Can't be me!

Now that I finally bought an OTA antenna for my LG TV, I’ve been tuning in to the local morning news during my hour of getting ready for work. Every morning I see how horrible the commute traffic is, and count my lucky stars that I don’t have to participate. I’ve got the next best thing to working-from-home: living a few blocks from work. The only traffic I encounter is the traffic light at the main thoroughfare next to campus.

I drove down to Souther California last week, and timed it horribly. I arrived in Los Angeles just as the Friday evening commute began. The 405 was an absolute parking lot in the Culver City area - where our hotel is. It was utterly despondent to see on the navigation that it will take half an hour to go a mere four miles. And to think: most of these folks do this every single work day, every single work week. Either they’re numb to the soul-sucking, or they’re watching YouTube videos while inching agonizingly forward in traffic.

If that were me, I’d move closer to work. As I have done in my current situation.

Did you know there’s a Hilton in Culver City? I didn’t, until on a recommendation from an acquaintance who does lots of business travel. Culver City is close enough to LAX that I saw many guests checking-in from their arrival flights. The Hilton Los Angeles Culver City is a finely-appointed hotel, with broad and clean rooms. The lounge area with a full-feature bar on the first floor makes it easy to hang out with friends staying at the same property (as we did). Of course, it doesn’t come cheaply: I paid (with points) about $300 for one night. Granted, any decent hotel these days is going to run you in the $200s per night. That’s inflation doing its work.

Fair warning: if you have a car, valet parking is mandatory. You absolutely cannot self-park. Cost? $42 per day. Extortion, is what that is.

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Slam dunk.

Deadly walking

Yesterday my housemate came back from a walk in utter shock. He almost got run over by a car at the major intersection near our home. The asshole driver went straight from a protected left turn lane - essentially running the straight red. Housemate had the right-of-way in crossing the intersection. The driver didn’t stop, even after making eye-contact. Despicable.

We’ve always felt that intersection to be fairly dangerous. For a major thoroughfare that intersects a street that flows into a mall, it really needs protected turn lanes on all four sides. Instead, only one side have left turning privileges with a dedicated green arrow. Crossing that street as a pedestrian we’re fighting cars wanting to turn left (and right) before the brief green is over. You absolutely cannot have your face in your smartphone when doing so: make sure cars are stopped before you proceed.

That’s the reason my housemate didn’t get seriously hurt - he was paying attention to traffic.

You know how people put dash-cam in their cars to record evidence in case of accidents? (One of my favorite channels on YouTube is a compilation of these type of recordings.) Perhaps pedestrians need personal dash-cams as well when walking through these dangerous intersections. Before crossing, start an instagram live stream just so there’s evidence being saved to the cloud, should you get run over by a car.

Rightly or wrongly, the onus is on the pedestrian to pay absolute attention at all times. It’s a matter of physics: you the person is magnitudes smaller than a multi-ton car that moves rapidly. So what if you have the right-of-way and the offending driver is in the wrong? You’re dead. For sure in a more perfect society we wouldn’t have to be so vigilant. But yesterday’s episode with my housemate shows, self preservation comes first.

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Abandoned music.

What did we do before?

I recently read about the utter nightmare situation for travelers into LAX: the airport decided to move the pickup location for taxis and rideshare cars away from the arrivals level and to a separate lot some ways away. LAX offers around-the-clock shuttle service to the new pickup lot, from where passengers can wait for their UBER or LYFT drivers, or get in line for the traditional taxi. It’s a move similar to my home airport, SFO: pickups for domestic travel have been moved to a nearby parking garage, though it’s less draconian of a rule than LAX as taxis can still pickup passenger at curbside.

Of course, the decision made by SFO has cascading effect for UBER and LYFT drivers as it created a brand-new traffic queue right out into the northbound exit of highway 101. The congestion problem created by the enormous amount of rideshare cars is still there, it simply moved to a different location - away from the terminals. I do wonder if if that was the original intent by SFO.

