http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-trafficdayone8-2008jun08,0,2498441.story?track=ntothtml
From the Los Angeles Times
L.A.'s commuters can't even go nowhere fast
A look at how your neighbors, in the next lane, juggle their lives and drives.
Sidebar: Traffic taking a toll on psychic health, experts say
By Christopher Goffard: times staff writer
June 8, 2008
In this neighborhood, nobody knows your name.
There you are in the photograph above, crawling anonymously along a
cheerless stretch of real estate known as the 110 Freeway at rush hour.
The roads are slick with rain and cluttered with wrecks, and you've
become a citizen of Stalled Nation, a community of the trapped. You're
having a quintessential Los Angeles moment, partaking of a civic ritual
more widespread than voting or church, one of the few universal
experiences in this segmented, far-flung metropolis.
If you're seeking the city's ever-elusive center, it looks exactly like
this. It's anywhere the tires are stopped dead, a thousand deep. As a
motorist in Southern California, your average rush-hour speed has
plunged from 26 miles per hour in 1980 to about half that today. High
gas prices have thinned traffic in some places recently, but the
improvement is unlikely to last. In L.A. and Orange counties, by one
conservative estimate, you're now delayed by rush hours 72 hours a
year, about double the time you were 25 years ago.
That's no small part of your waking life, yet you never get to know
your neighbors, all the sufferers stacked up left and right, ahead and
behind. You never learn why they're taking up space on your freeway at
this particular hour, when you urgently have to be someplace.
Seriously, where are all these people going?
Like you, we were curious. So we found a spot near the city's busiest
freeway interchange -- the 110 at the 10, clogged by more than half a
million cars each day -- to photograph the gridlock at exactly 7:30
a.m., dead-center of a Friday morning crush. We then tracked down as
many drivers as we could -- running their plates through the Department
of Motor Vehicles -- to find out what their stories might say about how
we live, in a way that statistics alone cannot.
John Kannofsky inches south along the inside lane in his Chrysler PT
Cruiser, deep into the 23-mile commute from his Highland Park apartment
to his job at a charter school near Los Angeles International Airport.
An art teacher, Kannofsky, 49, wears a soul patch and combed-back,
shoulder-length dark hair, and few situations shake his composure like
the one he finds himself in right now. Scanning the tableau of stalled
steel, he thinks: "What idiot made a wrong turn somewhere and got
clipped?"
He left home early, as always, but by the time he crawls into the
camera's view, he's been on the road for 45 minutes and he's nowhere
near school. He's supposed to get his first-period students started on
making cultural masks. If he doesn't make the 8:30 a.m. bell, they will
be stuck in the rain.
He's already given up on the possibility of his usual nonfat latte at
the Century Boulevard Starbucks. It's the way he celebrates having made
it most of the way to work, and he knows skipping it will leave him
groggy and a little depressed.
He'd like to use his time on the clogged 110 to get a head-start on his
work. But for that he needs his notebook, and his notebook's in his
shoulder bag, and his shoulder bag's in the back seat, and despite
heroic contortions -- one hand still on the wheel -- he can't quite
reach it.
Most mornings, the drive is just barely endurable. Except for rare
drizzly days like today, he keeps his 2006 Cruiser's sun roof open,
easier here than in his native Virginia. The car also has satellite
radio, which helps, and at the moment it's purring with the cadences of
the BBC World News.
He loves Los Angeles, mostly. In the last few weeks alone, he's seen a
Latin American art exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art, a Murakami
show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, an avant-garde dance
performance at UCLA, and flamenco dancing at El Cid restaurant on
Sunset Boulevard.
Tonight, he'll meet friends at Papa Cristo's Greek restaurant in L.A.
to dine on fried octopus and feta. He realizes how spoiled he is when
he visits Virginia, where all he sees are miles and miles of chain
restaurants, and where his best option is the buffet at his parents'
assisted-living home.
The price for living here? He's paying it now. He tries not to dwell on
how much time traffic steals from his life. He tries to think of it as
a chance to reflect, to meditate, because it's about the only free time
he gets. Right now, he's trying to observe all the buildings along the
110 that he's never noticed before.
