HOLLYWOOD — I have made the left turn from Franklin onto a certain cross street perhaps four thousand times, and I have never once made it without a small negotiation with God, the oncoming Prius, and the person behind me who believes the light turning yellow is a personal affront.
I would like to speak, unfashionably, in defense of this turn. Not to fix it. To keep it.
We are told, constantly, that Hollywood traffic is a problem — a thing to be engineered away with a bike lane here, a signal retiming there, an app that reroutes you down a residential street some grandmother has lived on since Eisenhower. And some of that is fine; I have nothing against a bike lane and a great deal against sitting still. But I notice that the people most determined to solve traffic tend to be new here, and the people who have driven these streets for decades regard the daily gridlock the way you’d regard a difficult uncle: exasperating, permanent, and somehow load-bearing to the family’s whole sense of itself.
Consider what the impossible left turn actually teaches. Patience, obviously, but patience is the boring answer. It teaches judgment — the split-second read of a gap, the courage to commit, the humility to abort. It teaches a kind of civic empathy you cannot get from a mission statement: everyone stuck at that intersection wants the same thing you want, which is simply to be somewhere else, and none of you can have it, and so you wave each other through in the small mercies that keep a city from becoming a war.
The unprotected left is where Hollywood is most itself. It is optimism against evidence. It is a person in a two-ton machine deciding, against all sensory input, that this is the moment, that the gap is real, that they will make it — and then, more often than the actuaries would predict, making it. If that is not the founding gesture of this entire town, I don’t know what is. People come here to make an impossible left turn out of their old lives and into a new one, in traffic, on faith.
I am not romanticizing danger. Turn the dangerous ones into protected signals; I’ll vote for it. But spare me the fantasy of a Hollywood that flows. A city that flows is a city where nobody stops, and a place where nobody has to stop is a place where nobody looks around. Half of what I love about this neighborhood I noticed while stuck: the neon I’d never clocked, the jacaranda dropping purple on a windshield, the old man who crosses Cahuenga at exactly his own pace and dares the world to hurry him.
So the next time you are trapped mid-intersection, blinker ticking, nose out into traffic that will not yield, do not curse the town. Salute it. You are doing the most Hollywood thing there is. You are certain, against all available evidence, that any second now the way will open. And you know what? Eventually it does.