Our business had concluded, and we got back into the vehicle right around 2 o’clock in the afternoon. On the one hand, it was good to be headed back. On the other hand, it was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, not exactly the perfect time to leave San Diego with an eye toward navigating our way through rush hour Los Angeles traffic. Especially vivid in our imagination was the possibility of another slow tour through downtown LA, where we’d be stuck seeing sites instead of mileposts.
This time, we told ourselves, things were going to be different. We consulted with maps, we talked to experienced commuting friends, we asked Google. We almost felt like pioneers asking people to guide us over the vast wilderness and to guide us safely to where it was we’d be homesteading. Heck, I think we’d even talked to someone at the coffee shop, who happened to be discussing cars and streets to a friend.
And all the advice and knowledge seemed to distill into a simple solution: go back the same way we came. It may be a little out of the way, but if one is talking about time (and we were), better time would be made even IF we drove a greater distance to achieve it.
In places like where I grew up, in Montana, when someone asked how far it was to a certain town, we could tell them the answer in miles. But, more often than not, it was actually more helpful to tell them the distance in hours. Because of traffic conditions in Los Angeles in the afternoon, from 3 o’clock to 6:30 pm, distance became irrelevant. In fact, a driver will often see electronic signs which tell the driver how many minutes it will actually take, because of said conditions, to reach the junction of another freeway or turnoff. Distance is meaningless when you are basically stranded in a parking lot which is collectively still moving along at a snail’s pace. So, when the sign says that you’re 25 minutes away from the next freeway, and the freeway is only 5 miles away, well, you get the point.
Armed with knowledge, faith and hope, we jumped onto the 805 and headed north until we reached the 15, which also took us north, but in a somewhat northeasterly direction. And we were pleasantly surprised that we veritably cruised all the way up to the city of Norco. No slowdowns, no traffic jams. We were starting to feel like geniuses.
Also, I must say that we had ‘help’. Our WAZE app on my phone was up and running the whole time. For those of you not familiar, WAZE is something like the equivalent of Facebook for drivers. Other drivers, who also use the app, will post something they see or experience while driving, so as to give the drivers behind them a ‘heads up’ for things like traffic conditions, stalled cars, accidents, even the presence of law enforcement on the way.
In addition to all this, WAZE tries to be helpful in suggesting alternate routes for you to take that could potentially bypass traffic snarls and the like. I suppose one would find it very helpful if one was more intimately acquainted with the LA freeway system as a whole. However, such was not our case. Within a half hour of getting on the 15 WAZE would relentlessly suggest we bail on the 15 and take every and any road, highway or freeway. This became quite tiresome quickly because there are so many alternatives in the system. We almost became concerned that we were going to hurt WAZE’s feelings because we disregarded its frequent advice to seek an alternative path.
As a kind-of I-told-you-so from WAZE, we did encounter quite a bit of snarly congestion once we were about 10 miles from the junction of the 5, which is probably the biggest freeway in all of California. Once we experienced, again, the irrelevancy of distance and the 10 miles took us 40 minutes to crawl. We were tempted to think, in terms of score, LA Freeways 2 and us 0. And were were still in SOUTHERN LA!
Then, almost miraculously, conditions completely turned around. We got past the junction of the 5 and, poof!, things cleared up considerably. We didn’t allow our hopes to get too high, however. We still had yet to see what the Pasadena Freeway, or the 210, as they say in CA, offered in terms of passage. After all, it was about 4 p.m., the very height of rush hour traffic. Would there, could there possibly be any relief?
Seemingly, almost no one carpools in California, which is a gigantic waste, in my opinion. The chief reason for my humble opinion is summed up in two simple words: Diamond Lanes. The California Department of Transportation, or CalTrans for Short, has ingeniously installed Diamond Lanes on major freeways in the State. Except they don’t call them Diamond Lanes. They actually call them HOV lanes. I had to look that up and CalTrans say HOV is an acronym meaning ‘High Occupancy Vehicle lanes. The people who actually do the driving merely refer to them as Diamond Lanes, the reason being the symbol which appears on signage and the symbol painted on the actual road surface in the actual HOV lane.
Regardless of what you call them, it means one thing: you practically have your own, personal lane of traffic, while the other poor schmoes have to inch along with their fellow drivers in the non-High-Occupancy-Vehicles.
And what, pray tell, you may ask, constitutes a high occupancy vehicle? Don’t laugh, even though it sounds so completely and absurdly reasonable. A High Occupancy Vehicle, is a vehicle which has a minimum occupancy of . . . . are you ready? . . . of exactly TWO PEOPLE! A driver and a passenger. That’s it! Isn’t that nutty? If you basically want your own private highway, then all you have to do is go where you’re going with one other person. This is beautiful and sublime.
And you’d think that southern Californians would figure out a way to go to work with someone else. Nope. Truth is, the vast majority, something close to 99% of drivers have to or prefer to drive alone.
Consequently, we found ourselves with our almost-private highway as we stepped on the accelerator and bombed our way toward Pasadena. Now time and distance were beginning to equalize.
In addition to this, we were greatly aided by one other factor, and that was the fact that it seems like the majority of commuters were headed AWAY from Pasadena rather than TO it. The opposite lanes were a mess, a parking lot. We, however, were fortuitous enough to be traveling in the opposite direction than the majority. That, and having our precious diamond lane meant that we were rolling at warp speed on the 210. We never slowed down for traffic. We were geniuses! We were the kings of the freeway and we were exultant. We felt like the explorers who found they mythical Northwest passage, or like the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise who found a way through the Great Galactic Barrier (please watch Star Trek V: The Final Frontier).
We had three legs of our journey home to the Central Coast of California. Now all there we had was to find the exit to the 118 and our vehicle would almost become self-driving. What an accomplishment. How would we fare? I’ll tell you in the next installment.
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