Just live close to where you work. The best way to have a terrible LA experience is to live "only twenty miles from work" and discover that is 90 minutes each way during rush hour. That can put a damper on your cycling real fast... or real slowly.

I lived in LA ten years, and it was a lot of fun while I was there. Just about anywhere you live you will find places to ride. But it is geographically huge. Even bigger if you consider Los Angeles to actually be LA County with its 76 suburbs, or "LA, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside" counties. Traversing just LA county can take 75 minutes by car at 3am. Traversing the greater metro area can be 2-4 hours by car on a busy time of day (which is pretty much 6am through 8pm).