For the past week I’ve been in Irvine, CA on business. I’ve had no issues tooling around in my rental car, getting to work, my hotel, the nearby shopping center and so on. I was actually getting fairly impressed with myself when I found my way to the gym I have a guest pass at after having only been there once.

On Friday afternoon I made my first foray deeper into the heart of the city (for reasons I shall discuss further in another post), and while it was somewhat crazy, it wasn’t horrible.

Then came this morning. A good friend of mine was going to have a booth at a comic book show down at the L.A. Convention Center, about a 40 mile drive from me. I haven’t seen him in person since Aug. 2004, so I decided it was worth the jaunt.

… whomever designed the L.A. freeway system should be taken out and summarily executed.

I have driven in a lot of places, and never have I seen a situation like this.  Lets say you have 6 lanes wide, going from left to right:

• lanes 1 & 2 become a different highway than you started on
• lanes 3, 4 and 5 are the highway you want
• lane 6 is the exit lane

Making sense so far?  Lets fast forward two miles:

• lanes 1 & 2 becomes your highway
• lanes 3 & 4 become another highway
• lanes 5 & 6 are another highway

One more mile:

• lanes 1 & 2 become another highway
• lanes 3 & 4 are now your highway
• lane 5 is another highway joining you
• lane 6 is an exit lane

See what happened to your highway?  You had to change lanes three times to stay on what is your highway although you never left the paved area you were on to begin with.  So you end up changing lanes repeatedly which just sucks as L.A. drivers aren’t the friendliest at letting you in.  Perhaps it’s better when you live here and you can anticipate the switches, but when you’re waiting for a GPS to fill you in, its less than fun.

Yes, yes, I know a million people have picked on the L.A. freeway system, but good grief this has to be one of the seven layers of hell.