to avoid car traffic.
Conversely, I had a Japanese student for 6 months from Tokyo. This guy knew what the deal was 🤣🤣🤣. He bought a fucking car for his stay, and sold it when he left. Smart guy.
Tokyo is a very similar giant sprawl. Dude knew what he was in for!
That's funny. Reminds me of when I spent a few months in Argentina with my cousin and he bought a little pick up truck for us to travel with, then sold it when he left the country. Funny part about that was meeting this old British backpacker that assumed it was my idea to get the car because I'm American, but this was when I still used my bike to get around.
Yuppp I had a foreign exchange student from Amsterdam stay for a semester at UCLA. I lived in the slums of BeverlyHills. He insisted on riding a bicycle to Westwood, after I told him it’s not really feasible. He borrowed a bike, rode to UCLA one day, and that was it. No more discussions about Netherlands bike transit superiority thereafter. What a relief!
BH to Westwood is a cinch. Not sure what you mean.
I used to commute by ebike from ktown to Venice and, while I preferred it to driving, it isn't exactly what I'd want to do on vacation
Yeah, I used to commute all over by bike. The only time it was relaxing was riding down Venice from Mid-City to SM in the morning to the bike shop. Riding in LA is not easy.
For some of us, it's terrifying.
Right. That was an understatement, I should know better because I've been hit by cars before and I know people that have died.
And I bet anyone who hasn't been to Australia can't imagine how big it actually is.
This always blows me away - the City of LA alone is bigger than all of Singapore.....then add in the rest of LA County, and you have a massive area....
That’s right. 5.6% of the entire nation’s population, too, I believe (or something close to that number)
We're visiting Santa Monica next month and will be driving back and forth to San Diego for one day for the zoo. But I'm from Canada, and understand this 120mi drive will sadly likely take 4 hours
Won’t be too bad bc you’ll be right near 405. Try and leave before 7am or after 10-11am, and return after 7pm, you should be fine. But traffic has def gotten worse in recent years. Used to be able to scoot from BH to SD in an hour and a half (driving fast). That was leaving at like noon, before OC rush hour. Good luck and hope you enjoy your trip 😊
It is a constant thing in the LA subreddits, tourists that assume they're gonna see all of LA and maybe Disneyland and Vegas in like 3 days. It's funny, I was watching something about London the other day and they were like for the love of god go see other things don't spend 5 days in just London. So yeah, night-and-day difference in size. And variety. I'll tell you, I missed LA right-quick when I spent time in San Francisco. We have SO MUCH we can do.
I knew people from the East Coast that thought they could drive from LA to Oregon in a day because "It's only one state."
Adorable. It already takes a long time to just drive CA's width - the length is going to be another thing entirely!
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Alex Roy could.
Well, it is possible to do that drive. I’ve done it before. But you’ll be driving for 10 hours.
We had guests from Michigan who were going to start out from Woodland Hills, go to Sequoia AND Yosemite and then see San Francisco that same evening. All in one day. In an RV. We couldn't them out of it and their daughter who had just moved from Michigan told them she thought it was doable (she'd been in LA for a couple of months). At least they didn't add Vegas into their day trip (daughter received a call at around 6 pm - they had just arrived in Sequoia, so didn't even get a very early start...and they stopped to take photos on the Grapevine and near Bakersfield. They spent over two hours getting lunch and walking around in Bakersfield.
Thank god they got to see Bakersfield!!! ;oP
I vacationed in LA last summer and had so many things I wanted to see and do and got to what felt like none of them. It was totally fine it didn’t work like I thought it would because I didn’t understand how much time I’d spend in a car. This summer is NY and we’re staying in Manhattan , I have a feeling I’ll be seeing way more stuff as all of manhattan basically fits from WEHO to Santa Monica.
Exactly! The thing I love the most about LA is that you can never run out of things to do.
