LA has always seemed like a terrible quality-of-life city to live in because of the traffic. The amount of time spent commuting makes me wonder why tech people, at least, don't want to move out of there.
I wouldn't call it terrible, life is nice in your car compared to say walking around in an east coast city during the winter if you have no car. Especially when it comes to grocery shopping. So I'd call it a trade off. Maybe SF is exempt from this a bit, but city living in a city that has some real weather (my experience was on the east coast) always struck me as very hard on it's human inhabitants compared to the car centric LA lifestyle.
You don't commute. AFAIK most of tech is in Silicon Beach and most people live within 20-30 mins