I've never owned a car in my life and I was born and lived in California
until I moved to the East Coast to go to graduate school.  Since I lived in
the SF Bay area it was possible to live a more or less normal life using
public transportation, of which there was a reasonable amount, and my feet.
However, this did limit where I could live, work, and shop.  LA is even more
spread out than the SF area and while it might be possible to live and work
in areas served by p.t. you'd most likely either 1) spend lots of money on
rent (to live, say, in Westwood or Brentwood, the neighborhoods in walking
distance of UCLA) or, 2) live miles from your workplace and have to depend on
a bus scheduled to run about every hour, with the last bus usually about 7
pm.  Either way, you'd probably never be able to get to a major grocery store
or shopping center on your own, and your social life would quickly become
extremely limited.  You'd be able to get rides from people for a little
while, but they would soon get tired of hauling you around.  New Jersey, it
has turned out, is somewhere between SF and LA in convenience for
non-drivers.  Many times I've just taken the train to NYC (the station is 3
blocks away from where I live) when I wanted to see a movie rather than try
to figure out if it were showing at a theatre I could get to.
        I've known people in CA who were reduced to near panic because the
car had broken down and they didn't have enough money to fix it right away
and the supposed work buddy who lived nearby was getting tired of giving
rides.  Cars in the US (NOT just CA or LA) are often very privates spaces for
their owners, who openly resent people who "take advantage" of them by asking
for rides, even in the cases cited above, and who also secretly (sometimes
not so) resent having to dump so much money and care into them.  Months ago I
heard one of the Car Talk brothers say that as far as he was concerned, the
personal automobile was the boondoggle of the century in the US.  I couldn't
agree more, but that won't solve the transportation problems both drivers and
non-drivers have.  If you live in LA as a grownup, you've got to have a car.

Adrienne D.
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