CQ2 | Ed Murphy

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“Inland Empire” defined as the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario Metropolitan Statistical Area. Census data for 2000; 2001-2008 are Census Bureau estimates.

Inland Empire history, such as it is, tends to have a boosterish, great men and dates, ever upward, back of the real estate guide flavor to it, so I was surprised to learn from the late great Carey McWilliams* that anti-Chinese riots, which swept the American West at the turn of the last century, reached our fair city:

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How is it that highways can have personalities?

The I-10  in California changes character as it goes east from ocean.  It’s a typical southern California multi-lane concrete freeway in Los Angeles that becomes  something out of a Mad Max movie in the Inland Empire, especially around the Colton rail yards.  By the time it reaches Yuciapa, it’s settled down again into a lanky western interstate.

No doubt that this personality can be defined by factors like traffic density, the physical landscape, the number of exits, development alongside the highway (either preceding it or because of it), and the condition of the actual road.  But the people driving on the road play a big part, too, in defining its character.

Whatever the cause, it never ceases to amaze me that a highway can have a personality.  Generalizing a bit, highways  in the IE are insane.

I thought that New Jersey, where I grew up, was the last word in traffic until I moved to Boston.  Even driving in Manhattan, which has a peculiar but clearly understood set of  driving protocols, was better than Boston.  Boston’s got bad, nasty, aggressive drivers and crummy roads.  Nothing worse than Boston.

Then I moved to the Inland Empire.

Rather than try to convince you by anecdote, see this report on road rage by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.  It’s out of date by now, but they measured deaths attributable to aggressive driving and the IE was the top-ranked metro area in the country.

It wasn’t even close; measured in deaths per 100,000 people, the Inland Empire scored 13.4 while second-ranked Tampa was at 9.5.  New York City (including northern NJ) was 36th, with a score of 2.6, and Boston was 37th with 2.1.  That is, drivers in the Inland Empire are six times more aggressive than Boston drivers.

If the Inland Empire was its own country it would be the 125th largest in the world.  With over 4.1 million inhabitants, the region (officially the “Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario Metropolitan Statistical Area”) is larger in population than Uruguay, Armenia, and Kuwait, and slightly smaller than Ireland, New Zealand, and Lebanon.

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There’s not much of a food scene in the Inland Empire, but the region, and the city of San Bernardino specifically, is at the center of the development of that quintessentially American icon, the fast food restaurant franchise.

There’s a good article by Jerry Daley, “Fast Food’s Ground Zero,” in the current, March 2009, issue of Inland Empire Magazine, unfortunately not online,  which touches on the well-known story of how Ray Kroc, a milkshake equipment salesman, was so impressed by the McDonald’s brothers’ hamburger stand in San Bernardino that he approached them about opening more.

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