Pity the Gridlocked Westsiders

(Flickr pic by GreenFrog808.)

Traffic, of course, is a bitch throughout Los Angeles. But as LAist recently noticed (and the LA Times' Bottleneck Blog backed up), it's much worse west of La Cienega.

It's one of the nice things about living east. (And I live east of the Los Angeles River, so I can say that.) Even when it's bumper-to-bumper, the surface street traffic at leasr moves. I dread the few times I find myself in West L.A. during rush hour, because I know I'm going nowhere. Call it poetic justice, as Beverly Hills and the west side have long resisted rapid transit options.

LAist's Kemp Powers, who brings up the topic while slamming the suggestion that Pico and Olympic go one-way, writes:

It took a relocation east to realize that the city of Los Angeles has been doing a lot of growing up, and making strides in battling those car-addicted, traffic-clogged clichés. I learned we have a subway system and, believe it or not, it’s pretty damn handy as long as you don’t need to go to the Westside.

Traffic east of La Cienega is always a fraction of what it is to the west on most major streets, even though the eastern parts of town are much denser. This one-way plan is about helping merchants and residents on the Westside (particularly the neighborhoods near the 405, where surface roads are the worst) by screwing the merchants and residents in the increasingly more manageable communities to the east. I have to call bullshit on that.

Thank goodness I'm still relatively young -- I can still hold out hope that I'll see a "Subway to the Sea" in my lifetime.