No stretch of Orange County freeway winds up on The Daily Beast list of America's 75 worst commutes, but vehicles originating from, destined for or passing through here certainly contribute to three of those bad drives–including the No. 1 place holder.
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Taking the top spot is the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles, which
logged 686 weekly hours of bottleneck congestion, according to research
done in partnership with traffic-tracking firm INRIX. The worst bottleneck is a .64-mile stretch of the southbound lanes of
the 101 at Vermont Avenue. There are 77 hours of congestion at that
spot weekly, with speeds averaging 14 mph during those times.
Supplying
“expert opinion” is Art Leahy, who left the top job at the Orange
County Transportation Authority last April to become chief executive of
LA's Metropolitan
Transportation Authority. “I recall they would say things like
it's a
20-minute trip downtown on the Hollywood Freeway,” Leahy tells the
Beast about his growing up in La-La Land. “No one anticipated the
congestion that would emerge.”
Another freeway on the list impacted by Orange County-based or -bound commuters is the San Diego (5) Freeway, which lands at No. 19 and is especially bad in the southbound lanes at Manchester Avenue between Encinitas and Solana Beach in San Diego County.
At No. 25 is the Riverside (91) Freeway, where the worst bottleneck occurs at eastbound Lincoln Avenue in Corona.
Rounding out the top five on The Daily Beast list, in this order, are: the Lunalilo Freeway in Honolulu; the Capital Beltway that surrounds Washington, D.C.; I-35 in Austin, Texas; and the James Lick (101) Freeway in San Francisco.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.