Don't lead or follow, just get out of the way

Let's face it, in the last 10 years we've gone from being the most mobile people on earth to being a populace in park. This great civilization whose grand processional boulevard -- Wilshire -- was the first ever designed specifically to accommodate the automobile is in full decline-and-fall mode and we're all in denial. We're strangling on traffic, and the best people can do is trade "surface street routes" to the Westside as if they were atomic secrets or try to convince themselves that they don't actually mind their hideous commute because it gives them more time to spend with "All Things Considered."

Worse yet, people once again have started nodding their heads when one or another dough-faced urban planner from the Institute for a Joyless Future or some pol with lots of contractor friends starts talking up another public transit project.

Well, I've been to that dance before and this time count me out.

Not the real me, but the archetypal me -- the native Southern Californian and nearly lifelong Angeleno, who believes that when Jefferson wrote the words "pursuit of happiness" he had in mind something with leather seats and a little snap. What this archetypal me objects to is that transit projects never seem to accomplish what really needs to be done, which is to get other people out of their cars so that mine can take me where I want to go -- fast.

We all know this region and, particularly, this city have reached what the too-easily-influenced nowadays insist on calling a tipping point. We're about to move from congestion to paralysis. Just try and get from Santa Monica to Pasadena in the middle of the day. At any given moment, the Westside is just a Lexus, two BMW SUVs and a Hummer away from total gridlock.

You know why that freeway is really called the 405? Because no matter where you're going or when, it takes you four or five hours to get there. If Dante were writing the "Inferno" today, he'd ring hell with our highways.

Traffic horror stories even have begun to rival real estate as a topic of casual conversation

Public transit could cure all this, if only other people would use it.