Bus Service in LA: Civility and Public Order

Eric Morris is intrigued to find that LA has pretty good public transport. He brings back memories: here's a bit that I posted in his comments:

I spent a year living in Sun Valley, working at the Federal Courthouse downtown, taking an hour-long bus ride each way every day. It was so much better than driving. I got a ton of paperwork done every morning before I ever hit my desk, and knocked off, inter alia, the Rouse translation of Homer’s Iliad in the afternoon on the way home.

There was this lady who got on before me–every day she would carry a bud vase with a single flower.

I shared the bus with a bunch of civil servants from Glendale who made it a social club; they’d share the birthday cake even with an unsociable bookworm.

Also: the driver knew how to merge from the (five?) lanes of I-5 down to the (three?) of the Pasadena.

I remember the LA bus system as a model of civility and public order.