The 405, the 10, the 101 — LA traffic is a civic religion of suffering that locals bond over daily. But with remote work fading and hybrid schedules tightening, is a brutal commute still a reasonable lifestyle choice or a form of self-sabotage?
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Add your commentOh sure, just 'live closer to your job.' Cool. I'll just buy a $1.8 million shoebox in Santa Monica so I can walk to my office. Problem solved. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Born and raised in Van Nuys. My grandfather worked at the GM plant in Van Nuys, my dad worked at a factory three miles from our house, I work in Century City. Each generation's commute doubled. This isn't a personal failure. This is what happened to working class LA over fifty years. Write an article about that.
just moved here from Chicago three months ago and i genuinely did not understand what people meant when they warned me about traffic. i budgeted 25 minutes to get from los feliz to culver city for a job interview. it took one hour and forty minutes at 10am on a wednesday. i called my mom from the car and she said 'come home.' i am considering it.
I moved from Culver City to Torrance six years ago because rent was actually survivable. My commute to my job on the Westside went from 12 minutes to sometimes two hours. Do I regret it? Every single Tuesday when I'm sitting on the 405 at La Tijera watching a guy in a Prius eat a full plate of pasta. But my kids have a backyard. Life is tradeoffs.
The comparison to other cities always kills me. People say 'in Tokyo they just take the train.' Yes and in Tokyo the urban density, rail investment, and land use policy evolved over a century to make that possible. You can't retrofit that onto a city that spent 70 years being explicitly designed around the car. The solution is generational, not a lifestyle blog tip.
To everyone saying infrastructure is the problem — okay, but when's the last time any of you actually showed up to an LA Metro board meeting or a city council session about transit? Complaining online about the 405 while voting against every density proposal in your neighborhood is its own kind of civic sabotage.
the 405 was built for like 200,000 cars a day and now handles over 400,000. this isnt a personal discipline problem its a structural infrastructure failure. framing it as individual life choice is exactly the kind of thinking that lets politicians off the hook forever
Nope. Hard disagree. You cannot tell people where to live in a city this size. The jobs aren't concentrated in one walkable downtown — we have like fifteen different employment centers spread across 500 square miles. This take only works if you've never actually tried to map LA's job geography.
I'll be honest, I used to judge people for their commutes until I got a job offer I couldn't refuse in El Segundo and had to move to the Valley because that was all I could afford. Now I understand. The economy decides where you live in this city, not your preferences.
lmaooo 'just live closer to your job' okay and when my job relocates to a different campus for the third time in five years what then. do i just move again. this advice is so divorced from how actual employment works here
I mean... I did literally do this. Took a $12k pay cut to work somewhere I could bike to. Best decision of my life, my cortisol levels dropped, I lost weight, I actually see my kids before bedtime. Not saying everyone can do it but nobody even tries to optimize for it. People treat a 90-minute commute like it's gravity — just a law of nature they can't question.
Hot take that nobody wants to hear: some people genuinely choose the commute and are fine with it. I spend 90 minutes each way listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I've finished like 40 books this year. My therapist says my car time is actually the only real decompression I get. Stop projecting your misery onto my routine.
Actually the 405 was originally designed as a bypass route in the 1960s and was never intended to be a primary commuter corridor. The real mistake was allowing all that commercial development along the Sepulveda Pass corridor without widening the road first. If Caltrans had just added four lanes back in 1987 when they had the chance none of this would be a problem today.
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