Sigalert

Cabdriver Yahya Said could have used a map to help navigate through his confusion Saturday outside Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. The 28-year-old taxi driver was thumbing through the latest edition of the Thomas Guide, considered the bible of street directories in a town that worships automobile travel. And a strange feeling was coming over him. The Biltmore Hotel wasn't where it should have been. Neither was Los Angeles International Airport or West Hollywood or anything else.

The Santa Ana Freeway brought fun-seekers to Disneyland and home buyers to Orange County in search of contentment in the suburbs. It is one of those defining roads in America, like the bustling expressways of Chicago or the Central Artery of Boston. But like stretches of Interstate 95, which connects the mainline cities of the East Coast, the Santa Ana Freeway has become a victim of its own success; it's hopelessly outdated in stretches and badly in need of overhaul.

Eberhard Diepgen was enjoying a drive across the countryside recently when he ran smack into the 20th Century. Or, rather, eastern Germany did. Construction work had caused what every motorist has come to expect in the former Communist region: a massive, motionless, turn-off-the-ignition-and-just- sit-for-two-hours traffic jam. "I was really annoyed," admitted Diepgen, the mayor of Berlin. But then he learned that the reason he wasn't moving forward was because eastern Germany is.

In writing recently about such expressions as "a hot cup of coffee" (instead of "a cup of hot coffee") I gave an inadequate definition and etymology of the word SigAlert , commonly heard in radio stations' traffic reports. I quoted Bill (Skinny) Keene, traffic reporter for KNX-AM, as saying that a SigAlert is broadcast to alert motorists to a traffic closure, though in the beginning a SigAlert meant any kind of big news story involving the police.

I am sometimes applauded for my essays in behalf of good English, but I take no credit for saving it from vandalism. English is indestructible. It has become the language of the globe. It can be killed only by some global upheaval, the destruction of Western culture; it cannot be done in by barbarians hacking at its parts. If I sometimes point out what I consider doublespeak, gobbledygook, tautology or simply incorrect usage, I am not alarmed; merely amused.

Up near the top of the "How Brandt and Shanon Vroman Came to Loathe Their Native Southern California" list has to be that nightmare trip to Santa Barbara three Thanksgivings ago. The sun was shining, the skies were clear. They took the Rabbit so they could put the top down and soak up some rays on the drive north. Big mistake. "It should be a two-hour, 15-minute drive," Shanon recalls, still shuddering from the flashback. "It took us four and a quarter hours. It was totally stuck.

A SigAlert was issued Thursday morning from the front seat of a white Cadillac stuck in a traffic jam on the southbound San Diego Freeway. Loyd Sigmon shook his head at the crush of cars inching along with him out of the San Fernando Valley and turned to his passenger in the back seat. "I'm not sure I'm going to forgive you for getting me into this ," Sigmon warned. "This traffic is miserable. I've just about had it." Sigmon, 81, had every right to issue the personal advisory.

If the morning commute took a bit longer than usual Tuesday, there was good reason: four SigAlerts that tied up traffic the length and breadth of Orange County. "It's very unusual that we have this many SigAlerts in one day," Highway Patrol Officer Linda Burrus said. "It pretty much screwed up all the freeways." The SigAlerts, issued during unusually disruptive traffic accidents, began at 6:15 a.m. on the Riverside Freeway and continued on other freeways for much of the day, Burrus said.

Monday-morning commuters everywhere should spare a minute for the long-suffering rush-hour veterans in Berlin. Drivers accustomed to fighting the jammed streets and autobahns that have become part of the city's rush-hour rhythm since the fall of the Berlin Wall a year ago heard a cryptic radio traffic advisory early Monday warning them of another obstacle that made them wonder briefly if the Cold War had ended after all.

For 25 years, Santa Monica restaurateur Jay Fiondella dreamed of finishing his homemade 65-foot pirate ship and setting sail for the South Seas. Instead, he ended up Monday with a shipwreck on Culver Boulevard. The flamboyant Fiondella's 26-ton galleon, the Bridgette Smith, capsized on concrete about 12:45 a.m. as it was being hauled by trailer from a Culver City boat storage yard to a similar facility in Marina del Rey.