traffic

My friends Bob and Gretchen were in town last night for the X-Files premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I met them afterwards and we went to Citizen Smith for a late dinner. (It took me just under an hour to get to the restaurant from my house, even though it’s only about eight miles away, because a single block of Hollywood Boulevard was closed for the movie.) Just like every time I’ve been there, the food was delicious and the service was atrocious. We had a great time, though.

On May 1, 2008 I received a traffic citation while driving approximately 5mph in the middle of a bottleneck on Sunset Boulevard. A motorcycle cop driving between the lanes was stuck next to me because the guy in the other lane had drifted too close to my lane. He looked at me and nodded. I looked at him and nodded. We inched forward in the congestion. He looked at me again. I smiled and he motioned for me to pull over. “I can’t possibly have broken the law,” I thought, “I’m not even going 10mph!”

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A few days ago a friend from a long, long time ago recently reinstalled AIM and contacted me out of the blue. While we were chatting I started to mention something about a road trip I’d taken in another life. I was going to say that I had once gotten lost in Washington D.C. on my way to Philly via I-95. What I found interesting was that — after years of living in Los Angeles — I almost referred to the East coast’s massive superhighway as “the” 95. My brain caught my fingers before I’d typed it that way, but it started niggling at me. In LA we honor all of the highways with the definite article. It’s not just 405. It’s the 405. You’d never tell someone, “Take 101.” You tell someone, “Take the 101.” Nobody — afaik — on the East coast refers to “the 95″. The only highway in Florida that gets a the is The Turnpike. In LA every highway gets a the.

And how about this? In Florida if you’re telling someone how to get from Jacksonville to Tallahassee you would say, “Take I-10 West until you smell the Seminoles.” But in California if you’re explaining how to get from Century City to Santa Monica you would say, “Take the 10 west until it ends.” Same road.

Anyone else ever notice that?

I’ve often wondered how Alexa manages to get its data. Their stats never seem to synch with mine. It turns out there’s a fly in the ointment over there.

For at least a year or two I’ve been waiting for someone to build a web service I could use to map running routes. This morning I drove to my buddy’s house at 6 and we went on a long run around Beverly Hills. With less than three weeks until the LA Marathon, it’s time to get serious about hitting the pavement. It took us about an hour and ten minutes, but — once again — I had no reliable way to determine the distance other than driving the route and watching my odometer. This is simply not practical in Los Angeles; at 7:30 in the morning there is so much traffic it would have taken me another hour of driving to do that. When I got to the office I figured I’d try searching for a Google Maps mashup. With the Nike iPod for runners and all the other cool mashups I’ve seen for everything else lately, I figured there must be one for running by now.

And there are two! At USATF (USA Track & Field) some brilliant souls have built a perfect route-mapping tool. We ran 6.72 mi (10.81km) this morning. How awesome! And now I can map the other five or six routes we take all the time to see how far I’ve really been going. Awesome. (There’s also one by Nike, but it’s not as cool.)

When the LA Marathon first announced its new point-to-point course last summer, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke to the significance of transporting participants for free on the Metro on race day. Yesterday, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, in her capacity as MTA Chair, said in a committee meeting that marathoners should not be provided with free race day transportation and withdrew the agenda item from next week’s MTA board meeting. Mayor Villaraigosa plans to take this matter directly to the MTA board meeting on February 22, 2007.

Please email Supervisor Molina and ask her to explain herself. Let her know that runners are going to be making traffic hell enough already without taking away this free pass!

Update: I sent an email a few hours ago and recently received a very interesting response. Continue reading for Supervisor Molina’s email reply.

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On May 20, 2006 I was tagged for speeding on the 405 while returning from my friend’s wedding in Valencia. This was one of the (rare) instances when I felt I was undeserving of a speeding ticket. There were cars on either side of me and a guy was coming up my rear like a bat outta hell. I even said, “Look at this happy a**hole!” as I gunned it to get out of his way and into the right lane. The happy a**hole was a CHiP and he gave me a ticket even though I tried to explain to him that I was only getting out of his way.