But he can't help himself -- he picks up his cellphone to call his
wife, Ursula, a florist, to remind her how lucky she is to have a
five-minute commute. He tried taking the train to work, but it took
three transfers and an hour and a half, and how would he run his
evening errands?
His wife sometimes asks why he doesn't get a job closer to home. The
answer is there aren't many union jobs for art teachers, and he's not
about to give up their $600-a-month rent-controlled apartment, which
allows him to be a culture maven on a teacher's salary.
Still, it's gotten so that he gets home and just wants to sleep. There
are streaks of gray in his hair. He can't imagine how he'd manage if
they had kids. "The only way to stay awake is to go out with people,"
he tells his wife.
He has an agenda in advertising his suffering in traffic. He's hoping
to ward off any domestic chores his wife may require of him later.
She's on to him, of course, and hardly needs reminding of his plight.
She replies, "I hope you have a good day, sweetie."
An aqua-colored Toyota RAV 4 carries technician Carlos Paredes. He's
heading north after an overnight shift at his Torrance office, where he
repairs laser printers.
The challenge now is to get home to Silver Lake -- a 20-mile drive --
to pick up his two sons and deposit them at nearby Marshall High in
time for the first bell.
Like the teacher passing by on his left, Paredes, 43, feels the urge to
call his wife. "Hang in there, I'll make it," he says into his
cellphone.
On a day like today, Paredes is reminded of why he had to change his
life. For 11 years, he roamed the city by day servicing copying
equipment, gobbling junk food, racing from job to job. Now and then,
the stress of battling gridlock induced headaches and the shakes. Then,
on the 101 Freeway seven years ago, a pain in his chest was so
frightening that he had to pull over. A stroke, the cardiologist said.
He took a pay cut and went to the overnight shift, figuring a faster
commute would be good for his health.
A sensible move. One stark study, published in 2004 in the New England
Journal of Medicine, found that nearly one in 12 heart attacks was
linked to traffic. Left unresolved was whether the culprit was
stop-and-go car exhaust, which can starve the heart of oxygen, or
stress, which spikes blood pressure, leading to strokes and heart
attacks.
Now Paredes sees more of his kids. He coaches baseball after school,
and he notices the harried looks on other parents' faces. "They're
always fighting traffic. They're always in a bad mood. Parents are
constantly trying to beat the clock."
He's spent most of his life in L.A., watching the roads he cruised
along almost 30 years ago grow steadily impassable. He's watched the
Staples Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Nokia Theatre rise
over downtown, jamming the roads during games and concerts.
Still, he's ambivalent. To him, construction cranes mean progress. They
mean a city is doing well and providing jobs for people. "I know that
we need all these businesses," he says. "I can put up with it, as long
as it doesn't get any worse than it already is."
His commute takes him past the $2.5-billion L.A. Live project, the
centerpiece of a development that, when completed, will add more than
40,000 car trips a day to downtown's crowded streets and freeways. When
asked about it, he sounds resigned. "It's gonna get worse," he says.
"You really don't have much choice."
His in-laws are here, and he's raising kids here, so it's not easy to
leave. Plus, he bought his home 17 years ago at a good price, and he's
not able to pay $600,000 for a new one in the South Bay just to be
closer to work. Ditch his car? He tried. It took three hours to reach
work by bus and train.
His radio is tuned to KFI-AM (640), where host Bill Handel has been
denouncing Berkeley's homeless squatters. Handel, the most listened-to
local talk show host in the country, rants regularly about traffic. But
he is one of the beneficiaries of all this misery. A vast army of
captive commuters has made Los Angeles the nation's most lucrative
radio market, an $890-million-a-year juggernaut.
As Handel's voice rails from the radio, Paredes inches closer to home
and his kids. They will be driving soon, and he'll advise them to leave
early and stay calm on the road. What more can a father say? "You just
have to live with it," he says. "You can't change anything."
