Vista Road used to belong to the State of California and is now called Fairlanes, Inc. Rte. CSV-5. Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway and is now called Cruiseways, Inc. Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the two competing highways actually cross. Once there had been bitter disputes, the intersection closed by sporadic sniper fire. Finally, a big developer bought the entire intersection and turned it into a drive-through mall. Now the roads just feed into a parking system -- not a lot, not a ramp, but a system -- and lose their identity. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal-12 has better pavement. That is typical -- Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.

-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

I'm pretty sure that Los Angeles is to blame.

I try to avoid Los Angeles County at all costs. I mean, I don't have any reason to go there: they don't have anything up there that we don't have here in Orange County, except for thicker smog. Well, okay, they did have that showing of Kieslowski's Decalogue at the Los Angeles Museum of Art last November. I left ninety minutes early for that one; it's only a fifty-minute trip, but I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to find a place to park and get my bearings.

Twenty-five minutes into the trip, right on schedule, I hit the county line.

Sixty-five minutes after that, I had progressed about three exits.

But this time out I wasn't going anywhere near Los Angeles. See, a while back I was selected for jury duty. I was scheduled to report on April 19th, but since I was planning to be out of the country that week, I called the number on the summons and asked if I could come in earlier. The clerk told me to pick a day between Monday through Thursday on any week that was convenient, and show up at 7:30 am. So one fine morning in March I woke up, saw that I didn't have anything else planned, and decided to drop in.

The courthouse is in Santa Ana, about a fifteen- to twenty-minute trip away. Once again, I wanted to make sure I had time to spare, so I left thirty-five minutes early. This time I progressed less than two exits before my time was up.

Normally the traffic in OC isn't this bad, but then, normally I'm not on the 91 West at 7am. The 91 runs west from OC through such popular vacation spots as Bellflower, Compton, and Torrance; it also feeds into I-5 just before the county line, and I-5 runs right into the heart of LA. But lots of roads head into LA County; lots of roads hook up with the 5. Those foolish enough to work in LA County while living in OC have lots of options if the 91 is crowded. They can duck down to the 22. They can bounce up to the 60. The 405 is an option. All these roads lead west into Los Angeles County. There are choices aplenty.

But if you work in LA and live in Riverside County (Corona, Riverside, Lake Elsinore -- I've even met someone who works in LA and lives in Murrieta, which is practically in Arizona), you've got a grand total of two choices. You can take the 15 up to the 10, and make your commute along the most heavily travelled stretch of road in the world. Or you can take the direct approach, and hop onto the only road that goes through the Santa Ana Mountains: the humble 91 West.

Because the stretch of the 91 that goes through the mountains between Corona and Anaheim Hills is so congested***, something had to be done. Normally this means widening the freeway -- and, as it happens, a big part of the backup on the 91 West on the morning in question was caused by all the construction work that lay ahead: at the intersection of the 91 and the 57, at the Harbor Boulevard off-ramp, at the confluence of the 91 and the 5, and no doubt at other points further along where lanes were being added. In fact, just about the only place where construction wasn't taking place was at the intersection of the 91 and the 55 -- and the cones had only been taken down from that bit of work a few weeks before.

I myself was trying to get onto the 55, but it was rather congested itself. Quite a few people in OC blame the congestion on the 55 on the carpool lane. The 55 pioneered the carpool lane concept: only those with two or more people in the car are allowed to use it, or it's a $271 fine. There's a delicate balance at work: if too many people use the carpool lane, then its allure as an open lane vanishes and the incentive to carpool is lost, but if no one uses it, then it's just a waste of space. Many believe the latter to already be the case, and a citizens' group has sprung up demanding that the carpool lane on the 55 be opened up to all traffic to ease congestion. That makes the "solution" to the traffic problem on the 91 seem even more absurd.

For when the stretch of the 91 running through Anaheim Hills was widened, the leftmost two lanes in each direction, right up to the Riverside County line, were set aside as "FasTrak" lanes. You don't need to have anyone else in your car to take these lanes -- you just have to shell out some dough. And you have to pay in advance: tolls are deducted electronically via a transponder placed in the inside of each vehicle's windshield. (Lockheed Martin handles the fare collection.) Those who enter without a transponder have their license plates snapped by a camera; citations arrive in the mail a few days later. (The fine is in the neighborhood of $15.) This means no tollbooth operators, but it also facilitates the best-known aspect of FasTrak: the rates fluctuate. As you approach the lanes' entry point on each side, you see overhead a large billboard indicating the current price. At present, the range stretches from 60 cents in the middle of the night to $3.20 during rush hour; the system is also equipped to select a rate between these extremes based on the traffic flow or lack thereof, though as of this writing it follows a published schedule and only changes hourly rather than minute-to-minute.

There's one other notable thing about FasTrak. It's private.

Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash between 1988 and 1991; Transportation Corridor Agencies opened FasTrak for business on 27 December 1995. Their website calls itself tollways.com: apparently they didn't want to fight Stephenson for the rights to "Fairlanes" or "Cruiseways." The land is leased from the State of California, and the deal initially called for the lanes to be handed over to the state in 35 years' time. This deal was almost immediately renegotiated, as ridership has been running drastically below estimates: forty to ninety percent below, depending on whom you believe. It seems that the fine people of Southern California just aren't as thrilled about the idea of spending $6.40 each day to slice some time off their commutes. A recent Los Angeles Times poll indicated that sixty percent of those surveyed refuse to use toll roads on principle. One would like to think that it's the naked capitalism on display that offends -- one lane for Acuras, another for Hyundais -- but it seems pretty clear that really it has a lot more to do with the fact that paying directly for transportation just isn't part of the Southern California psyche.

This is deliberate, of course. It is a commonplace that Los Angeles had one of the finest mass transit systems in the world circa 1920 or thereabouts, but that it fell apart thanks to pressure from auto and oil companies who stood to benefit from a metropolis based around the car. Why pay for a tram ticket every morning when you can drive to work absolutely free? (Except for little details like gasoline and maintenance and transportation bonds and...) But the feeling that one could travel hither and yon with the greatest of ease led to such developments as the conversion of Orange County into one big bedroom community for Los Angeles. What was once a patchwork of ranches and orchards and utopian experiments, full of people who more or less stayed put to work the land or in local shops, became a haven for people who wanted to live surrounded by orange trees even though they worked in skyscrapers. And LA and OC together spawned yet another bedroom community on the other side of the mountains -- but while OC was made alluring by its (now-vanished) agrarian beauty, this "Inland Empire," as San Bernardino and Riverside Counties came to be known, is alluring precisely because of its ugliness: the heat and smog and dirt bring down housing costs, and so one can find a place to live in Riverside County for a fraction of the price of comparable places in LA or OC. However, the job base is weak, necessitating a commute. In the morning, that means the 91 West.

The sheer distance being traversed in this region is quite striking.1 Transposed into the Northeast, for example, the commute from Anaheim to Los Angeles is comparable to that from Providence to Boston; tacking on the additional distance to Riverside brings Connecticut into the game. And while commutes from Providence to Boston, or from Trenton to New York, are far from unheard of, the Los Angeles area has no commuter rail to deal with the problem; all we have are roads. The fact that the Northeast splits into three different states a region that in Southern California is treated as a single metro area itself says a lot about where the problem lies. A trip from Lake Elsinore to Los Angeles is treated like a jaunt across town -- we don't even separate local roads from major interstate thoroughfares by having the latter skirt around the downtown area, like other metropolitan areas do with their beltways. Those trying to get from Point J to Point K have to share the road with those trying to get from Point A to Point Z, and that's not good for either group.

Of course, there's a reason that the freeways don't shy away from downtown: at least in OC, there is no such thing. I was trying to get to Santa Ana, where the civic buildings like the courthouse are; but how many other people could say the same? OC's points of interest are scattered about. The civic center is in Santa Ana; the touristy spots like Disneyland and the Convention Center are in Anaheim; the universities are in Irvine and Fullerton; the hot shopping is in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. There's no one place most people are trying to go at any given point. This is a big part of the reason mass transit for OC would seem to be doomed: we have no hub. Every stop would need to go to every other.

The OCTA bus system tries to do this, but it's no help. For one thing, buses do more than their part to clog up already overloaded roads. For another, the only people who take the bus are those without cars -- and the only people in Southern California who don't have cars are those so desperately poor that they can't afford any vehicle remotely capable of locomotion. I took a county bus to school for years (here's another sign that sprawl is out of control: I went to school fifteen miles from my house); I always knew when strawberries were in season, since either I would be fighting for lebensraum amidst a bus packed ceiling to floor with migrant workers, or else I'd be the only one aboard. You have to pay to take a bus. People don't pay directly for transportation here.

And with so many miles to be travelled between stops, grafting any sort of new mass transit onto the existing system would be prohibitively expensive -- it was nine digits a mile to build the LA tram. Just laying down slabs of asphalt is expensive enough -- so much so, that even after the failure of FasTrak, the next major road to open was also established as a toll road. This would be the 241, which presently runs from the 91 (and, hilariously, is only accessible from the non-FasTrak lanes) to Irvine. This route takes the freeway through what is essentially Mediterranean wilderness. Wildlife is everywhere, including so many deer that special measures were taken to keep them off the road. To wit: six-foot-tall fences were built along the sides of the 241. Of course, deer can jump about eight feet in the air with a running start, so the first few days of the freeway's operation were marked by deer jumping onto the freeway, then finding themselves unable to build up enough momentum to get back over the fence. Enough deer were killed that special deer underpasses were then built, but the deer didn't seem to want to take them. So the underpasses were baited with apples and alfalfa. Except deer can't digest alfalfa. Cleanup crews had to be sent in to cart away the deer found in the underpasses, their alfalfa-filled stomachs having more or less exploded.

But there are people who want to live among deer, and still work in a city over fifty miles away. So there must be roads. And the roads will be so expensive to build that there must be a toll. And the toll will be so odious to the citizenry that they will not pay it. Instead, they will take the roads I need to take to get to the courthouse.

And they will slowly turn me into a Type A driver with rabies.

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