The dumbest half-mile in Los Angeles
An annotated breakdown
Rachel Sennott’s “I Love LA” speaks the language of its neighborhood well. Selfies with Courage Bagels and whines to ditch Tenants of the Trees for Bar Seco. Jumbo’s Clown Room hats and Maru coffee cups. Questionable passerby fashion. A pervasive sense that everything is a little dumber and less convenient here than it ought to be.
I enjoyed the pilot enough to crack my standard aversion to new scripted television. But I left it convinced that if this show really wants to use driving culture to portray how inconsequentially cumbersome and preternaturally self-indulgent Silver Lake’s surrounding area can get, then there’s only one spot to location scout:
This is where Stadium Way meets Academy Road in Echo Park, sandwiching Dodger Stadium and Elysian Park. If you venture these streets with any frequency, you know exactly where this is headed. Few things disturb LA’s chill like bringing up the absurdity of navigating this space during both peak and random hours.
The trouble hits if you’re trying to go south bound on Stadium Way and turn right onto Academy Road into Echo Park. This is my morning commute to get a drink at Canyon Coffee. It’s technically a local-traffic-only area. Often, cars will pile up 50 deep in the far right lane of Stadium Way waiting to make the turn:
They saunter along slowly, nudging their way toward what may or may not be a yield to the cars coming from an adjacent stop sign, before hitting a short decline and another four-way intersection right here:
Traffic headaches are part of everyday Los Angeles life. A DJ quickly became the most viral celebrity in town earlier this year for torching the city planning on IG. You pick a neighborhood in this city by accepting what five-mile radius is worth never having to leave. But this little hellscape is about as wild as it gets, and here’s where it becomes nuts.
This intersection below where the arrows all meet is only a three-way stop. A southbound car on Stadium Way should theoretically be able to right turn down the ramp — maybe yielding to a westbound car on Academy that just hit a stop sign, the only reason for any slowdown — and continue on unabated.
Plus, there are no other traffic backups in sight. If you’re coming in from any other direction, you can pass through unencumbered by bullshit.
Of course, that’s not how it works. About half of the westbound cars treat the intersection as a four-way stop, and the others do a cautious, jerky jaunt, all of which leads to that southbound Stadium Way crush. A rare aggressive driver coming from one of the other three directions will refuse to concede the right of way, knowing that if they book it into the intersection everyone else will just wait.
I don’t have much patience for lines or inefficiency. There’s no world in which I would sit behind 50 cars groundhogging one mile per hour. So I’ve embraced a hack that started as a whisper and has spiraled out of control in its adoption. Since so few cars are coming westbound on Academy and the right two lanes remain wide open on Stadium, you can bypass the traffic, hit a left at this stop sign, drive just far enough up Academy to avoid suspicion, hook a questionable U-turn, and then cut the line by waiting out a single beat back at that very same stop sign.
Last Thursday, I went to make this now-instinctual maneuver and trailed 15 other cars doing the same thing. A parade of cheats illegally U-turning their way into saving 10-20 minutes. Later that night, I met a fellow Echo Park resident at a party and quickly dove into intersection chat. She said my shenanigans warranted bad karma. But then she added, “Why don’t you just keep going and turn right? That’s what I do.”
If she were trying to get to Canyon, she’d skip the U-Turn and take Boylston to Scott:
Better for karma, sure, but to me it’s a half-measure.
I love Los Angeles so much. I don’t want anyone to try to “fix” this intersection, especially not the city, though I do need people to drive when they have the right of way. That would be a good start.
If I show up next week and there’s a traffic cop waving folks down, I’ll turn around and try to become a Quat guy. The incongruity of a single lane being backed up while every other one flows steadily is head-scratching, but that’s LA. New York has higher highs and way more real obstacles to reaching them. LA is easy. And when it doesn’t work, when the selfish, kind of broken and lazy side comes out, you can either hack your way out of it or sit there and let it happen to you. Either one is fine.
Last thing: If you missed my Substack Live on Wednesday with talking rom-coms and his new movie 31 Candles, you can catch a replay here:
