Double Blind

I’m currently in Los Angeles right now, or rather a suburb approximately 30 miles east of LAX airport. I find it very amusing how they geographically divide all the cities in the area when it’s just one large suburbia. Of course, some areas are worse than others (don’t get caught in Compton, a.k.a. “Rodney King Riot Neighbourhood”), but otherwise it’s just miles and miles of civilization in all directions. The other hellish facts are that it doesn’t rain here and it’s too hot in the afternoon unless if you live in a trillion-dollar beach mansion on the coastline breathing fresh ocean air.

As far as I can tell, the only good thing that this area of the world has to offer is not Disneyland, but rather miles and miles of freeway. The good thing about these freeways is that they enable you to get out of the city. The ability for people to get to one place to another here is incredible, providing that you avoid major choke points in rush hour. I find it amazing that even though most of the road network was planned in advance, you still find plenty of areas where 10-lane freeways don’t get the job done getting commuters from A to B in a continuous fashion. Ultimately, the transportation planning was a victim of its own success – more people decided they could save money on expensive property values by moving further east into the desert and thus this causes a larger volume of commuters on the roads. The 91 freeway, connecting Riverside and Orange Counties, is particularly a nightmarish sort of hell to drive through rush hour.

If somebody is unfortunate to end up moving to Los Angeles or surrounding area, I have a few pieces of advice for them. One is that if you are uncomfortable driving at 120 kilometers per hour in 6 lanes of condensed traffic while attempting to move 4 lanes to your right within 30 seconds to make your exit, then you shouldn’t be driving here. So if you’re not a good driver, you better be living very close to your workplace. Number two is that you absolutely need a car – this city was built under the assumption that everybody would have access to one. Third, your car should have a V6 engine. Anything less and your car will die an early death on the roads, not to mention suffer from any accelerating power on the freeways. Anything more and you’ll consume too much gasoline. Six cylinders in an engine is perfect.

Getting on the issue of cars, Justin has pointed out on his September 22 article an interesting looking enclosed motorbike that can go 325 km/h – or over twice the speed limit on the I-5. The cost (“88.5000″) most likely has a typo – the extra zero is probably incorrect. Also, Europeans like to reverse the dots and commas in their numbers for some weird reason. At 88,500 swiss francs, that’s approximately $90k CAD, which is expensive stuff. But it would sure be nice driving in one of those at night over here, providing that you could figure out a way how not to go airborne with all the bumps in the roads here…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2004 and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.