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Old 09-24-2008, 10:40 PM
 
142 posts, read 753,148 times
Reputation: 46

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Traffic is bad, but there's things you can do. I go in at work at 8:00 A.M. and live around 14 miles away. I have to take the 101 South every morning. I leave my house at about 6:20 A.M. and arrive at work at around 6:40 A.M. Am I crazy? I do it for two reasons. One: I don't want to get on a freeway after 7:00 A.M. because it'll take me forever, and I run the risk of being late to work. Two: Sometimes there's accidents or stalls or spills on the freeways and the traffic gets really bad that it looks like a parking lot for miles and miles long. If I leave my house at 6:20 A.M. and something like this happens, I still have time to get to work using the surface streets. By the way, I avoid using the surface streets versus the freeway because with all the traffic lights and the low speed limits, it'll take me three times as long to get to work (I've tried it twice). In the afternoon, I usually leave work by 3:40 P.M., so I think I avoid the rush hour then too. There's ways you can work around the traffic if you try.
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Old 09-24-2008, 10:45 PM
 
Location: Los Angeles, CA
419 posts, read 1,444,089 times
Reputation: 181
Quote:
In the afternoon, I usually leave work by 3:40 P.M., so I think I avoid the rush hour then too.
In my experience, the clock is set the other way - start late and leave late. If you leave early, you're considered a slacker. Same result...
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Old 09-24-2008, 10:45 PM
 
Location: Burbank
1,203 posts, read 4,404,455 times
Reputation: 437
Quote:
Originally Posted by HotFudge View Post
Traffic is bad, but there's things you can do. I go in at work at 8:00 A.M. and live around 14 miles away. I have to take the 101 South every morning. I leave my house at about 6:20 A.M. and arrive at work at around 6:40 A.M. Am I crazy? I do it for two reasons. One: I don't want to get on a freeway after 7:00 A.M. because it'll take me forever, and I run the risk of being late to work. Two: Sometimes there's accidents or stalls or spills on the freeways and the traffic gets really bad that it looks like a parking lot for miles and miles long. If I leave my house at 6:20 A.M. and something like this happens, I still have time to get to work using the surface streets. By the way, I avoid using the surface streets versus the freeway because with all the traffic lights and the low speed limits, it'll take me three times as long to get to work (I've tried it twice). In the afternoon, I usually leave work by 3:40 P.M., so I think I avoid the rush hour then too. There's ways you can work around the traffic if you try.
Early birds think alike
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Old 09-24-2008, 10:46 PM
 
Location: South Pasadena
689 posts, read 2,572,080 times
Reputation: 560
The freeways in LA are bad, but not that bad. Except for the obvious rush hour traffic you can actually get around the region pretty efficiently if you do a little planning and pay attention. One of the problems is that rush "hour" is now more like 3 or 4 hours. I try to schedule my appointments so that I leave the house between 9 and 9:30am and leave wherever I am before 3pm. If you are one of the unfortunate souls who has to commute on the freeway during peak hours it can be madning. These days there are no secret routes that can shave time off of your commute and the surface streets are generally as backed up as the freeway. You just have to pick your poison. You can either slog it out on the freeway or get on the surface streets and worry about red lights, buses, getting stuck behind people trying to turn, etc. The other thing is to check the traffic on the computer before you head out and listen to traffic radio (I prefer KFWB). If you find out about an incident on your route do something about it before you get stuck.
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Old 09-24-2008, 10:49 PM
 
Location: Burbank
1,203 posts, read 4,404,455 times
Reputation: 437
Quote:
Originally Posted by streetscenes View Post
The freeways in LA are bad, but not that bad. Except for the obvious rush hour traffic you can actually get around the region pretty efficiently if you do a little planning and pay attention. One of the problems is that rush "hour" is now more like 3 or 4 hours. I try to schedule my appointments so that I leave the house between 9 and 9:30am and leave wherever I am before 3pm. If you are one of the unfortunate souls who has to commute on the freeway during peak hours it can be madning. These days there are no secret routes that can shave time off of your commute and the surface streets are generally as backed up as the freeway. You just have to pick your poison. You can either slog it out on the freeway or get on the surface streets and worry about red lights, buses, getting stuck behind people trying to turn, etc. The other thing is to check the traffic on the computer before you head out and listen to traffic radio (I prefer KFWB). If you find out about an incident on your route do something about it before you get stuck.
Sigalert is key
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Old 09-24-2008, 10:50 PM
 
142 posts, read 753,148 times
Reputation: 46
Quote:
Originally Posted by ConsideringLA View Post
In my experience, the clock is set the other way - start late and leave late. If you leave early, you're considered a slacker. Same result...
My work does end at that time. I don't leave early. Those are my hours.
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Old 09-24-2008, 11:46 PM
 
Location: Whittier, California
330 posts, read 1,310,078 times
Reputation: 134
Default Car maintenance?