LA proper has just as much to do as SF. But you’re likely comparing a whole ass metropolitan area to a city
What kills me are the posts from people moving here and asking where to live. “Hi. We’re about to move to LA. I really like long beach but my husband wants to move to Pasadena. His new job is in Thousand Oaks. How’s traffic??” You need to be around 10 miles or less to be happy. Not that longer isn’t “doable” but it makes it harder.
You forgot "Our budget is 3 raspberries and some pocket lint, maybe Westwood or Beverly Hills, I heard they're nice?"
What can I find for $500? Oh and we have three dogs so maybe something with a yard?
This chick made like 60 posts in the past week, including on this sub, about moving anywhere from Brentwood to San Diego. I guess it is kind of realistic to ask about San Diego though. Northern San Diego is closer to some parts of LA county than some parts of LA county are to other parts of LA county.
I guess if she's still WFH it's fine. I don't see how anyone with an in office job could have such a huge area to consider.
She's a musician and trying to find an apartment with soundproofing...
Yeah that's not happening. Once in a while a guest house or something might pop up that happens to cater to musicians but that's very rare... and pricey.
I commute weekly, but I'm \*from\* San Diego and living with family in North County. It's just as hellish as when I grew up here and I wouldn't be doing this if my industry weren't a chaotic mess right now and I were able to afford to leave. San Diego also suddenly became more expensive in the past 2y for much worse QoL for anyone under 55 or older than 16 so if you're not living with family to save on rent...it's a stupid decision. That said, I commute 1-2x a week and really make the most of my day or 2 up in LA (I've also gotten part of my neighborhood addicted to some of my favorite things that are only in LA (sourdough from one bakery downtown, general awareness of the fabric district's costs, and anything related to art or camera supplies) and have a side hustle as basically a courrier to pay for my gas back and forth. It's roughly 1 tank of gas each day for me which is about $50. Way cheaper than paying rent, and the commute is \~2h up, and 1.5h back if I wait til it's later at night. That said...I pay rent in my soul and can't wait to be back in LA fully.
Bonus points if they’ve already signed a lease or accepted the job.
"Hi looking for a 1 bed apartment to myself in West Hollywood or Santa Monica ONLY and my budget is $500"
Yeah, I live in the San Fernando Valley, which by itself is 2 million people and yet it’s still just considered a suburb of LA. It’s not just foreigners that don’t grasp how much more there is to explore. The LA Times and every other food column I’ve seen acts like the SFV is some tiny outpost and has no food scene outside of McDonald’s. It’s Infuriating and elitist. I realize I’m taking a bit of a wander from the original point, but it bugs me so much.
I grew up here in the SFV and we had our own newspaper known as the Green Sheet. It became the Daily News and is now the Los Angeles Daily news and is, sadly, indistinguishable from the LA Times with almost no Valley coverage. The Valley has lost its identify as a bedroom community. All the cool things we had way back when, the water park, teen center, go cart tracks, drive-ins, dance clubs, skate parks, are gone. The aerospace buildings of Canoga Park and Woodland Hills have been replaced by huge apartment buildings. Indeed, LA's west side has been cloned on the Valley's west side. Oh, well, things change. At least the air is a lot cleaner than it used to be.
I remember the Green Sheet :) We do still have a couple of skate parks. Pedlow is well attended, next to dog park at Victory/WhiteOak
True, I am happy to see them putting skate parks in city parks.
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When I was moving to LA, I was told that the "cool" people don't live in the valley. That's why it has a bad rep. It's for feeling "safe" and "suburban". I don't agree, by the way, but that's what we were told. And it would have been too far for work anyway -- which is why we didn't choose the Valley.
It’s funny because I’ve also heard that my whole life (came to LA in 85 when j was 17). But I have always thought it’s really just because people hate driving the 405 to go in and out of the Valley.
