If there’s something San Franciscans like to do when visiting the City of Angels, it’s griping nonstop about the traffic. But the truth is that LA traffic isn’t that much more awful than the I-880 during rush hour.
In fact, when it comes to the worst traffic in the nation, SF and LA are pretty much neck and neck. The Bay Area ranks second after LA — as in so-uncomfortably-close-on-the-heels second that I can breathe the putrid fumes emitting from your exhaust pipe.
Bay Area denizens spend an average of 78 hours per year dawdling away in traffic. That’s 6.5 months over the course of a 40-year career. This isn’t much better than in the City of Angels, where commuters will spend an average of 80 hours per year and a total of 6.7 months over the course of a 40-year career in traffic.
Let’s not forget that San Francisco is roughly 47 square miles, while Los Angeles is about 500 square miles, or 10 times the size of SF. So you SF folks are getting almost the same amount of traffic to cover a helluva lot less ground.
Any way you slice it, sitting in traffic sucks. But since we Angelenos are still the reigning gods of traffic, maybe we have a thing or two to teach the Bay Area. For instance, one way to make a shitty situation better is to GAMIFY! And I don’t mean playing Candy Crush while stuck on the Bay Bridge. If you find yourself jammed up against traffic, don’t fret. Here are some games we play down in LA to help spare our fragile sanity. Feel free to adapt these for your Bay Area purposes:
1. The Six Bottlenecks of Hell (Get through ’Em All!)
Of the 10 major traffic bottlenecks in the US, LA has six of them. Can you squeeze through them all?*
+ 101 between Sepulveda Boulevard and Laurel Canyon Boulevard
+ 110 between Exposition Boulevard and Stadium Way
+ 101 between Franklin Avenue and Glendale Boulevard
+ 405 between Venice Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard
+ 10 between Santa Fe Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard
+ 405 between State Routes 22 and 605
*Listed in order from least hellish to most hellish
For each bottleneck you survive, treat yourself by devouring cronuts and binge-watching your favorite guilty pleasure on Netflix. Oh wait, you already do that, don’t you?
If you get through all six in a single day, you win* your choice of a limited-edition tattoo: the state of California split in half; a vignette of tiny people drowning amid a sea of thrashed palm trees; or the Dodgers logo.
*By “win” we mean you should go treat yourself to your own tattoo.
2. How Many Man Buns?
You’ll get an eyeful of a spectrum of lads sporting man buns, from a low-slung man bun to a pony bun and everything in between. There is no shortage of males in LA sporting these, so see how many per block you can spot.
Best neighborhoods to play in: Venice, Echo Park and West Hollywood
Bonus points: If you’re playing on a Monday, use the hashtag #ManBunMonday
3. I Spy (LA Freaks Edition)
When you’re passing through inside streets, can you spot the following archetypes in each Los Angeles ’hood?
West Hollywood
+ Spaced-out meth head+ Fit and fab people
+ Dog people (usually walking with a pack of 2–4 identical dogs)
Echo Park
+ Trust-fund musician
+ Trust-fund hipster
+ Hipsters who could be mistaken for hobos
Hollywood
+ Costumed superhero
+ Mime
+ Spaced-out meth head
Santa Monica
+ Yogi
+ New-age vegan sapiosexual spiritualist
+ Recent transplant from Silicon Valley (yes, they’re here too!)
Beverly Hills
+ Nannies
+ Mannies
+ Boyfriends who could be mistaken for dads
4. Sepulveda or Sep-Pull-Veed-Dah?
These are the names of streets in Los Angeles that newcomers — and Waze — notoriously mispronounce. If you happen to be passing through one of these streets while mired in traffic, see if you can figure out how to say it, and then yell out your window at a local to see if you nailed it.
+ Cahuenga
+ Rodeo (there are two in LA, and they’re pronounced differently)
+ La Cienega
+ Los Feliz
+ Sepulveda
+ Tujunga
+ La Tijera
+ Duquesne
+ San Vicente
+ Figueroa
+ Micheltorena
5. B-Celebrity Bingo
See how many of these you can spot while drudging through the doldrums of traffic:
Pauly Shore
+ Nicole Richie
+ Mario Lopez
+ Terri Nunn
+ Adult-store outlet
+ What used to be a Pioneer Chicken restaurant (you can tell by the silhouette)
+ Contestant on The Bachelorette
+ Nick Viall
+ Nikki Sixx
+ Dov Charney
+ One of Dennis Woodruff’s automotive creations
Bonus!!! If you hit everything on the list, you win* a tank top with the words “Los Angeles: Where Dreams Go to Die.”
*By “win” we mean that if you can really prove that you spotted all these celebs in one day, we’ll totally get you that T-shirt.
In “plug and play” fashion, you can create your own San Francisco traffic-game variations. Sure, you can complain about the horrendous traffic all you want, but instead, why not embrace the madness and eek some enjoyment out of life’s tedious moments? Or get a job that lets you telecommute.
