Friday On Friday - "Carmageddon"

Tonight, when mothers sing lullabies to babies and the children of a simpler time long for days gone by, not even a pale horse will ride the 405 over the Sepulveda Pass. Just as a prophecy foretold of a time when life as we knew it would cease, during a time that will be known as... Carmageddon.

According to the LA Weekly, this short stretch of road between the Santa Monica and Ventura freeways plays travel host to upwards of 281,000 vehicles a day. And, beginning with scheduled on-ramp closures at 7 pm, followed by off-ramp closures at 10, the heart of the busiest road in the United States will be ripped, still beating, from the chest of the West Coast’s largest city like faster than Mola Ram in the Temple of Doom.

On a wacky, coincidental note, for the Getty Museum, located right in the middle of the closure zone, and destination for 1.2 million visitors annually, July 15–17 is the busiest weekend of the year. Or at least it was... until Carmageddon.

And of course, with the freeway closure, comes the unavoidable ancillary surface street gridlock and alternate route spill-over to other freeways, expected to extend as far north and east and south as 30 miles.

But hey, this isn’t just a news article, it’s a celebration of the precursor to the next great moment on the apocalyptic calendar... 2012. It also serves as a reminder of other attempts by Hollywood (right in the heart of the newly drawn thirty-mile-zone that is Carmageddon) to scare the living crap out of the rest of the world with other lame attempts at the End of the World genre.

And as a member of the working Transportation community, I will be at work beginning precisely at the time that the first of the closures takes place. And for those of you who want to know exactly what is taking place at ground zero of Carmageddon, you can all follow my special Friday night tweets in real-time from LAX at twitter.com/FridayOnFriday. And who knows, as a public service, maybe my tweets will serve an even greater purpose than this article... at least it should.

So remember... this weekend, if you live in Los Angeles, and you’re reading this article before it’s too late, get your MREs and your Netflix Online and hunker in bunker till 5 o’clock Monday morning. Unless the city planners were wrong about all this, and the Sunset Blvd demolition takes a few months longer than previously thought.

In which case, “... a prophecy foretold of a time when life as we knew it would cease, during a time that will be known as... Carmageddon.”

[a special thank you to Broowaha columnist Shari Alyse for the idea of the video clip used in this article]