Column: Going Carless in L.A. was Great. Until the Coronavirus

Ben Bergman

Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.

Column: Going Carless in L.A. was Great. Until the Coronavirus

When I moved back to Los Angeles from New York a year ago, I decided to try forsaking what has long been considered to be as much a part of L.A. life as the sunshine and celebrities. I would go without a car.

As recently as four years it seemed to be an unthinkable and perhaps even heroic undertaking. In 2016, someone made a two-hour documentary about "surviving" carless L.A. But since then, ridesharing went mainstream and scooters became ubiquitous on city streets. I'd also gotten used to riding the train in New York and it helped that I was living in walkable and transit-accessible downtown L.A. I would save some money and reduce my carbon footprint. As an added bonus, being carless in L.A. always made for a great conversation topic.


Sure, there were times when I wished I could hop in the car and stock up at Trader Joe's or months when I racked up a lot of Uber bills because my job took me to locations that were hard to get to via transit. But overall, I missed driving less than I thought.

But like so many other things, the calculus changed with the novel coronavirus. My carless lifestyle no longer seems so great and now I feel stranded.

Public transportation is still operational but I'm avoiding it because experts agree riders are at an increased risk of exposure to germs. I used to subscribe to Metro Bike Share to get around downtown, but cancelled my pass after touching bike handles didn't seem like a great idea. Riding a Bird or Lime scooter? No thanks. I still use Uber and Lyft occasionally but sharing a car with a stranger has become much less appealing. And those services rightly put an end their carpooling options, so the price has gone up. I tried to sign-up for BlueLA, an electric car sharing service that launched in 2018, but learned that the service has been suspended.

uber | uber Credit www.quotecatalog.com with an active link … | Flickrlive.staticflickr.com


When I've lamented about the lack of a car some people have quite reasonably asked since most everything is closed, where would I go? The answer is I would love to go hiking or run on the beach, or shop for groceries and household essentials, which I'm consuming at a much faster pace than before. Even escaping my little apartment to drive around L.A.'s eerily quiet streets listening to music sounds nice.

Before all this, owning a car and with all its associated costs and hassles seemed to be becoming obsolete. Now all the sudden sharing – carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing – has lost its shine. I hope this is just a temporary setback because I think the sharing economy has a lot of benefits, but now I find myself dreaming of owning a car again.

My sister, who's been carless for years living in Brooklyn, is doing the same thing. She and her husband are desperate for a way to get their kids out of the city. But she's having trouble finding a dealer who's open, a stark illustration of how our economy is at a standstill.

One of the few silver linings is that it will probably be a great time to buy once businesses reopen if you have the means to do so. Automakers are already starting to offer big deals, financing is cheap, and gas prices are at historic lows.

Ben Bergman is dot.LA's senior reporter covering venture capital.

https://twitter.com/thebenbergman
ben@dot.la

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LA Tech Week Day Three: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

K-beauty Entrepreneur Alicia Yoon On Taking the Leap From Corporate Consultant to Starting Her Skincare Brand

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Alicia Yoon in black and white
Alicia Yoon

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, Peach & Lily founder and CEO Alicia Yoon discusses her journey from being a corporate consultant to establishing her own skincare brand as well as the necessity of having an airtight business model to become successful.

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