CQ2 | Ed Murphy

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  It’s out of date by now, but they measured deaths attributable to aggressive driving and the IE was the top-ranked metro area in the country.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.

More on the Basque country:

There’s an old beautiful rustic church,the ermita de San Adrián, located on a hillside outside of the town of Elorrio (near Durango).  “Ermita” literally means “hermitage,” so strictly translated it’s “Hadrian’s hermitage” but I think “the chapel of San Adrián” better captures the feel of this single-roomed church. Perhaps there were hermits associated with these little chapels that are so common in the Basque country, but I sort of doubt it.  A cluster of farmhouses might share an ermita, and today people visit them only on the feast day of the saint associated with the chapel.

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There’s an article in the Sunday (tomorrow’s) travel section of the New York Times by Sarah Wildman entitled “Basque Without Borders.” It’s a lovely article, a narrative of a short trip eating across the Basque country of northern Spain and southwestern France.

Coincidentally, I just returned from a similar short trip to the Basque country to visit my aunt in Bakio, a little seashore town outside of Bilbao.  She spends half the year there and I’ve been going there, on and off, my whole life (so far, as they add in Maine.)

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I’m a big fan of Kayak, an online travel service.  It is for me the default go-to for researching airfares; Kayak has the best tools for searching through and evaluating airfares.  The service lets you sort by airport, departure/arrival time, layover, total duration, type of aircraft, and on and on.  You want to leave from the LA area on a weekend morning on a Star Alliance flight with a maximum of one transfer but you’re flexible on dates?  Kayak can help.  And with the complexity of airfares, you need all the help you can get.  I’ve opted-in to a weekly email update from Kayak with the latest deals on flights from LAX to Asia.  So here’s what I got today from Kayak:

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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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