There are days when I really miss driving in Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, I will never miss sitting in 4+ lanes worth of traffic inching my way to the city, or to home. But at least Los Angeles was built as a 'driving/car' city, with the understanding and intent that people will use their car a lot and drive everywhere. As a result, freeways are numerous, with lots of exits, streets are wide and its easy to find an alternative route to where ever you are going, since most streets are designed in a grid pattern. One is usually never more than one short block away from an alternative route.
I have had so many instances where I'm driving in Philly (or the burbs really) and the road I'm on is suddenly closed, or jammed and I have to find an alternative route (because sitting in one lane traffic is almost worse than 4+ lanes). Because this area was not really built with cars in mind, or at least not beyond the idea that a family would never own more than 1 car, no matter how many adults over the age of 18 lived in the house, the roads are narrow, snake all over the place (i.e. no such thing as a grid pattern), and seem to rarely, if ever, have signs to tell you where you are, what road you are on and whether the road ahead of you is closing.
On our way to an anniversary dinner in the city, we got stuck in traffic on the one freeway into the city from our area because of a lane closure ahead (turning a 2 lane freeway into 1 lane). Since we knew side streets never went the direction they first appear to go in, and it is quite easy to get lost and completely turned around, we took the only sure route we knew, which forced us to backtrack quite some distance. We ended up 30 minutes late to our reservation, fortunately got seated (the restaurant made no promises), but of course, cost us more in babysitter time and our own frayed nerves.
Another time we missed the turnoff we meant to take to get to the Turnpike, but thought it was ok because there was another junction further ahead. Ok, a little bit out of our way, but not much. Well, turns out that while the road we were on did intersect with the Turnpike (actually merged in so once we got past a certain point we were forced to continue), but only in 2 of the 3 possible directions and naturally not the direction we needed. So now we had to go even further out of our way because exits are very few and far between on the Turnpike. Took us a good 30 minutes or so to get to the next exit, turned around and back to where we should have been in the first place. Good thing it wasn't any more, or we would have had problems getting dinner that night, we barely made it to the restaurant before it closed.
This morning I ended up getting sent on a huge detour (because of snakey roads) that took me an extra 30 minutes to get to my local train station because Penn Dot (or whoever) couldn't be bothered to post a sign to the tunnel in front of the train station parking lot warning people that the tunnel was going to be closed today. I'm sure they knew yesterday they'd be working there today, so why couldn't someone take a few minutes to post a sign at the train station? Come on, people need jobs. Pay someone mininum wage to go around posting signs of upcoming work. Think a little bit about the public. In fact, there were 5 construction-type people standing around talking and doing nothing when I finally got to the parking lot, pay one of them to actually do something maybe. Will the tunnel be closed again tomorrow? Who knows?
Driving and parking on my street is always a challenge because the street is so narrow and most of the families in our neighborhood own at least 2, if not more, cars, but the houses have shared driveways and at most one car garages. So usually a house can only have 1 car parked in their portion of the driveway (or 2 if the driveway is extended into the yard). That means a lot of cars are parked on our road, making it sometimes quite difficult to back my minivan out of the driveway, and one always has to pull over to let opposing vehicles by because there's not room for 2 cars to travel when there's also a parked car on the road.
So yeah, I sometimes really miss driving in LA.
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3 comments:
Here in Arizona our biggest problem is left lane hogs. I can't tell you how many times I've seen traffic backed up on the interstate because of some inconsiderate dingrod won't pass the semi that he's paralleling, even if both are going 15 under the speed limit.
That said, construction and closures can be aggravating here as well. In Tucson it takes two years to get something done such as a street widening.
Dingrod....that's my word of choice these days. Not sure if it's an improvement over "upstart" or "malcontent".
My French family has taught me a few choice words, of which most people don't know the "exact" meaning.
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