L.A. sucks, but there is a happy ending ...

That must be terrible to have to read an insult about where you live, thinks the guy from Alabama. Who could possibly be expected to stand up under the strain?

 

Downtown LA is pretty filthy and long overdue for a spring cleaning.

 

If you weren't criticizing L.A. because of its traffic, I apologize for misinterpreting your post.

 

it's all good. I was having a bad day and it was about 119 degrees when I got to my hotel and sent off that missive.

 

Great avatar though.

 

I saw her on Broadway years ago and she is breathtaking in person.

Would even look good in a Burger King crown.

 

I will timidly weigh in on this debate and say that growing up in the Midwest, NYC and LA were often considered something close to hellmouths, especially the SoCal traffic. (The latter point is quite rich coming from my fellow Chicagoans, who live in the land of highway construction and gridlock).

Anyway, when I finally visited LA myself in the 2010s (to visit my wife’s sister and her family in Torrance) I was surprised by how much I enjoyed visiting. Granted, regarding traffic, we basically stayed in the South Bay area the whole week, and the two times we did venture to other areas (Angels Stadium, Beverly Hills area) it was traffic jam-tastic.

 

And I’ll weigh in here to say that my experience with LA traffic was not appreciably worse than traffic in Atlanta or Dallas.

 

Los Angeles is pretty much like big cities everywhere. Parts of it are great. Parts are unremarkable. Parts are bad.

It's more complicated than the Golden Age of LA was for sure, but it's like any place else. It is what you make of it.

 

I’d love to see how much worse LA traffic would be if they had to deal with weather issues more than a few times a year.

Every time a single snowflake falls in DC, gridlock ensues for 50 miles in every direction.

We also have thousands of tourists here at any given time trying to navigate roads it took me at least five years to learn. I imagine similar problems in LA.

Also, there’s usually a mass exodus before every holiday, as everyone who lives here is originally from somewhere else. So traveling for a holiday is just s huge clusterfuck. Again, I imagine similar problems in LA.

 

The only 2 times I encountered bad traffic in LA was on Sunset driving to Santa Monica and on the 405 heading to LAX for a flight home. (The bitch wagon I rented had great brakes fortunately.) Otherwise I got around surprisingly fine.