Dear Roads In The City of Los Angeles

Dear Roads In The City Of Los Angeles:

You owe me somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight hundred dollars, according to an estimate from my mechanic.

"Your shocks are leaking" said the diminutive Raffi, Swedish car savant of Hollywood Boulevard, the last time I stopped in for an oil change. "All four of 'em."

"I didn't even know shocks had fluid," I responded.

"They're pneumatic," he explained to me.

"Isn't that the thing you use to remember something?" I asked. We eyed each other for a while as the Larry David stare music from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" ambiently played. Then I took out my credit card.

Newly shorn of any excess funds, I pulled out of the tiny alley next to my mechanic's. Then I hit a bump so huge, I think I peed a little.

Roads of Los Angeles, you are a war zone. Never mind the, Eurotrash-sunglassed BMW drivers who troll you, the be-SUVed, flat-ironed West LA Moms in their Escalade and the blue-haired elderly in their enormous Lexus sedans who congest you. Never mind the windup Toyota pickups crammed full of lawn-mowing equipment and gardeners alike sputtering along that are, by law, at least 25 years old. Navigating you is already enough of a challenge without your surfaces resembling the pattern of varicose veins on a heavy woman's thigh. You possess a positively uncommon series of bumps of Hindenburgian proportions; teeth-rattling potholes and recessed manholes that figuratively chap my ass and literally bruise my skull. You are in such terrible condition, I'm convinced that D.W. Griffith himself paved you sometime in the early 1920s, and no one has paid attention to you since.

There are obviously a catalogued list of prominent offenders; black holes of misery capable of swallowing even the heartiest of Korean cars, and unique drainage situations found nowhere else in these United States clearly tossed in as an afterthought in lieu of the more traditional "sewers." These disastrous elements combine to proffer an infrastructure rivaling many countries whose names end with "stan."

Wilshire Boulevard between the sadly defunct Robinsons-May and Westwood, you are if not the most acute thoroughfare of misery, at least the longest and most consistently fraught. On no other road in the city is there such a flagrant disregard for the integrity of vehicular undercarriage. Strange, speed bump-esque goiters in the middle of a road where one can comfortably drive at 50 MPH rise out of nowhere, jacking up even the most staid of Mercedes', wantonly skipping CDs and sending latte lids flying. My own standard transmission has even been known to be jounced into neutral over one particular bump just east of Glendon.

Wilshire, driving on you is an exercise in alertness. Is it this one of four lanes with the bump constructed of almost right angles, or is it the one to the right? Is it in front of this garish mid-rise that the pothole is as deep as the middle-eastern oil wells that paid for the Maybach of the driver next to me, or the next one? Occasionally, you realize you've miscalculated, and the bump looms before you. A high-pitched wail of fear that starts in your muffler and ends in your wallet shrieks from your mouth as you careen, blinker madly flashing, across the better part of three lanes in hopes that maybe, just maybe, this time, you'll save your oil pan, exhaust pipe, or whatever the hell else down there you've already blown to hell.

Sunset Boulevard in Bel-Air, you are equally malignant. In order to make any kind of headway, one is forced to travel in the right lane around the lumbering Bellagio Road impresarios who see fit to drive at 30 MPH, but by doing so you dance a frightening tango of doom with not only the narrowness of the lane, but the gashes that riddle the already recessed drainage trough in which some portion of your wheels are forced to travel that some paragon of civil engineering saw fit to install several decades ago. You can lead the tango, rose in teeth, passing the slow-moving cars in the middle willy-nilly, until you land in a cavernous pothole that you can't help but enter, as a last minute swerve will place you in contact with the business end of a Range Rover in the left lane. You leave behind not only your dignity, but pieces of one or more of your right tires. It's hard to believe the zip code with what must be some of the highest property taxes in the country can have a main thoroughfare this poorly and illogically surfaced. Curious as I once was at the popularity of SUVs in a climate devoid of snow, now I understand; it's not for the four-wheel drive, it's for the ground clearance.

And, Roads of Los Angeles, there are so many, many more. Hollywood Boulevard between La Brea and Fairfax? A minefield. Moorpark in Valley Village? Ghastly. Laurel Canyon south of Mulholland? You should be condemned. And the 405? The 405 and your awful, AWFUL striations? There are just no words in the English language.

WHY, roads, are you so decimated? Why have you been so egregiously neglected in a city so reliant on cars that buses, rather than being lauded and revered as our only form of public transport, are instead as derided and viewed as mere obstacles, the Manatees of our already congested roadways? Granted, the city is already overextended, and happens to be in a state involved in one of the most highly publicized budget brouhahas in the country. Granted, somebody zoned the shit out of LA back in the day, erecting apartment buildings spewing forth vehicle upon vehicle rather than the two or so cars that would've come from a house in its stead. And granted, any road construction project would interrupt the flow of traffic to the point that the ambulances needing to make their way to treat the self-inflicted gunshot wounds of miserable commuters would fail to reach their victims.

But, perhaps, the sage urban planners of this great City of Angels have decided to let you, its roads, languish with such pronouncement that in the rare event ONE of you is repaved, it is as if God himself reached his steamrolling finger out and parted the black, yellow and white seas. The newly repaved stretch of Fairfax? A revelation. The stimulus package-funded San Vicente in Santa Monica? Heaven on Earth. Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills? Be still my fluttering heart. These projects were well-worth whatever gunshot casualties that inevitably resulted from the misery of people stuck in horrific repaving-based traffic jams.

Roads of Los Angeles, I will try to honor the freshly-smoothed among you. I will obey the speed limits you mandate, I will yield to the pedestrians crossing you, I will not run the last seconds of your yellow lights. I will treat you with the reverence you deserve, honor the beauty you possess, and wait patiently for the invitations you extend to your brethren to follow you to the Promised Land; a Canaan of the newly-paved, a kingdom of pothole-free smooth sailing.

In the meantime, I'll be on the bus. My shocks are getting fixed.

Best regards,
Dear Crabby