Los Angeles is a city known for everything fake.

It filters every part of life through kept appearances, canning what works for what looks good, even if it kills us – like our car culture.

The LA Metro rejects our car-driven culture and instead strives to build a future where biking, walking or catching a train is as simple as driving, according to their 2028 Strategic Plan. But, it has an unbeatable obstacle standing before it: its perception.

Metro lives in the minds of many Angelenos as dirty, dangerous and inefficient. It has potential to be world-class, but surface-level complaints and the surreal views of transit held by so many create an unrealistic perception of it.

The UCLA community must begin to see Metro as one of the rare non-plastic parts of our city. With benefits like the U-Pass, the whole city is at our fingertips to explore – for free. We just need to use them.

Transit, when compared to other available forms of transportation, is incredibly safe. Driving, not so much.

“It’s one of the leading causes of premature death in this country,” said Jacob Wasserman, research program manager for UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies.

And yet, the danger of the car is not put in the same caliber as the train.

“Car crashes … they’re not reported as things to be on the lookout for,” Wasserman said.

They just become traffic. Incidents on the train or at train stations, however, become a clickbait worthy spectacle.

Media outlets use Metro’s name to garner attention, even if the Metro was uninvolved, said Karen Parks, Metro’s director of Special Projects. The transit network gets bad PR by association.

Because of this, the Metro still doesn’t feel safe. It feels like I might be gambling with my life on the B Line.

Stories about violence on public transportation enrapt the viewer differently than other nightly newsbreaks. When you see a clip on Instagram of a homeless person harassing a rider or a story of a person killed by Westlake/MacArthur Park, those fears seem justified .

If you feel unsafe on the train, even if nothing happens, chances are you likely would not ride it again.

“Part of it is like, for example, when I’m waiting at a bus stop and there’s a situation going on near me, and I’m just waiting for the bus, there’s nowhere else I can go,” said Winston Li, co-director of Bruins for Better Transit. “There’s no one else there.”

Metro knows this. Parks says their Ambassador Program and their recent social media campaigns try to subvert this notion of the Metro as dangerous and risky.

“I think if we build a culture of public transit, the more students that use it, the better the environment becomes,” said Li, a fourth-year statistics and data science student.

There seems to exist two contrasting understandings of transit: How it actually is versus how most perceive it to be.

When I tell people, typically those above the age of 30, of my transit escapades, they act as if I just mucked through Verdun. Then, when I tell them how uninteresting my trip was, they still look as if I’d been shell-shocked by hearing “doors are closing” for an hour.

Metro is not perfect. I’ve missed too many connections and been put in too many uncomfortable situations to give it a gold star. But, it gets me where I need to go cheaply and safely.

“It’s a lot more fun to ride together in public transit versus riding alone in an Uber or in a Waymo,” Li said. “When it’s a lot more affordable, you can spend that money on other things that you care about.”

We need to look beyond the veneer crafted by the pre-existing powers to see the Metro for what it truly is: LA’s skeleton that, while not beautiful, will always keep us moving forward.