US/FR: car

Under the freeway, LA 2009

USA, CA land of the car lifestyle. You quickly understand that you need one to move around. What struck me:

– Toyota Prius

Third generation

The car is the most fuel efficient car ever produced and has a better reliability that some expensive german cars. Add the built-in technology (the last generation includes a voice-activated touch-screen DVD-based navigation system and an 8-speaker JBL audio system) and you can easily see why this car –at least in LA- is like the R5 in France in the 80s. It’s fucking everywhere.

– Where are the US cars?

*cue More Bounce To The Ounce*

Short answer: nowhere. In the pick-up category, there’s still some. For every other brand new car or old ones, it’s like 90% of them are japanese. Maybe more. Sure some people are still cruising with good old vintage Cadillac Eldorado or of course some ‘68 Ford Mustang but it’s a very narrow percentage.

I don’t know why but seeing this I can’t help but think about Hiroshima. If Germany had bombed France with one of the deadliest weapon ever created, I don’t think we would ever love their car to the point that our national production would be almost dead. US/Japan relation is weird. And yes, we don’t care anymore.

– Traffic lights

*cue drinking in LA"*

I guess it’s a classic one but damn, it makes so much more sense to have it in front of you instead of on your side like in Europe. Because you don’t have to look away from the road and because it’s on the other side of the intersection, you always have time to use the breaks without little panic.

– Driving

Night Life

For my first time driving one hour alone on the freeway and all I was scared as shit. But it’s easy. I mean with a gps it’s easy. Everything is large so you rarely have to do some weird and dangerous stuff to get out from a wrong way. Road signs are not confusing and never too late. People drive safely, I mean I come from France and on a traffic jam people are just bitches. Here I was the bitch, sneaking from lane to lane. I didn’t see a lot of asshole behavior. Around Paris on the Boulevard Périphérique it’s simply war. With a lot of trucks and 2 wheels. In LA there’s almost none of them. It simplifies a lot what to pay attention to. Also people know how to park, I’ve never seen someone doing two or three times the entire process of doing correctly a parallel parking move. It has to do with the wide roads and the car culture.

– Law

”So.. How about sandwiches for diner tonight?”

Man it’s tough. A friend got a 450$ ticket for not stopping long enough at a stop sign. I had a 80$ parking ticket on a saturday morning at 8:03am. Another friend had a 300$ ticket for crossing the street while the pedestrian sign was saying he could not. They don’t mess around. In France every driver would be in jail with laws like that. At least it makes people careful and on the road that’s the priority I guess.

– Parking

 
Ha! Wait.. 

Night-mare. Worse than anything I did in Europe. Frustrating because from my narrow french point of view everything is wide large and fat here so parking spaces should be that way too. Oh boy.

– Relation with the car

Time to nap

I saw so many people hanging in their car. Like this time when I went to the music store, this guy was almost laying down in it, chatting on his phone in this dead and dusty parking. One hour later he was taking a nap. I saw a lot of that, people parked and chatting, having diner etc. In France only workmen are doing that for lunch or students to smoke some pot or make out in winter but otherwise the car is alone, left in the street like an object. Seriously.

– Thoughts

With everybody in cars one thing really cool is that sidewalks are empty. It’s great to walk with no one interfering your path. It never happens in Paris.

LA should have something like Velib and an extended public transport system. The city is lucky enough to provide the best weather ever to bike all year long. If it was easier to move from a side to another one (tons of buses, but for the metro..) cars would be less useful unless you have to carry a bass amp or something. Nobody likes to be stuck in traffic. Everyone hates parking hunting. Public transportation allows you to safely tweet, read, dance and not care about these things. I mean how great is that? How can you be against that?

Next comparative subject, probably services.