How to calculate distances in Los Angeles


As someone who likes to know distances, I've often asked people in Los Angeles how far away something is, and inevitably they have answered me in minutes. And of course those minutes were auto minutes, not minutes to walk somewhere, or anything else.

When I would ask again, yes, but how far away is it, and they continued to say "12 minutes", I knew that it was an easy conversion: one minute equals one mile. That is, theoretically you would get on a freeway and go from point to point at sixty miles an hour.


If you've ever driven in LA, you know how ridiculous it is to assume a mile a minute, but I have a theory about it, that it was originally a marketing trick that was used so often that people got used to it.

In time the ad at the top of this post, Los Angeles had very few freeways, and it was VERY crowded. From what I've learned, traffic just inched along, and calculating a mile a minute would have been absolutely ridiculous. Still, I have to wonder what Desmond's Westwood meant when it said, "12 Auto Minutes to Westward Village". I have to assume that they meant from downtown.

Hang on, I'm going to see if I can determine the distance from the middle of downtown LA to Westwood (where UCLA is). Here's what I found:



Looks like it's 15.7 miles, which Google figures will take 19 minutes to drive. Of course, I'm only guessing that the billboard was downtown, and based on the distance, and the fact that there really wasn't a way to take a freeway to Desmond's, I now doubt that presumption. Maybe the billboard was much closer, like in Santa Monica, or in Beverly Hills?

Anyway, if someone in Los Angeles tells me that something is thirty minutes away, I know it's thirty miles away, and I make my own estimate as to how long it will take me to get there. If traffic is heavy, I bring along my lunch in the car.

Thank you for going to Desmond's in old-time Los Angeles with me!
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