off by one for 2005 September 20 (entry 0)

(2) Tue Sep 20 09:25:47 PST it's raining poached eggs:

It rained today for the first time since we've been in LA -- over a month and a half. It was great to see the rain; one thing I'm definitely starting to be annoyed by is the almost total lack of weather (especially on this side of the Santa Monica mountains). I guess for some people, weather is made up for by earthquakes, or perhaps traffic... but that's not likely to work for me. Anyway, it was great to have it rain... but it brings up maybe my least favorite thing about LA: water usage.

Don't get me wrong; the traffic here is ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. It is crazy that a city like Los Angeles relies on everyone having cars to get around. The city is so spread out, and so "mountainous" (not really so much mountainous as just hilly) that roads can't be straight, must be curvy, and must go up and down a lot, which includes freeways, and which necessarily builds congestion. Also because of the mountains, there are places (like out where we live) where there is really only one or two good ways to get from point A to point B, and you really only have one or two opportunities to change over to one or the other. Contrast this to Chicago where, if you wanted to take Cicero Ave. all the way to Midway Imitation Airport because 90/94 was blocked up, you could, easily, and you could get onto the surface streets from the freeway just about every half mile if you wanted to. Not only could you do that, but taking Cicero all the way there was not that much dramatically slower (with traffic) than taking the freeway, because the surface streets are direct and traffic flows. None of that is true here, as far as I can tell.

So the fact that there is no good public transportation here is really shameful. How many hours of peoples' lives do they give up every single day? Most people here drive an average of an hour, I would think, each way. Averaget that together with the old chestnut "Time is Money" and figure out how much pain the lack of good transit costs Los Angeles every day. I for one would much rather ride in a train that sit stuck in traffic, even if it ended up taking the same amount of time.

But the problem is that putting in public transit here would be a nonstop project that would cost a lot of money. At least a billion, I would think, to put in real public transit in LA. (Especially because they wouldn't do it the cheap way out here.) I'm making these numbers up, but I bet they're pretty ballpark.

No, that is not the most annoying thing to me about LA. The most annoying thing to me is water usage here.

I never really understood growing up how LA is really virtually in a desert. I don't think that fact is quite obvious unless you drive here from Las Vegas, and you see firsthand how much desert surrounds the city. Sure, it's not Death Valley, but there is practically no precipitation and all the vegetation in the mountains is low-water usage. It's scrub. Scrub on rocky soil that doesn't hold water.

Most people know that LA gets most of it's water from outside reservoirs and sources, many of which are far away, because the aquifers here aren't nearly enough to support the size of the city. The Owens River (near Yosemite), and the Colorado River (which no longer reaches the ocean due to overuse) are major sources. Yet practically *every day* when I walk down the street I see *rivers* of water running down the gutters straight to the ocean because people watering their lawns or plants do not care enough to actually watch and see what is getting absorbed and what is simply running off. Literally, gallons and gallons of water just running down the street into the drains. I sort of have a philosophical problem with cities built in areas which cannot even *hope* to naturally sustain themselves. But when residents of that city, living on resources borrowed from other ecosystems (sometimes borrowed at great cost) care so little about the resources they have that they can't even be bothered to think about it, it tells me a few things: 1., that people are selfish, self-centered beings. Big surprise. 2., that the water system here is very inefficient. The street drains run into the ocean because the water doesn't in theory need to be "processed" for safety but it also won't be reused. What? And 3., water in LA doesn't cost nearly enough. We have rivers being dried up, lakes and other communities destroyed hundreds of miles away, but water is so cheap here that people can just afford to let it run down the street because they can't afford to pay their groundkeeper (who is probably getting less than minimum wage, wink wink) to turn off the water when it overflows. It's so cheap I don't even know what it costs. I try to conserve water -- not because it has any economoic penalty for me (as a person living on savings) -- but because I care. Water should be expensive, and maybe it should be billed on a sliding scale -- rich people are no more morally or ethically justified in wasting -- literally wasting -- water any more than average citizens.

I'm not a "crazy environmentalist" -- at all -- but this is just totally insane and I'm looking it straight in the face every day.

Oh yeah. Also, we poached eggs for breakfast this morning.

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