Lifestyle
Skip $300 parking. How to get to the World Cup at SoFi Stadium on $1.75 Metro shuttles
In a perfect world, you’d be able to take a helicopter from your home straight to Sofi Stadium during the World Cup. But unfortunately, we do not live in that world, so you’ll probably need to find a reliable and cheap way to get to the World Cup.
Fans from all around will flock to the Los Angeles area for the biggest sport event in the world, meaning that traffic will be worse (if you can imagine), buses will be fuller and Metro stops will drown in the flags and jerseys of all competing nations.
But Metro is offering a bit of reprieve: The system will partner with 13 other regional transit agencies to get fans to Sofi Stadium (which FIFA is referring to as Los Angeles Stadium). Starting Friday, nine transit hubs, including Union Station, Crenshaw Station and downtown Long Beach, will host shuttles that provide direct access to the stadium for $1.75 each way, according to Metro.
For an additional cost of $60 to $150, you can park your car outside of the World Cup service station shuttle stops. If that seems steep, consider yourself lucky: Official SoFi Stadium parking starts at $100 and can get as high as $300 for the best spots, and unofficial parking around Inglewood might be hard to come by.
If you want a list that keeps the most green in your pocket, this is your guide. Here are the best ways we found to get to SoFi Stadium/Los Angeles Stadium at the lowest possible cost and highest convenience. Just remember to give yourself plenty of time in case of unexpected travel delays and to have a contactless payment method handy for Metro fees. Also, be open to going on an adventure in terms of how you get to Inglewood.
Westside
Direct bus service from the Westside to SoFi Stadium is centralized around the downtown Santa Monica World Cup service station.
This is one of the more transit-accessible service stations, with three options of arrival: the Metro E Line, which has stops from East L.A. to Santa Monica; Big Blue Bus lines 2, 9 and 43, which come from Westwood, Pacific Palisades and Mid-City, respectively; and Metro Bus lines 20 and 720 coming from downtown L.A.
The journey via the direct shuttle will be around 40 minutes each way.
Traffic will be heavy on the Westside due to an influx of fan events and peak beach traffic. If you can’t catch a bus and don’t want to waste your time in a car, using a metered bike, like Lime or Metro Bike Share, might save you some time getting to the station in downtown Santa Monica.
For fans arriving at the service station in cars, parking is slightly less expensive than it is at the Culver City stop, starting at $73.33 plus fees. (Otherwise, you can try Waymo, Uber or Lyft to get to the station or directly go to SoFi Stadium, if you’re willing to deal with high traffic and higher prices.)
Metro service to the stadium will begin four hours before the matches, and five hours before the U.S. and Paraguay match on Friday.
Central L.A.
The iconic main entrance facing Alameda Street of Los Angeles Union Station West.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Unfortunately for soccer fans in Central L.A., they will face one of the most-crowded service station stops closest to downtown at Union Station.
Lucky for them, though, they will have several options to get to the Union Station hub without a hitch.
Chinatown and downtown L.A. residents will be able to access the station via ride share, Metro rail or on foot. For anyone outside of the region, all of Metro’s rail lines connect through Union Station, which has a 40-minute direct bus to SoFi Stadium.
Union Station parking will be $65 on a first-come, first-serve basis. Therefore, it might be better to hop on a bus or use rail to get to the Metro hub. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can choose from Amtrak, Metrolink, Metro Rail and Metro Bus.
The Union Station stop will work best for people staying near a transit stop with direct access to Union Station.
South L.A.
Metro’s K Line makes its way along Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
South L.A. might be one of the easier regions for World Cup access because it sits close to some of the best transit connections feeding SoFi Stadium. Soccer fans in neighborhoods like Crenshaw, Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Baldwin Hills and Westmont will have shuttle access to SoFi via the Crenshaw Station stop and K Line corridor.
For many riders in South L.A., the easiest move will be going to a nearby rail station, taking the C Line toward Los Angeles International Airport and then using the direct World Cup service toward the stadium.
