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Hollywood Freeway Ranked #1 for Worst Commute
Photo by staceyviera via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr
Photo by staceyviera via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr
Everyone bitches about the 405, but seriously, the 101 is the city's hidden monster. See, the 405 you can at least expect to suck. The 101, on the other hand, plays tricks on you, being all perfect at times and then a total suck face other times. The Daily Beast released today a list of America's 75 worst commutes, and lo and behold, the Hollywood Freeway is ranked as the country's worst commute.
Research has found that the freeway has 686 hours of weekly bottleneck congestion with the worst bottleneck found at Vermont Avenue in southbound lanes (we agree!). That bottleneck tends to be .64 miles with the speed of 14 mph. "I recall they would say things like it's a 20-minute trip downtown on the Hollywood Freeway," Metro chief executive Art Leahy told the blog about traffic when he was growing up in Los Angeles. "No one anticipated the congestion that would emerge."
There are four reasons why we have a congestion problem, according to Anthony Downs, author of Stuck in Traffic, finds The Daily Beast:
- The core of the city goes to and from work at the same time.
- Good jobs means multiple cars in households.
- When roads were conceived, they weren't conceived for the current population.
- More cars = more accidents = more traffic.
The list of worst commutes wasn't compiled subjectively. The blog partnered with the traffic-tracking firm INRIX, "which culls information nationwide from more than 1.5 million GPS units, mostly in freight trucks." First they identified the worst cities, then found the worst commute within.
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