At the corner of Olympic and me

IF THE CITY of Los Angeles goes ahead and converts Olympic Boulevard into a one-way street, my easy, familiar eastbound drive from Fairfax Avenue to downtown will vanish.

There will be plenty of aspects of the drive that I won’t miss, starting with the triple threat that welcomes me to the world each morning: the meeting of Olympic, San Vicente and Fairfax, stretching, it seems, the distance of a football field, with traffic signals pointing noncommittally in all directions.

Nor will I miss the thick pile of cars, trucks, buses and the inevitable illegally parked delivery truck slowing us all down at Olympic and Alvarado, or the long line of left-turning cars that spills into the oncoming traffic at Vermont, or the inevitable construction near Staples Center, where cars traveling east play chicken with westbound traffic by driving British-style for a block or two.

For that matter, I could definitely do without Olympic and Rimpau, where I have witnessed three accidents within sight of a school crossing. None of them would have happened on a one-way Olympic, because they all involved eager westbound drivers inching into a blind left turn onto Rimpau while eastbound Olympic drivers were speeding up to see how well their cars hug the curve of the road.

I have memorized all those curves -- and the maximum speed I can travel on them -- along with the traffic signal patterns, the places where cars are most likely to be illegally parked, the intersections that have left-turn signals and the ones that don’t.

It is an easy, nine-mile routine that I never worry about or think much about as long as it takes 20 to 35 minutes door to door, which it almost always does, barring the rare major accident or other disaster.

Only in the last few days, since I learned that my route might disappear, have I paid more attention to the drive.

There are certainly things I would miss, like driving the sloping stretch from Lucerne to Crenshaw, where planners seeking a more direct route “from business section to sea,” according to a 1936 Times article, cut a path more direct than following Country Club Drive. I’d miss seeing the skyline loom through the morning mist just before St. Andrews, the clean stone carvings on the Standard Oil building at Hope and even the dozen-story-tall ads painted on the Hotel Figueroa.

Instead of Olympic, my new route to work would be along a one-way, eastbound Pico. It is strange to imagine Pico only going east, because in the early part of the last century, the Pico-to-the-Sea Assn. emphasized its westward path -- carrying city dwellers to the ocean -- while lobbying to get the street extended.

I’ve traveled east on Pico several times during the last week, imagining what it might be like without cars swerving into the middle lanes from behind buses, or stopping traffic to make left turns on streets with no traffic signal.

I deliberately drove slowly to see the new sights: the morning sun peeking through the towering self-storage sign at Crenshaw, the pretty pink of Jewel’s Catch One disco, the tower of the Ethiopian Christian Fellowship Church at Arlington. I saw uniformed children in PE class at Pio Pico Elementary, brightly painted taco stands, a mannequin store. Drivers behind me honked and passed.

The one-way switch would make it easier to get where I want to go and get there quickly. But it could make it slightly harder to appreciate the sights along the way, to note the places that have already become my personal landmarks and the new ones that would appear.

Without slow, two-way traffic to look at them closely, I may even have to get out of my car and walk.