2005/01/20
an alternative to laurel canyon
For regular drivers in this city, it is especially common to dread trips to and from the San Fernando Valley. One way to avoid Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and its associated congestion, is to take Nichols Canyon Road instead.
To get to Nichols Canyon, go slightly east of Fairfax Avenue on Hollywood Boulevard. You will then see a traffic light that says "Nichols Canyon" on the north side of the street and "Genesee" on the south side. Head uphill on Nichols Canyon.
At one point, you will have to turn right to stay on Nichols Canyon. This is fairly easy to figure out because the street will otherwise reach a dead-end.
You will eventually reach Woodrow Wilson Drive. Turn right on Woodrow Wilson and follow it up to Mulholland Drive. Turn left on Mulholland once you reach it.
At this point, you have several options:
1. Take Mulholland to one of the more common downhill routes (Laurel Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Beverly Glen and so forth).
2. Take Mulholland to a poorly marked street called "Multiview Drive." Turn right on Multiview and wind down the hill. You will wind up on Cahuenga Boulevard West in Universal City.
3. Take Mulholland to Wrightwood Drive. Turn right on Wrightwood. Follow all the appropriate signs on Wrightwood to stay on it until you reach Vineland Avenue. Turn left on Vineland and it will take you down to Ventura Boulevard.
4. There are other options, depending on where you are going. You can figure them out as you go along.
Note: In light traffic conditions, Nichols Canyon is more of a scenic route than a timesaver. Plan accordingly.
Additionally, there is a way to cut between Nichols Canyon and Laurel Canyon once you are in the hills. This is for you to figure out by yourself.
the fast way to pacific palisades
Most people assume that Sunset Boulevard is the only way to get to Pacific Palisades. This is most certainly not the case. Although there are some shortcuts that utilize surface streets in Santa Monica, I refuse to disclose those. However, I will share a more obvious trick, although it's useless under heavy traffic conditions.
If you pay close attention to the signs on the 10 West, you will see ‘Chatauqua Boulevard’ at the bottom of one of the exit lists. This mysterious exit actually comes after the 10 merges with Pacific Coast Highway, so the sign seems erroneous.
To reach this lost exit, simply follow Pacific Coast Highway north until you see the sign for ‘West Channel.’
At West Channel, you can make an obtuse right turn onto Chatauqua Boulevard.
Once on Chatauqua Boulevard, simply follow it all the way up to Sunset Boulevard.
Turn left onto Sunset Boulevard and, a few blocks later, you're in the middle of the Pacific Palisades business district. For anywhere else in Pacific Palisades, modify your directions accordingly once you reach Sunset Boulevard.
Under good traffic conditions, this shortens the travel time from Downtown Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades to approximately 30 minutes.
2005/01/19
airbus’s bigger bertha (ii)
Wired now has a column one article about the new A380 as well, proving that a really disparate range of news outlets is willing to jump on this bandwagon. Fortunately, their take is rather more balanced. The focus is on the reality of the highfalutin promises of airborne casinos and retail shopping, which the author feels to be more fiction than fact. After all, similar promises were heard when the 747 debuted, with little to show for them; passengers are still packed into planes like cattle.
Of course, there's always Sir Richard Branson, whose trend-setting brand Virgin Atlantic promises to provide “two ways to get lucky on a Virgin flight.” Mile-high gaming is one; he leaves the other to the audience's imagination (making the brand name seem particularly ironic). He's just crazy enough to actually follow through in using the new A380's capacity, though his other sky-high project of late, Virgin Galactica (which plans to offer customers a stratospheric joyride), seems so fanciful as to defy even the rebel billionaire. Time will tell.
The Wired article goes on to outline potential flaws in the A380's business model. Notably, no major U.S. airline has submitted any orders for the jumbo jet. Some of this hesitancy may be due to a general American partisanship for Boeing, but the unanimity bespeaks something larger. Ryan Singel avers that a poll shows that North American fliers prefer smaller planes with non-stop flights to jumbo-jets which must detour to major hubs before a second flight carries them to their final destination. A preference for a single-hop trip seems natural to more than just a Western Hemisphere audience, but perhaps the Old World is simply less demanding of that ease of flight.
In any event, Boeing is laying its bets squarely on the non-stop bandwagon with its 7E7 Dreamliner, the successor to its popular 767. The new 7E7 would have considerably longer range and cargo capacity, due in large part to more efficient air profile and lighter-weight materials (much like the A380). More intriguingly, the ‘E’ indicates a new commitment to a ‘smart’ infrastructure providing wireless networking, electric hookups (to all passengers), and better centralized entertainment systems. Now those sound like improvements we can sink our teeth (or rather, Blueteeth) into.
2005/01/17
airbus’s bigger bertha (i)
As part of its continuing progress on overtaking Boeing at everything avionic-related, Airbus has now debuted the biggest commercial aircraft in the world, the A380 jumbo jet. Airport regulations agreed to worldwide call for no larger than a eighty-meter wingspan, and the A380 tips the scales at 79.8: it seems unlikely that Boeing's likely to retake the crown anytime soon.
The minimum capacity of the A380 is in the 500s, but is still more than the maximum capacity of the Boeing 747, long the standard in jumbo jets. Its maximum capacity, in the 800s, seems likely to challenge the way we consider airflight. With this increase of capacity, the airplane can accomodate a bar, lounge, and sitting rooms for first-class passengers, entertaining them in a style which has largely been lost to commercial airflight—or so Airbus says in its literature. In any event, the plane is a full double-decker, with six columns of seats on the upper and seven on the lower level (For comparison, the 747 has only four above). To fit these extra seats, the A380's profile is kiwi-shaped, while the 747's is more pear-shaped— the former being a more efficient design than the latter.
The LA Times also gushes at length about how global the reach of this new behemoth is, implicating workers from myriad nations and forcing infrastruction improvements in airports, the construction of new ships, and the building of new roads to admit the enormous components necessary for its fabrication.
To be honest, the Times article reads like a fluff piece, which is probably the case, since the A380 isn't to be debuted until later today, suggesting that Peter Pae's (of the Times) source is Airbus itself. Indeed, his piece seems to draw several figures from their press release, though he clearly has acccess to more information than is publicly available on their site. Still, the story is Column One, a higher honor than seems due Pae's regurgitation of pleasant pabulum. This does not recommend the credibility of the lofty assertions for the airplane's actual impact on the industry. (To be fair, Mr Pae is the author of many good articles, and he's generally a fair and balanced writer on the military and technology.)
By contrast, the New York Times' article Tuesday notes only that the plane came in 5 tonnes (5.5 tons, or 11,000 pounds) overweight and briefly adding that it will be debuted soon and that Airbus already has 149 orders for it. It allows that the five tonne overshoot is still less than one percent of its maximum weight. The article's about three paragraphs long.
The LA sibling of New York's paper of record ought to know better than to slap Mr Pae's puffery on the front page. Of course, we speak as on-the-record Boeing advocates in the ongoing War of the Duopoly, so take our views with a grain of salt as well. Then again, we—unlike the Times—are not claiming objectivity.
