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L.A. traffic: why is it all on the Westside?
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If there’s one thing my city- and suburb-dwelling friends have in common, it’s the shared disdain for driving anywhere on the Westside. Invite my Hollywood friends over to my Santa Monica pad for drinks, and they say, “Oh, man, and get stuck in that weekend traffic?” Suggesting a 3rd Street Promenade movie to my Stevenson Ranch pal is like offering him a night in Dick Cheney’s personal torture room: “No way. I’d prefer my in-laws over Ocean Blvd and Colorado.”
(AP Photo/Matt Sayles)
It's counterintuitive for the city that created the 3rd Street Promenade for pedestrians in the 1960s, and rededicated it in 1989 (briefly, with limited hours for cars). Santa Monica is a city that is as pedestrian (the good kind) as any in the LA area -- with a people-scale downtown, a winning bus system, and typically the freshest air in the area -- but it also has some of the most congested roads, degraded traffic circulation, and an aura of automobile overload. And that’s not only on summer weekends.
Gleaming Office Parks with Those Pesky Employed People
Much of the current car crisis on the Westside can be pegged to two issues, both rooted in the sunny appeal of this once sleepy retreat: increasing residential density, on top of industrial-sized business expansion. This wouldn’t have wreaked such havoc with the city’s erstwhile quaint-itude if all the new apartment dwellers were the same folks heading over to offices at the Water Garden, or Yahoo! Center, or Sony or MTV or...
Alas, ‘twas not to be. It’s more cost efficient for the middle-wage employees over at Sony to live in Silver Lake and cram into this town at 8:30am in their ‘92 Volvo station wagons than to rent a $2000 stucco apartment within walking distance. (Many of us locals head out of town for our paychecks.) Projected commuting patterns for Los Angeles show the Westside will continue to be a hotspot for employment density, while maintaining a low population density relative to the rest of the city. Traffic outlook: bleak.
Go East, Young Man
And so, for those of us who do live here, we have two choices: Stay here and keep only our local friends, or stay connected and venture east, beyond the 405 (but never between 2:30 and 8:30pm!). Because I have the un-green distinction of working 24 miles from my home (my office is in Burbank – but I vanpool; that story later), I tend to prefer my weekends be local. So I try to schedule weeknight appointments after work with my friends in any of the Valleys (San Fernando, Santa Clarita, San Gabriel). In the end, though, you accept some level of isolation no matter where you live in this town. I have more friends outside Santa Monica than in, so we’ll just have to plan to see each other when the traffic lifts...
Next Olympics?
(Upcoming: Paving Pet Peeves, OR Top 5 L.A. Roadblocks)
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