Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Warsaw

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Detroit

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Brooklyn

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Kowloon City, Hong Kong

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Bucharest

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Skid Row, LA

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Russia

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- LA

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Seoul, South Korea

Urban Hell And Awful Cities- Slovakia

all-thats-interesting:

Urban Hell: Cities Of Overpopulated Misery

Sometimes, with the mass of people and the output of garbage, living in a city can be an absolute nightmare. Here are some scenes from the gritter, filthier parts of beloved cities.

Source: UrbanHell

So, interesting photoset and commentary and all. But I’m actually reblogging only because I want to comment on the third-from-the-bottom photo; hence the cut.

I grew up (at least if you count from the point when I started driving) in LA, and a lot of my thoughts about the city are mediated by my experience of driving there. And I can’t see that photo without remembering the first time I drove one particular ribbon of road that’s prominent in the image.

You’re looking north at the intersection of the 105 and 110 freeways. Or if you’re more name- than number-oriented, the Century and Harbor Freeways.

The Harbor Freeway has been around as long as I remember; it’s one of the oldest LA freeways. The Century, on the other hand, is comparatively new. When we were driving back from the prom my senior year, for example, me driving my older brother’s Peugot with one batch of prom-goers while my friend Scott drove his Chevelle with another batch, coming south on the 110 from the Bonaventure, Scott exited at Century Blvd. and headed west for Manhattan Beach while we stayed on the 110 south to the 405, then came back north and exited at Century. It was a race; which would be faster? And the funny thing was it came out exactly the same. Because when we got back on Century, Scott was the car right behind us.

But that’s not why I bring it up. It’s another memory I want to share, from a couple of decades later. We were driving back from (I think) Disneyland, on our way to Carp with the kids in the back (or maybe just Julia; this may have been pre-William). And we were dodging traffic from listening to radio reports (this was pre-smartphone, or at least pre-crowdsourced realtime mapping apps), and we ended up taking the 105 west to the 110 north. And we were in the carpool lane, which means we took the carpool connector.

You can see it in the photo. It’s that thin, topmost ribbon of concrete, swooping in from the right, sailing up and over the other layers of the interchange, matched by its mirror-image 110 south to 105 east carpool connector on the other side.

Neither I nor my wife knew what was coming. We were just following signs. You put your trust in CalTrans at moments like that. The sign says this is the right lane, so here we go.

So there we were, humming along in our earthbound Odyssey minivan, when suddenly we were launched skyward, far above the city. Linda’s always had a bit of agoraphobia, and I’m not completely immune, and man, for a few seconds there it was an experience.

And then it was over, returning to earth. Welcome to the future!

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1Gm1F6G.

Tags: driving in la.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, March 17th, 2015 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.