East L.A.
The Metro 70 bus enters downtown, heading from Boyle Heights.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
Eastside riders would be best served by riding the E Line in Maravilla to the Union Station shuttles, which provides the shortest possible ride from the Boyle Heights and East L.A. area.
Another smart move would be boarding the E Line and riding west to the Expo/Crenshaw stop and taking the shuttle from there. If you’d rather stay on a train for longer and shorten your trip on the shuttle, then you can transfer to the K Line from Crenshaw Station toward LAX/Metro Transit Center.
Traffic will be lighter on the Eastside, so ride-share with Uber or Lyft to the nearest rail line that takes you to Union Station. Or take a Metro bus to downtown L.A. and make your way to Union Station.
There will be no on-site parking for LAX/Metro Transit Center, but parking at nearby hotels ranges from $50 to $150.
South Bay
Soccer fans in the South Bay will be the closest to the games outside of South L.A., with 25-minute-or-less shuttle drives from the El Camino College, Torrance Transit Center and Harbor Gateway World Cup service stops.
Harbor Gateway would work best for the park-and-ride travelers, with a price of $65. But if you don’t have a car, it would serve you well to head to the LAX/Metro Transit Center via the Metro C Line and Metro Micro. Once you get to the LAX stop, it is a 15-minute ride directly to the stadium.
Again, remember there will be no on-site parking for LAX/Metro Transit Center.
San Gabriel Valley
The San Gabriel Valley has strong rail and bus links to downtown L.A., so getting to Union Station would likely be the best bet if you live in this area.
Hop on the A Line and go to Union Station for the most direct route to a World Cup service station shuttle.
If you’re farther south or west in the San Gabriel Valley, in neighborhoods including Alhambra, Monterey Park, San Gabriel or Rosemead, you’ll have better bus connections to Union Station or to a transfer station than a straight rail trip.
Parking at Union Station is limited and will cost $100 or more for reservations.
San Fernando Valley
For the San Fernando Valley, the best World Cup options are the North Hollywood Station for the eastside of the Valley and Pierce College Metro Station for the westside of the Valley.
The key for the San Fernando Valley is to skip the stadium parking and use Metro’s direct shuttle service from two Valley anchor points: North Hollywood Station for the east and central Valley and Pierce College Station for the westside.
To get there, fans in the Valley can either use a ride-share app or take a bus to either hub.
If you absolutely need your car to get to the service station, it’ll cost you about $55 plus fees for parking at the North Hollywood Station and the Pierce College Station.
Long Beach and Orange County
Long Beach and Orange County soccer fans have two main hubs for the World Cup: Downtown Long Beach Station for the south, and ARTIC Anaheim station for central and north. Both are direct-service locations, so you get a no-transfer ride to SoFi Stadium and avoid the traffic.
You can roll in by train, bus or car (and park if you need to), and board the shuttle straight to SoFi. However, the downtown Long Beach and ARTIC Anaheim stations will be best for car commuters, with parking starting at $10.50 a day.
Since parking can fill up fast, arriving early is the best move. With service starting up to four hours before kickoff and running about 90 minutes after the match, you’ve got plenty of time to grab a bite, mingle with other fans and still make it to your seat without a headache from traffic.
I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
Karen McNenny is a certified divorce coach, certified co-parenting specialist and author of the book The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family.
Wiley/Jossey-Bass/NPR, Nicole Wickens/NPR
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Wiley/Jossey-Bass/NPR, Nicole Wickens/NPR
When Karen McNenny was facing divorce about 15 years ago, she was afraid of what it would mean for her future: despair, debt and a lifetime of resentment, she says.
At the same time, she was thinking of her two children, she says. She didn’t want their father to become her enemy.
So she and her former husband chose to approach divorce differently as a couple. “We’re going to renovate and transform this family. We’re not going to destroy it,” she says. “The marriage is ending, not your relationship.”
