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Comment by djabatt | Hacker News Reader

I live in Altadena and I see those homes. They don't seem all that bad. By the way, Altadena has nice mountain cold air at night, accompanied by the sound of owls hooting. The night time views of Downtown LA are awesome. So, Altadena gives you country living, and within a 20-minute drive, you can be in Silver Lake, DTLA, or Los Feliz to check out a band or a dinner.

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I refuse to believe anything in LA is within a 20 minute drive unless you’re going at 4am.

That place has the wildest traffic!

Everywhere in LA is accessible in 20 minutes. That has been a long running statement/joke forever. It’s not untrue; you just have to give yourself an hour.

One of the most unique things about the city of Austin is that it is around 1 hour from Austin.

It's funny how LA traffic in the movies (especially from the 80s and 90s) always looks pretty good. Driving fast through those hills and canyons.

Those roads are also fast in real life, not a lot of people live out in those more undeveloped canyon parts to generate a ton of traffic. Tons of car and motorcycle clubs race up and down roads in the santa monica mountains and angeles national forest every day. They will actually ride your ass to try and get you to pull over at a scenic overview if you are too slow.

A lot of it is like that if you stay outside downtown.

Or just outside of rush hour.

rush hours*

Kind of like all the car commercials today, they never show people stuck in traffic.

All you need is a long involved permit that lets you block the road for half a day, and you could experience it too!

Go ahead and look at how the freeways are designed. Altadena to Silver Lake in about 20 minutes takes advantage of the fact the 2 is a stub freeway that only gets backed up when some catastrophic car accident happens. Its a huge region and driving across it seems daunting, but hardly anyone does that regularly. Average commutes are 30 minutes about the same as anywhere else. There's enough redundancy within the region where you rarely feel the need to venture out of your little 5-10 mile sphere of influence, since all your boxes are already checked within that bubble. Other cities its more common to be traveling back and forth across town, but there's no need for that here. You hardly need to leave your neighborhood most of the time.

LA is big and has a lot of traffic for sure, but most adjacent neighborhoods can be reached within a 20 min drive. It’s only when you want to go from one side to another that it will take you more than an hour.

yes, a 20 minute drive to an adjacency, we're talking a handful of miles. Beverly Hills to West Hollywood, they are cheek by jowl, and an exhausting drive apart, and so on for every adjacency.

> Altadena gives you country living

I grew up about a mile from the rose bowl, and spent many years in sierra madre. I would definitely not call this area country living. I do miss the smell of the chaparral though.

Used to live in Pasadena and I second all this.

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