Traffic Has Flair for Dramatic

If you don’t have a fondness for hyperbole, or, at the very least, superlatives, then you’re living in the wrong city. And certainly, you’re driving in the wrong city. Because if nothing else, driving in L.A. forces even the least literary among us to stretch their poetic borders. Metaphor and simile, hyperbole, narrative omniscience and anthropomorphism are as necessary as brake lights, turn signals and A/C when it comes to surviving the average commute.

“Around me rages an inferno of brake lights,” one friend told me over his cell phone. “It’s brake and bake out there,” my brother said of a particularly bad summer’s eve. Traffic is typically “unbelievable,” “horrendous,” “unbearable,” or, on the other side of the descriptor list, “miraculous.” The 10 is a parking lot, 3rd Street is a nightmare, the 605 the seventh level of hell. Our fellow drivers are sometimes maniacs, lunatics, kamikazes, but often they are simply identified by whatever type of (expletive deleted) car they’re driving. “I gotta Beamer on a cell phone with a latte in his lap who will not let me pass,” says another friend from the 405. “I’ll call you back.”

And that’s just the extemporaneous. Our local vernacular is already littered with SigAlerts (for years I thought this meant traffic so bad that if you didn’t have cigarettes, you better get some), carbeques (a car on fire), slow and go, and freeway locations known as the Orange Crush, the South Bay Curve, the Four Level and the El Toro Y.

“Here, if anywhere, I seem to hear the coming footsteps of the muses,” W.B. Yeats said on a visit to Los Angeles. That was in 1925, 15 years before the first freeway opened. A few decades later and he would have known it was the coming four-wheel drive of the muses that he heard.

No other literary device is as overused as the superlative. According to conventional wisdom, if not the actual data, Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the country. (Not so. Commuters in New York, Chicago and San Francisco have it worse, according to the Census Bureau.) And every driver seems to know the best cross-town route, the easiest way to get to Long Beach, the worst time of day to be on the 101.

Part of this is the natural human tendency to “know” what’s best, worst and impossible, but it’s also a very Angeleno tendency toward the dramatic. Most of us need to smite the dashboard once a week or so and utter sweeping statements such as, “My God, I cannot bear to live in this sun-scorched town for one more minute” while all around the sky is a Fragonard blue, the jacaranda is in bloom and the traffic on Santa Monica is just a little slow like it always is.

I recently found myself striking my steering wheel in deliciously self-righteous frustration and announcing to the empty car seats behind me that the left-hand turn off 3rd Street onto Fairfax Avenue is the absolute worst in the city. Possibly the world. Despite the constant onslaught of traffic, there is no green arrow, which means that only one car--two if a daredevil is at the wheel--can make the turn per light. I have sat for as long as 20 minutes. And I still defy anyone to beat it. If you know of a worse one, e-mail me. I will personally test the top three candidates I get. And if I’m wrong about 3rd and Fairfax, I’ll cop to it, and the winner will receive the quiet satisfaction of having proven a newspaper columnist wrong.

Meanwhile, we’ll all find solace in our own vivid diatribes, our own climactic monologues, our own shreds of poetry dragged from the white glitter of windshields, the opera-length string of headlights, the hot gasp of a city moving into the future.

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