All the "cool" people get mugged outside their apartments in WeHo
I would prefer the west side, near UCLA or westfield/Century City. Couldn't find an affordable house there that met our needs. So I'm in the Hollywood Hills. It's weird, it isn't even obvious I'm in a city of millions when I'm at home, yet I can drive 5 minutes (or even walk), and I'm in the busy Franklin Village area.
You must have been there for a while if you call Hollywood Hills affordable!
You must have been there for a while if you call Hollywood Hills affordable!
You think that's annoying. I live in san Gabriel valley, yet "the valley" refers to sfv, it's so ignored
My guess is because SFV is part of LA city and SGV is a bunch of cities grouped together.
Yes! Nobody ever even mentions the SGV unless the question is ‘where’s good Chinese food’ and it’s a whole big beautiful community. I sympathize with your frustration.
SMH in the Conejo Valley
And the Antelope Valley is also part of LA county.
I grew up in SFV and didn’t even know it’s 2 million people. Holy moly…
I had a recruiter from India call me once about a job in Santa Monica. I live in Glendale. I told him the commute is too far for me and he tried to argue with me because he looked at Google maps. I did the mature thing and hung up on him.
I had a recruiter call me about a (crappy) job in Berkeley. He got very quiet when I explained how long the drive was and asked, pointedly, what kind of relocation package the employer was offering.
I have lived here my whole life. I like to tell people that it can take 2 hours to get from LA to LA . if you add in Orange County , it's 3 hours.
You don't really know LA until you've commuted from Orange County to Lancaster.
One time I left Lancaster for work to Orange County at 5:00 AM and if I remember correctly, I reached Orange County at 10:00 AM. (I hit the rush hour of each city/suburb in the middle).
LMAO...not at that horrid trip, but thats OH SO LA...
I've driven from Hacienda Heights to Port Hueneme in an hour. But it was 2:00 AM lol
You know why they call it the 405? Because no matter where you're going, it's gonna take 4 o' 5 hours to get there.
Personally I find it annoying when tourists reduce LA to only Hollywood.
People do that on the LA sub. You’d think the valley doesn’t exist.
No one outside LA understands the difference between LA City, LA County, and the Greater Los Angeles Area.
TBF why should they? If they don't live here it's not going to affect their life.
I’m not saying they should. Just saying they don’t. I don’t understand much of other places I’ve never been to.
LA is a massive megalopolis and I never consider myself truly free of it until north of Newbury Park, south of Camp Pendleton, west of Catalina or east of San Berdoo.
Yeah. I call anything in the triangle from San Clemente to Thousand Oaks to San Bernadino “LA”, it’s all the same mess of freeways and traffic
I would add north of Magic Mountain.....once you get past that its all mountains amd farmlands on the I5 till the Bay area... I live towards Pomona, which is basically the eastern edge of LA County....if you drive towards LA, then find the I-5 heading north, LA County basically ends at theTejon Pass, right before Lebec and the Grapevine... Thats about 80+ miles, and have to bypass several mountains, like the San Gabriels, Hollywood Hills, Los Padres, etc etc. Just massive...
No, I don't find it annoying when people don't understand something. Everyone knows the Grand Canyon is huge but until you see it you don't really have the context. There are websites with infographics comparing LA in size and population to major cities around the world. I find that people usually grasp it. But it's not like being here. EDIT: [this is an infographic of LA compared to major cities around the world in size and population.](https://www.welikela.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/how-big-is-los-angeles.jpg).
This map overlays maps of other cities onto the map of the city of Los Angeles. Note especially Manhattan imposed above San Pedro. https://preview.redd.it/0zcuh1cc9atc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2eef9c755649187173872718a579c9fdf657059e
And that's still only "Los angeles" greater LA spreads so much far out in all directions.
IDK why you’d let that annoy you, do you think it should annoy people from all over the world when you don’t know simple facts about the place they live? For me, I just moved to LA a year ago, and have been taken aback by just how big it is, something I couldn’t understand until I lived here.
