I-210 and the Gold Line

[nibot]

My daily walk/bike ride to Caltech takes me over the I-210 freeway—all twelve lanes of it. Our housemate loves to shout "Suckers!" over the traffic when it's bumper-to-bumper. (But of course we do drive, mostly on weekend/evening trips, and the fast connection to LA is nice.)

Sandwiched in the middle of the freeway is the Los Angeles County metro Gold Line; in the distance you can see the Lake Avenue station, which opened in 2003. It's encouraging to see the rate at which Los Angeles is building a subway, and people do use it: the trains are packed at rush hour.

Looking at this scene, I can't help but imagine breaking up the pavement and constructing a vast linear park/farm. Maybe when we run out of oil.

Comments

[diskothiq.livejournal.com]

I can't help but imagine breaking up the pavement and constructing a vast linear park/farm

Funny, maybe it's a side-effect from having grown up in So-Cal, but during long drives I often find myself imagining what the road I'm on will look like, say, five hundred years from now -- abandoned, disused, completely overgrown, barely discernable. The interstate system is a great marvel to me, but there's something I love too about the idea of its great expansiveness and seeming permanence being, at the end of the day, well, impermanent.