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#  A Cerulean Blue Moment at the LAX Transit Center

December 01 2025

Written by Matthew Hetz.

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LA TRANSPO -

[LAX Transit Center is among the 2025 LA Architectural Award Winners](https://archinect.com/news/bustler/10752/lacma-and-wildfire-groups-among-2025-la-architectural-award-winners)

There are benefits from riding buses and trains in Los Angeles. My greatest benefit is reducing my carbon footprint by driving less. This reduces air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin and fights the on-our-doorstep threats from global warming and climate change.

Other benefits are less wear and tear to my car. Lately I have been driving more to attend concerts twenty-eight miles away, and because of the recent rains.

In my younger years I would trudge through rains, some very hard, but with my current transit commutes including walking up to a mile one-way to my destination, and another mile back, now in my late 60s, I drive in the rain. As a transit colleague succinctly said, I have made plenty of deposits into my green bank account to allow for some driving.

Driving more, I rediscovered, is more stressful on the nerves and body than riding transit. Driving more I find my jaw is clenched much too often. I am exhausted after driving from the intense concentration to deal with other drivers, especially in the rain. With transit riding this does not happen.

Driving places the driver in a locked-in position, with little room to stretch, squirm, and relax. My knees have been stiffer with more driving.

I am not suffering exhaustion-mentally and physically stiff knees, a stiff neck and a sore jaw when I instead ride buses and trains, and these are great benefits.

Another benefit, which would be disastrous if I drove, is to spend time watching the sky. I love to watch the sky, either clear, or with clouds. Los Angeles sits in a desert with a Mediterranean climate which offers many dry days with incredible opportunities to watch the sky.

The Los Angeles sky changes and shifts constantly, and one needs to be on alert, and not driving, to catch these changes. One recent sky change was after arriving at the LAX Transit Center from the K/Crenshaw Line to transfer to a Culver City Bus to get home.

The transit center has an up-and-over from the trains to the City Bus Bays. The train rider needs to take an escalator, stairs or elevator over two sets of train tracks, walk diagonally across the transit center and then descend by elevator, stairs or escalator to the City Bus Bays.

These bus bays have long, curved roofs which lead to a north facing opening. There is a gap between the two bus bays which gives a compressed view of the sky. It is like a long U-shaped, open-air skylight. This compression captures and magnifies the colors of the sky, similar to one of Jame Terrell’s open-air rooms.

With the clock gratefully back to Standard Time, and why can we not just keep it there, I now arrive at the LAX Transit Center after sunset.

Recently, while riding an escalator down from the up-and-over to get to my city bus stop, the open sky between the two City Bus Bays was an amazing blue. It was a blue I would never have noticed strapped into my seat in my car, intently looking out the windshield to drive safely home.

The blue was eye catching, breath taking, remarkable, intense, wonderful, awesome, and a thousand more adjectives. The color of the sky was so amazing I needed to look it up on the internet.

The sky, at that moment in the early evening at the LAX Transit Center between the curved roof of the City Bus Bays was a cerulean blue. The color was fleeting, and the sky soon moved on to other colors and then darkness.

The time of day and atmospheric conditions created a wonder, and who knows when the cerulean, blue sky will return, but my chances of seeing another one are greater riding buses and trains.

*(**Matthew Hetz** is a Los Angeles native and composer whose works have been performed nationally. He is the former President of the Culver City Symphony Orchestra and Marina del Rey Symphony. A passionate transit advocate, Matthew is dedicated to improving the rider experience and encouraging drivers to embrace public transportation as a solution to air pollution and climate change. He teaches at Emeritus/Santa Monica College and is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com.)*

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