Before moving to the PNW 10 years ago, I lived in L.A. for 17 years (Clarington at Palms). I’d been living in Lancaster and commuting to Edwards AFB, 35 miles away. I went to work for a contractor that used our data, who was located across the street from LAX – 75 miles away, and with the Sepulveda Pass in between. I made that commute for two years before moving to L.A. My apartment was seven miles from the office, and it took 20 minutes to get to work. Sure there was the occasional gunfire, but it pretty much stopped after the Crips and the Bloods came to their truce. After a while I was laid off. A couple of months later I was re-hired at the same company, only it was at a facility in San Bernardino – 70 miles away. I bought a non-running 1979 Honda CX500 from a coworker for a dollar and spent $300 for new tires and a tune-up. As part of the famous ‘Peace Dividend’, the program closed and I was laid off after two years. My next job was in Orange, 42 miles from my apartment. I rode the CX500 until I got a Yamaha XJ600 (currently in the shop), and rode that until I got a YZF-R1. I have over 100,000 miles of riding in L.A. traffic.
Motorcycles can be cheap. You might not find one for a dollar, but you can find them at affordable prices if you’re looking for basic transportation and not something flashy. The Seca II got 50+ mpg and cost a couple-hundred dollars per year to insure. Lane-splitting is permitted in California, so traffic jams were not much of an issue. (Lane-splitting can be nerve-wracking, but generally there’s plenty of room and not bad at all.) You can also use the carpool lanes. Additionally, many places allow motorcycles to park free. Southern California is blessed with good riding weather. I rarely ride up here (which is why the Seca II is in the shop – it deteriorated from sitting in the poor wether – and the R1 gives me forlorn looks every day), but you can ride most days in SoCal.
The advantages of motorcycling in L.A. is that inexpensive motorcycles can be found, they get excellent fuel economy (the cheaper, less-powerful ones tend to get better mileage), they’re cheap to insure, they are less affected than cars by traffic jams, you can sometimes park free, and they’re fun.
The disadvantages are that car drivers will try to kill you, they’re less fun on the rare rainy days, and you can only carry as may groceries as will fit into a backpack. (You can actually carry quite a bit.)
If the weather up here would cooperate, and if my office wasn’t 110 miles from my house and my butt could withstand more than 80 miles on the R1, a motorcycle would be my primary transportation – even if the Prius gets better mileage than the R1.