Ask A Native Angeleno: How Do You Deal With Soul-Sucking Traffic?

This week's question comes from a transplant who can't take the traffic. If you have your own burning question for a Native Angeleno, you can e-mail us using the subject line "Ask A Native Angeleno." It's fine if you want to be anonymous, just let us know which neighborhood you live in.

Dear Native Angeleno,

I've lived in L.A. for a little less than three years. I really like it, but the one thing I can't stand is the traffic! Ugh!!! I feel like it's slowly sucking the life out of me. How do you deal with it?

Sincerely,

Trapped in a Tin Box

Dear Trapped in a Tin Box,

Traffic may well be Los Angeles' defining existential crisis. There's a scene in Hal Hartley's film, Simple Men, where a character is trying to fix a broken motorcycle and exclaims, "Nothing like a machine to make a man feel insignificant." That must hold doubly true for a machine that is literally boxed in by other, nearly identical machines.

And so on behalf of the LA's 3.8 million inhabitants, I am sorry.

However. Some perspective may be in order.

In my most recent column, I noted that Los Angeles is less a city and more this humungous thing (incidentally, I referenced a map showing other cities drawn inside of LA; as an astute commenter pointed out, the map has a number of flaws—namely, it grossly underestimates the size of San Francisco. LAist regrets the error; however, we feel that the map has a sort of greater truth, in that L.A. is still really really fucking big, bigger than a number of big cities combined). When it takes a long time to get from point A to point B in Los Angeles, part of the problem is the enormous distances we're attempting to traverse. It's a bummer that it takes me 30 minutes to get to the Grove from Echo Park in rush hour. But how much is traffic really adding there? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

It was with great anticipation that I first rode the Expo Line, which connects Downtown to Culver City, and will eventually run all the way to Pacific Ocean. But I was disappointed to find that the ride takes 30 minutes—about as long as the westbound drive would take during rush hour (perhaps a bit shorter than the eastbound trip). Now, the Expo Line is a bit slow. But all the public transportation in the world isn't going to make the Westside and the Eastside closer to each other.

Are we condemned, then, to a life trapped within slowly rolling glass cubicles? The Native Angeleno thinks not. There is no silver bullet; however, like many incurable diseases, a number of steps can be taken to mitigate the problem—choosing to live closer to where you work, biking to work a couple days out of the week, taking public transportation a couple days out of the week, driving to work early or late in order to beat rush hour, and so on.

Reyner Banham, that Brit who unexpectedly fell in love with Los Angeles, once wrote that the city's, “mobility outweighs monumentality.” Whereas the character of many other cities can be gleaned from iconic architecture, Banham argues, the character of L.A. can only be understood through movement, through seeing how all these funny little neighborhoods connect.

I wonder sometimes if that is in fact changing, if the menace of traffic, which has gotten noticeably worse since I was a kid (there used to never be traffic on the 10 West in the morning, or any traffic on weekends) is choking off what Banham called the "language of movement." Throw in a Disney Hall here, an Eli Broad museum there, maybe the city is becoming a more conventional one, one that takes its architecture more seriously and its driving less seriously.

For many, car-dominance in LA is simply the price of admission, the punishment exacted for 300 days a year of sunshine. A growing number of Angelenos believe a change is afoot—a slow train coming, if you will—that the automobile is soon to be dethroned in favor of an East-coast-esque public transit system. (Sidebar: wouldn't it be just like Los Angeles if the driverless car really took off just as we were finishing our 30-year light rail monstrosity?)

The Native Angeleno, for one, believes the truth to be somewhere in the middle. The misery of sitting in traffic will always be a thing, like the sub-par air quality and the preponderance of actors. But it doesn't have to be the thing that defines us, the syntax through which our Angeleno-ness is forever understood. That will change, one way or another.

Hillel Aron is a Native Angeleno. Follow him on the twitter at @hillelaron.