For Markus Schmid, a native of Switzerland now motoring north in his
2001 Volvo wagon, the promise of the United States once shimmered in
chrome and sang in speed.
He envisioned the wonderland of the car commercials, a nation of "open
land and wide roads and freedom," the perfect place to live out his
fantasy of buying "a real American V8 car," preferably a Ford Mustang.
When he moved to Southern California two years ago, he became rudely
acquainted with gridlock culture, potholes and endless idling. He
worried about contributing to global warming. He scuttled the
muscle-car dream.
"Once I was here, I realized how stupid it is. It's really just a waste
of money and fuel," says Schmid, 35. "You cannot even enjoy it. In the
U.S., there's really no point."
Which is why he's making his 38-mile morning commute in a practical
wagon with 105,000 miles on the odometer. He listens to the Mark and
Brian show on KLOS-FM (95.5), because it helps him with his English.
During ads, he finds rock 'n' roll on JACK-FM (93.1).
In Zurich, he had a three-minute walk to work. On a good day here, it
takes 45 minutes by car to get from his home in Venice to Monrovia,
where he works for a company that makes special-effects fog machines.
Today, getting there will take him two hours. "It's hard for me to
understand that there's not a high pressure on the government to create
public transportation," he says.
He and his wife rent a house a block from the Pacific, which for a
native of Switzerland feels like "vacation every day." On weekends,
they stroll to the beach and the farmers market.
He's not giving that up, even though his office will soon move even
farther from home. "It's getting closer to the edge where I'd consider
other options," he says. "I would not do much more."
Saleswoman Alexis Bilitch is nosing south through the drizzle in a 2003
BMW. She's heading to Santa Monica, a 23-mile drive from her home in
the San Gabriel Valley, for a seminar on "Effective Negotiating." After
an hour and a half, she's not close to her destination.
During commutes, she has tried audio books and Spanish lessons but had
trouble absorbing them. So she listens to talk-radio. All morning,
she's been listening to KABC's Doug McIntyre, who is outraged that
Sudan ordered a schoolteacher lashed for naming a teddy bear Muhammad.
Weather guy Capt. Jorge has explained that today there's a wreck ahead,
near Washington Boulevard, which accounts for the logjam. She pounds
the steering wheel, thinking, "I can't believe it. This is the worst."
A couple of months back, when she had to attend a meeting in Orange
County, she doubled the time MapQuest had estimated for the trip.
She was still 10 minutes late, which brought a swift rebuke from
management. "I thought, 'That means I have to plan for three hours if
I'm going to go anywhere,' " she says. "You can't plan in this traffic.
It's everywhere."
A MapQuest spokesperson acknowledged that their algorithms don't
"currently have the ability to take traffic into account." But the
company is working on it.
To kill time this morning, Bilitch puts on her cellphone headset and
calls her sister in New York City. She tells her how long she's been
crawling along. "And I'm not even near where I need to be," she says.
It's a short conversation. Her sister, who has an appointment too,
wishes her luck.
In his 1995 Toyota Camry, process server John Evans is struggling to
get from his downtown office to a stakeout in West L.A. He's hoping to
thrust a no-travel order into the hands of a man about to leave town
with his 6-year-old daughter. His caseload today will then take him to
Encino, Burbank, Santa Ana, La Mirada, Long Beach, San Pedro and back
across L.A. -- a circuit of more than 100 miles before he heads home to
the Westside.
Evans, 34, hits the road early because he must find people who don't
want to be found, and he logs four to five hours a day in traffic he
describes as "unbearable on any given day."
All morning, Evans has been watching motorists cut each other off, stop abruptly and generally behave like lunatics.
To calm his nerves, he listens to HOT 92.3 FM, the oldies and R&B
station, which as he passes through downtown L.A. is playing the Dazz
Band's 1982 funk classic "Let it Whip."
He calls his wife on his Bluetooth. They chat about their kids and
about maybe grabbing dinner out tonight. But he has a lot of road to
cover first, none of it clear.
Janet London, advancing haltingly in a Toyota RAV 4, has a 22-mile haul
from her home in South Los Angeles to the Judicial Council of
California in Burbank, where she works as an executive assistant.
