COLUMN ONE : Surviving Without Driving : Hundreds of thousands go about their business in L.A. but don’t have a car. They know their surroundings more intimately, but it isn’t always a love affair.

There are 20,810 miles of road in Los Angeles County and no cars in the Bernards’ garage. Last year, Sheila Bernard sold the family Honda. Pricey gas and dirty air, she told the kids.

Shalonda Chappel’s engine went kaput. Michael Silverblatt never learned to drive. Marta Giron, a Beverly Hills maid, simply can’t afford wheels.

This is the city that did for the auto what Venice, Italy, did for gondolas. Yet every day, these Angelenos and hundreds of thousands of others somehow navigate this freeway capital without cars.

Theirs is a city within a city, a place the rearview mirror rarely reflects. It is largely poor and old, but also richly diverse--and, social scientists say, understanding this alternative Los Angeles is crucial to this city’s sense of itself.

In 1990, 333,562 households in Los Angeles County lacked even a single automobile. That was down from 1980, when 346,551 households had no car. Still, the figure represented more than 11% of the county’s households--more homes than in the state of Montana. Because most households consist of more than one person, the deprivation affected hundreds of thousands more.

To be carless in Los Angeles is to face the city head-on, to interact with neighborhoods that drivers glide by. It is to commute, not to the blare of on-the-air traffic reports, but to the gossip of maids, the bickering of retirees, the rapping of teen-age boys.

It is to know the smoothest bike paths, the safest bus routes, the peculiar etiquette of bumming a ride. It is to cope with limits, but also to develop patience and intimacy in this least patient and intimate of cities.

Some react fearfully, but others say that living without a car has helped them develop a sense of tolerance that would have come less easily if they were able to skirt unfamiliar neighborhoods.

Urban planners, meanwhile, suggest that if fewer people relied on the automobile, the city’s haves and have-nots might be less estranged.

“Primarily, (driving) allows out-of-sight, out-of-mind segregation of people, whether it’s economic or ethnic,” said Ralph Cipriani, the Southern California Assn. of Governments’ principal planner for regional mobility. “It creates a false sense that we are escaping society’s ills, because we can literally put distance between low-income areas and the rest of the city.”

Some go so far as to theorize that if Angelenos were less hung up on driving by themselves, the riots might not have taken so many in this city by surprise. Sit for five minutes on an RTD bus, and L.A.’s divisions are clear: Blacks sitting with blacks, Latinos with Latinos, the elderly clutching their handbags and groceries in the front seats, Anglos all but invisible.

Yet at the same time, public transit also can encourage mingling to a degree that other common spaces in Los Angeles--parks, beaches, street corners--cannot. In a crowded bus, there is no escape from your neighbor until you reach your destination.

On a recent Friday evening, for example, a county AIDS nurse found herself thrust into the back of the No. 470 bus to Montebello with a tattooed Skid Row junkie who was holding forth on clean needles and safe sex. Meanwhile, in the front seats, a cholo in baggy pants and slicked-back hair took to the aisles before a startled cluster of elderly women.

“ Orale! “ he announced, jamming his hands deep into his pockets and segueing into an off-the-cuff rap. “ Homie , that’s my bruthah! Layin’ in the guttah . . . . “ The women looked at each other, then down at the bus floor, gathering their purses closer to their chests.

Minutes later, the cholo found a new conversation partner, a heavily perfumed beautician who had boarded in East Los Angeles. While he griped about his “old lady, Dolores,” the old ladies several seats away arched their brows knowingly.

Veteran bus riders say such scenes--this chipping away at the territorial walls between people--show the upside of life without the automobile.

“Getting around by walking and transit and bicycle gives you a chance to be more in touch with the city, and that’s important,” said Ryan Snyder, a transportation planner and longtime advocate of more public bike paths.

“The downside, of course, is that with the lack of good transit, you don’t have good mobility. It takes longer to go places, and some places you can’t go at all.”

Most go without a car because, economically, they have no choice.

According to the 1990 census, for instance, 80% of the households without cars were rented rather than owned--an indication of a lack of disposable income. And 38% were occupied by people over 65, who tend to live on fixed incomes. A survey of Metro Blue Line riders found that the median household income of those who rode the train was $20,700, considerably lower than the county median of $34,965.

Shalonda Chappel, a 19-year-old receptionist, owns a Honda Civic. But it has sat, dead and rusting, on the street outside her Hollywood apartment for 18 months. Chappel turned up one recent afternoon on the No. 27 bus to Beverly Hills, trying vainly to get to Westwood, where she had a 3 p.m. job interview. At 2:55 p.m., having missed her connection, she sat stranded at a Century City bus stop. Head in hand, her earrings dangling listlessly, she pronounced her job search over for the day.

Chappel pines “all the time” for a car that runs. She longs to shop at the Fox Hills Mall without having to change buses three times. She hates the trouble she has getting a taxicab to pick her up when she visits her old South Los Angeles neighborhood. She couldn’t even ride to Burbank the other day without feeling covetous.

“Lotta Benzes in Burbank,” Chappel sighed. “Lotta Mustangs. Classy cars. Makes me think, I can’t wait till I get enough money to buy one of my own.”

