New day, same old Traffic

Mad Max here today:

Everyday I am baffled and truly frustrated by the congestion of cars that roam the streets of Los Angeles. Everyone is of course forewarned of this problem before visiting or if they take the big step, moving here. And while I've lived here for almost 3 years everyday I struggle with the stop and go, bad driving of others and general mayhem that ensues with too many cars, too many people and not enough road. I have recently come to the conclusion however that it may not be any of the aforementioned things but the traffic lights, the timing of them and the way it affects the flow.

Have you ever noticed that if you're traveling from Hollywood to say the Westside of Los Angeles the moment you hit Beverly Hills everything slows down, the roads get almost smaller in width and it seems like you've entered a third dimension of driving. I used to attribute this to the old, stuck up people who generally live in the area. First of all, if you're old it's probably a given that you're going to drive more slowly than the rest of us. Secondly, Beverly Hills being its own municipality tends to want to stray from whatever the norm is in Los Angeles and I figured that if you've got that kind of clout legally you'll change the driving laws to whatever you damn well please. It turns out that this isn't far from the truth. Being its own municipality Beverly Hills is on a different lighting grid from the rest of Los Angeles slowing down traffic. In fact there are times when I will be on little Santa Monica going through the heart of Beverly Hills and I will see three green lights in a row, one red light and another green. How on earth does that make sense? Not only does it disturb the flow of traffic but it's just ridiculous.

Now the city of Los Angeles itself isn't all that much better than Beverly Hills for they will frequently have similar lighting incidents where there are several greens in a row, interrupted by a red and then more greens. I understand that Los Angeles, being so big, having so many drivers and so forth is going to be a on a different system than New York City but New York’s truncated system where the lights in a strip of street turn Green one second behind each other makes sense. Traffic flows from east to west in one stream and then from north to south in one stream of cars and pedestrians. Why can LA not be the same? It seems to me that each neighborhood (which I rave about as a cool facet of Los Angeles: having all the different neighborhoods in one big city) are on their own grids causing this massive blockage all around town. People need to start talking to one another, neighborhood lighting systems need to start syncing up when one flows into another, when a boundary line is crossed.

Or maybe it's not Los Angeles at all and the people are really just terrible drivers and instead of paying attention to the road, driving defensively and understanding the rules they just get behind the wheels of the car and press the accelerator.