I’ve been resistant to delving into political topics on this blog, mostly out of fear that I might expose too much about my own ignorance. 
I do tend to follow political debate (particularly at the national level) quite a bit, though. As a registered Democrat that will almost certainly end up supporting and voting for whichever candidate becomes that party’s nominee, I have certainly been taking a lot of interest in the 2008 primary season.
I disagree with the increasingly widespread commentary accusing the Democratic Party of self-destructing simply because both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still active candidates with more than 3 months remaining before the party convention and with several states still having yet to have their primaries. As I see it, the Democrats are prompting a fair amount of criticism and doomsday predictions simply because the candidate selection process is working essentially as designed. This primary instead seems to be illustrating how the basic method being used to select candidates usually doesn’t work very well and has largely become an outdated relic of a very different time.
I think that the result of the Republican nomination is much more troublesome, although very typical of the process for both parties during the typical modern election, including all the ones since I’ve been eligible to vote. John McCain was widely accepted to have clinched his party’s nomination after the March 4th round of primaries, even though the primary season still had several months to go. Much has been made about the voters of Florida and Michigan being disenfranchised in the selection of the Democratic candidate due to those states violating party rules regarding scheduling, but it is that really worse than the fact that the Republican primaries in 10 states have ended up being basically irrelevant?
The extended, highly staggered primary process made quite a bit of sense in a time when traveling from state to state could take days or weeks and when 24-hour news networks and the Internet weren’t available as a means for the candidates and parties to get their views, positions, and even personalities quickly and widely disseminated to every part of the country. In today’s era of air travel and mass communications, though, campaigning for a simultaneous, nationwide primary would certainly be feasible and would avoid large portions of the population from being essentially disenfranchised from the selection of the candidates. There might be a grain of truth in the concern that such a system could pretty sharply reduce the importance and influence of smaller states and rural communities, but the current system usually seems to have largely the opposite effect, which really seems to make even less sense. I really hope that this year’s primary will prompt some serious discussion of this long overdue change.
Los Angeles Freeway Construction – A Rant
Monday, July 21st, 2008I think Caltrans is specifically conspiring to make it as difficult as possible for us to get home from Orange County on a Sunday night. Last night, we had dinner with friends at Downtown Disney (which was very nice), but it ended up taking us close to 2 hours to get home to Van Nuys, mostly due to multiple construction projects.
We left the Disneyland Resort a little before 11pm and traffic on the North 5 was moving along at pretty much full speed until just past the 91 interchange, where it came to almost a complete halt. I wasn’t able to see the brake lights until we were too far past the 91 to cut over to it as an alternate route. The big problem at this point was that they were doing construction work that had all but the far left lane closed. This brought traffic to a near stand-still, even fairly late at night.
While in this, I heard a traffic report on the radio indicating that there was a Sig Alert at the Slauson exit a bit further north, so I definitely wanted to get off the 5. I decided to try and exit at either Auto Center Drive or Beach Blvd. and then cut across surface streets to the 91. It turned out that the Auto Center Drive exit was closed completely, but there wasn’t a "ramp closed" sign until you were pretty much right at it. That actually resulted in me merging to the right at one point into a lane that was about to end, because I didn’t realize the exit ramp wasn’t accessible. I then continued to stay as far right as I could, since there were no signs indicating where I needed to be to get off at Beach, assuming that exit was even opened. It did turn out to be opened, but it took us about 20-30 minutes (I lost track of the exact time) or so to go the 1-2 miles from the start of the construction zone to the exit.
The Beach exit actually drops you onto Auto Center Drive, just a bit north of the exit for that road specifically. You then turn onto Beach at the next light. When we got to Beach, we found that it was actually closed as well at that intersection. That meant that we then had to turn on Stanton instead and then cut over to Beach near Knott’s Berry Farm in order to backtrack over to the 91. Just to further my rant against road work, I should mention here that we did get stuck behind a sweet sweeper for part of the way as we went down Stanton.
The 91 was basically smooth going. We then got off on the N-710 and found that they had the 2 left lanes closed on that road as well. Fortunately, we were only going a short distance there (up to the 105) and traffic is generally light enough on the 710 that time of night that the construction didn’t slow things down that much. It didn’t take us very long to get onto the 105-W, which we then took over to the 405-N.
The 405 wasn’t too bad through the LAX area, but then slowed to a crawl right around Culver Blvd. Yes, as you probably guessed by now, Caltrans had a couple lanes closed for construction between Culver and the 10 interchange. That stretch of road is pretty bad even under the best of circumstances (this is one of the busiest stretches of road in the country), so traffic was once again barely moving. Obviously, this wasn’t as bad as it could have been during rush hour, but it still took quite a while to get through there. To make matters worse, I was starting to need a restroom pretty badly, which helped to make the rest of the drive even more miserable. With the traffic largely stopped, it would have been incredibly difficult to force our way over to the right to get off at any of the exits. In addition, it was after midnight by this point, so I think there was little chance that there would have been anywhere opened with public restrooms that were both available and safe to use.
Once we got past that construction zone, fortunately traffic was moving pretty much full speed the rest of the way. By this time, we were all pretty completely wiped out and miserable, of course. In fact, I ended up getting home and sending a note off to my boss at work that I was planning to come in late this morning (they owe me a few hours anyway…), so I guess I should probably head there once I finish typing this.
I certainly do see the need for construction work on the freeways, and I understand why Sunday nights are a good time to do it, but last night certainly was frustrating. I couldn’t help but think that there must have been some way that they could have better planned the projects so that someone driving a fairly common route (Orange County to the San Fernando Valley) wouldn’t keep continuously finding construction zones pretty much everywhere they turned.
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