Month: February 2020

I read a number of blogs about water. One I read with more frequency than others is On the Public Record (OtPR). I’ve been reading it since I saw it in an article in the Los Angeles Times. The writer is credible, smart, thorough, and possesses a style that makes for entertaining reading. At least for me.

One item mentioned in the LAT article was The California Water Atlas. OtPR mentions it in response to a reader looking for background material on California water. “All the cool kids have one. Don’t know if it has information you couldn’t find online these days, but having one in your office is part of the secret handshake.” I decided I wanted one but it took me a couple years (and seeing a citation of it in an Edward Tufte book) to get around to buying one on eBay. I think I paid $80 for it. But it cost $39.86 (plus $2.39 in sales tax for California residents) in 1980. That works out to about $130 today, according to the first inflation calculator I found online. So I guess I got a deal.

However, you don’t have to spend anything for a virtual copy. It’s available as a .pdf from the David Rumsey Map Collection and it’s worth downloading the big version (180MB). I don’t know how much of the material is still current, but it’s worth having for a couple reasons. One is that it’s impressive that a state agency would undertake a publication like this, and for another it’s probably the best example of graphic literacy in a book that I’ve ever seen. In an article in the Jan/Feb 1980 Sierra by Marc Reisner (which I found tucked into my copy of the atlas) he said, “Some of the graphics convey at a careful glance what whole books do not teach.” If people built their presentations this way PowerPoint wouldn’t have such a bad reputation.

The book itself needs a pretty large coffee table to be a coffee table book. It’s almost 19″ tall and over 32″ wide when open. That only makes the content more impressive, though. And if having a larger table and a deeper shelf is all I need to be one of the “cool kids”, that’s something that I can do.

I guess we’ll start with the title. I never heard “the” used in front of a number of a highway before my wife and I came here. It’s used for all flavors of highway – “the 1”, “the 101”, “the 5”. Interstate 405 has another name as well – “the San Diego Freeway”. I would guess other names people use for it aren’t appropriate here.

The 405 is a bypass that leaves the 5 freeway northbound near El Toro in Orange County. It runs west of the 5 until meeting up again near San Fernando 72 miles later in the “Valley”. You can tell it’s a loop from the 5 from the route number – three digits starting with an even number (meaning bypass – an odd number means a spur) and ends in “05” (the 5 is the parent freeway). Since the 405 has only one route between its two intersections with the 5, it’s a bypass. If there was another branch to the east of the 5, the 405 would be a beltway.

I’ve been driving my stretch of this freeway about a quarter of its lifetime, and in that 15 or so years I’ve seen a number of changes. The replacement of one Goodyear blimp with another after an accident and the new blimp’s inflatable hangar (which is usually not inflated). The proliferation of large digital billboards vying for your attention while you’re driving in the pitch black before work. Auto dealers with sports cars displayed so you can compare them to the car you’re stuck going 4 mph in. This is only outdone in the irritation department by the “experience center” built by a well known sports car maker where a golf course used to be – now you can see people thrashing sports cars around a closed track while you sit in traffic anticipating the day they carve another carpool lane out of the highway and charge a toll so that the rest of us can go even slower.

The last paragraph has a bitter tone, but the 405 isn’t all bad. So let me close by observing that there are a lot worse places to be stuck in traffic than between the Valley and Orange County. The weather is usually good enough to put your windows down. The drivers on the 405 are as good in general as anywhere else (how would you measure that?) Occasionally you get to see the blimp making a landing. Los Angeles has two NPR stations to listen to, so when one has a pledge drive, you can always switch to the other (after donating, of course). And without the 405, my commute would be even worse.