Driving around Santa Monica, the epicenter of Los Angeles’ booming “Silicon Beach” tech neighborhood, you’ll encounter the most Los Angeles of events–a traffic jam. In this case, it’s heavy construction equipment blocking a street where they’re putting the final touches on a new subway line. LA Metro , the biggest transit agency in Southern California, is on a subway-building binge and adding five new subway extensions–several of which will be open to the public before New York’s decades-awaited Second Avenue Subway begins operations (even if much of the construction has been over budget and delayed ).

In the heart of American car culture, L.A.’s urban planners are trying to convince commuters to ditch their cars and take public transit. For tech and creative workers, it will be a particular challenge. Unlike in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, techies generally don’t take public transit to work. Even the Google bus phenomenon–the private transport system for Silicon Valley tech companies–is non-existent in Southern California.

And this has had big impacts on the nascent industry’s culture.

Los Angeles’s high-tech companies are scattered over a wide metropolitan area with multiple hubs. Some companies congregate in Santa Monica’s “Silicon Beach” while others cluster in Downtown Los Angeles, the office parks of Playa del Rey, or in suburbs like Pasadena or El Segundo. And there’s no financial incentive to running shuttles for employees: There simply aren’t any neighborhoods full of Mission District or Noe Valley-like commuter densities.

I moved to Los Angeles from New York in March 2014 and, although I own a car, I regularly commute by subway–my home in the formerly battered by the flight of commercial tenants but currently rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles is at the hub of the region’s rail system. But many fellow white collar professionals (Los Angeles, sadly, self-segregates across economic classes more than almost any other American city) are bemused when I tell them I regularly ride the Los Angeles subway. It’s almost like you’ve announced you work as an alpaca farmer; in other words, no social stigma but unusual enough to be a point of interest at parties. The fact is that poor and working class Angelenos and middle and upper class Angelenos inhabit different worlds, and public transit doesn’t cut across classes the way San Francisco’s Muni or New York’s subway system does.

According to estimates by the American Community Survey, the median earnings of Los Angeles public transit riders are only 54.7% that of the public as large. But in Cambridge, Massachusetts, public transit commuters earn 110.5% more than the public at large; in New York, MTA commuters come in at a respectable 96%. As subways prepare to weave their way underneath the office towers of Wilshire Boulevard and a mass transit terminal is built blocks from Santa Monica’s iconic amusement pier, urban planners are trying to learn how to teach Angelenos how to love mass transit.

The construction of these new subway lines is subtly changing Los Angeles commute patterns. Jerome Chang, the founder of coworking space chain Blankspaces, is one of these new public transit commuters. From his home in Redondo Beach, Chang regularly takes an existing subway line to an express bus when working at his downtown Los Angeles office. According to Chang, the 60-75 minute commute (versus a 45 minute drive) is better because it allows him to catch up on work emails and news along the way. It’s also significantly cheaper, at $7 for a round trip versus $25 once he pays for downtown parking and tolls to use high-speed lanes on the highway.