LA Highways = Atherosclerosis

One of the most granola thing I do is that I bike to work.  The ride is 7 miles each way, and majority of it is on the Ballona Creek bike path.  Not the most scenic route, but it sure beats going along traffic.  My coworkers are always baffled by my choice of two-wheeled transportation.  To me, I'm more baffled by how they spend more than an hour each way on clogged LA highway traffic just to get to work.  Three coworkers come in from OC, and one commutes from SGV.  I already spent a good couple of months commuting from South Bay to Westwood, which was painful enough.  And I was even carpooling at the time, so imagine how disgruntled I would've been had I commuted solo.

In other parts of the country, people talk about the weather when the conversation runs dry.  In LA, commuting is ice breaker topic-of-choice.  Why?  Because weather is so constant here that you can't possibly talk about the weather for very long before the crickets start to take over.  So my coworkers often talk about the traffic.  "Never take the 110 to the 10."  Or "you'll get there so much faster on the 210."  People seem to talk in code when discussing the labyrinth of LA freeways.  Almost all of my team members have a hybrid with a carpool sticker.  Sad thing is that the carpool lanes are even backed up these days, so it doesn't really help.

City Hall has many problems it needs to deal with in the near term.  However, the whole traffic madness needs some attention from Mr. Villaraigosa.  That is, when he's not too preoccupied with his girlfriend.  In the meantime, I'll continue to bike to work and aim to build my leg muscles.

Photo credit: LA Times