The No. 27 brims with riders who feel the same way. Marta Giron is one. A 27-year-old maid who had spent the day scrubbing a Beverly Hills mansion, she spoke from behind two sacks of double-bagged groceries--just the essentials, chili, meat and rice. The carless know better than to buy cumbersome juice jars or heavy canned goods or more than two bags at a time.

“In my house, we have three people,” the Salvadoran housekeeper said in halting English. “Three people, but no car. And no money for car.”

Would she like one?

“Sure,” she laughs, rolling her eyes. And a Beverly Hills mansion would come in handy, too.

Some, however, were resigned to public transit and making the best of it. Tracy (Tenee) Franklin and Nicole (Kaos) Williams, had, for example, made a game of their daily commute to and from continuation school. Aged 16 and 17 respectively, the girls spent their ride on the 27 busily scratching their names into the bus windows. The pair say their goal is to autograph the entire RTD fleet.

“Cleanest bus?” mused Tenee, a tiny, gum-snapping brunette. “The 439 to Redondo Beach.”

“Roughest? Gotta be the 105 from West Hollywood to East L.A.--I’ve seen people robbed on that bus, people smoking dope, gangsters, people drinking 40-ouncers,” she continued. “I seen a boy come through the back door of that bus three months ago, and put a gun to a man’s head and say, ‘Gimme all your money.’ Man, you shoulda seen the people run.”

For a few, living without a car is less a matter of economy than of philosophy or infirmity or fear. Some can drive, but choose not to. Others have never learned.

One such non-driver is Michael Silverblatt--a radio personality known to his daytime listeners as the Bookworm.

A 40-year-old resident of the Fairfax district who is host of a KCRW-FM radio show on literature, Silverblatt grew up in New York, reared on public transit. When he moved to L.A. a dozen or so years ago, he said, he settled in Santa Monica, where he could walk to restaurants and stores. Each time he changed addresses, he managed to find a home close to bus lines. Now he has an ever-expanding network of acquaintances and friends who chauffeur him in exchange for a free movie or good company.

“You develop an etiquette,” he said. “. . . I can’t tell you how many friends I find myself reading manuscripts for, or friends of friends, or how many peoples’ sons or daughters I talk to about finding an agent or writing a book report.”

“Of course,” he added, “it does put a strain on an emotional relationship to depend on it for a ride. But is that any different than the hundreds of other ways in which lovers develop dependencies?”

Silverblatt acknowledged, however, that he does pay a price for his lack of familiarity with the city’s car culture. “I have friends who, as cars drive by on the streets, can say,’ ‘72 Corvair! ’84 Honda!’ I wonder, ‘How can you tell?’ For me it’s like listening to Martians talk.”

Others eschew the car for environmental reasons.

“It feels good not to drive,” said transportation planner Snyder. The more you understand the environment, he and others say, the less comfortable you feel sullying it.

Lois Arkin, for instance, runs a nonprofit group that promotes housing and business cooperatives--a way of life that practically forces adherents to consider the environmental consequences of their lifestyles.

Arkin had driven since she was 14. But as she got into ecology, guilt gnawed at her. So she “practiced stopping driving the way people practice stopping smoking” for several years. Finally, she sold off all three of her cars last year.

Now Arkin travels by bike, bus and--her favorite--on foot, and has discovered her mid-Wilshire neighborhood anew: the Art Deco architecture, an 80-year-old sycamore tree, the smiling faces of the people next door.

“And you get all these different smells at dinner time--Koreans on one block, Latin Americans on another,” she said. “In a car, the only smell you get is from the fumes.”

Sheila Bernard also had altruistic reasons for giving up her family car, a brown 1980 Honda with an oil leak. A 43-year-old teacher and vegetarian who lives in Venice, Bernard was concerned about air pollution.

She decided that the most important contribution she could make would be to “look to myself.” Problem was, she had to look to three kids, too. Two are teen-agers. And not all of them were sold on the idea.

Doing without a car meant that Bernard’s 8-year-old and 14-year-old sons, for example, could no longer attend after-school activities at the Culver City YMCA. Her 17-year-old daughter, who loves art, opted to attend public school instead of art school this year because art school was an intolerable hour and a half away by bus.

It was embarrassing to be the only carless kid in his crowd, said Bernard’s 14-year-old, Aryeh. But then he was embarrassed by the “junky” Honda, too. Her daughter, Nerisha, was proud to have a mother who “has more motivation and more depth than people who just think of their own convenience.”

“There’s good news and bad news,” her 8-year-old, Avi, summed up. “The good news is, it’s fun riding bikes.” The bad news is obvious.

“When I initially sold the car, it felt like I’d jumped off a cliff,” Bernard explained. “I felt really vulnerable. But I don’t like it when people complain about how bad things are without getting out and becoming part of the bigger solution.”

She acknowledged that her two boys feel deprived.

“Other people drive their kids to soccer and karate and ballet and piano lessons, and we don’t do that,” she said. “But I try to tell them that being different doesn’t necessarily mean being worse, and that we do this for good reasons.”