Losing our advantage

FILMMAKER Woody Allen famously dissed Los Angeles in one of his films by saying “the only cultural advantage of living in LA (vs. New York City) is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”

Harsh. But having lived in both places, I can say there’s some truth to his crack.

But that same kind of NY-CA snobbery I may be guilty of can be applied to LA County’s westside vs. eastside rivalry. Westsiders say they’ve got a cultural advantage over us here on the eastside. They’ve got Santa Monica, Third Street, The Getty, UCLA, the LA County Museum of Art and if you throw in downtown, Dodger Stadium and MOCA. My colleague Larry Wilson, editor of the Star-News, would argue the Pasadena area (part of the eastside) is no slouch when it comes to culture. It has the Norton Simon, Old Pasadena, the Huntington Library and the Rose Bowl. He would have a point.

But for argument’s sake, I’ll give the cultural IQ to the westside. Plus, they’ve got the beach. But us on the eastside of the basin have a geographic advantage. We are centrally located. You can live in the San Gabriel Valley (or the Whittier area) and be almost equidistant to any of LA’s or Orange County’s cultural institutions, stadiums, venues and destinations.

From my house in Temple City, which is centrally located within the San Gabriel Valley, I am 34 miles from UCLA and 37 miles from Cal State Fullerton. Amazing. It is just a few more miles to Santa Monica Pier and again, just a few more miles south to Anaheim/Angel Stadium/Disneyland.

San Fernando Valley? Very close by, just a hop skip and jump to Universal Studios, City Walk or Hollywood’s sights. When my East Coast friends come out to visit and stay with me, it is geographically convenient to take them to all these LA and OC landmarks. They are equally as close. My guests are closer to everything than if they had stayed on the westside or in Orange County.

What small businesses like to say is the most important thing to success, the San Gabriel Valley has in droves: location, location, location.

But that geographic advantage is slipping away — nearly erased — due to traffic. It is the freeway gridlock — not just during “commute hours” but more often on Saturdays and Sundays — that is taking away one of the San Gabriel Valley’s most precious advantages over the westside.

SGV’ers have let traffic affect their choices in entertainment, in careers, in friends, even in baseball clubs. Traffic is killing our geographic advantage. Like the frog in the lukewarm water, our “best location” advantage is slowly dying only we don’t know it. And with it, some of our identity dies too.

I told a friend from SoCal (now living in Northern California) I enjoy going to restaurants in downtown LA.“You go to dinner in downtown LA? Where?” he said in disbelief. It’s less than 10 miles away! Yet because of traffic we’ve stopped going there.

I had the day off and took my son, Matt, 17, to visit and tour UCLA. I reached Kerckhoff Hall’s parking structure after only 34 miles. With morning traffic it took us 1 hour 15 minutes.

My wife and I hitched our bikes onto her car and drove to Santa Monica Sunday morning in less than 45 minutes. With very little traffic the “distance” to the westside grows short. It’s the traffic that colors our perception of distance. It’s the traffic that caused us to measure car trips in hours, not miles. We’re one of the few people groups to do that.

My friend Rich in Irvine loves the LA Dodgers because he grew up in LA and his father was a Dodger fan. But recently, the bottlenecks and heavy traffic he encountered along the drive up Interstate 5 to Dodger Stadium (not far in distance) caused him to attend an Angels game with me in Anaheim. He even bought an Angel cap! Can traffic change our loyalties to a sports team, some of the most ingrained social programing in the human psyche? The answer is yes.

One last example. My nephew’s wife is a graphic artist working at a company in Orange County near where they live. She doesn’t like the job but won’t consider the possibilities of working at an LA firm because she fears spending hours each day sitting in traffic.

Isn’t that what Orange County (or the SGV) was built as: a bedroom community for companies in LA? Now, even that suburban model is breaking down.

Traffic is not just spending more time in a car and less time at home. It is a cancer that is slowly limiting careers, changing lifestyles and stealing our advantages — things that once made us as a Valley attractive.

Steve">steve.scauzillo@sgvn.comSteve Scauzillo is the opinion pages editor for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group.