I’ve driven a manual for my entire life and up Baxter regularly as I live around the corner. There’s nothing more terrifying to me than stop and go traffic on that street. Even all wheel drive has you cooking your clutch.
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Do the 1% even live on public streets?
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While that’s believable for a 60 year old hunk of Detroit iron with power-assist-optional drum brakes, it shouldn’t be nearly so bad in a modern car. I’m thinking people simply go too fast because they’re impatient and have been routed well out of their way to get around some traffic jam. Trucks may be a different story depending on how long the road is and if they prohibit use of jake brakes due to noise concerns.
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I don’t know, I can definitely imagine “public” roads that can have some sort of predefined throughput limit. Just because you can get to my cul-de-sac without going through a gate doesn’t really mean it’s suited for all 200 million US cars to come calling at the exact same moment.
What makes more sense is to, like speed limits, define throughput limits for non-highways through DOT and then have Waze and other apps incorporate those. I mean, we want some commuters using Baxter Street - just not all of them at the same time.So let’s define what “some” and “same time” are and start building a better system.
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Ya, she’s a keener. Looks like she’s tacking, too. I was impressed 
In LA? Yeah, mostly.
You may be thinking of the 0.01% or the 0.001% – and while it’s true that many of them live in exclusive, gate-guarded private communities – it’s also true that many of them don’t.
The eat-the-rich stereotypes often seem to assume that “rich people” all live in private gate-guarded communities (and that “the 1%” are “rich people”), but it’s just another bullshit stereotype, at least here in LA. Some do; but most don’t.
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Was your GPS on Dukes of Hazzard mode?
What’s the speed limit on that road? Lowering it (to reflect the fact that it can be dangerous to drive at high speeds) may make it less appealing to the routing algorithm Waze is using. [If the speed limit is 20 but Waze’s calculations assume you’re going to travel 40 on the road, I think the authorities would be interested in talking to Waze for encouraging people to break the law.]
A couple times when I was growing up the school bus had to drop me at the bottom of the road on which I lived while it continued up the main road and I had to walk up. [It wasn’t that far, about 2000 feet.] I believe the concerns were that the school bus might not be able to make it up my road at all (but the main road was plowed, salted, and/or sanded more frequently) and may not have been able to make it safely down my road from where it connected to the main road at the other end.
Based on my observations, I think the “L.A.” part of your statement was too restrictive.
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Whenever possible, streets that are designed for more traffic get wider lanes, more setback to buildings, reduced parking, better sight lines, etc. I would argue that intentionally sending lots of traffic onto a street that is not designed to handle it is dangerous and irresponsible.
Not that I think Baxter should be turned into a thoroughfare. I’m more in favor of Christopher Alexander’s style of city planning - let’s make neighborhoods slow and social.
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She’s still there, still climbing. She’ll make it one day.
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Indeed, I grew up in Phoenix, AZ, where most of the precip occurs as brief gully-washer monsoon thunderstorms. Then the clouds blow away, leaving everything sunny and sparkly and wet – and the next thing you know, cars are sliding sideways through the red lights.
LA at least has occasional hills throughout the city to keep people on their toes. Anyone who goes hurtling down Laurel Canyon Blvd into the Valley in the wet will develop a fine appreciation of frictional coefficients. (-:
But Phoenix is almost entirely flatlands (or was when I was there), so people tend to forget just how slippery wet roads can be until the first time they try to brake hard.
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Now you’re touching on an insane situation with respect to the California Vehicle Code. Between the CVC and court interpretations based on speed trap lawsuits, if >85% of the vehicles are exceeding the speed limit on that street, the city must choose between leaving the limits posted as is OR raising the speed limit and then enforcing against violators of that 85% group. This legal interpretation has completely left out pedestrians, bicyclists and other users of the roadway who have a right to use it but may reasonably be too afraid to try it. It also puts a burden on every city to regularly survey every street or stop enforcing their posted speed limits.
There are two new items in the council file to lend support to a couple of state proposals to fix this.
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Council File 18-0002-S20 (Resolution PDF)
Resolution (Englander - Bonin) - Resolve that the City hereby includes in its 2017-18 State Legislative Program, its position for legislation and/or administrative action that would increase local control of speed limit setting and enforcement. Referred to Rules, Elections, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee (A CLA report was submitted on February 28, 2018) -
Council File 18-0002-S30 (Resolution PDF)
Resolution (Koretz - Ryu) - Resolve that the City hereby includes in its 2017-18 State Legislative Program its position for AB 2363 (Friedman), which would authorize a local authority to establish lower speed limits on the basis of accident surveys. Referred to Rules, Elections, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee
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Baxter Street, especially as you crest at Alvarado, can be absolutely terrifying to drive even when you know what you’re doing (which most people sent there by Waze don’t). You’re looking straight up at the sky and can’t see any cross-traffic on Alvarado.
Indeed.
Echo Park/Silver Lake (and Edendale, for that matter) are all northwest of downtown LA, so the idea that it’s somehow “East Los Angeles” is simply absurd. East Los Angeles, as you note, is a chunk of unincorporated County territory east of the City of LA, while “the East Side” and “East Los” have always referred collectively to East Los Angeles and adjacent east-of-downtown LA neighborhoods (including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, Montecito, and El Sereno).
When hipsters began infiltrating Echo Park/Silver Lake, they knew it wasn’t the fabled wealthy “Westside”, but something a good deal scruffier, so they decided it must be therefore be “the Eastside” or “East Los Angeles”; completely ignoring the fact that neighborhoods with those names already existed (on the actual East Side of Los Angeles!) for decades before their arrival.
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I’d argue the “hipsters” moving in had less to do with it than the real estate agents and journalists writing about it. Example: Virgil Village.
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All of our roads are unsafe. All of them. Whenever LADOT tries to do something to slow traffic down and make travel safer and more deliberate, a small group of a-holes push the council member of that area to stop the project. In NYC, they succeeded in making streets safer because there are 50 council members, so power there is diluted and their DOT can do their jobs. In L.A. we have 15 fiefdoms that make our infrastructure a crappy patchwork quilt (except for the rails - know why? Those are largely on rights-of-way controlled by a county agency). There’s literally a guy who doesn’t even live in L.A. pouring tens of thousands of dollars into recalling an L.A. councilmember for his crime of trying to make the streets safer which threatened to slow down this guy’s commute. Now the rest of the council members are afraid of him.
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People aren’t going to use your cul de sac, because it’s not going to get them anywhere. What’s why cul de sacs took off in US urban design, to discourage outsiders and foot traffic.
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And I would disagree with you. “Echo Park” and “Silver Lake” have a LOT more RE cachet than “East Los Angeles.” I can’t imagine any sensible realtor using “East Los Angeles” to promote the area, since plenty of locals already know East Los Angeles as a poverty-stricken ghetto full of brown people and gang crime.
To be fair, the flatland areas of SL/EP were also poverty-stricken ghettos full of brown people before the hipsters arrived, but the image is mostly based on the hilly areas, including the Neutra-rich modernist enclave in the hills overlooking Silver Lake (which was largely a gay ghetto full of fabulous bargain designer homes, back before Modernism once again became mainstream-fashionable).
I was one of the people who helped fashion the (pre-hipster) gay/Latino alliance that helped rescue Silver Lake from civic neglect, so I’m pretty familiar with the demographics and history.
ha! i found that street maybe 30 years ago and had to, as in challenge had to, drive up it in my "60 VW.
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Are you saying that they’s have to start ticketing the now “too slow” drivers?
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I’m baffled that nothing in Seattle made this list. I’ve rolled back on hills here in an automatic.
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