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!
If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, along with a LOT of cool old photos of Phoenix, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more