It’s no surprise then that the same situation resulted in LAX. A dedicated lot for rideshare may sound good on paper, but the sheer passenger volume is so great that UBER and LYFT cars and taxis are stuck in line for more than an hour just to get in the lot. As it is in SFO, moving the pickup point doesn’t really solve the main issue - too many people waiting for rides - other than punting it elsewhere. Again, maybe that is LAX’s goal: at least the terminals are nice and free-flowing, a sort of quality tax on passengers who rely on rideshare to take get them to their final destination.

Whether that seems fair or not is up to you.

This newfound malaise in our airports caused by the advent of UBER and LYFT asks the question: what did we all do before? The people hailing rideshare cars: did they take taxis before UBER was a thing? Or was it a combination of that and calling in favors from friends or family for a ride? Personally, I’ve always been the latter, even with the convenience of rideshare making it super easy to call my own ride. That said, the emergence of rideshare definitely shifted the passenger load from other modes of transportation, modes that previous have not caused the insane level of congestion we are seeing now. Taking rideshare is such an attractive option for travelers, but the existing infrastructure was not meant to accommodate essentially everyone calling their own taxi.

And what happens when UBER or LYFT - some would say inevitably - go bust? What are people going to do for transport now that we’ve all become accustomed to rideshare? Both companies are losing over billion dollars every quarter, with no prospects of profitability in sight. These companies aren’t necessarily too big to fail, but would they be too ubiquitous to fail? I think we’ll find out this answer sooner or later.

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What’s in the box!?

Turo turned me on to automatic gearboxes

A few weeks back I helped my younger brother move in back to UC Santa Cruz. This year he’s living off-campus so there’s plenty more to bring, mainly the stuff that belongs in the kitchen. His MK7.5 Golf GTI hatchback can fit quite a bit of stuff, but in the end we also needed a second car to haul to all.

Unfortunately, my first ever car, the family’s 2006 Toyota Corolla, gave up the ghost the same weekend. The car’s utterly weak C59 manual transmission (third gear has had a grind since I can remember) shattered a few gear internally, and it was making the most horrible noises when driving, akin to a racing car gearbox with straight-cut gears. The lever refuses to go into third or fourth gear, and we simply weren’t confident it can make the 130 miles round-trip to Santa Cruz.

We needed another car quite quickly, so to the Turo app we went the night before. 50 bucks on the credit card later the following morning, and we had ourselves a 2017 Honda Civic to use. What lovely convenience it is to be able to rent a car in that swift a timeframe; the traditional route would’ve found us at the SFO airport rental car complex because it’s be the only spot open on a Sunday. Not to mention it’d cost considerably more.

The Civic had an automatic gearbox obviously, because why would any sane person lend their manual transmission car out to a stranger. I did the driving duties, and it was the first time in the longest time I’ve driven an automatic car for an extended period. Perhaps it is because I’m getting old, but as an avid advocate of the row-it-yourself gearbox, I found driving the auto Civic to be an absolute pleasure. Automatic transmissions are actually okay!?

I get it now: in normal everyday driving, not having to do the clutch and gearstick dance at every intersection is a godsend for comfort. In a car with an auto ‘box you just push the gas and go. Manual transmission fanatics sticking to their dogma of daily-driving a stick-shift car being no more difficult than a car with an automatic gearbox are fooling themselves; I use to be that guy, but having driven to Santa Cruz and back in that Honda Civic, my position have changed completely.

Bay Area traffic isn’t going to get any better, mind.

I don’t think I’ll buy another manual gearbox car as a daily driver ever again. The bliss and ease in letting the car shift itself, particularly in traffic, is worth the “car enthusiast credibility” sacrifice. Don’t get me wrong: on an empty winding mountain road in a proper sports car, a stick with a clutch is still the choice for pure driving enjoyment.

Or you buy a 911 with PDK and get the best compromise of both worlds.

Look at the stars, look how they shine for… you.

