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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
What transforms a simple Hollywood restaurant into a hangout for the rich and famous? Salon's Tinseltown correspondent dishes up the inside scoop.
Oct 14, 1997 | i don't drive, though I grew up and still live in Southern California. I used to drive, but I don't now because of the effects of glaucoma and keratoconus on my eyesight, and the loss of effective vision in my right eye. I don't carry a cane or wear special glasses.
When I tell people in Los Angeles that I don't drive, they express surprise. I joke with them that non-drivers here are a protected species, like the California condor. When I tell them I don't drive because I don't see well, they become skeptical. It's at this point that the conversation gets awkward, for no Southern Californian can imagine that an otherwise fit-looking, middle-class male would not drive, however marginal his vision. The drivers are uneasy with my claim of disability. Maybe they think it's something else that keeps me from driving.
I talk briefly about taking the bus in Los Angeles. I tell them how it's a stop-and-go, Third World country on wheels, permanently separated from the fluid world they know. They get very uninterested. I'm describing habits Los Angeles drivers have no intention of ever acquiring. They imagine a future in which they will always be drivers. They think they will always be in control, if only of a car. The drivers tell me how lucky I am to be a non-driver. They turn the conversation to the frustrations of freeway traffic and the troubles of maintaining their cars. These are subjects a driver can always talk about with other drivers, when they have nothing else in common.
Instead of driving a car, I walk, take a bus and get lifts from colleagues at work. Like Ray Bradbury -- another Los Angeles non-driver -- I've been stopped by a sheriff's patrol car on a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday, dressed in a coat and tie, and ordered to identify myself and explain my destination. As a pedestrian, I was a suspect.
Pedestrianism is dangerous, and not just in Los Angeles County, where a third of California's 27,000 injuries from colliding metal and flesh are concentrated. Nationally, drivers injure more than 110,000 pedestrians each year. About 6,000 of them die. The number of deaths is greatest in the suburbs of the Sunbelt -- Miami, Atlanta and Dallas -- and least in Northeastern cities, including New York and Boston, that have a tradition of wary pedestrians.
Walking is particularly hazardous for Los Angeles drivers. Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin was struck and killed in 1994 walking across Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. In March, the head of the Los Angeles teachers' union jaywalked across the seven lanes of Olympic Boulevard in West L.A. and was killed.
Using a crosswalk is even more deadly. Cities have sandblasted thousands of formerly marked crosswalks since the mid-1970s when traffic engineers showed, not surprisingly, that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than out of them. Traffic engineers said the painted lines gave pedestrians a false sense of security and that made them less attentive to danger. Risk managers said marked crosswalks make cities vulnerable if they're sued by injured pedestrians or their survivors.
The federal government doesn't test cars for their impact effects on pedestrians, and very little is known about making cars safer for the pedestrians they hit. Car door handles have been recessed to keep them from hooking into clothing and dragging an unlucky pedestrian under the wheels. Ralph Nader ridiculed tail fins, and the scythelike fins of the Chevrolet model line gradually shrank. Apart from these changes, the exterior of a car today is as unforgiving of flesh as the 1951 Ford Tudor my parents bought as their first new car.
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