I don’t know how people live in Los Angeles! It’s a great city, but there are just too many people in it for my liking. I had to travel from our Anaheim offices in Orange County to the old Petersen building on Wilshire Boulevard in downtown LA for a staff meeting yesterday. Driving back to Anaheim took me an hour and twenty minutes. The drive one way is only 38 miles.
Yahoo maps tells me the commute is a distance of 37.54 miles. I left the Petersen at 4:55 p.m. and about 45 minutes later I had made it a whopping 8.5 miles. The traffic did lighten up a bit after I made it through some major interchanges. I finally made it back to Anaheim at 6:20 p.m. The toughest part of the commute was driving out little red 2007 Jeep Wrangler JK, it’s a manual. Left leg in (depressing the clutch), left leg out, left leg in, left leg out, etc …
I was actually going to try and count the number of times I had to depress the clutch to kill the boredom, but I lost count somewhere around a 100, I am sure it would have been somewhere in the thousands. This isn't the kind of traffic you can keep the vehicle in first gear and slowly keep crawling, its stop and go, stop and go, stop and go, etc …
My recommendation to anyone contemplating a move to Los Angeles, sell your manual transmission vehicle or keep it for a trail only rig.