I love Los Angeles, but I hate downtown. It totally and completely sucks. The streets were laid out by retarded dyslexics who liked to drive in endless circles. The freeway junctions are ridiculously useless -- you can't get back to anything you pass, and there are lots of places you can see that you can't get to at all. There are innumerable exits with no corresponding entrances, so if you get off the freeway in the wrong place you're basically doomed. Traffic everywhere for no reason; people crossing the street at 0.00001 miles per hour; intersections you aren't allowed to turn at, in any direction; signs that purport to you lead to the freeway, but don't; streets that are one-way in some places but not in others. I hate it.
Message of the Day:
Some friends and I have just launched MindThrow, a site designed to help you find new things to do based on your current interests. Check it out, and make sure to send any feedback you've got, positive or negative, to mindthrowATgmailDOTcom.
8 Comments
Leave a comment
The comment login system is acting strange. If you get an error message saying you aren't logged in when you are, just reload the comment page and try again. I'm trying to track this bug down, but it's not easy.
I think thats just you. I have no problem navigating and getting around in downtown.
m-a-p
If you think downtown L.A. is bad, give Boston a try sometime. I learned how to drive in L.A. I WILL NOT drive in Boston. Not any more, anyway.
All the old roads in Boston are paved-over cow trails. All new roads are made in the same venerable way, only now they just turn a cow loose and follow her around with a paving truck. To save money on stoplights, they squeeze in three or four streets to an intersection. And there is evidently some sort of rule (written or unwritten, I know not) that left-hand turners and thru traffic are to alternate (one turner, one thru) instead of the left turners yielding to all the oncoming traffic. One of these days they're going to start requiring a certificate of insanity for drivers' licenses there, because anyone who chooses to drive in Boston has to be crazy.
If you would like to see a city that's easy to navigate and easy to drive, try any city in Utah except Ogden. They are invariably laid out on a grid system and all the streets are numbered so you don't have to memorize a sequence of names.
Downtown's not too bad once you Mapquest the location you're heading. But yeah, I heard Boston's nuts...
I live in downtown and primarily get around by walking and transit. Downtown is much more enjoyable when you're not in a car. It is one of the more pedestrian/transit friendly places in LA.
i COMPLETELY agree with you. every single thing you just said is everything i always ALWAYS ALWAYS complain about driving around downtown!! i suppose one could get used to it after driving it a while, but i go there maybe a handful of times a year, and each time is mindboggling. onramps and offramps are seemingly random that you would have to stop and pore over a map before finding your way back to the freeway to go home... i'm glad i'm not the only one.
Boston is the worst city ever. dont ever go there unless you have a degree in geography.
I'm just going to combine two of the above comments to make a point. Downtown LA is transit friendly for the same reason Boston is hard to drive in: They weren't designed to make cars happy. They were designed to make people happy. All those people crossing the street slowly have the RIGHT OF WAY. The car culture in LA mixed with the culture of entitlement (I "deserve" to be able to get anywhere I want easily and by car) is more or less the root of everything that is wrong with that city, and most of America. Park your damn car and walk around. You might even end up somewhere you DIDN'T mapquest ahead of time, but find coincidentally; or meet somebody you didn't just say "I'll be right there" to on the cell, which is actually the point of a downtown in any city that's worth it's weight in beans.