El Camino Real (The Royal Highway)

by Eve Eisenberg

I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix.
  - Dan Quayle

(August 26, 2002) One aspect of life in the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) that most New Yorkers probably don’t know much about is the traffic. In fact, if you are anything like I was before I moved out here to the SFBA, you imagine that almost everything—quality of life, life expectancy, the weather, the food, the demeanor of the people—is better in California (except for Los Angeles). I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.

Because I had a teeth-grittingly typical experience on the road today, I’m going to tell you about the traffic here. Let’s pretend it’s time to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and renew our registration today. It’s a normal Wednesday. The DMV opens at 8:00 AM. I can take either surface streets to go about five miles south of here, or I can hop on the highway (the distance will be about four exits). I decide to leave at 7:00 AM, figuring that I will get to the DMV a little early and hang around outside.

I choose the highway, which is a fatal mistake. Actually, it’s not a highway. It’s called a freeway out here. This is The 101. Everyone calls it The 101. At 7:00 AM, heading south from Palo Alto towards Mountain View (heading AWAY from San Francisco), The 101 is already a parking lot. Although I am going no more than five or six miles, as the crow flies, I could be stuck here for forty-five minutes, unless I get smart and hop off of The 101 and onto Embarcadero.

I get smart and hop off of The 101. I take Embarcadero to El Camino Real, a.k.a. 92, which isn’t a freeway, and in fact has a great deal in common with good old Route 1, the Boston Post Road. A six lane road with a thick median in the center, El Camino is lined with businesses for the most part, although at one point I do pass Stanford University. There’s not much of Stanford to see from El Camino, though. In fact, although there are some famously scenic roadways in California, for the most part the SFBA is so densely populated that all the freeways have large “sound barrier” walls on either side, that prevent you from having a view of much of anything at all. Still, as you drive past these barriers at 65 MPH (the speed limit), you can see the third and fourth floors of row after row of condos and apartment complexes lining the freeway, interspersed with towering Home Depot signs or lit golden arches to denote the presence of a strip mall.

I suppose what really startles and bothers me about traffic here is that it is constant. There is no particular time of day, day of the week, or month of the year in which the density lessens to a “normal” level. If I drive around a suburban SFBA town at three o’clock in the morning, sure, it’ll be pretty quiet in some areas, but there will always be some streets—such as El Camino Real, Embarcadero, and Middlefield—that are relatively busy.

Having also lived in Westchester, NY, the Research Triangle Park in NC, and the Middle of Nowhere, CT, I can say that the traffic situation in the SFBA is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered anywhere before. The only potential explanation I can come up with for the sheer absurdity of the traffic mayhem here is population density, coupled with the lack of feasible mass transit, and every Californian’s belief that he or she has the inalienable right to clog the roadway with an SUV. But I think population density is probably the main problem.

In almost every residential neighborhood in Menlo Park, for instance, there seems to be an equal mix of apartment complexes and houses. And there are more apartments going up every month it seems—there are two gigantic apartment developments just about to open up within just one mile of where I live (one by the train station in Menlo Park, a block from El Camino, and the other directly on El Camino just up the road in Redwood City), and the traffic here is already so bad that I feel my hair start to fall out at the very thought of driving between three and eight PM. And it’s not even as if these apartment complexes are a viable “middle income” housing alternative—rent here is just about the highest in the country, and the quality of the housing is often quite low. But often it’s just all that’s available, and so people spend easily three quarters of their monthly paychecks on rent.

An example of the insanity: although El Camino Real is less than a half mile from where I live, it can take me 15-20 minutes to cross from one side to the other to get to the post office. That is the equivalent of needing 15-20 minutes to go from the corner of Oak Ave. & Larchmont Ave. to Chatsworth Elementary School after crossing the Boston Post Road. I know, I know. Your pity is welcome, but doesn’t help me much.

So, while I know it’s not difficult to find things to love about living in Larchmont, I think all Larchmonters should give thanks for the relatively sane traffic in Westchester. Just remember: it could always be worse.

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Eve Eisenberg grew up in Larchmont and moved to California after graduating from college in 1999.

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