Expert Article

Infrastructure Be Damned

The Migraine-Inducing Roadblocks of Driving in Southern California

Imagine you’ve just been offered the job opportunity of a lifetime. You’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this since you graduated college and moved back home to work at your family’s small-town business. A quiet life is all you’ve ever known but this opportunity will change everything for you. The only problem – it’s in Downtown Los Angeles. Congested, confusing, cacophonous Los Angeles. What’s a small-town joe like you to do? Not to worry, for I will be your guide through this unfamiliar, pothole-ridden terrain. At the end of this driver’s ed course you will be able to:

• (Mostly) avoid traffic

• (Sometimes) work around road construction

• (With luck) find parking

• And (not) use public transit

Unfortunately, it will not conclude with a visit to the illustrious California DMV whose official slogan is “Where happiness goes to die.”

Avoiding Traffic

Every driver in the world knows about rush hour: the time of day when all of the corporate sheep go between their dreary cubicles and their little boxes on the hillside––see “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds. Rush hour in SoCal, however, seems to last all day. Except for a seductive six hour period between 9 AM and 3 PM where you can sail across the 10 from Culver City to Downtown in less than 15 minutes. If there’s anywhere you want to go on a weekday this is the time to do it – unless you want to drive in the middle of the night, which even then doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing as I’ll address later.

During the last 18 months, however, the pandemic and work-from-home policies have changed the way we understand commuter traffic. According to USC Professor and Economic Researcher Andrii Parkhomenko, “If a third of people work from home, overall time spent commuting in Los Angeles could drop 32%” (Parkhomenko). So even if you have to commute to your new job, others not commuting will work in your favor. 

Constant Construction

So, one of the four horsemen of the metropolitan transit apocalypse may be dead. But traffic caused by construction remains. As previously mentioned, driving at night is no workaround because lanes are often closed for construction. To make matters worse there are always those drivers who don’t understand the concept of zipper merging and won’t let anyone in front of them, or even worse the ones who drive on the shoulder to get ahead. Closures like this happen regularly and are more or less unavoidable as for some baffling reason Apple and Google maps never seem to know when the freeways are closed. 

Southern California Public Radio called the closure of the 405 over a long weekend in July of 2011 “Carmageddon”, as if road closures are comparable to the end of the world. As for the shortcuts LA natives think they know, “for every secret passage that you know, there’s probably 50,000 [people] that know that same passage. There is gonna be no secret way through the closure” (Watt). 

Unlike commuter traffic, construction traffic isn’t going anywhere. Four years ago, the state approved a 10-year gas tax––as if California gas prices weren’t high enough, another nuisance to look forward to––to fund highway improvements. According to LA Times writer Patrick McGreevy, “the state has spent billions and made some progress in repairs, but officials now say the funding is sufficient only to complete less than half of the work needed” (McGreevy). So, California drivers can continue to count on overpriced gas and never-ending road work. But getting where you need to go is only half the battle.

Free Parking is a Myth

You’ve arrived at your destination and now comes the fun part: finding parking. As far as I’m aware, it’s not normal to worry about where you’re going to park before you’ve gotten to your destination in other parts of the country. Parking in Los Angeles is so difficult to come by that when my date last week told me he had an extra parking space, I briefly thought he was my soulmate. There are two different beasts to tackle with parking: residential and commercial.

Most parking in residential areas doesn’t cost money, but it’s far from easy to come by. Street sweeping leaves half of the parking in a three-block radius unusable for hours during two days of the week. Parking tickets in some cities cost about as much as you would pay to park in a commercial lot, but not in Los Angeles. The tickets start at $75. Never mind areas with permit-only parking. 

In commercial areas, you’ll find metered street parking and overpriced lots. Street parking is even more difficult in the city due to delivery zones and rush hour constraints. One Los Angeles resident was so frustrated with confusing signage that she created new parking signs which she now posts underneath the unreadable city signs. The resident’s friend calls it “functional graffiti” (Stinson). My advice to avoid the abysmal activity of parking in LA? Get someone else to drive.

What About Public Transit?

You may be asking yourself at this point “Why would I ever want to have a car in Southern California?” The cherry on top of this hell storm? it’s your only option. Unlike New York, San Francisco, and most other high-traffic metropolitan areas, public transportation in Los Angeles is a joke. 

Let’s examine my roommate’s route to work as an example. This is how she could get to work if she had a car:

    1. Take the 101 to the 110 freeway (20 minutes)

And except for the four-lane merge you have to execute in less than 50 yards from the 101 South to the 110 South, the drive is fairly easy. But she doesn’t have a car, and this is how she gets to work:

1. Ride a Bird or some other kind of scooter to a bus stop (5 minutes)

2. Take the bus to the metro stop (10 minutes)

3. Ride the metro to the closest stop to her workplace (25 minutes)

4. Ride another scooter from the metro to work (5 minutes)

Forget taking an Uber or Lyft either; not only can it take 10-15 minutes to find a driver, but the supply of rideshare drivers is so low that the cost for the 20-minute ride is often over $50.

Is It Worth It?

Let’s review. There’s almost always going to be traffic and ongoing construction. Parking is never free whether you pay in currency, or the time spent finding it. And we’ve ruled out any alternatives to owning a car. Is it still worth moving to Los Angeles for that job? Probably. Because as much as I love to complain about how much of a headache it is to get around, there are so many places and experiences in Southern California worth exploring. Even if the journey to get there feels like trudging through wet concrete.

Works Cited

McGreevy, Patrick. “California’s highest-in-the-nation gas taxes are rising. But promised repairs are lagging.” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-23/gas-tax-hike-slow-progress-fixing-roads-california. 

Parkhomenko, Andrii. "Op-Ed: How Remote Working in the Post-COVID-19 Era could Transform L.A. and Other Cities." ProQuest, Dec 20, 2020, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/blogs-podcasts-websites/op-ed-how-remote-working-post-covid-19-era-could/docview/2471251230/se-2?accountid=14749.

Stinson, Liz. “A Redesigned Parking Sign So Simple That You'll Never Get Towed.” Wired, Jul 15, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-redesigned-parking-sign-so-simple-youll-never-get-towed-again/. 

Watt, Brian. “Carmageddon cometh: Officials gearing up for weekend-long shutdown of 405.” Southern California Public Radio, Jul 11, 2011, https://www.scpr.org/news/2011/07/11/27685/carmageddon-officials-gearing-weekend-long-/.