So, this weekend they have to do repairs (tear down a bridge) on the 405 in the LA area. They will be closing down a 10 mile stretch.
You would think the world has ended if you watch any of the news stories about this - and the news coverage is absolutely ridiculous. Reporters everywhere, little news snippets about free buses, cheap flights from Burbank to Long Beach (about 200 yards away from each other) and other earth-shattering news.
I live in Nevada now, but probably know as much about this as anyone who lives in LA. And although I used to live in LA, I can’t imagine the closing of the 405 on a weekend would have affected me an iota.
Geez - they have had major earthquakes, fires, riots, mudslides - and now they are reacting to a 3-day road closure as if this ranks right up there with living in a war zone.
Seriously - if there had been a major earthquake, this road could have been closed for months or longer, but for a 3 day closure to make this the news story of the decade? Wow.
Have you ever actually driven in Southern California? The 405 is a parking lot pretty much 24-7, so I can’t even imagine what a disaster the freeways are going to be with it closed.
It’s hardly national news, but I shuddered with horror when I first heard they were closing a big stretch of it down for three days. If I still lived there, I’d hunker down in my house and refuse to leave until it was fixed.
I was living in Northern L.A. County and working across from LAX when a guy decided to put on a diving exhibition in the Sepulveda Pass. I tried taking the Laurel Canyon, but that was packed with people who had the same idea. I suppose I could have gone back to the 10, to the 5, to the 101, but after three hours in the car I couldn’t do it. I ended up sleeping at friends’ place north of Culver City.
You guys make good points, but I still remember the Rodney King riots, where EVERYBODY in LA left work in terror at about 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon. Traffic was moving along at about 1/2 MPH and it was gridlock on every freeway, boulevard and side street. Cars were hitting cars and not even stopping to exchange insurance papers, idiots were smashing cars with baseball bats and it was chaos.
Closing down a 10 mile stretch of the 405 for three days is hardly the worst thing that has hit LA…
It all came off with nary a ripple. It turns out that more people than they anticipated heeded the warnings and left their cars at home, or if they did use them, they stayed local.
There was a constant buzz of helicopters. But they weren’t police choppers. Nor were they FD air ambulances out to collect people who were caught in the gridlock when they needed the E.R. There wasn’t any gridlock. Instead, we had news helicopters up there to show–nothing out of the ordinary, except that all the freeways were strangely clear.
And the engineers and their construction crews finished the work ahead of time.