Events Rain on Drivers’ Parade

Last Wednesday I spent something like 25 minutes in Chinatown waiting for the accident. Crawling down Broadway about 5:30 I found myself engaged in one of the more unnerving habits of life in L.A., hoping that whatever irritating bit of carnage--an overturned big rig, an SUV burst into flames--was fairly close by.

But as the inches passed by, I saw nothing, just two lanes of cars you could have walked across like stepping stones. Arriving at home with the sparking eyes of one whose 20-minute commute has just taken more than an hour, I flung myself on my husband for comfort. He looked at me as if I were mad. “Honey,” he said, “the game started at 6.”

The Lakers game, of course, Game 4 of the finals which gave the home team the NBA championship. Every freeway and surface street had been jammed as rush hour, which normally extends well past 7, folded over on itself as Angelenos all over town tried to get home by 6.

I had not been in commuter hell; I had been trapped in a vortex of civic pride.

Some people think Angelenos have a hard time expressing themselves as a community. They are wrong. We just are less about placards and more about license plates. If you want to know what’s going on in town, all you have to do in this town is watch the roads. Is there a Dodger game? The Harbor Freeway will tell you. If the western lanes of the 10 and 134 are included in the traffic jam, that means the team is doing particularly well.

And let’s not even talk about the L.A. marathon and other runs, walks and races throughout the year. Stage an event that involves the streets of this town and everyone participates. If not by handing out tiny cups of Gatorade, then by barking oaths and hissing promises in the attempt to find one street, one freaking street that doesn’t end in pylons and police tape.

Parades, festivals and even seasons are inevitably prefaced, and therefore flagged, by traffic. Are cars streaming downtown on a weekday evening? It’s Cinco de Mayo. Circling West Hollywood on a midweek day at the end of October? That would be the Halloween parade.

How does an Angeleno know it’s officially summer? Bad beach traffic, surface-street madness around the Hollywood Bowl and gridlock on Disney Way. In the winter, snowfall in the Angeles Forest can be seen on a clear day from the hills of Glendale. And the traffic winding up the mountain as desert-city denizens seek their 15 minutes of snow fights is just as visible.

The knee-jerk reaction is to see this as a bad thing. But think about it for a second.

For one thing, traffic provides a natural filter for events--if you think the L.A. Times Book Festival is a zoo now, imagine how crowded it would be if so many folks weren’t put off by the fear of driving, and looking for parking, in Westwood.

And those large glittering objects moving south at the stately speed of 5 mph as the tents of Cirque du Soleil rise into view aren’t just cars, they’re people in cars. Protesters know this--sure, you’ll see the occasional picketing of City Hall, but when people really get serious, they trawl the thoroughfares, waving their banners and shouting their demands at the cars moving by. If we could figure out a way by which people could vote by car phone, we might have a shot at a true democracy.

I wish I had thought of all this as I fumed my way through Chinatown last week. I could have rolled down my windows and made a few friends. This wasn’t gridlock; it was a communal event, and I didn’t even have to bring lawn chairs.

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.