I had to deal with the ticket by July 14th, and of course that didn’t happen. I actually had the date confused with the court date of a different speeding ticket so I went to wrong courthouse. Ha! (Note: The LA Superior Court didn’t find this even remotely comical.) Even though they were upset, the State of California allowed me to reschedule and set a new court date. I had to appear at the San Fernando Courthouse in September.

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There is something pathetically ironic about being stuck in twelve lanes of 15 mph traffic in Los Angeles while driving to court to deal with a speeding ticket. Late at night back in May I was doing about 65 mph in the center lane of this same freeway when a maniac came flying down the road behind me. I gunned it to get out of his way and the maniac turned out to be a cop who proceeded to give me a speeding ticket. When I explained that I was only trying to get out of his way he laughed at me.

Traffic on the 405 at 3pm on an average Thursday in Los Angeles.

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On January 18 of this year I got a speeding ticket for doing 53 mph in a 35 mph zone on a barren stretch of Sawtelle Avenue at about 7 a.m.

This morning I drove behind two CHP patrol cars — one was license plate #1204664 — doing between 54 and 57 mph for at least two miles on the exact same stretch of Sawtelle. They obviously weren’t in the act of pursuit or anything. They stopped to get gas.

There really should be a place to report law enforcement personnel who abuse their power like that. Cops in LA are notoriously bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat behind an LAPD officer who flipped on lights and sirens just to get through a red light.

Words cannot describe how frustrating is it to drive anywhere in Los Angeles. The part that really slays you is when you realize that the problem is not bad drivers. (Warning: It will take you at least a solid year to come to this realization.) The real problem is the traffic infrastructure: traffic lights, stop signs, road configurations, and construction. I’ve written before about the supreme idiocy of the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. Today I was quite upset to learn that in 2005 the Federal government — not money from my California tax dollars, but from my Federal taxes — granted $1,611,962,012 to the California Department of Transportation. And yet it still takes 30 minutes to drive 5 miles.

There was massive construction along most of the mathematically-convenient 100 miles between Daytona Beach, FL and Gainesville, FL for the entire 4.75 years I was in college. The State repaved almost all of SR40 and made major improvements to I-75 in that time. Work was mostly done between 10pm and 4am so it was not tragically intrusive to the commute I made dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Compare that to the laughably inefficient way that Los Angeles is handling the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. I daily have to deal with roads ripped into pieces comparable to the Big Dig in Boston. The main difference is that the work in LA is only over about a 3 mile stretch. Oh, and they only work between the absolutely most-inconvenient hours of 7am and 4pm. And I don’t believe they have a snowball’s chance of hell in being done in the projected 3+ years. What a joke.

This month’s issue of Discover Magazine featured an article on The Math of . . . Changing Lanes. It was the usual drek on reasons why I shouldn’t drive like a maniac. It’s the sort of thing my mom would clip and mail to me with an “I told you so”-type note attached. Sneaking its way into the first column is this almost-too-crazy-to-believe fact:

… drivers are about 35 percent less likely than usual to die in an accident in the month after receiving a traffic ticket, and that driving fatalities increase immediately following the Super Bowl — 68 percent in the losing team’s state but only 6 percent in the winning team’s state.

So they’re saying that February (or, lately, with the longer post-season, March) *always* has more traffic fatalities than January (or February)?! That’s hard to believe. That’s very hard to believe.

“The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving, driving without a motorcycle license - and driving 140 miles per hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.”

Now this is something cool: TrafficGauge™. It’s a PDA-type device that sits on your dashboard and displays up-to-date highway traffic. They have it for Seattle and LA. This is the sort of thing I always expected I’d someday be able to do on my Axim, so I’m actually a bit peeved that I would be forced to buy an additional PDA to get this kind of service … There’s no way I’d buy one of these right now, regardless of how nifty it is, because (a) it wouldn’t be worth the hassle of hiding every time I got out of the car, (b) I already have a much, much more useful PDA, (c) by the time I get a new car, this sort of thing damn well better just be in the dashboard, and (d) I don’t commute as much as I did six months ago. Still, though, it’s a pretty impressive product. They were advertising on ESPN, too.