When the news broke that a weekend fire had damaged a mile of one of the most heavily trafficked freeways in Los Angeles, the reaction across much of the country was alarm.
Los Angeles is a city defined by its car culture, and officials estimated that 300,000 cars a day had traveled along the now shut-down stretch of Interstate 10. How would Los Angeles function, for an unknown amount of time, without a key piece of its highway?
By the end of the first post-fire work day, it was clear that observers may have underestimated just how good Angelenos are at dealing with traffic.
At the height of Monday’s rush hour, the streets around the closed stretch of I-10 were packed with cars; workers directed traffic at intersections; and helicopters hovered overhead. But everyone kept moving, if a little more slowly than usual.
At one gas station near the center of the I-10 detour snarl, Angelenos said they were adjusting to the crisis, which Governor Gavin Newsom would later announce was expected to take three to five weeks to repair.
“If you’re from LA, you’re going to know the traffic. You’re going to know how to deal with this too,” said Carlos, 38, from north-east LA, who did not give his last name.
He said he felt bad for visitors to Los Angeles, who might face serious delays, but that he thought people who were familiar with the city, like him, would understand when to get on and off the highways and how to use the backstreets.
People who knew how to navigate the city would face delays of only 10 to 15 minutes, he estimated, though people who were less familiar might end up spending an extra 45 minutes to an hour getting to their destinations.
For him, “It was a detour, but it wasn’t an ‘Oh, shit, what am I going to do’ detour,’” he said.
Cynthia Wong, who lives in Gardena and works in downtown Los Angeles, not far from the stretch of shutdown highway, said traffic delays had been “really bad” for her.
On Monday morning, it had taken her about 30 minutes to go about two blocks from the freeway exit to her work. In all, she expected the traffic delays to nearly double her daily commute, from about two hours round trip to closer to four hours.
There had also been ripple effects for people who didn’t drive, Wong said: the clients she works with told her the city’s buses had been “jam-packed”. Still, she said, the additional traffic had not made her want to take a train instead of driving.
While officials had strongly urged Angelenos to take public transportation to reduce traffic, and announced additional commuter trains to meet potential demand, it was not clear how many had followed the official advice.
“It’s too soon to tell if there were increased transit boardings on LA Metro today as a result of the 10 freeway fire,” Dave Sotero, a spokesperson for the metropolitan transit agency, said in a statement on Monday. “We will continue to monitor and encourage the public to use the Metro bus and rail system as an effective alternative to driving LA county freeways.”
At Union station, the public transit hub in downtown Los Angeles, five different workers, all of whom declined to give their names, said they hadn’t noticed much change in the number of commuters coming through, though one said it was perhaps a “little bit” busier than a usual Monday.
“Another day at the office,” a Metro worker said.
Despite concern about getting students to school on time, the highway closure did not end up having much of an impact on schools, Anthony Carvalho, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified school district, said at a press conference on Monday.
Of the roughly 1,300 school bus routes in the district, only 42 reported delays on Monday morning, “on average between 10 to 15 minutes”, Carvalho said . Only “a couple of outliers” had longer delays, up to “about half an hour”.
Arto Hovhannisyan, who works at several gas stations near the highway detour route, said there had been less business than usual over the past few days because of the “horrible” traffic.
Compared with everything else going on in the world at the moment, he said, the traffic delays in Los Angeles were not that big a deal.
Wong, from Gardena, said she had been 15 minutes early to work on Monday despite sitting through nearly an hour of traffic delays, and that she would “just have to wake up earlier”.
