That horrible world's fair example looks like the LA Metro map, only beige. You know your maps. That's awesome. I geek out on them but cartographer I ain't. I'm in Playa Del Rey. It's as close to Seattle as you can get in the LA Basin. I left my apartment in North Hollywood for the last time and took off my shoes in my apartment in PDR for the first time on August 31, 2009. NoHo was 108 and PDR was 72.
I think the LA Metro map is meant to make you think three things: 1) There is nothing on the west side of the city (for non-Angelinos: this is like saying there is nothing to see on the Left Bank of Paris or that Rio is just a statue of Christ on a mountain); 2) It's no big deal to take mass transit from LAX to the rest of the city (Ha! If I drive from West Hollywood down Fairfax to La Cienega to La Tijera it's 30 minutes, but it's more than two hours by express bus because I have to go downtown first -- instead of due south, it's way east then south west); 3) There are reasons to go downtown (if you like cocktails or you want to visualize Raymond Chandler novels, yes; if you want dinner, entertainment, or shopping -- very no). Interstate 405 is one of the busiest expressways in the Western hemisphere. It doesn't just run north and south through the west side: it becomes a wall and makes Sepulveda into Unter den Liden (the fashionable street that was turned into land mines and barbed wire by the Berlin Wall). For some reason, there are NO PLANS AT ALL NOPE NONE to run an express transit line along it. The Expo Line (aka "the Streetcar to the Sea") will get to Santa Monica in two years and already goes halfway (from downtown to the northernmost part of Culver City). In ten years, the Purple Line will get to... maybe Westwood (if they stop asking Beverly Hills for permission and run the dang thing to Pico & Robertson instead). However the Sepulveda Pass has a potential, a vague maybe, for a bus. Grrrrr. Santa Monica & Fairfax should be the Union Square of midtown.