Going Nowhere

Chris Goffard: In this neighborhood, nobody knows your name.



There you are in the photograph above, crawling anonymously along a cheerless stretch of real estate known as the 110 Freeway at rush hour. The roads are slick with rain and cluttered with wrecks, and you've become a citizen of Stalled Nation, a community of the trapped. You're having a quintessential Los Angeles moment, partaking of a civic ritual more widespread than voting or church, one of the few universal experiences in this segmented, far-flung metropolis.



If you're seeking the city's ever-elusive center, it looks exactly like this. It's anywhere the tires are stopped dead, a thousand deep. As a motorist in Southern…