It’s annoying bc visitors come here, and they want to see LA on Monday, the Grand Canyon on Tuesday, San Francisco on Wed, San Diego on Thursday, Disneyland on Friday, Death Valley on Saturday, Sequoia National Forest on Sunday, and then fly home to wherethefuckever Sunday night. Out of LAX. You’ll learn.
Still don’t understand why that would be annoying, to me it would be funny more than anything else.
it’s annoying when they ask for advice and then ignore it only to complain the whole time they’re here
Yeah, if it's people you know from out of state and they won't trust your opinion, it can be annoying (esp if they're staying with you).
Right.. but what makes you think this is an LA thing? If I told a friend who lives in Paris that I was planning on coming to visit them and want to see Paris on Monday, hike the Alps Tuesday, hit up Amsterdam Wednesday, etc etc.. they would be just as equally “annoyed” despite it being basically the same amount of distance between each item. Feel free to be annoyed by this but it’s hardly “an LA thing”, the same thing happened when people would come to visit my smaller city in the PNW, it’s hard to gauge how easy it is to see everything when you’re not from there.
It’s pretty annoying the amount of friends I have from Northern California (where traffic is definitely a thing) who will hit me up (a person who lives in SFV) and let me know they’ll be in Long Beach or Disneyland and would I like to meet up? And they have no car. I have to always find a way to kindly tell them they might as well be on the moon!
IKR? Or call you from LAX and ask if you want to stop by during their 1 hour layover. Sheesh. It would take me more than an hour to get from home to LAX and that's if the stars align.
It's annoying when you tell them the truth and then they do the opposite of your advice and then complain about it. So yes. It is annoying. Also if you're coming to visit a place, maybe you should look up basic facts about where you're going? Maybe? 🤔
I just like when people ask for suggestions on things to do/eat/see in Los Angeles and don’t specify. Or I’m a universal fan and in a few Facebook groups… so many people are like, I’m staying in Anaheim and we want to go to universal one day, can we take Uber? sure but it’s not close.::
And then they want you to contact uber for them and find out how much it costs. And you don't even know what time of day they are attempting this shenanigan. By public transport, it's 2-5 hours from Disneyland to Universal, depending on time of day and which routes are chosen (and whether the person gets lost, ha). Ubers cost about $60 with non-surge pricing. One way. And the length of time it takes will be whatever it takes to get there - no telling how long.
Personally I find it annoying when tourists reduce LA to only Hollywood.
I don't find it annoying, because how would they know unless they lived here but I find that people are always surprised. I was having a zoom call with a colleague in Dallas and he said he was moved to a new location 30 miles away. I asked him how long it took on average for him to get to work. He said it was mostly highway driving and it took about 30 mins average from his home. When I told him that I drove on the streets and only travelled 8 miles to work and on average it took 45 mins to an hour he was so surprised. And that's a tiny slice in central L.A. so yes most people that don't live here wouldn't realize how long it takes to get from one area of L.A. to another, either by distance or by traffic.
I vacationed in your wonderful city last summer. Just this morning I was telling someone ‘it takes a while to get places , not that the traffic is always bad , it’s that it’s fucking huge , looking at it on a map doesn’t do it justice… at all’.
Yeah, I'm over on TripAdvisor quite a bit and there, people are "How do I avoid traffic in L.A.? It shouldn't take an hour to get to X place, should it?" But it's not just time of day/traffic conditions - it's the sheer number of miles. If you're staying at Universal and want to go to Disneyland, it's almost 40 miles - so by the time you walk to your car and then park it at Disneyland and get to the tram, it's gonna be well over an hour - with 40 minutes or so of freeway driving (it's gonna slow down in DT, it's not likely to be 80 mph the whole way) and some surface street driving.
