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 California, your average rush-hour speed has plunged from 26 miles per hour in 1980 to about half that today. High gas prices have thinned traffic in some places recently, but the improvement is unlikely to last. In L.A. and Orange counties, by one conservative estimate, you're now delayed by rush hours 72 hours a year, about double the time you were 25 years ago.