Traffic

It's not looking good for the restaurant industry, which struggled through a slow spring season and will likely see flat traffic for the next two years. Mild weather over the winter drove more diners to eat out, leading optimistic analysts to predict that the industry was recovering after being slammed in the recession. But those hopes were dashed as the year went on and restaurant visits rose a paltry 1% in the spring, according to research from the NPD Group. Analyst Bonnie Riggs cited consumers' “continuing cost-consciousness, still relatively high unemployment and economic uncertainty” as reasons for the industry's disappointing performance.

An Oakland police officer was shot in the foot Sunday morning after stopping a big-rig truck driver for driving erratically on a freeway, authorities said. The police were making a traffic stop on Interstate 880 north of the Oakland airport about 3:45 a.m. when the driver left the truck and fired a shotgun, hitting one of the officers, Sgt. Randy Pope said. Police returned fire but did not hit the suspect. The man got back in the truck and fled before crashing the big rig in the 3400 block of East Ninth Street, Pope said.

Restaurant visits have fallen across the country since the recession, and the bulk of those lost customers - 87% - abandoned independent eateries. Americans ate out 60.6 billion times last year, according to research company the NPD Group. That's down from 62.7 billion in 2008 and flat compared to 2010. Of the 2.1 billion visits lost, 2 billion would have been to independent establishments. Instead, consumers are patronizing larger restaurant chains, which have added 4,511 units since 2009.

Anyone who lives or works on L.A.'s Westside knows that traffic is an equal-opportunity torturer. So, I was really hoping that the candidates vying for the City Council seat in District 11, which includes this traffic-choked area, would have some clever ideas about how to fix it. Instead, what I heard from the four candidates when they gathered at a forum to discuss this very issue sounded like: Get a bike. In all fairness, the forum was sponsored by Streetsblog, an online blog dedicated to “sustainable transportation,” and the candidates knew their audience.

President Obama was a big hit on Reddit, so much so that he helped set an all-time traffic record for the popular social news website. The session , known as an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit, registered more than 4 million visits since it went live Wednesday afternoon. At one point, as many as 200,000 people were on the site at the same time, which significantly surpassed Reddit's previous high of 130,000 concurrent visitors. When asked why Obama chose to participate in the Reddit Q&A, the Obama campaign said it was a chance for the president to interact with Reddit's robust community.