Reply #351: LA is not hard to get around in [View All]

[kwassa]

and not easy to get lost in. It has major urban traffic, like any other big city, but Los Angeles is also a giant grid, and it is easy to hop off the freeway if things bog down, and take surface streets, something I often used to do. You only get lost if you can't read a map. Los Angeles also has better signage than any big city I have ever been in.

I drove every day in LA for 17 years. I drove after the Santa Monica Freeway was knocked down by the Northridge earthquake, and I had to take surface streets.

I now live in Maryland, north of DC, where traffic is almost as bad during rush hour. The problem here is that roads are NOT in a grid, but wander all over the place. I don't dare hop off the freeway in many places, because I don't know where I will end up. A north-south road will become an east-west road, and then zip off in some other direction, while the name of the road changes several times for no apparent reason. Roads are not marked that well, and the signage in Washington DC is just awful.