Driving

I know y'all are wondering what I think about all the driving.  This is LA so of course I'm driving now, right?  Well, yes.  Luke who never owned a car in his life (and took the trains and buses all over San Francisco for ten years), now not only owns a car but has been driving it too.  It's true!

I got to experience the nightmare of driving that so many know as "just another day in LA" first-hand a few days ago when I had a couple meetings in and near Santa Monica.  Yes, that is the same Santa Monica that is just ten miles west of me but took nearly an hour for me to get to on Friday morning.  You wanna see road rage?  Thank goodness there was no car webcam on me once I reached my destination at the end of that excursion.

Oh and thank goodness for Ryan Seacrest and his morning radio show, which at least kept me semi-entertained.

It is definitely true that traffic here can be horrifying.  Case in point, we went to watch the LA Galaxy MLS Soccer game on Friday night and it took an hour and a half just to get to the stadium, which is 22 miles south of me.  Granted, we were driving in Friday after-work rush-hour traffic, and we also overshot the stadium by a couple miles, so perhaps we could have done it in 15-20 minutes' less time.  Still, I can say that I've rarely had to just suck it up and get used to driving conditions like I've experienced in my brief time in Los Angeles so far.

I just added up all the time I spent in a car on Friday.  About... five hours.  No wonder I had serious vertigo by the end of the day!

So, yeah, driving can be a pain in the butt.  However(!), if you know the short routes - the fast(er) ways to get around town - you can shave lots of time off your drive.  Just the other night, I took the fast(er) way to my boyfriend's place, and it was just 10 minutes.  A few days later I tried a different route, thinking I'd mix it up and try something new, and it made the trip take almost 20 minutes.  No, there wasn't more traffic at that time of day; I literally just tried something that was almost the exact same distance and ended up taking nearly twice the time.

I do loves me my transit, and I'll have more to say on what I think of LA's transit system sometime soon.  In the meantime, suffice to say that LA probably proves the point that a good transit system means more than just fast trains and buses that run frequently.  It also means trains and buses that take you to the places you want to go from the place you are, and it means new development being clustered around transit-accessible locations so that people at least have the option to take the train or a bus, even if it's not quite as convenient.

I've also learned (and kinda already knew this) that Santa Monica Boulevard moves about as quickly as the U.S. Senate.  This is a given.  Almost any day.  Any time.  Any place along the road.  Don't trust the Google Maps on this one.  SMB (as I have learned to abbreviate it) is no place for the impatient or those on a schedule.

Now I just need to find alternatives...