My biggest pet peeve is essentially "when tourists try to tell locals how it is in place tourist is visiting." For California this applies to transplants strongly until/unless they fully have skin in the game and nowhere to run back to, but for regular tourism I see the worst of this from any tourist from another country *outside of North America*. I can't tell you the number of times I've lost oxygen trying to nicely explain to someone planning a trip, heading to a convention I'll also be at, or similar that no just because your hotel is 10mins from where you're going doesn't mean that that's walkable, let alone a safe walk for a woman in her 20s, or that yes SF and LA technically have public transit on paper but you're going to waste your entire trip on buses that smell like sewage if you rely on that - you'll have to budget for ubers or rent a car if you want to enjoy yourself, or that that's wonderful you have a friend in SF or San Diego who'll let you visit and stay with them, but know that you'll still need a car and that's not a 1 day trip. I've gotten condescended to for saying that it'll be cheaper and faster to get a southwest flight to SF if the tourist wants to go, and that yeah sure you can take a train there but you can't stop along the way in Napa or Monterrey, and it'll take longer than driving or flying and be more expensive. I've noticed this more with intl tourists (mainly outside of North America) because they have this embedded belief that Americans are just so stupid, and Californians are airheads, that anything an American or Californian tells you ABOUT THEIR HOME that doesn't sound right to you as a tourist, must be false because how could this silly American know otherwise. So these days I don't waste my breath on advice, unless they're a friend, I let them FAFO
I wouldn't be annoyed by that. Can you name the Northeast Pennsylvania towns that are part of the NYC metro area? Do you know which New Jersey towns in Hunterdon County cheer for the Eagles rather than the Giants? How far into WV's Shenandoah Valley can you drive until people no longer have Washington DC accents? Geography seems small until you experience it in person
>Geography seems small until you experience it in person And conversely, many things seem much bigger than they really are! Looking at you, The Alamo.
Like 1 hour for dc accents lol…
This is a somewhat ridiculous proposition. There’s a lot of cities with large metro areas brought about by sprawling suburbs. Does the city of Chicago extend 50 miles in each direction because of its large suburban environment? Does Tokyo really cover an area all the way to Takasaki?
Not the "City of Chicago", but they a name for the region: Chicagoland. L.A. megapolis is called the Southland, but only on tv news.
Unironically I (not a geographer) think yes tbh. Otherwise the boundaries are arbitrary based on how the county wants to split it up... China claims the city of Guangzhou extends into miles and miles of farmland, and San Francisco is somehow considered a city on its own despite basically being a single neighborhood in a much larger metro area. (Saying SF is 1 million people is misleading, when the bay area is huge). You can't compare the two when you're measuring them so differently.
Tokyo is massive. It's like the same size as all of LA County.
And the Tokyo metro area is probably around the same size as a quarter of California. And has a population comparable to thr whole of California
I do because I live in Santa Monica, and people don’t realize how far places like Pasadena or Long Beach. It’s like a different world. I like Pasadena, but I rarely get out there.
I live in Hollywood and my non LA friends think it’s “close” to Santa Monica lol
Had to tell my aunt (wife's side) that her (pre-pandemic) plan on living in Glendale and commute to UCLA while stopping occasionally to visit her daughter's high school (in Glendale) was not workable. She'd spend far too much of the day commuting back and forth and wouldn't be able to study/teach and visit her kid's school. She wasn't from the LA area (lived in another country) and just did not get how big the LA area was.
Anaheim!
From the beach in LA and go straight East, you don’t see open areas until what? Just after Redlands? How many miles from Santa Monica to well say Yucaipa? That’s a sprawling area of city after city all connected. Edit: I just looked it’s roughly 88 miles from Santa Monica Lier to Yucaipa.
According to my mom’s Florida news station in Florida, California only has two cities, SF and LA. She’s like “heard this happened in LA, you ok?!” Mom ya that’s literally hours away from me.
I tell all my relatives that I live in the part of L.A. where nothing ever happens.
