I’m a big fan of know your hood/know your lane. That you should know every alt route available and the most efficient use of lanes to avoid needing to change them at all. Did you know if you get in the left lane of the 101 South well past Woodland Hills (west of Woodland Hills) that it exits at Los Feliz on the 5 with no lane changes? That was my exit when I worked on the Westside and lived in Atwater Village.
I took every route imaginable on the way home and it was never less than an hour. Taking Wilshire to Vermont to Los Feliz was probably the least aggravating but took forever mostly trying to get past Beverly Hills. I mostly would take Sepulveda to the 101, but that was still very irritating. Going there I usually took Los Feliz to Western to Sunset to La Brea to the 10, sometime cutting across to La Cienega but not usually. I remember one time it took me 2.5 hours to get to work. The distance? 23 miles.
The amount of precision you need when backing into an aisle is far less than what you need when backing into a space, so the average person should be much faster backing out of a space than backing into one.
I’ve had almost no regular commutes, but jobs that required driving all over the area. My dad, though, had the same commute for 25 years or so. He, more or less, knew what lane to be in at all times to get there the fastest. He was a pretty aggro driver. I like to get into the second lane and just stay there and listen to the radio and almost never sweat the few minutes you might gain changing lanes.
Having strong opinions about parking is a sign of the woke mind virus. If you leave a car out on the street it should be treated as community property. Do your shopping quick before someone drives it away
I swear in Minnesota there could be a sign “Lane ends in 5 miles” and the y would one
1 immediately shift to remaining lane (without looking)
2 every 5th card would straddle the lane divider to try and prevent anyone from using the lane to be closed
3. If a semi-truck is involved they will both block you and roll down the window and curse you.
They ran ads in TV and billboards. Didn’t make a difference.
There was a time, about 3 years ago, where Tesla had the opportunity to jump on this:
Battery in your vehicle is paid as a subscription, variable cost based on the minimum state of charge you want to maintain
Two-way charging for all cars and home chargers, ample charging ports at businesses
Customer gets a cut of energy arb
In the simplest scenario, it’s objectively ridiculous that the 75KWH a Model Y holds costs me about $3 to fill up during the night, during the day in summer the value of the power in the battery magically increases to $16, but rather than saving ~a hundred dollars per month the power just sits there in the car battery. Ditto if you’re driving to work and only need a few KWH to get home–sell that shit to the office or factory that’s paying top dollar for peak power every day.
Vertically integrate into utilities, electrify the shit out of everything, cut the shit out of fossil fuel energy sources, control the world. Trillions of dollars of valuation suddenly make perfect sense.
Instead, they focused on boondoggles and their CEO outed himself as a Nazi and now the company seems doomed to languish with no competitive advantages. I don’t see how they have a meaningful lead in home battery storage either; that’s basically becoming a commodity as well.
Car drivers should just about always do whatever is needed to accommodate semi-trucks. (that could mean speeding up as much as slowing down - or changing lanes - but just whatever makes their merges easier)
You’re still debating pull-in versus back-in? That’s basic PTO. We should be discussing Range Balancing in our parking choices. Are you always backing into corner spots and obvious pull-through? That makes your parking range too predictable! I even introduce a randomization element into my back-in approach depending on if it is an even numbered day of the month or the song currently fits the theme (e.g. “Back Dat Azz Up”, “Back Door Man”). You may also need to sometimes suboptimally pull forward in a good back-in spot just to balance your range and confuse… well, whoever is tracking your parking habits.
A+ but absolutely no one will get how funny that is outside of the L.A. area.
One of my favorite L.A. centric scenes was in an early episode of The Closer. L.A., despite once being part of Mexico does not handle street and area pronunciations well. Examples of this are Los Angeles and Los Feliz. In the early episodes, Brenda would constantly butcher street names hilariously and be corrected. And then she lands on Sepulveda, and butchers that one too. Her pronunciation was Sehpoolveeda. Nope, it’s Sepulveda exactly the way you’d expect.
This is happening. Tesla was the impetus for a distrubted resource pilot in texas utilizing powerwalls, and eventually EVs. This taps into the ERCOT market. Utility specific programs are also rolling out.