When even the buses are too crowded

One thing I realized in the contrast between taking the bus at night and taking the bus during "normal" commute hours is just how much more passengers there are in the latter. Honestly I was slightly annoyed the bus had to stop at every stop to let people off, compared to the bus at night in which it'll breeze through all the stops until my destination. Now that schools have begun Fall semester the negative effect is compounded: last Friday it took me a solid hour to get home, where it usually takes 40 minutes.

The population density of my neighborhood is only going to go up (there's two huge housing constructions happening on the western and eastern end), so if the buses are crowded now, I'm not sure how they are going to handle the additional thousands of people. There's but two main road arteries that leads out of the neighborhood, and even now it's already super congested during rush hour. Street parking is already impossible so let's add another hundreds of cars? Good luck with that. 

I sold my own car, electing to take public transportation, to avoid the above hassles. A few years from now however I can foresee that even taking the bus might be untenable due to the increase in passengers. Won't do me much good if I can't get on the bus and have to keep waiting for the next one (or one after that). I don't think I can live with the amount of wasted time if my combined commute to and from extends well beyond two hours.

For the sake of curiosity, I started to look at alternatives.

One would be the motorcycle. There are no laws prohibiting lane-splitting in California so a bike can simply weave through heavy traffic to get up front (as I see motorcyclists do all the time). Compared to cars, bikes are dirt cheap to buy and insure (no $21K Ducati Panigales in my future), get impossibly excellent fuel mileage, and are stupid easy to park. I plan to stay off the freeways so I don't think it'll be all that dangerous, either. 

I reckon an M1 license is in my future. 

At least it isn't busy on the weekends. 

The kids are back in school

San Francisco Unified School District is back in session for Fall so just when you thought traffic couldn't get any worse around here, out comes thousands of parents driving their young ones to school joining in on all the fun. 

Must. Be. Nice. Right from the start of elementary school onwards I either walked or took the bus to school. Granted the grade school I went to was a 10 minute walk up the hill, I bet you parents of today would drive their kids to school given the same distance. Wasn't crime much worse back in my day? My immigrant parents were to busy at work earning money to stay afloat in this new country of ours to care. 

I don't begrudge them an ounce. 

If I had kids I'd drive them to school too, no matter how short the distance. I probably won't let them roam freely until after puberty. You should all thank me then for not having kids and therefore not contributing to the traffic calamity. It isn't just highways that gets jammed up: on my usual commute bus there are tons of parents, who otherwise can't afford to drive, taking their kids to school. Good on them indeed but the buses are packed enough as is. 

You'd think the transit agency would add more buses when school is in session, but that sounds way too logical for SFMTA. They can't even get enough drivers to fulfill the usual quota! On my route there definitely is not a bus every 8 minutes as prescribed in the official schedule. Far too often I encounter 20 minute(!) gaps between buses during rush-hour, and those days are the worse. 

I'm looking forward to returning back to night-shift next week so I can take the bus at 1 in the afternoon and it'll be empty as can be. Until then, this week is one of the very few times I really miss having a car. 

Perhaps I should try biking to work...

The petty games

A few nights ago I was driving home stopped at a intersection. The street has two lanes so there was an SUV next to me. The light turned green and the car behind the SUV immediately honks at it to get a move on. I take off while shaking my head because it seems to be an epidemic these days with impatient people honking at the lead car as soon as the lights change. 

As I look in the rear-view mirror I smiled because I saw the SUV playing the petty games: it purposely continued to go in order to piss off the honking driver even more. Even when it finally took off the SUV went at a slower pace than other traffic. The honker was also boxed in by the faster moving cars on my lane, unable to skip out of the mess. 

Karma is so sweet. 

I personally would never play the petty games because this is America and you have no idea who has got a gun. I live in not exactly the finest of neighborhoods so it is best to be avoided. If I'm at the head of the line at an intersection I treat the lights like the starting grid of a Formula One race: as soon as the lights turn I am off.  

Not everyone needs to be like me and treat traffic lights like a racing driver, but I think if you are the first car in line then you have an obligation to move as quickly as possible. Likewise, those queued behind should exercise more patience because not everyone or every car is capable of moving off the line so fast. 

That said I do enjoy watching other people play the petty games.