The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

When I met my friend, the displaced New Yorker, in Beverly Hills last week our conversation immediately turned to the traffic. I'm not sure it was even all that bad on Saturday, compared to what it's normally like, but from what I did experience I was aghast (no pun intended).

Understand, I'm used to crappy driving infrastructure. I did learn to drive in New Jersey, after all, and I recently spent a few years driving around Boston. But driving in the Bay Area is so much easier. Yeah, sometimes there's not enough capacity. But the roads by and large are well-signed and well-designed. I always thought these qualities were a California thing, but having now spent some time with the Los Angeles infrastructure I no longer think so. It's not the traffic there that's the problem, per se. In fact, I think the traffic is actually the consequence of the problem.

For example, at one point I was on I-10, which seemed to have unmarked frontage lanes. But only sometimes. And the exits were marked with numbers, but you could only see them if you happened to be in the frontage lane. Meanwhile even surface streets were problematic, generally lacking guarded left turns or any sort of useful signage that could possibly give non-local drivers any indication of where they were or where they needed to go. (In fact, it might have even been better if there had been fewer signs, instead of the few that there were that started to direct drivers and then left them stranded.) As a result there's so much confusion that gridlock results. It's not that there's so many cars on the streets; it's that there's so many cars that can't move.

The effect of all this is that Los Angeles is a broken city. My friend and I both shared the opinion that individual pockets of LA are very nice. (I liked Pasadena, for instance.) But traversing from one pocket to another is untenable. My friend lamented how little he goes out these days, even though he technically has the time. The draw of the destination has to be really strong in order to justify the stress of trying to get to it. The result of this situation then is that even though Los Angeles is a town full of vibrant, talented people, they're all balkanized into their own local neighborhoods. Despite the massiveness of the city and all it has to offer, because people are largely stuck where they are LA is missing that pulsating urban energy that nourishes cosmopolitan life in other, more functional and traversable cities, and that's a shame.

I suppose decades of historical evolution and bad choices have brought LA to this point. No one woke up one day and decided to deliberately build a defective city. But it seems like in California, with its sensible road engineers, something could be done. Certainly there should be a better mass transit infrastructure, to make people less reliant on their cars. But even for the cars that remain, improving the roads can at least improve the flow so when people find the need to drive somewhere they actually can.