July 31, 2005 – Pondering The Freeways of Los Angeles

July 31, 2005 – Pondering The Freeways of Los Angeles

The freeways of LA are unique from those anywhere else, perhaps because they defined the term “freeway.” When I hear the term, I reflexively think of LA. These major arteries supply life to this city that unlike Manhattan, Boston, or even San Francisco appears to be without a heart. But, there is a Los Angeles, of course. The small village of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula River) was founded September 4, 1781. And it’s the closest thing there is to a heart this sprawling urban-suburban megaplex will ever possess. Viewed from a map, the original Pueblo appears imprisoned within a diamond-shaped cell by three major freeways—in the heart-artery metaphor, LA appears to have an aorta and a pulmonary artery. California Highway 101 and Interstate 110 form an X at the northern tip of the diamond (the aorta). The 110 crossing I-10 form the western tip moving counterclockwise (the pulmonary artery). The southern tip is located just before I-10 crosses South Alameda Street. The eastern tip is where the 101 and I-10 run parallel a short distance before splitting up and going their separate ways.

These freeways in addition to Interstate 5 and California Highway 60 all converge on the 12-square miles surrounding the small Pueblo. If you’ve ever been near downtown LA on any of these seven freeways during the morning or evening commute, you know how fast LA’s blood flows. And as with the heart, all the main arteries do pass through LA, but just as the heart creates auxiliary flows, there are several bypasses and ancillary arteries that snake around to escape the bottleneck of the small village that often threatens to shut down circulation all together—curiously the French call traffic “la circulation.”

This whole complex transportation system began in 1897. At his shop on Fifth Street, S.D. Sturgis built the first automobile in Southern California for J. Philip Erie. By 1904, 1,600 automobiles were driving the streets along with horse drawn carriages. The maximum speed in residential areas was 8 miles per hour but you had to drive slower, 6 MPH, in business districts. A hundred years later, each day over 10 million people collectively drive nearly 100 million miles on the freeways within the approximate 6000 square miles of greater Los Angeles. When an LA freeway is moving at 60 miles an hour, it will transport 2000 cars per hour per lane. Inside these millions of cars traveling LA freeways daily are a cross-section of humankind, all rushing at over 60 MPH where and when possible: cops and robbers, movie stars and wanabees, dope addicts and dealers, soccer moms and trophy wives, gang bangers and nerds, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, rich people and poor people… all of them going some where to do some thing. Cars and freeways are all about wish fulfillment. Whatever you want is a drive away: a Laker’s game, dinner at Spago’s, the interview that will change your life... Most of them will arrive late, because every one of these drivers in search of what ever is not exempt from the backup. (The only exceptions are those drivers with passengers zooming by in the carpool lanes as four or five lanes creep along stop and go.) Sitting in that backup are hundreds of thousands of “if only's…” and “I wish's…”

The drivers in these cars are a heterogeneous mix of age and experience from the senior citizen to the high school student who just passed his driver’s test: the former who remembers when many of LA’s freeways were new and the latter who only knows today’s worn, asphalt-patched concrete thoroughfares. I’m closer to the former, who has lived through and taken for granted the growth of LA’s highway system. I’ve driven them as a young man in search of information: the currency that I collected during my travels. I’ve been both an “if only” and “I wish.” Companies I visited in my travels included Dataproducts in Woodland Hills, Alpha Data in Chatsworth, Kennedy in Altadena, MDB Systems in Orange, Wangco and Pertec in Los Angeles, General Automation in Anaheim, and the list goes on. All of them were making computers and peripherals long since made obsolete. Most all were “if only's.” Back then I often thought, “I wish” I’d been part of their success only to watch them fade away. Displaced workers moved on to form or work at companies that supplanted their previous ones. Companies like people age. Those with good genes live longer.

I moved on as well realizing how futile were the many times I said, “I wish” and “if only.” Funny how all these changes occur and the traffic on the freeway continues to zoom by completely unaware of the little dramas going on continuously along its many miles. The observer, like me, sees some of these dramas and for a moment in time records them but then moves on as well. Life, like freeway traffic, continues on day after day. Even the Northridge Earthquake on January 17, 1994 that collapsed the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) at La Cienega Boulevard, as well as a section of the Golden State Freeway (I-5) and the Antelope Valley Freeway (California State Highway 14) only stopped the flow of traffic for a small section of the entire system. The traffic continued to move as Angelinos found ways around the break in their continuous daily journey to and from where ever it is they go. Like some ever trudging Sisyphus continuously toiling to roll his stone up the hill and watch it return to the bottom LA life rolls on and the freeways enable it to do so.