It usually takes her about 45 minutes to get to work, and today, so
far, she's making average time. She's absorbed in the conclusion of the
thriller she's listening to, "Obsession" by Karen Robards. Every week,
she checks out a couple books on tape from the library. "That's the
only thing that keeps me from losing my mind," London, 57, says.
"Sometimes I don't even know how I got where I'm going because I'm
listening to the book."
Californians yearn to fill the dead time in their cars, and so they are
voracious consumers of audio books. One industry leader, Simply
Audiobooks, says one in four of its subscribers lives here.
Whatever her distractions, London describes traffic in L.A. as
something that "completely controls your life," and adds, "That's
probably the most stressful thing in my life, just getting to and from
work." Some days, getting home takes two hours. "The 110 is always
jammed for no reason. No accidents, nothing going on, just too many
cars on the freeway. I can practically count on one hand the number of
times the 110 has been clear."
She'd take mass transit if she could, but she doesn't know how she'd
get to Burbank from her home. "I don't know what the solution is.
Things are definitely getting worse." She'd like to live closer to
work, but she owns her own home and can't afford the Burbank area.
What keeps her in L.A. are her grown daughters. She hopes they'll
follow her to North Carolina, where she'd like to retire in a few
years. "I don't want to be 75, 80 years old and living in this crowded
city."
Behind the wheel of a silver 2001 Lexus RX 300, accountant Diane Duncan
is enduring a 40-mile slog from her home in Marina del Rey to a client
in Monrovia. With its all-wheel drive and front-and-side air bags, the
SUV makes her feel safe.
When the windows are up, Duncan feels a world removed from the
freeway's industrial bleats and roars, and she can catch every word of
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," playing now. "If you
listen to rock 'n' roll, it amps you," she explains. "You want to drive
fast, and you can't."
She will make slow, steady time till just past the Interstate 5
turnoff, where the cars stop dead. This puzzles her because she never
sees the wreck that causes it -- thereby illustrating, as it happens,
the kinetic forces that make traffic like today's so hideous: For every
minute an accident blocks the road, four minutes of delay result, as
cars stack up far behind it. Even if a car is towed off the highway 30
minutes after it crashes, the snarl can last for two hours.
She's been driving in L.A. for 20 years, and her current job --
visiting clients all over town -- keeps her on the freeway at least 12
hours a week. "Before, it seems like there were times there wasn't
traffic," she says. "Now, it doesn't matter if it's the middle of the
night or the middle of the day."
When she travels to other states, she's reminded of why L.A. is home.
In Indianapolis once, she asked the locals what there was to do, and
"all they could do is list the names of the bars." Here, she hears
classical music at the Hollywood Bowl and Disney Hall, and she lives a
mile from the ocean. Worrying about traffic "doesn't get me there any
faster," she says. "It's part of being here, and I guess I just accept
that."
She bought the Lexus knowing that she'd be stuck in it for large chunks
of the week, a motive that carmakers are keen to capitalize on, rolling
out new fleets with ever-slicker creature comforts. The manufacturer
has equipped current models with "things that make the commute more
palatable," in the words of one dealer -- voice-dialed phones,
auxiliary plugs for MP3 players, 30-gigabyte hard drives, even live
traffic-navigation maps.
And, of course, there's that all-important place to put a drink. Duncan
is pleased with the capacious cup holder now cradling her coffee mug.
She has already logged hard time as she passes through downtown,
however, and the mug is empty. She could use a refill.
This is a snapshot of the humanity moving through one swath of overused
asphalt in the City of Angels at exactly 7:30 on a drizzly Friday
morning. It's a transient village of chrome and steel, anxiety and
resignation and grudging choices. It's about to dissolve, this
configuration of souls that will never reproduce itself in just this
way again. When the minute ends, everyone remains strangers. It's now
7:31 a.m., and in the drizzle, in the shadow of downtown's skyscrapers,
another neighborhood is forming.
christopher.goffard @latimes.com
