(Image via Atwater Village Newbie)

Call it light rail. Call it a subway. I don’t care. Just make it happen. Now. This Los Angeles City Beat piece from last week dives into the people and politics of fixing our traffic problem.

But what will it take to get innovative, reality-based transit ideas rolling through the halls of power in Los Angeles County? This installment in L.A. CityBeat is the first in an occasional series that will examine all of the issues related to making L.A move again.

After a year of apathy and two years of hatred, I have grown to love Los Angeles. Of course, that love is not unconditional. Every major American city has it’s problems. Seattle pesters you with it’s Chinese water torture-like weather until you want to tear off your North Face jacket, kick off your Tevas and dart into the surrounding mountain-side screaming bloody murder. Chicago combines the ball-numbingly cold winters of the Northeast with the hellish humidity of the deep south. Atlanta is in Georgia, which is in the aforementioned deep south. Which is awful. Having lived in Arizona for two years I can tell you that anyone living in a desert city is either certifiable or in graduate school. And if they aren’t crazy, a few years of constant triple digit temperatures will fix that. If you even seriously entertain the notion of someday possibly maybe moving to New York…you’ll get a bill for $275 from Mayor Bloomberg’s office.

In Los Angeles, it’s the traffic. The awful, hellish, unbelievable, soul crushing, unavoidable, what the fuck are all these assholes doing on the 5 on a Sunday morning, traffic that has come to define Los Angeles.

If we don’t get serious about addressing it we are all seriously fucked.