In 1993, when I was still living in New York, I visited some friends in Woodland Hills, CA. They lived in a beautiful home south of Ventura, and the head of the house had been a successful TV producer in the 1970’s. He was a big eater, rarely walked, and had definite opinions about the world and his city.

“In LA, you don’t have to drive through any bad neighborhoods to get to the airport when you come from the Valley,” he told me.

A simple statement, yet it stayed with me all these years. He represented to me one type of person you find in the Valley: satisfied, successful and completely isolated from the city. He preferred living in Woodland Hills because he was removed from those lower elements.

In it’s more extreme form, the “Calabasas mentality” is an escape from urban life. Behind gated entrances, inside the Hummer, on the mobile phone, driving at 80 miles per hour down Malibu Canyon–the ones who have “made it” think that they are morally superior to those who have not.

As the Busway opens, Los Angeles, and the Valley in particular is experiencing a culture shock of sorts. For not often do we construct beautiful public works which are both environmentally and culturally beneficial. As an added insult to the Calabasas cretins, the Busway services people who do not or cannot afford auto transport. Liberals who criticize and demonize Bush for the Iraq war and the billions poured into democraticizing that country, cannnot bear to see the hundreds of millions spent on local public transportation!

There is another strange stereotype that the Valley provinicials engage in. They like to say that they know who will use the bus. “It’s the lady cleaning houses in Chandler Estates” or “It’s Mexicans going to East LA”. As if the riders could all be dissected and the entire mode of transport dismissed because one imagined that it serviced the wrong type of people!

It is really the freeway that is a waste. Criticize the driver in his solo vehicle. He is belching out emissions, burning fossil fuels as the icebergs melt, on his way to get a coffee at Starbucks.

By contrast, the bus rider is mostly using the bus because he HAS TO, not because HE WANTS TO. Do we dare make large scale assumptions about people who are driving on the freeway? Do we say, “I resent that new off ramp in Brentwood because it is used by spoiled bitches who are on their way to Yoga class?” Of course not. We presume that the widening of the 405 into the Valley is useful because the users are people like us.

We Angelenos know on many levels that the old ways of thinking about how to live here are undergoing reformation. The collapse of our health care, the failure of many schools, the resistance to public transportation, the environmental spoiling of wild lands and the destruction of historic landmarks such as the Ambassador Hotel, all are symptoms of a sick society. We are not sick in the sense of being evil, we are ill in that we are not healthy.