Highway To Hell

A quick rundown of what happened on the third day in California:

I moved to another room with a television and no roommate. Tomorrow I will move to a room with three roommates and no television.

I met with a guy from Turkey who is moving out of his apartment to go back home and serve in the military (he said it is mandatory for everyone to serve 18 months or so. That makes me feel better about our country, where the government only forces lower class ethnic people to serve in the military. Sometimes, I take our freedoms for granted).

After buying groceries at Ralphs, I stayed in my room, looked for apartments and gainful employment, and watched the wall-mounted television. One commercial I saw on Telemundo (Mexican NBC) was for a show called El Ticketero! From what I gathered, it was a show similar to COPS, but it followed meter maids. The commercial showed clips of meter maids with pepper spray dropping chumps that were angry for getting El Ticketero!’d. Another shot was of a different meter maid performing a flying roundhouse kick in an attempt to intimidate and stop a separate encounter from escalating. Quality television.

Now, let’s leave the melodrama that is my California adventure for an entry and look at the long-awaited dissection of driving in Los Angeles. It’s poorly structured and a bit of a hodgepodge house stew of a blog, but so is California’s road system.

As I have alluded to before, driving in Los Angeles is not a desirable experience. Pretty much everything about it is too cumbersome and gimped by poor planning or because this cesspool of a town suffers from overcrowding. Whatever the case, it is what it is.

The roads are packed with traffic—it doesn’t matter whether it’s on the freeway, commercial, or residential areas, moving vehicles, or parked. Anywhere you want to go, there are going to be about a thousand other people wanting to go there too. Lights will change from red to green, and before you can get past the intersection, the green will have turned to yellow, and yellow will yield to red. Rinse, repeat.

A major problem comes from not having turning lanes. One lane can get completely backed up by a motorist trying to make a left turn. Without a green turning arrow, the car wanting to make a left turn won’t get that chance until the light turns to yellow again due to the onslaught of oncoming traffic. Then three or four cars tear through the red light so as to not have to wait on the same red light again. Ironically, they’ll just end up waiting again at the next red light, because nothing is timed. Or maybe the lights are timed, but because there are just too many cars on the road, it doesn’t work. And that’s the most important thing to take away from this—driving in California does not work.

The highway, intended to get you wherever you want to go faster, is really just an excuse to go a different route. The highway is still going to result in a fifteen-minute drive just to go four miles. Again, there are just too many cars trying to take the freeway. Traffic really slows at major exits. If you want to switch from the five to the one-ten (that’s California talk for Interstate-5 and Interstate-110) to get downtown, be prepared to stop dead in your tracks and crawl your way off the exit ramp. Oh, and it’s worse during rush hour.

Speaking of exits, the exits themselves fork to other branching exits. It’s a lot of fun trying to decide on the fly what exit to take at 70 mph (I know I just said you lurch off of exits in the previous paragraph—well, there are some that you don’t have to, so no one call that out as a discrepancy). When I first arrived in California, I got to one of these exits founded off the principles of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, stalled in my decision making, and was about killed by a semi. I gather not a lot of people in California know quite where they’re going, because people start taking one road and then jump the median at the last second to get on the right road. Also, a lot of people have GPS navigational systems hanging off their windshields. I use a yellow legal pad to find where I’m going.

A long time ago, I told someone I would never be afraid of left turns. That person responded back to me, “Never say never.”

I merely brushed this cliché’ statement aside. Back then I was young and naïve—not the worldly figure I am today. Now, I can honestly say uncontrolled left turns scare the hell out of me. I will oftentimes find an alternate route so as to not have to take a left turn. Other times, if there is a place I need to go where an uncontrolled left turn is unavoidable, I’ll just not go there. As a result, there are some parts of Los Angeles I will never see. What makes left turns so scary? It’s the cars parked alongside the road. They blind you from seeing any oncoming traffic from the left or the right. What results is you slowly creeping out into traffic, hoping and praying no one is going to sideswipe the nose of your car. Eventually, it’s a leap of faith. You abandon the creep and just gun it around the corner. Sure, it’s risky, but I’ve yet to find a more proven method, outside of abstaining from left turns altogether.

To drive is to park. Any time you drive, it is preceded by a park and ends in a park. Parking is a yummy sesame seed bun and driving is a 100% Angus beef patty topped with cheese and lettuce, but no onions or mustard. Since parking is inevitable in any driving situation, let’s talk about parking, a nightmare in and of itself. Again, due to too many people with driver’s licenses, there are cars parked everywhere—main streets, side streets, on top of other cars, etc. To make matters worse, because so many people live in every home and apartment in Los Angeles, and all of them bring their cars, there is never enough parking to accommodate all of them. That is why on average, I park about three blocks away from my hostel. Occasionally I’ll get lucky, and only have to park down the street, but those times are few and far between. Every once in a while, I will see someone sitting in a parking space while a roommate or parent runs to their car and tears ass to parallel park their auto in the empty space.

Another joy that comes with trying to find a parking space is all of the parking restrictions enforced. There are certain places you can’t park at from seven to nine in the morning or four to six at night. On the street that my hostel is on, you cannot park on one side of the street from noon to three on Wednesdays for street cleaning, and the same hours on Thursday for the same reason. Rendering one side of the street, along with other side streets, unusable for a block of three hours, can make the already scarce parking that much worse. It’s also important to note no one in Los Angeles works, so it’s not like street cleaning happens while people are at their jobs.

Speaking from experience, it’s not a good idea to park in these restricted areas, because you will get ticketed, and it’s a hefty fine. When I first arrived in California, I was not aware of all the different restrictions. Having found a great parking space, and afraid to leave my hostel, I left my car sitting in a particular spot. It was okay for one of the days, because that day did not have a restriction attached to the place I parked. But the next two days resulted in getting two tickets—for $75.00 each. I thought about approaching the meter maid that gave me these tickets personally and try to reason with him person to person, but the maid’s last name was Battle, and having seen what they are capable of doing already from El Ticketero!, I begrudgingly took up my complaint with the DMV.

Oh, and if you want to park near any kind of business, or place where activities happen, like at the beach, expect to pay just to park. There are meters everywhere, or parking ramps that cost anywhere from a couple of bucks to $10.00 an hour. When I went to the DMV to contest my parking tickets, it would have cost me about $4.00 an hour to keep my car in the parking ramp, had it been for anything else.

In short, driving in Los Angeles sucks. However, because everyone knows driving in L.A. sucks, everyone sort of helps each other out. If you need to switch lanes because your exit is on the left of the freeway rather than the right, people tend to let you over without causing a fuss. Also, everyone accepts the fact it takes forever to get anywhere because of the stupid lights system, so they just go with the flow and don’t get in a rage over how long it takes to drive down the block. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it does make it easier to stomach.

One last thing:

Q: What do you call a frog parked in a red zone?



A: Towed.