Quote:
Originally Posted by HotFudge View Post
Traffic is bad, but there's things you can do. I go in at work at 8:00 A.M. and live around 14 miles away. I have to take the 101 South every morning. I leave my house at about 6:20 A.M. and arrive at work at around 6:40 A.M. Am I crazy? I do it for two reasons. One: I don't want to get on a freeway after 7:00 A.M. because it'll take me forever, and I run the risk of being late to work. Two: Sometimes there's accidents or stalls or spills on the freeways and the traffic gets really bad that it looks like a parking lot for miles and miles long. If I leave my house at 6:20 A.M. and something like this happens, I still have time to get to work using the surface streets. By the way, I avoid using the surface streets versus the freeway because with all the traffic lights and the low speed limits, it'll take me three times as long to get to work (I've tried it twice). In the afternoon, I usually leave work by 3:40 P.M., so I think I avoid the rush hour then too. There's ways you can work around the traffic if you try.
Besides time, traffic, gas, $ and stress there is the wear and tear on your car! Driving surface streets means stop and go traffic and freeway driving for miles every day can take its toll too. People spend a lot of $ for maintenace and repairs or buy a new car every 5 years.
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Old 09-24-2008, 11:59 PM
 
Location: Whittier, California
330 posts, read 1,310,078 times
Reputation: 134
Surface Streets: Red lights, train tracks, busses, slow moving gardening trucks, drivers half asleep, pedestrians, closed off lanes, construction crews, ambulances and fire trucks with sirens, police cars pulling people over, drivers driving slow to make right turns into parking lots and pot holes.

Freeways: Trucks, diesels, traffic, merging lanes, toll roads, car pool lanes, accidents and closed off lanes and forcing your way over to change lanes because no one will let you in. Missing the off ramp and having to get off and get back on the freeway.

Take your pick!
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Old 09-25-2008, 12:10 AM
 
Location: Denver, CO
5,610 posts, read 23,224,697 times
Reputation: 5447
From what I've seen lately, the 10, 110, and 101 freeways (the 3 freeways I use the most frequently) don't really run smooth until 9:30 at night on weekdays. Maybe I'm going crazy, but it seems like the traffic is almost twice as worse now as it was several months ago. The surface roads are a mixed bag-- some of them going at certain directions at certain times of the day are better than the freeways, but some of them are permanently slogged it seems like. (slog-- a word I invented-- SLow and/or bOGged down with traffic at the same time).

Isn't there some way they could use technology to reprogram all the lights in this city so they're actually coordinated-- like all the N-S flows of traffic, and then E-S, etc, in a whole giant swath of the city get to go green all once? So much time gets wasted when you wait forever for a light to change, and then the second it does turn green the light in the very next block turns red... repeat ad nauseum. Another observation-- many of these roads in the old urban parts of LA are permanently FUBAR-ed. A lot of these roads, Vermont Ave being a great example, don't even have dedicated left hand turn lanes, so a car waiting for oncoming cars to pass to turn left plugs up an entire lane. And often no right hand turn lanes either-- and then at every intersection there's a batch of Latin American immigrant women with strollers, plugging up the right lane before the car can turn right. And then some of these roads like Vermont have so many busses it seems like every 2 or 3 blocks there's another bug plugging up the right lane. I've even seen it where BOTH lanes are plugged up with someone wanting to turn left and a bus stopping in the right lane, where nobody moves. And I've seen on this road where they close off a whole lane, right at the intersection with Wilshire, plugging up traffic to oblivion. Having to drive through the surface roads of central LA is a living hell.
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Old 09-25-2008, 12:11 AM
 
8,256 posts, read 17,247,862 times
Reputation: 6220
Seriously, traffic just depends on where you are and where you need to go (most of the time). For example, by my house, traffic is stopped for about 1 mile on a surface street going north, but going south is empty.

Just avoid Sepulveda Blvd, the 405, and the 10. However, in the end, it all comes down to knowing the city well. My mom is pro so we almost never get stuck in traffic because she knows tons of alternate routes and shortcuts since shes been here almost 30 years and drives a lot.

But yeah, traffic has reduced a lot in the past couple years and buses have become more crowded so they now come more often, have more lines and stops, and bigger buses. I took a bus from my house near LAX to UCLA in Westwood and everyday over the summer, about 70-120 ppl were on one single sized bus at the same time. But almost all buses are usually filled to capacity now because no one wants to pay for gas and just happened to realize we have the best bus system in the country.
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