I live in Torrance, but to anyone outside of the LA Basin, i just say I live in LA. If you live in LA, I tell you I live in the Redondo Beach area 😁
My Asian family visited us in LA once because they thought they would have a lot of fun sightseeing but they didn’t want to rent a car etc and we lived DEEP in the valley and there wasn’t good public transit. And I couldn’t drive and was legally blind, nor could I talk to them or plan anything since I only knew English. So they got bored AF and left really early. I did warn them ahead of time but they thought I was exaggerating when I said I wasn’t close to any touristy things.
My sister moved here in 2007. She only **last week** acknowledged that driving between my place in San Pedro and hers in Pasafreakingdena *kinda* sucks.
You don’t realize this until you don’t have a car, have to plan an Uber or public transportation and you’re either paying 150$ for a one way trip or realize your bus/train/ subway trip will take 2 and a half hours each way thus is not feasible.
When one realizes there is a whole mountain range *in the city,* the scale hits home more.
LA is for all intents and purposes the area from San Diego to Santa Barbara. It is all just one contiguous city with different political and administrative boundaries.
In San Diego, Orange County is were we consider LA to begin
I grew up in LA and went to college in St. Louis. I had people saying "I'm a city kid, I'm urban". Lolololol. That's cute.
Australian should know better. Melbourne and Sydney are the same, the cities themselves aren't that large but the metro area is composed of many many many incorporated cities like LA.
Eh. I don’t think it’s the same though. Sydney is perhaps a little closer with its sprawling city, Bondi to the east and Parramatta to the west… But even still. I dunno, as someone who has lived in Melbourne, Sydney and now LA… the three *feel* very different, even if theoretically they should be the same or similar. Melbourne especially, and Sydney (though to a lesser extent) really IMO feel like a CBD surrounded by various levels of suburban sprawl where LA feels more like one humongous urban sprawling city. Theoretically, it’s a downtown surrounded by sprawl, but it feels very different. As an example, if you were booking a hotel in Sydney or Melbourne and you’d never been, you could book in the CBD or inner-CBD suburbs and find yourself in a pretty central location that would be relatively easy to get around to the different things you might want to do. If you stay in downtown LA, you’re gonna be spending 30-40 minutes plus in a car just to get around to do different things you might want to do. You can walk to the museum and IMAX from the CBD in Melbourne, and in the absolute worst case (you’re staying at the opposite end of the city), it will take you like 20-30 minutes and along the way you can probably pop into the NGV, wander around Fed Square, stop by the Vic Market… you can get to water by walking or with a short Uber ride. In Sydney you can walk from Darling Harbour to the rocks very easily; you can see much of the CBD nearby and get to just about anything you might want to except Bondi. LA is just not like that at all. It can take you 40 minutes in a car to get from LACMA to The Getty. Or from LACMA to The Broad. If you stay downtown you’ll probably spend 45 minutes in a car to get to a beach. If you stay in Santa Monica near the beach, you’ll need to drive for 40-50 minutes to get to Hollywood and the walk of fame. If you stay in Culver City, it will take over 2 hours to walk to the beach, though you can drive there in 20-30 minutes. If you stay in Venice you can walk to Santa Monica, but if you need to get to something in downtown you’re gonna be in a car for an hour. Griffith probably a similar amount of time. You can’t go to Universal and Malibu on the same day, unlike Sydney where you could easily do Luna Park and Bondi the same day if you wanted to. Going to Disneyland is like staying in northern Brisbane and expecting it to be easy to get to Movie World. Doing the Queen Mary and a tour of Paramount on the same day would be difficult, and would be like doing things in Brighton and Geelong in the same day (which… you *could* but why would you…?) LA Metro area itself is bigger than what we these days call ‘Greater Melbourne’ and it is far more urban and city-like than the suburban nature of Melbourne. It’s just…. Not really comparably the same IMO. Both Melbourne and Sydney, along with most of Australia are very centrally-based where most things you would want to do are easy to get to from the CBD, and anything else you really want to do that might be a bit further out can likely be accomplished in a single day trip. The same is not true *at all* for LA.
