Dude! I lived a half block off Colorado Blvd near Sierra Madre in Plasterdena for 8 years and drove in LA traffic the whole time. Strangely enough, all MY traffic horror stories are from the Bay Area. I related my 580 shooter episode in another thread, but here are a few others worthy of note.
1. Getting on I-80 in Vallejo and getting stuck behind some guy breathing from a plastic bag as he drifted back and forth across all 3 lanes of traffic and played pinball with his car off the sides of the Carquinez Bridge span. In a classic case of Never-A-Cop-Around-When-You-NEED-One, he drove that way with about a 1/4 mile space cushion between him and EVERYBODY else on the freeway all the way to El Cerrito, about 20 miles.
2. Driving my '68 VW camper to work night shift in SF in the middle of a North Pacific Gale and losing my flywheel just past the Yerba Buena Island offramp. I got to within 50 feet of the crest of the Bay Bridge suspension span and finally threw a rod before hitting the downhill portion and coasting off the bridge.
3. Being the only broadband guy to be able to get BACK into SF the night of the big Quake and driving across the North Bay from Vallejo to Novato and then down the 101 as the lights of Marin County were coming back on before me. I was the ONLY car heading southbound across the Golden Gate and as soon as you left the toll plaza, everything south was pitch black. I fell in behind a PG&E trouble truck as I waved my AT&T ID at the MPs and winos directing traffic on Lombard and Van Ness as everybody else who had a car were heading north out of town.
4. My main commute car was a 76 Toyota Corolla with dents on all 4 sides and a bullet hole in the side it picked up when I loaned it to a coworker so he could go home to Alameda from Oakland for lunch. I went out that afternoon to go home and spotted it. So the next day I asked him,
"Damn! What neighborhoods were YOU driving through? Hey! There goes a White guy! Boom!"
5. The time my wife took me to work in Oakland on the night shift in the above thrashmobile(guarenteed to get you 6 car lengths of space cushion in rush hour traffic, especially if you add the "No Insurance" & "I Brake For No Apparent Reason" bumper stickers) and got lost in West Oakland near Esther's Orbit Room before finding her way back to the freeway past the gas station where 2 cop cars and 4 cops had yellow crime scene tape up as they waited for the Coroner's van.
