MLK Day Commute: Shades of Labor Day
OK, so I'm on the way to see the Lakers play the Nuggets at Staples Center ... and I run into gridlock. On a holiday.
I thought Martin Luther King Day was fairly safe, in terms of traffic. Nothing special. Maybe light. Almost all government workers off, right, and don't they make up, like, half the workforce these days?
But no. I was crawling by Fontana, on the west-bound 10. I was stop and go before the 15.
Hearing there was a wreck on the west 10 at Holt, I decided to hop over to the 15, to the 60 ... except "hop" is not the proper description of my next half hour ... spent crawling onto and down the 15 south ...
When I got to the 60 west, finally things let up.
I got to Staples well before tipoff, and I'm not writing anything live, so I'm fine, as far as the job goes.
But I learned something about current Southland traffic.
1. MLK Day should henceforth be considered on a par with any other three-day Monday night, with awful congestion coming down the 15 and west on the 10 and 210. People coming back from Las Vegas and the desert, that is.
2. Rain will NOT help any commute. A teensy bit of it freaks us out, and I hit occasional drizzle.
3. Actually, you don't need a holiday OR bad weather to run into bad traffic -- going any direction at any time of day, from the IE to San Diego to OC and Ventura County. It's just bad. Always. And it almost certainly will get worse.
I may have mentioned a time or 10 ... I have no earthly idea how some of you commute 100-plus miles five days a week.