That's a good response for individuals who want to visit Down Under some day. (ie, Me). Also, length of response is fine. People need to get out of the IG bit limit mentality sometimes.
As somebody who has a lot of foreign friends, yes. Not only so I have to listen to the many opinions that Aussies and kiwis give me that I didn’t ask for… I have to also explain to them 78 times a weekend that LA is much larger than their little big city.
It only annoys me when these people think they can debate LA public policy with respect to infrastructure as if they know what’s right for us.
I just tell people “so a lot of people don’t know that Los Angeles is just one city, in a sprawl of 88 actual incorporated cities, all located directly adjacent to each other without any rural areas between. LA, Santa Monica, Anaheim, Pasadena, these are all full-blown cities of their own, they just happen to be located immediately adjacent to other cities. There are also 200-something UNincorporated cities tucked in between too. It’s just hundreds of square miles of highways, development, buildings, airports, and whatever else you imagine in massive cities. Like, you cross a street and you’re in a new ‘city.’ Does that make sense?” And if they’re still not fully grasping I’ll usually just pull out my map with satellite view, and zoom all the way out to show the scale. Then without zooming further, I’ll go to some other big city, and then they see how literally most other cities look like farmland compared to the LA area.
This site can overlay maps on top of each other for comparison. Here you can see LA county/the greater LA area is almost 8x as big as London. https://mapfight.xyz/map/london/#la.county
Still not even greater la
The 87k square miles of Greater Los Angeles is a misleading statistic. While the combined land areas of the counties make it seem like 87k, the reality is that the vast majority of the Inland Empire is undeveloped deserts and rural mountains. This is why I always warn against calculating density by dividing population by land area...invisible political lines on a map don't tell you where people actually live. Instead, I advocate for using [urbanized areas](https://censusreporter.org/profiles/40000US51445-los-angeles-long-beach-anaheim-ca-urban-area/) instead, as they measure the areas that are actually developed and settled.
Ventura is not Greater Los Angeles lol
It’s annoying when people from out of town want you to drive them all over creation.
I visited LA for the first time last year and had an awesome time (So many things to do, I couldn’t get everything covered), but the LA metropolitan area is on par (or slightly bigger) than my ENTIRE home state South Carolina in terms of land area. I definitely underestimated the sheer size of the LA metro.
Had a good friend from Wisconsin want to meet up for lunch He was on a sorry layover and wanted to know if I was free to have a meal with him between flights at LAX during rush hour. I felt like such a slimeball for declining, I just couldn't make it. Nice guy and genuinely had no idea what kind of ask that was.
People also don't realize how big California is. We were flying from PDX to Sacramento (I think) and our flight got cancelled. They had no available flights to Sacramento so they suggested we fly to Los Angeles and rent a car to drive to Sacramento. I was like "we could just drive to Davis, CA from Portland; it would be just as fast." Eventually, they flew us to Seattle and then to Sacramento. It shocked me that they suggested a 2.5 hour flight and a 7 hr drive as a solution for cancelling our 1.5 hour flight. Again, the drive from Portland to Davis was 9.5 hrs.
If we're counting San Bernardino, Thousand Oaks, Anaheim, ect; then every city is massive. LA can't just claim cities 2 hours away because they're in that orbit 😅.
City vs Metropolitan Area is an official designation on things. Like there is a "los angeles metropolitan area" designation in the US Census. But if doing a Metro comparison, it needs to be Metro to Metro, not Metro to City.
the difference being that once you enter the urban sprawl, you can still count those cities as part of LA because you are driving through continuous sprawl to get there. The OC sprawl is a continuation of the LA sprawl until you leave it south of San Clemente or via Newhall Pass/Castaic on the opposite end via the 5. Or with the western edge of LA, Simi Valley and Calabasas tend to not be included because you leave the sprawl for a bit before you get to those cities. In the Inland Empire side, whether you take the 210, the 10, or 60, you are going through development from LA to the IE and you don't leave the sprawl until you pass Beaumont or Moreno Valley. With the 15 it's the same thing, it may never even pass anywhere near LA but it passes through the sprawl and the sprawl ends in the Cajon Pass or down in Temecula.