For McNenny, a mediator, certified divorce coach and certified co-parenting specialist, divorce is a tool, not a weapon. She expands on this concept in The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family, which came out this spring. The book offers guidance on how to maintain compassionate and respectful ties with a former spouse while also healing and moving forward.
According to Pew Research Center, a third of Americans who have ever been married had a first marriage that ended in divorce. For that reason, McNenny hopes her book becomes a must-read for couples before they get married. “The best time to talk about divorce is before you need to talk about it,” she says.
She shared insights from her book in a conversation with Life Kit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book is called The Good Divorce. What does that mean?
[For those with kids,] the good divorce is about protecting the future of the family while we dissolve the marriage.
After the paperwork is done and the assets have been divided, can you and your co-parent sit on the same side of the bleachers during the basketball game? Can you still see yourselves as a partnership, with the ability to have thoughtful conversations about your kids?
For those who don’t have kids, [the good divorce is] about protecting your health — your mental health and your physical health. If we are doubling down with resentment and bitterness, all of that gets stored in the body and shows up in different ways. You deserve a pathway that’s less destructive.
Let me also be clear: There are times when an amicable, collaborative process is not possible and maybe even inappropriate. For instance, where there’s active addiction, abuse, domestic violence, coercion or unmanaged mental health issues.
How do you get to a place where you don’t feel triggered by your partner, so you both can work together toward a good divorce?
That, my dear, does not happen overnight. That is more like a dimmer switch going up and down and up and down, and the gift of time helps to get there.
It’s a complex emotional journey because we do feel relief in walking away from our spouse and the challenges. But with it, there is extraordinary grief that comes with divorce that I think is often underestimated and undersupported.
If my spouse had died, people would’ve been checking in with me regularly. I never would’ve spent a holiday alone in that first year. There probably would’ve been a meal train.
But he didn’t die. My marriage died, my family structure died, my identity as a wife and a partner died. There’s so much grief through these transformations that come with divorce that we don’t see.
So supporting friends in all those ways that you would as if there had been an actual death is doing a lot for your friends who are going through divorce.
How do you let your friends, family and community know that you’re getting a divorce and that you might need support?
Put a communication strategy together. It’s not just for how we tell the kids. It’s also a communication strategy for the grandparents; to the circle of support around the kids, like teachers, coaches and mentors; and our shared community.
It’s extraordinary when a couple can write that message together, not unlike a marriage announcement. [You might say:] We’ve made a really difficult decision. We wanted to let you know. We’re not going to court. Don’t expect a battle. Please don’t ask us why. Just ask us how we’re doing. We’re on the same side as the kids. You don’t need to pick sides.
In doing so, we’ve given everyone the same information at once. It’s a unified message that comes from the parent team, and it allows your community to know how best to support you. And it takes out all the gossip and wonder about what is going on.
If you have kids and they’re splitting time between two homes, what are some ways to make that change easier for them?
Our kids were 5 and 7 when we divorced, so it was three or four nights at a time in each home. By the time they got to be about 8 or 10, it made sense to go a week in each residence. After COVID, the kids came to us and said, “Can we just have two weeks in a house? We wanna be able to settle in more.” [So we said] OK.
A lot of parents are so rigid about the schedule. There’s no flexibility. That doesn’t serve anyone. So I recommend liberating yourselves from the calendar and letting it grow and bend with your kids appropriately.
Knowing what you know now about divorce, what questions do you think couples should ask themselves before they get married?
So often when people arrive at the threshold of divorce, couples are like, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” Get educated about the business part of it.
There is no harm in having a prenuptial agreement. Even if you decided not to file it, have the conversation about the implications. What does it mean if we buy this house together? What does it mean if one of us works more and one of us works less?
We also underestimate what it means to be roommates. What are your value systems around cooking and cleaning? How much alone time do you need? It’s easy to fall in love and not know if you’re compatible.
Do you think you’d get married again?
I absolutely hope that I get to say yes to a lifelong commitment with a partner, as I believe we often are given the opportunity to become a better version of ourself through partnership.
The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
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