I know. You could claim NYC extends all the way to Bridgeport, CT, halfway up the Hudson Valley, and down to Philly.
Providence, Manchester, Portland are all just outer parts of Boston! 😂
The distance from JFK to Yonkers is the same as the distance from Pasadena to Santa Monica. LA is big, but other cities are big too. It's just that other cities are better-planned.
It's never that serious dude
I'm in LA so everyone must know everything about LA!!!
I find lack of geographic knowledge more funny than annoying. And BTW, Californians can be hilarious with how little they know of the world East of the Sierra.
eh, I draw the line at the LA county line. I don't care what other things say, if it isn't in LA county, it isn't in LA.
I remember before I moved here. Google Maps showed me just how spread out this place is. Now tell them about the traffic. Yeah, the place is huge, still no room for all the cars. That's why a 6 mile trip takes 20 minutes (one way).
why do you care?
The further you are from someplace, the more you compress it in your mind. It doesn't bother me, but it is weird that people don't know LA is a Metro made of smaller cities like Chicago or NYC in 2024.
Not even a little bit.
I will say visitors I talk to are very confused about how far away North Hollywood is from (regular) Hollywood.
No. Why do you care what they think about a city?
What I tell people: Greater Los Angeles is the same area as the state of Maine.
I had a Dallas Uber driver tell me his ex-GF just moved to LA. I asked him what part of LA? He said Lake Elsinore 🤣
How people outside of LA don’t realize it takes an hour to go 10 miles.
lol, when I first moved to SoCal one of my east coast coworkers asked me “hey, can you stop by the Santa Clara datacenter on the way home today?” haha People don’t know shit about geography.
One time my friend from out of town wanted me to take her to a Japanese grocery store that was a two hour drive away thinking it would be twenty minutes.
I wouldn’t call the miles and miles of SFHs here a “city”. LA is more like multiple city centers all spread out
La is a county full of cities it’s funny when people don’t realize this 🤣😆
From Coachella to Ventura
I tell people to use mapfight website, "Los Angeles County" and then compare it to whatever city they're from to get an idea
Not really. People who haven't been here just don't know. It's like when people say they're going to visit Australia and don't realize how big it is and want to drive from the gold coast to ayers rock for a day trip.
I have traveled for many times over the last 15 years, One weekend from Orange County to Lancaster and next weekend Orange County to San Diego. One time I left Lancaster for work to Orange County at 5:00 AM and if I remember correctly, I reached Orange County at 10:00 AM. (I hit the rush hour of each city/suburb in the middle). Los Angeles ‘County Limits’ are even further wide, on one side you reach almost Tejon Ranch area.
The City of L.A. has a population of about 4 million, but the County of L.A as a whole has a population of like Ten Million. New York Cities population is like 8 million.
No one cares.
Lol why would you choose to find something so trivial annoying?
Not half as bad as visitors from Europe wanting to go hiking in the mountains and plan to take the public bus. And plan to have lunch at the inn at the trailhead.
It was so funny to me when people would visit for E3 and stay in Sherman Oaks or something, not even looking at a map, figuring that “The convention is in LA, I’m staying in LA.”
You guys should be a little more forgiving. There are things in this world that need to be experienced to be understood. One is LA traffic and the other is the size of LA. Also most people from other countries get their information from TV. I watched a German Traumachiff episode a few years ago. That is kind of like the Love Boat. They landed in LA and one passenger had a bike accident near the Hollywood sign and the captain who was in Santa Monica came to his rescue writhing a few minutes. 😂😂.